2025 has been a great year. We shot and finished “Lift” in February and finished re-editing and releasing “Catching the Sun” in May. The festival circuit has been good to us, giving each of the films semi-finalist placings and awarding Best Actress to Sarah-Jayne Rothkopf for “Lift” (Brooklyn Short Film Festival) and Best Producer and Best Ensemble to “Catching the Sun” at the Berlin Short Awards Festival, and Best Film at the Katonah Short Film festival.
Whew. So far, about the best year ever. I’ve been backing away from online networking and looking for ways to spend more time with real people in actual human spaces in the real world, and that too is working pretty well, with Woodstock Fringe doing all sorts of cool readings and a new start-up theater salon run by Philip X. Levine and Deborah Magrum-Price off to a good start.
But back to that Best Producer award. I don’t really know what a producer does. On “Lift”, my friend Constant, who is credited with the cinematography but also built the set, helped me over my own technical editing hurdles, helped with sound, gave excellent advice on where to spend and not spend money, and just generally kept things moving until we were over the finish line; anyway, he’s as much a producer as I am on that film, even though he modestly just wanted the cinematographer’s credit. On “Catching the Sun”, Cheryl was as much a producer as I was, even though I got the SAG-Indie producing credit she scrambled for props, kept the set organized, created all the logo’d material for the plot’s retirement home and generally had a better mental check list of what needed to happen at each moment than my own paper list.
So I think you’re a producer if you produce; instead of just sitting back and waiting for things to happen, you make them happen. I’m happy taking partial credit for that, but as is my usual mode I don’t so much stand on the shoulders of giants as ride along in their shirt pocket, enjoying the ride.
