On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome actor and filmmaker Jeremy Schuetze,  whose first feature Anacoreta — in which he stars opposite Antonia Thomas and screenwriter Matt Visser as a director trying to make an experimental horror movie in increasingly stressful circumstances – just dropped on digital and on demand. 

And Jeremy’s choice, given his own project, makes a certain sort of sense: He picked American Movie, Chris Smith’s beloved documentary about Wisconsin auteur Mark Borchardt, whose attempts to make a horror short called Coven after stalling out on his folk-horror opus Northwestern develop a certain epic quality as he and his eccentric friends and family –  the kind-hearted Mike Schank being the most loyal – push through one obstacle after another to bring his vision to the screen. I don’t think it’s a spoiler, 26 years on, to note that Coven did not have the cultural impact Borchardt hoped for … except that I guess it kind of did.

You know how this goes: Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while waiting to watch the dailies from yesterday’s shoot.

And then you should catch up on Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about the new Criterion editions of Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy — two character studies from the late ’80s that marked a turning point in the way “smaller” movies would be approached in American cinema, even if no one knew it at the time. You can subscribe at any time, you know.