Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics

Our Declaration of Principles

In January 2020, I began co-hosting the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics.  Here’s the premise: Mike Takla, a former student and longtime friend of mine, and I would watch movies separately and then record our conversations about them for the show.  We’d been talking about movies since the 1990s and thought that the podcast would be something we’d listen to if it were available.  People always say to write what you’d want to read and that was how we approached it.  

Just as Charles Foster Kane had his Declaration of Principles, we had ours:

1.  No banter allowed.  None. Each episode would start with us talking about the movie–not our lives, jobs, families, funny anecdotes, etc.  Every second is precious.  People are giving us their attention and we can’t take that for granted.  There would be no discussions of current events, sports, politics, or anything that distracts from the topic of the film at hand.  Start late, leave early.  In a terrific diatribe against podcasts just when they were gaining traction, music critic Chris Richards says, “Whatever asks for our most attentive listening should aspire to be the most worthy of it.”  Amen.  Too many podcasts begin with the hosts meandering their way into the subject.  We find this irritating.  

2.  We’d use a consistent format to keep us on track.  Part One is an overview of the film: what we think of it as a whole.  There’d be no recap of the plot; we assume that anyone listening to an episode has already seen the movie.  Sometimes we are rewatching films we’ve seen a hundred times; sometimes we’re watching one for the first time that the other guy suggested.  (This second scenario led to rule 2a: Whoever suggests the film has to let the other guy speak first.)  Part Two is a look at our favorite moments that reflect the issues of the film as a whole;  Part Three is a conversation about the ending, title, or both.  I came up with this format because it always works when creating paper topics in literature classes.  Each segment would run about five minutes so we could keep the promise of the podcast’s title.  

3.  We’d do a movie each week to keep us in practice.  

4.  If we ever hit 100 downloads, we’d get a bottle of champagne.  We didn’t think this would happen–aren’t there enough podcasts already?  But as Ted Gioia argues, the fun of a podcast would be contributing something to the microculture as the macroculture dealt with its own problems.  

5.  We wouldn’t be rigid about which movies we covered.  We’d talk about movies we had just seen, wanted to see again, or were reminded of for some reason.  

We’ve never broken the first rule and have kept the three-part structure from rule 2, although we routinely break the five-minute-per-segment rule out of respect for the movies we examine.  We’ve made too many episodes to change the name of the show, but there are times when we get close to fifteen minutes.  We’ve also followed rule 5: we haven’t stuck to any particular genre, although we did do a run of horror films and one of films named after their protagonists.  We also change the schedule all the time, usually because our texts look like this:

DAN: OK, confirming–we’re set to record on Anatomy of a Fall?

MIKE: Hey! I just rewatched the Brando version of Julius Caesar.  

But this is exactly what your friends do to you all the time: they urge albums, films, and books to you and then pester you with questions about them, motivated solely by their enthusiasm and the desire to be affirmed.  Mike actually mailed me a favorite book of his about two years ago that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading; when he sees this, I know I’m getting a text about it.  I keep a rough list of movies for us, but this is always changing.

The early episodes that we created with Anchor now sound rough around the edges.  I didn’t really know how to use editing software and Mike and I were both in the same room, sharing a single microphone.  We didn’t even say our full names and didn’t tell too many people about it in case it tanked; there’s also the statistic that most podcasts fail because their producers give up after three episodes.  (It’s difficult to find an authoritative source for this other than sites that want you to pay them to promote your podcast, but it certainly feels true.  How many of us have typed, “It was a dark and stormy night” and then decided that was enough?)

We kept at it and kept learning about how to create the show as we went along.  Many people think that podcasting is simple: just plug in the microphone and begin.  But learning when to interrupt the other person and how to avoid circular conversations that are still wholly spontaneous and unscripted takes a great deal of practice.  It’s even harder to do alone: we tried some solo, shorter episodes, but these were difficult to sustain and not as fun.  After about the twentieth episode, we moved to Podbean and the show began gaining traction: we bought the champagne and continued to create more episodes, often amazed that there was an audience out there that wasn’t only listening to the show, but subscribing.  We bought new microphones, learned how to use Audacity, added bumper music and clips to each episode, and began a feed on Twitter.  

Two years later, after I had begun interviewing authors for the New Books Network, its editor, the tireless and always-upbeat historian Marshall Poe, offered to host Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics on the NBN site, which would exponentially increase our reach.  Marshall–someone whose enthusiasm drives an enterprise for the good of the culture–even imported our entire back catalog.  We left Podbean and continued recording, with our first episode released on the new platform in June 2023.  The subject of that episode, the restored director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate, would have given us pause if we were superstitious.  

Now, Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics has released over 250 episodes and shows no sign of slowing down.  I still text Mike all the time about our schedule; he once said that I am the one holding the baton but that I have more batons than this guy.  Check it out and let us know what to watch next.