Cleveland film culture meets COVID-era media debates—programming, policy, and the politics of storytelling

Corrupt adults from Ikebukuro

We open on the guest’s day job: building arts education in Cleveland—first running non-degree programs at an arts college, then leading the Cleveland International Film Festival’s education wing. FilmSlam (the long-running student mini-festival) gets a spotlight: selecting submissions, curating blocks for middle/high school, and creating classroom study guides.

Beyond classrooms, the festival’s “community partner” model pairs films with local nonprofits.

Local infrastructure matters. The guest sits on boards (Greater Cleveland Film Commission associate board and the stewardship board for the historic Capitol Theater) wrestling with post-COVID realities: how to keep a neighborhood cinema sustainable when theatrical habits and business models have shifted.

Programming life at an art-house gets some love: designing calendars, stunts, and special events. We trade notes on the shot-for-shot fan remake phenomenon (the Raiders kids) and why the documentary around it can be more watchable than the artifact itself.

Screenwriting vs. comics: development hell, endless notes, and why creators like Daniel Clowes sometimes swerve away from Hollywood. Comics can ship under a single vision; films demand money, logistics, and a village.

Then the COVID digression: lab-leak vs. zoonotic narratives, masks as social signaling, shifting public-health guidance, censorship/algorithms, pharma incentives, EUA dynamics, and policy overreach (travel restrictions, mandates). We frame it as contested terrain that shaped culture and film production.

COVID in cinema: minimal-cast movies shot under restrictions, a Canadian-made-in-Taiwan horror entry (The Sadness), and why most viewers don’t want masks in fiction. Broader ripple effects: money-printing, inflation, supply-shocks, and the 2020–21 crypto boom as zero-rate capital chased risk assets.

Process notes: perfectionism and “Frankensteined” pages; how starting without a finished script creates rework. We kick around the “easy win” idea—a graphic nonfiction comedy about tech confusion and cord-cutting, sparked by a local TV segment on a Roku location snafu—tentative title: My Dad Cuts the Cord.

We wrap with shop talk: why voice notes are a misuse of tech when speech-to-text exists, how to keep projects scarce and focused, and a quick tease of upcoming guests.

Guest Links:
Get "Horse Girls" Here
Get "Ain't It Fun" Here
churchghost.com
instagram.com/aaronlangecomix

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