Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Spaghetti Western

Filmmakers Digital Diary 3

11 September 2025

Hello investors, Eden Residents and new friends, I, Diana, am jumping in on the digital diary this week giving you the producer’s perspective of our project as we enter the deep dive into fund raising.

While I am trying not to feel or actually seem old, I have to admit to having been in the film business since age 22. As a Minnesotan about to graduate from an east coast university, my sole goal as a history major graduate who focussed on American women’s stories from pioneering times through the 1950s, was to find a job, any job, in New York City and just experience life in the big apple for a few years. The plan was to go back to academia…..and write books about women’s stories after these two exciting years, possibly waitressing, hopefully becoming very cosmopolitan!

Well, for some reason I succeeded in finding a position assisting a first time director on his docudrama - STRIPPER - and started working 5 days after graduation in his new offices on 57th and 6th. The only thing I knew about film was from a survey course taught by the charismatic Annette Insdorf on the history of cinema - it was something you took to get an easy grade and a little rest!

I loved it.

Over the next two years, I learned all there was to know about making a small docudrama and also absorbed the personal stories of our talent; what is was that that led women to become strippers and what that looked and felt like for these women. Luckily for me, I was one of a very small group making the film and we traveled from NYC to Las Vegas and Vancouver and what I learned about producing, editing, shooting and delivering a film was a crash course in filmmaking - and what I learned about human nature and the state of gender roles in the 1980s was even more life changing.

When the film was finished, and the job too, I realised I had found the world I loved and the profession I would pursue, and I never looked back.

Because no film is the same, no cast and crew and script the same, learning is always a part of filmmaking and the business of making films. SPAGHETTI WESTERN is yet another turn in that process, and I am so excited to be sharing the experience with all of you. This is brand new - raising equity from a special group, an all female group of investors, small and large, and tackling the business with a new tool: non-professional passionate supporters.

This is so inspiring to me and my co-producer Francey Grace, and we are watching the spark take hold as each woman introduces us to another and ideas spread like wildfire, and conventions become challenged, and new answers become a flame of purpose and possibility. What I bring to each turning is a reminder, I believe, of what has come before, what is usual, what has worked, and what might then need changing or moderating. Blending the “normal” with the newly minted “ new normal”, finding a mixture of risk taking and learned experience. Putting out potential fires while fanning the flames of controlled combustion!

In other words, I am an old dog learning new tricks and it is very inspiring!

As September and the autumn quickly erase the summer fundraising period, we are now looking at casting options and potentially larger investments. We are planning a scout to Gran Canaria to see locations and to meet producing partners. And we are putting one foot in front of the other.

As we now have gotten used to saying, “Wagons Ho”!