I watched the Raygun doc on Netflix this weekend.1 It was fine. The story — its characters, world and stakes — has a lot going for it, and it was competently made.
But even though it was eminently watchable, it was hard for me to watch, because I wanted to make that film, damn it. I tried!!! I even met with Rachael Gunn in person, after sending what I thought was my most persuasive letter. (It clearly was not that persuasive. I’m sharing it today, along with two other initial outreach letters — so you can judge for yourself.)
I can think of at LEAST 5 films from the past 2 years in this same category of “didn’t get past initial request for access.”
Access: the true coin of the realm
Access — usually to the same people everyone else wants access to — is the coin of the realm in documentary.
It probably matters a lot more than “good ideas” or “good filmmaking” or whatever else I tend to prioritize. And I genuinely don’t know if I’m aggressive or cocksure or persistent enough for this part of my job. Even the words “get access” I find vaguely distasteful and distressing.
I think I always knew this, and that’s why my first 3 features involved protagonists I did not need to get access to at all. Our Nixon was constructed entirely from archival material, and most of the principal characters were dead. The protagonist of Nuts! had been dead for more than 70 years. And The Pain of Others was made entirely from YouTube videos its subjects had already chosen to share publicly. In all of those films, I didn’t need the main subjects to say yes.
Or maybe I’m just being hard on myself and my hit rate is about as good as anyone’s.
In any case, I tend to simply “take no for an answer” most of the time. If someone says no off the bat, I usually say, “okay!” It’s very rare that I would even ask a 2nd time. If I had persisted with any of these and not just treated the first no as the end of the story, who knows if things might have turned out differently. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do, for reasons I’ll explain.
Then there’s the question of what kind of monster would even consider pitching some “take” on another person’s story. How much of an expert on someone would you feel you need to be in order to feel confident enough to approach that person to say, hey, please let me make a feature documentary about you?
I personally feel like that should be a really high bar! Putting myself in their shoes: I wouldn’t want to be harassed by some know-nothing who couldn’t be bothered to do their homework in exchange for asking for something so BIG and potentially LIFE-DEFINING. I think the decision to subject one’s self to being, well, a subject, is a big one.
But in reality, most pitches fail, so I have to pitch constantly, all while juggling multiple projects and trying to pay the bills. I can’t spend the months and months I would like to spend researching every detail and considering every angle before making the big ask. (Obviously, none of that work is ever paid.) I have found my own balance with this, but I am never sure it’s the right balance, or the ideal one, or the one most likely to lead to success.
A tale of 3 failures
Back around Christmas, I hinted at some outreach I was crafting. I wanted to persuade Lynda Barry and Matt Groening to let me make a film about their friendship, and I decided that pitching two artistic geniuses required more than an email (especially in the age of LLMs).
So I made an elaborate handmade package. That didn’t work either, but it’s way too beautiful to just sit in a drawer. I’m sharing that today, and the story of what happened with it.
And then there was what I jokingly refer to as my white whale: Stephen King. I pretty much knew I would fail. First of all, if he ever participates in a doc (and: why would he?), he can get literally any director on the planet to direct it. But there was no lifetime in which I wasn’t going to at least try to see if I could make a film about the only artist that’s mattered to me in every decade of my life.
Imagine writing for an audience of one of the best living writers who is also your favorite artist probably of your whole life! NO PRESSURE PENNY. I ended up liking what I wrote, though, and the process of writing it revealed something to me.
Even when outreach doesn’t produce a film, writing it forces you to discover whether you truly see a film there — and whether you’re willing to spend years making it.