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My Best Work as (Mostly) an Editor
When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and commissioning editor. It holds up better than I hoped: I came out swinging in my second print issue with what I’m reasonably sure was the first non-video, written-out English-language interview with Roberto Minervini for Stop the Pounding Heart; his next film, The Other Side, is a defining work of the decade. There’s a solid mixture of European arthouse known quantities (Arnaud Desplechin, Mia Hansen-Løve) and more geographically-dispersed candidates for the next iteration of the canon (Andrew Bujalski, Ulrich Köhler, Eduardo Williams, Alexander Nanau, Adirley Quierós and Joana Pimenta), two cover stories (Justine Triet, RaMell Ross), a brisk but serviceable walkthrough with Fabrice Aragno about the 3D tech of Goodbye to Language and my only interview with an editor, Jennifer Lame, for Manchester by the Sea; my last full print interview was with one of my formative filmmakers, Wes Anderson, as good a stopping point as any. There were also innumerable profiles of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, some of whom are also now friends; a job that gives you the chance to learn something interesting while expanding your social world in a meaningful way can (sometimes) be a kind of present. Finally, there’s what started as a thought experiment (what if I rounded up every single 35mm production for the year) and became an albatross around my neck as I repeated it for a decade; still, someone had to do the indexical work.
But what I’d really like to highlight is some of my work as a commissioning editor; thank you to Scott Macaulay for the leap of faith in hiring me in the first place and the subsequent freedom both as editor and, er, “contentious” critic. Writing reviews, mostly as festival dispatches, was the bulk of my public-facing role, but maybe 30% of what I did overall. Let the bulk of what that 70% consisted of go mercifully undescribed, but learning to be an editor was the interesting on-the-job training—one of my biggest satisfactions, and the memories attached are more meaningful to me in some ways than what I wrote. That was fun; let’s do it again sometime.
And yes, I’m looking for work—contact me here. Above: an image of the cover of the first film log I started keeping, when I was nine years old. Weird!
“How to Deliver Your Film to a Festival,” Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia (revised twice; in 2018, necessarily, and 2022, post-pandemic-grimly)
This piece is in part a stand-in for the time I spent at True/False Film Fest from 2010 to 2025; much to be said about that, but I gained an entire education in the nonfiction ecosystem and met a billion people (approx.). When I started meeting the projectionists specifically, I thought, “Why shouldn’t they write? They know more than anyone about what’s being showing some ways.” Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navio twice updated this guide on delivering your film to a festival several times in all the gory technical particulars, making something potentially dry as personable as a bar rant.
“In Dark Trees: David Lowery on Pete’s Dragon“
I get zero credit for conceiving or commissioning this interview by James Ponsoldt of David Lowery for Pete’s Dragon; it simply wouldn’t have occurred to me, all credit to Scott. But I had the experience for the first time while doing a first pass at chopping down the raw transcript (non-AI generated—I shed a tear!), which initially seemed an impenetrable morass of “um”s and “like”s, of discovering this wasn’t just a good interview but a great one, a start-to-finish guide on how an indie filmmaker auditions for a big Disney production. When it was all cleaned up, it read almost like someone looking for advice on how to follow that path—indeed, Ponsoldt was signed for a (never-realized) Disney production announced some time later.
“Projecting Outside the Echo Chamber,” Chris Boeckmann
More True/False, with their then-programmer Chris Boeckmann unsparingly diving into the thorny realization that empathy machines or no, documentaries probably can’t change the world, so if we still care about them now what? Chris turned out to be a naturally hilarious writer, and whole passages of this survive near-verbatim in my head.
“Outta Respect,” Steve Macfarlane (photos by Chris Maggio)
One of my first times working on a photo essay and unintentionally creating a future obituary. Steve Macfarlane pitched an essay on the storied “Goodfellas diner”—which then burned to the ground, an unfortunate but effective way to get evergreen traffic.
“Why I Am Hopeful: Programmer Eric Allen Hatch on the Future of Arthouse Programming”
I had never stirred up so much trouble as a commissioning editor! Eric Allen Hatch quit the Maryland International Film Festival in a blaze of Twitter glory, and some time later I wondered if what he’d said could be transformed into a piece. He did not hold back and I got to hear people argue about his decorum, or lack thereof, at parties. Extremely gratifying (and Eric rebounded strong with New/Next Film Fest, a form of vindication in and of itself).
