Welcome to the third season of Someone on Film (FKA Substack on Film1). A year in, we’ve shared stories from all sorts of writers and creators—including Lloyd Kahn, the nonagenarian pioneer of the green building movement; former Vogue editor Plum Sykes; children’s book authors and illustrators Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen; and many others. For our latest season, we decided to visit Substackers who call Los Angeles home.
LA is a city of creative strivers, and we tried to capture that ambition from several angles: a TV-showrunner-slash-illustrator, an underground club raver, a veteran entertainment journalist, a lifestyle creator with millions of followers, and a touring comedian. We shot it all on 16mm film, as usual, working with Director of Photography Jack Duffy, sound recordists Kenneth Orozco and Adrian Arteaga, and with our very own Dave Bonawits behind the second camera and in the editing booth.
First up, we visited Lisa Hanawalt, who you might know as the creator of Tuca & Bertie and the production designer of BoJack Horseman. She’s currently working on a book called I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, and she let us invade her (very nice) lair to take a look at the pages. We traded imaginary horses for real ones when Lisa brought us to the stables, where we met her horse, Juniper.
I hope you enjoy our first installment of Someone on Film: Los Angeles. There’ll be more episodes in the coming weeks.
We’ve renamed the series from Substack on Film to Someone on Film. The films are really about the people in them, not about Substack itself—and the name should reflect that.
