Looking Back at 2024 /Ahead to 2025
Polls! Qs! Highlights!
Welp, another year is just about in the books. Personally, 2024 has been a bit of a rollercoaster, full of a lot of big changes and new experiences. Was it brat? Mmm, not quite. But it had its moments (I briefly grew a mustache). Apart from this newsletter, the most exciting project I worked on this year was producing (along with Ray Knudsen) a feature that will shoot in February/March of this coming year. It’s been my first experience producing someone else’s work, and it’s been a great education and also a lot of fun. Much of my focus has been on the creative side, helping the brilliant writer-director, Stephen Musumeci, hone his vision and elevate his ideas. I’ll share more updates on this project down the line, but for now I just wanted to put out into the universe that this is something I’d like to do more of in 2025 and beyond!
As for the year’s movies, you can read some of my thoughts over at Esquire, where I recently reflected on the 2024 slate and ranked the year’s top 60 movies. TLDR: There were lots of great movies; very few of them came from studios’ big-budget efforts.
Right now, I’m putting together a big list of the most anticipated movies of 2025, which will come out early next month. I’ve got a pretty good list going. But I wanted to open this up to you all: What films are you most looking forward to next year?
Nothing Bogus in the future…
As the year comes to an end, I’m looking for feedback on what’s working and what could improve about the newsletter. I’ve got a few poll questions for you. But if you have more open-ended feedback, please feel free to email me at nothingbogus1@gmail.com.
Substack only allows five poll options. If there’s something else not mentioned above that you’d like to read more about, leave a comment below.
Pitching Nothing Bogus
I’m also always taking pitches at nothingbogus1@gmail.com. If you’d like to contribute, here are a few guidelines:
Ideally if you’re pitching me an interview it’s with someone you don’t know but are a fan of / provokes genuine curiosity. I think these things are best when the interviewer has something specific they’re trying to figure out and the subject has answers. A good example: One of my favorite interviews from this past year was the one Nevin Kelly-Farrar did with Between the Temples editor John Magary. Immediately after seeing the film, Nevin was dying to know how John put together the chaotic dinner table scene. Their conversation went deep on the subject and was very illuminating (I thought!).
I’d love more first person accounts that other people can learn from. That could be an explainer on how you got funding, a budget breakdown, a festival diary like this, a filmmaking breakdown like this, etc. Think about what wisdom you picked up working on a project that would be valuable to impart.
Bonus points if there’s a big visual component! I’m a sucker for BTS materials.
If you ask for coverage of your own film, please understand that there’s a decent chance I will pass. This doesn’t mean your film was bad or I hate you. It just means it wasn’t a good fit at the moment. I schedule a lot of these things way in advance and if you’re pitching me your film a week before it comes out, it probably won’t work. Please be respectful :)
Some Nothing Bogus 2024 Highlights
Thanks to everyone who participated in Nothing Bogus this year. Whether you answered my questions, asked someone else your own, or posted listings, you helped make this newsletter run each week. I tend to be skeptical of compliments, but the amount of positive feedback I’ve gotten about this thing has been quite heartening. And that some of you have put your money where your mouth is and snagged premium subs has been even more encouraging. Seriously, thank you!
The newsletter covered a lot of ground this year. Here are a few highlights…
The most popular newsletter of the year was…
When we went [to Texas], I sent Dave and Abby the Joshua Siegel book on Frederick Wiseman. There's a forward that's like an autobiography that Frederick Wiseman writes. And he talks about what he needs when he makes a film. And one of the first things he does is that he goes to the power brokers, the leaders of an institution, and he lays out a plan of what he would like to do when he makes a film. And I said to Dave and Abby, “We need to do that here. To do the story justice, we need to find the person who will become our confidant and lead us there.”
The most ‘liked’ newsletter was…
There's a point where you've revised something so much that none of it works for you anymore and it doesn't produce anything in you anymore. At that point, we laid out: What are the two or three moments in this movie that still make you feel something? This was after two or three months of working on it. And they didn't necessarily overlap. And we were like, OK, if it [still produces a feeling], then let's keep that in and we will make the movie work to keep those things in.
My favorite story someone recounted…
The difficult fix was on Silence of the Lambs. The scene when the police find out that Lecter has caused all this shit in his cage… I brought Jonathan Demme and Ed Saxon in to see [the cage] on a Friday — we're going to shoot on a Monday — and they walked into the space and they looked at it and they just turned around and walked out…
The one where there was so much good stuff we had to split it into two…
Well, the wonderful thing of working with Altman is that you’ll have multiple cameras and the cameras even see each other, but he knows he can cut around that. He originally came out of television with multiple cameras. And he wanted to document something that was authentic about the performance, by, he felt, letting it just happen. Before we would start the take, he goes, “Let's boogie.”
The one where there were tears…
The most important thing that I learned and that I tried to promote is: One must know thyself. If you don't know who you are, you're never going to understand anybody else.
The one I wish more people had read…
We're realizing that the tracks for distribution are increasingly isolated. It used to be that you couldn’t put out a home video edition before you did your theatrical, and we're not living in those times anymore... So we can do things however we want and do more day-and-date and be more nimble about it.
The one I’ll be referring back to for years…
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this expansive list of great restaurants to eat before/after a movie in NYC! Already, I’ve found a couple great spots from this.
A format I want to explore more next year…
I loved hearing Melina Valdez break down the different choices behind various key frames in her excellent short, Weapons and Their Names. I learned a lot and gained a whole new appreciation for the film. Hoping to give the Frame by Frame treatment to more films next year!
No listings this week. But as always, if you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.).
Keep up the good work!