Screen Slate's Jon Dieringer on Doing It Yourself, Vibe-Coded Competition, and the NYC Cinephilia Boom

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: Longtime readers know that the interview subjects for this newsletter often stray from explicit musical trappings, and that I love to chat with fellow writers and independent publishers about the ins-and-outs of what they do. In that vein, Jon Dieringer—who's long maintained the invaluable publication Screen Slate, which provides daily listings for repertory and arthouse screenings in New York City and the Bay Area alongside vital independent film criticism—is someone who I've been chatting with about a formal interview for quite some time. By the time we were able to carve out time from our busy schedules for a proper nosh-and-chat at Greenpoint's estimable Three Decker Diner, Jon had also found himself unwittingly ensnared in discourse that was ginned up by former music publicist and current tech guy Clayton Blaha (who, full disclosure, I had crossed amiable paths with many times during his time in the music world in the 2010s) vibe-coding an extremely specific dupe of Screen Slate's model, which ended up bringing forth a groundswell of public support for Screen Slate itself. (If you'd like to support the continued existence of Screen Slate in the face of AI dupes, btw, you can head right here to the Patreon page.) It's funny how things shake out! So of course we had to stat off by talking about Clayton's creation, but the rest of our conversation about the nature of running your own situation and the changing face of NYC cinephilia was no less engrossing and should be fascinating to read for many of my readers with similar interests. Check it out:

Before we get into a larger conversation, I want to talk about Clayton Blaha's accidentally-viral vibe-coded listings site that resulted in a spate of attention in your direction.
I previously worked in film production a little bit and I knew some people, but generally speaking, I was not connected. I remember my parents asking me [about Screen Slate], "This seems like an interesting idea, but what's your business model and how are you gonna make money off of it?" I was like, "I don't really care about making money. If I do it, I'll meet cool people and create something that I'll possess"—and I did it for literally zero dollars, if not at a significant financial outlay for myself, for seven or eight years, and it was great. I draw some money from it—beer money, walking-around money—but all that said, I have a pretty zen attitude where I'm grateful for whatever comes in, and I'm not necessarily hustling to be number one at something or be the best.

Competition can sometimes be annoying. With the AI stuff, it's changed the equation a little bit, because now people can spin up similar projects. To put it in perspective, for the longest time—I'm talking over a decade—people have been reaching out to me pretty regularly asking, "How do I start a similar thing in my city? I've always tried to provide as much information and assistance as I can, but the most important thing—and it sounds a bit egotistical to say and is hard to convey to people sincerely—is that it requires a ton of hard work. The reason Screen Slate exists is because I work extremely hard on it, and for better or worse—I'd probably say for worse—it's my life. I'm working 'til midnight. During all that time, it would be pretty rare for something like [Clayton's vibe-coded knockoff] to pop up. But within the past two years, these things started to pop up. It took me a second to realize, "Oh, this is vibe-coding."

The risk of AI is that it's really easy to create something that has the semblance of plausibility. I've heard it described as a possibility machine, and it gives very surface, cursory appearances of legitimacy, accuracy, and usefulness—the things you create with it, the text you generate with it. I think it can be a helpful tool for people who understand that and use it to enhance what they do—something that's based on solid principles of design work, where you use it to help you break through a certain problem. I use it as a thesaurus if I'm struggling for a word and I want to describe the word I'm looking for. It can be helpful for things like that. But if you hit the button, the thing it puts out will look legitimate—but in fact, it can be 80% accurate, which means it's 20% trash. What's happening is, people are like, "I love Screen Slate, but what if I could add something to my Google calendar with it? What if it also included these other theaters?" They'll do that really well, and everything else will suck—but it still creates this expectation where people are like, "Well, if other people can add this to their sites, why don't you just add it to yours and then we're all good?"

I compare it to something like cooking. My friend Chris Hansell of Chrissy's—it's the best pizza in New York. Maybe someone will eat it and say, "This is the best pizza I've ever had, but I wish the pepperoni were a little crispier. I wish it had a little more cheese. Add hot honey to this." I mean, Chris would probably give you the recipe—so you take the recipe and go to Claude, and you're like, "How do I make the pepperoni crispy?" Then you have a pizza with the most perfectly crisped pepperoni.—but everything else is fucking parmesan.

Dealing with that has been a new challenge in the past couple years—and, frankly, it does force you to embrace AI, to finesse it in a smart way. But we're also in a really weird position, where we're not a real need. This is not my full time job—it's not anyone's full time job. The total annual budget is less than a salary that you need to have a one-bedroom in New York. Most of that money gets to paying writers. But at the same time, it's been around long enough, it has a large enough audience, and it's maybe kind of an institution, so we can't afford to faceplant on adding bullshit to our website that way.

Something you're orbiting here is one one of the big issues that's plagued a lot of things in the last 15 years, which is the notion of scaling—of constantly having to grow something. I also think people have come to appreciate when they're being given something honest and straightforward, rather than something that's more but also possibly disingenuous. I'm optimistic in that sense. You see a lot of stuff come and go, but longevity is directly tied to reliability, which is harder to achieve than people think.
And in the long run, it's a "slow and steady wins the race" type of thing. It's all really amplified and accelerated by social media and AI, and there are moments when people don't appreciate that long game and they're like, "No, do this now." It's something I've worked on literally every day for the last 15 years. It's a daily email, and I send it myself. I've come to appreciate those cycles. Whether it's in terms of reputation or financial support, there's boom and bust.

