Flasz On Film

I’m terrible at blowing smoke up my own backside, hence not many people in my nearest vicinity know that I write or that I run a podcast. I don’t know how to play the social media game, and I feel incredibly awkward about sharing and re-sharing links to my articles or to the episodes of Uncut Gems Podcast, so I am fully aware that my output—or my contribution to the culture at large, should you choose to call it that—remains for the most part undiscovered and as such I feel I am in no position to give other people pointers as to what to do and what not to do when setting up, running or marketing their podcasts. You have a bajillion SEO-ready listicles available for just this purpose.  

However, I thought I’d sit down and reflect on my journey as a podcaster because in the recent weeks the show I started in January 2021 has officially added its 200^th episode to the roster. Well, there’s also like a hundred or so bonus podcasts we recorded as an aside for the companion Patreon stream of the show, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that for the last two hundred weekends I’ve sat down in front of a microphone together with a cast of friends and talked about movies well into the wee hours of the morning, then proceeded to edit whatever came out and then published these recordings on the internet for others to hopefully discover.  

Therefore, I don’t know if there’s something I can teach you about the craft of running a successful podcast. The number of people who choose to download or stream whatever we put out every week is laughably small compared to other indie shows, and they simply pale into insignificance when set against podcasts you may see on Spotify charts with their celebrity hosts, exuberant production quality and seemingly all-encompassing worldwide reach. In fact, I entered this arena with eyes wide open and unburdened by any illusions of success this project could potentially bring. I wasn’t starting a podcast to hopefully quit my nine-to-five one day. I wasn’t doing it to “create content” or to become a voice, or some kind of a cultural entity. I just felt it was something I wanted to do and, as it turned out, it was something I needed to do.  

I wasn’t the only one out there who decided to experiment with their life, if only a little bit, using the cultural chaos stirred up by the arrival of the COVID pandemic. Our lives got flipped upside down and even though I wasn’t sent home and continued working throughout lockdowns, I chose to make changes to my priorities, if only to cope with the topsy-turvy world outside, but probably because my life demanded I took some decisions. I leaned more heavily into writing about movies, which I had only taken beyond Letterboxd shortly before lockdowns began. This place sprouted into existence towards the end of 2020 and after dabbling as a guest host on ClapperCast, I thought it would be cool to talk about movies nobody wanted to talk about with me. Movies like Congo or Mission to Mars and Never Let Me Go or Death Proof and Prince of Darkness. And somehow two hundred weekends flew by.  

Meanwhile, as the pandemic faded into memory, my long hair experiment ended abruptly, symbolically closing this chapter of my life. But the idea of recording a podcast every Friday night has remained unchanged. I wrote before about how podcasting is likely what fishing must have been for my father’s generation, and this is the biggest takeaway message I can pass along while thinking about the ways in which podcasting has enriched my life. In the increasingly atomized world filled with tasks, to-do lists, pressure and seemingly never-ending rolling crises what I needed most was a sense of fraternity and a ritual to complement it. Podcasting filled this space perfectly and provided me with both an avenue to decompress and a project to nurture and grow while nobody was looking.  

For me, podcasting throughout the last four years or so became a ritual, a mode to build and retain relationships and a project to funnel some of my excess energy into and what it proved to me was that the philosophy of just putting your head down and persisting at something in the complete absence of positive reinforcement was something I needed to cultivate. In fact, the very concept of just doing something for the sake of doing it I immediately adopted and championed in my writing efforts and, for the last two and a half year, in the gym. My life is now rich in various rituals, all imbued with different meanings, and it all effectively started with my podcasting journey. I don’t think I’d have had it in me to persist with working out or even with writing as religiously as I have without the realization that it was not only possible but most importantly enjoyable to do something all by myself, without any external praise, validation, or the pressure of competition.  

That’s what I learned. That doing something is enough and that I do not have to prove anything to anyone. That the process and the ritual were more important than the product or how the product was received. In fact, I barely look at how many people listen to the show. I don’t care, quite frankly, though it is sweet to learn that there are some people out there who care about what I do.  

Fittingly, as I was writing these words, my smartphone just lit up as it informed me this year’s Spotify Wrapped has arrived to provide that little bit of external validation. 

So, here I am telling you to start a podcast because I have been recording mine for two hundred weekends and I am looking forward to two hundred more. No, I’m not famous. Far from it. A small bunch of people care about what I do, I suppose, and I’m glad they’re out there listening, engaging and supporting this project of mine. But I am telling you that if you’re thinking about starting a podcast yourself, just go and do it. Nobody cares and what you will hopefully learn, if you stick with it that is, is that the beauty of doing it is not in the outcome but in the ritual. Maybe, like me, you’ll fall in love with the idea of recording something that looks and feels imperfect because after all what is the point of pretending in front of the world that your diction is perfect or something. I’ve learned from John Cassavetes that the truth is in the moments you capture. I’ve learned from my friends that listening is a skill. I’ve learned from hearing myself stumble through the English language that the word “embarrassment” has no place in my vocabulary. I’ve learned that therapy is not in talking about my emotions but in expressing them and in channeling them through productive work and repeated rituals.  

That’s what two hundred weekends of podcasting did for me.