Documentary First

Ep. 286 l RKO, Stax, and Music Rights: How Does a Catalog Become a Movie?

Do you have a documentary, or do you have a Wikipedia entry? Music rights for film are the reason a lot of documentaries never get finished. Sophia Dilley has cleared th

Ep. 285 l How to Make a Documentary With No Film School: 5 Lessons

Who finishes your film if you can't? This episode is about how to make a documentary with no film school. Andre N. Jackson had never made a film. He had twenty years in

Why Can't Your Documentary Find an Audience? l Deep Dive on Ep. 284

When did your audience stop being people and become a number? Most independent films and podcasts do not fail because the work is bad. They fail because no one ever felt

Ep. 284 I How to Fund a Documentary Without the Industry

How do you fund a documentary when the whole industry says no? How do you fund a documentary without film funds, grants, or a commissioning broadcaster, and still reach

Who Believed in You First? I Deep Dive on Ep. 283

Who believed in you before you could believe in yourself? In this Deep Dive, documentary filmmaker Christian Taylor makes a quiet case that we rarely overcome self-doub

Ep. 283 I 7 Filmmaking Tips From the Distributor Who Directed "Cold War in Philly"

What does it really take to make a documentary that finds an audience and earns its money back? “You have to have the passion for the story and the passion to do the wor

Ep. 282 I Finding the Heartbeat of Your Story | A Lesson From Normandy

How do you make people care about your documentary? Facts alone rarely make an audience care. The emotional core of a documentary lives somewhere else. In this episode o

Ep. 281 I 13 Letters That Saved a Dying WWII Documentary - on Heroes of Carentan Pt 1

Can thirteen letters from an 88-year-old stranger bring a dead film back to life? For two years, Heroes of Carentan, Christian Taylor's documentary about the 101st Airbo

The Disappointment You Didn't Choose I Deep Dive on Ep. 280

What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live? Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all

Ep. 280 I Danny Gans, the Man of Many Voices, Lost His Own. His Son Set Out to Find It.

He Could Become Anyone on Stage. What Was He Hiding Offstage? Danny Gans was the Man of Many Voices, the highest-paid headliner on the Las Vegas Strip, and the first per

When Is Silence Wisdom and When Is It Complicity? I Deep Dive on Ep. 279

When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it? The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When

Ep. 279 I She Was Here: Heather O'Rourke's Family Debunks the Poltergeist Curse

Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years? On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nea

The Two Kinds of “Alone” Every Filmmaker Knows I Deep Dive on Ep. 278

What is the difference between solitude and loneliness, and why does every creative person need to understand it? There are two kinds of being alone in creative work, an

Ep. 278 I Adapt or Die: A Working Filmmaker with AI in 2026

Adapt or die. What does that actually look like for a working filmmaker? Chicago documentary filmmaker Armin Korsos has a working filmmaker's answer to the question ever

Anthropic's $1.5B Mistake. Yours Could Cost More. I Deep Dive on Ep. 277

What does a $1.5 billion AI lawsuit have in common with your unwritten will? In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the largest copyright laws

Ep. 277 I Why Does One Documentary Clip Cost $70,000? Music Licensing and Fair Use

How much does the average documentary filmmaker's biggest licensing mistake cost? A 30-second Jackson 5 clip can run a documentary $50,000 to $70,000 in licensing fees.

The First Generation to Live Shorter Lives Than Their Parents | Deep Dive on Ep. 276

What if the documentaries no streaming platform will buy are the ones that could save your kid's life? Today's children may be the first generation in American history t

Ep. 276 I Robin Canfield on Teaching iPhone Documentary in 20 Countries

Why do documentary subjects freeze for a professional camera - but open up to an iPhone? Robin Canfield shares why he films with iPhones, how he teaches documentary in t

They Wanted My Voice to Train AI - What Thoreau Knew About Living Deliberately in a Revolution: Deep Dive on Ep. 275

Someone tried to harvest Christian's voice for AI training. The pitch was polished, the project sounded real. But when she responded with ten professional questions, the

Ep. 275 I Erik & Chris Ewers on PBS Funding, AI & Directing Goldblum, Clooney & Streep

Even with Ken Burns and Don Henley attached, funding a PBS documentary is brutal. So what hope do the rest of us have? Erik and Christopher Ewers get real about PBS fund