“Outer Visions: Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman on Serving as Ad Astra’s Experimental Film Consultants,” Michael Sicinski
More Twitter inspiration, this time from Leo Goldsmith, who announced there that he and fellow experimental film scholar Gregory Zinman had served as consultants on Ad Astra. What could this possibly mean? Another fun part of the job was getting writers I admired and read growing up to do some of that inquiring work for me; in this case, an interview conducted by the excellent Michael Sicinski.
I wanted an interview with Frank Beauvais about his Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, and I thought an all-archival essay-film with a literary bent would be of interest to archival producer/documentarian Sierra Pettengill. As we all settled into pandemic torpor, Sierra conducted an email interview, in which she correctly guessed that Annie Ernaux’s The Years was an influence on the narration. I didn’t know Ernaux’s work, made a note of it and the next year finally got around to The Years. I immediately realized I needed to buy and read everything she’s ever had translated; the following year, I was ready to to be one of three journalists in a room for an interview about her film made with her son, The Super 8 Years, and later that year she won the Nobel. Pretty good!
“My Job During a Pandemic: Producing 100+ DVDs and Blu-rays in 2020,” R. Emmet Sweeney
I asked Kino Lorber’s Rob Sweeney to write about the particulars of producing DVDs and Blu-rays during the pandemic. He was worried about getting too in the weeds, which became the prompt for the first time I remember systematically giving the note “expand this” on granular particulars no one else could dive into. My go-to trick.
“The Longhand Film,” Courtney Stephens and “I Saw That at Cannes!,” James Vaughan
Asking filmmakers to write is fun, especially when they’re writing (well) about somebody else’s films. Courtney Stephens went long and magisterial on handwriting in experimental film; James Vaughan went comic and broad on attending Cannes.
“Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground”
One of my better pieces of detective work in terms of tracking someone down. The task was to find someone equally knowledgeable about experimental music and film to interview Todd Haynes about a film heavy on both. Jim O’Rourke was an obvious answer; he deliberately doesn’t make it easy to track him down, but I figured that experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino, whose work O’Rourke has scored, would be a decent intermediary. He said he’d pass my email along, no results guaranteed, but my blind shot worked and presently O’Rourke manifested in my inbox, a musical legend who couldn’t have been nicer from start to finish before disappearing back to wherever he lives in Japan.
Shout-out to Vikram Murthi for first connecting me to Superbad director and all-round-mensch Greg Mottola. This pairing made sense in my head—indie-background directors with subsequent studio proficiency who make comedies that actually look like something, screenwriters who’ve worked with pre-existing properties. It turned out they knew each other, began the interview by lightly roasting me and then had an hour to talk process, so the pairing made sense in action as well.
“Seeing Eye to Eye: Color Correction Styles Across Today’s Film Restorations,” Bingham Bryant
There are intersections where the most recondite, crate-digging cinephile and “post-Fincher-only please” tech-heads meet on matters of rare mutual interest, and they tend to be somewhere around vexed questions of color, resolution and restoration. Bingham Bryant is one of the most esoterically-inclined cineastes I know, both in his work and viewing, but he had the stamina to dive directly into the maelstrom of controversy about color correction signatures and actually get the restoration artists involved to talk to him. I eventually saw the piece cited on a comment board where a Japanese theater programmer was very upset about the yellows in the latest restoration of The Conformist.
“Everybody’s in Showbiz: The ‘80s Downtown Actors of Miami Vice,“ Mark Asch
The most fun you can have trying to clear photo rights is being given a contact sheet of 1,000+ stills from the entire run of the original Miami Vice series and choosing three. The image of Crockett and Tubbs opposite a very pissed-off looking Miles Davis is the single most amusingly arcane thing I ever had getting to obtain for print (this being, generally and by definition, not a fun process). Mark Asch wrote the piece, which is to say it seemed to write itself.
“True Crime Schedules and Teams,” Daniel Garber
The longest-gestating piece of my run, in which I would send texts to editor Daniel Garber on a quarterly basis reading, essentially, “…how about now?” Persistence is one of my most annoying superpowers. I’m very proud of the resulting piece, which came from me wondering where precisely the rigid tropes of true-crime documentary were coming from; Dan managed to get far more on the record than either of us initially thought possible and took the piece deeper into the traumatic and ethical implications of this kind of work. It didn’t get the traffic I’d hoped, but I heard that every working documentary editor read it, which is nice.