Let's circle back to the beginning. What was your background before coming to the city and starting Screen Slate in 2011? Tell me the origin story.
Growing up, I was all about film and journalism. I grew up in Canton, Ohio. My mom was a public school teacher. My dad worked for the IRS. There was a small movie palace in Canton, and it's where where the Football Hall of Fame is. if you were to imagine the most average American city—and I understand the word "average" is rife with potentially problematic meanings—but it's literally a place where they hold athletes back in school so they're better at high school football. There's a really great experimental film about it called Massillon by William E. Jones—and he's a queer filmmaker, so it really gets into what it's like to grow up as a queer person in, again, the most "average" area of the country, where they'd test out new flavors of Doritos.

We had a lot of multiplex cinemas, and I would see literally everything at them. We also had a really beautiful, historic movie palace, the Canton Palace Theater, which is known among movie palace people for having an original Pillion organ. My friend Patrick Dahl and I, who I met through Boy Scouts, we started programming movie nights at the cinema when we were in high school. At the same time, I had a really good high school journalism teacher, and I was torn between wanting to go to school for film production, film theory, or journalism. Originally, I went on a journalism track. I did one year at Kent State University, and then for journalism. I got into OU and Northwestern, but I wanted to be near my high school girlfriend, which was a terrible idea. My classmate who went to OU is an editor at the Washington Post now or something—but, you know, different paths.

So I went to Pittsburgh and studied film theory. Around the time I graduated, they'd passed these tax incentives that brought a flush of film production. They were essentially grabbing people off the street and giving them jobs. So I went from being a film studies person to being an accounting clerk and working in production accounting on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was cool because I met Nick Nolte. Then someone called me up and were like,"Hey, do you want to work in the art department?" I was like, "I don't know literally anything about art or art departments"—and they were like, "You're hired."

Then I got a call from Ted Hope, who was kind of my idol because I'd been interested in film producing. He ran Good Machine and This is That, which was producing Adventureland, so I got hired as the local assistant for Ted Hope and Anne Carey. It was a really interesting film, because they had a really young cast, so it was kind of my job to hang out with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, before she was even cast in Twilight. I even talked to Jesse about his character, because his character in that movie was in a similar position that I was in personally. It was a really interesting experience.

I got restless in Pittsburgh and went to Chicago for a bit, Los Angeles for a bit. I always wanted to be in New York because of authors and musicians I admired, so I drove cross-country and ended up here because someone had an accounting job. The day after I moved here, I woke up on my friend's couch, walked outside, and ran into Jesse outside Academy Records—and we were wearing the same shoes. We went and got a coffee, and as we were sitting down, the script supervisor of Adventureland walked by. Jesse ran out and grabbed her, and I was like, "Yeah, I just moved here last night. I'm trying to get my bearings and find an apartment." And she was like, "Well, I'm going out of town. Do you want to cat sit for me?" It was the craziest morning, and I was like, "I'm destined to be in New York City."

You've been doing Screen Slate independently now for 15 years, and you started it when the blog era was in the process of becoming more corporatized. Obviously, we're back at the beginning of the blog era scale-wise—only it's a bit darksided, because everybody's mentally ill and not happy with what they're doing. I'm curious to hear you talk about what you've weathered as an independent publisher over the last 15 years.
Everything you can map Screen Slate to, it has also essentially pre-existed—sometimes only by a few months. If you look at the mainstreaming of arthouse culture, which the primary driver has been A24—Screen Slate was been around a year or so before A24 was first formed, let alone came into its own. It's similar with Letterboxd. On the publishing side, it existed well before Substack. I'd say Screen Slate probably wouldn't exist if I had started it somewhere within that span, because maybe it would've just become a Substack. But the model is more complex than a daily newsletter, because it's also about listings—a utility for the users, a service.

In terms of things I've weathered, it was very difficult to monetize this stuff. It was pre-Patreon—maybe even pre-Kickstarter. Now, people are a bit more accustomed to paying for the type of service Screen Slate provides online. The problem is, we started at a time in which no one would pay for that. Also, as part of my lowercase-c Communist principles, I wanted this to be totally accessible and open to everyone. The problem is, when you give stuff away for free, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't impose a paywall on it. That's been a long-term challenge that's resulted from the era in which it started. At this point, when I see people paying $5 or $10 for some bullshit Substack that they don't even read, just fist-bumping their friends.—I don't take it personally, but then it's like, "They don't support Screen Slate."

Because I've always wanted Screen Slate to be useful, there's something inscribed in its DNA that makes it easy to take for granted. With 30% seriousness, I've considered it a durational internet performance project, like the On Kawara date boxes or David Lynch's weather report. "How many days in a row can I I email movie listings?" And it's manual, not automatic. Speaking of art, I did end up becoming very involved in the art world. My day job was making $45,000 a year as the technical director of Electronic Arts Intermix, which was a pioneering media art institution I worked really closely with artists like Barbara Hammer, Dan Graham, Dara Birnbaum—all of whom became huge idols and role models to me. The three I just mentioned have, unfortunately, passed away in recent years. But that was cool, because it was the greatest job I've had in my entire life. I worked with my best friends and looked forward to going in every day, on the side of my literally unpaid thing that I was putting some money into, which was tough.

There is always that thing with doing something on your own where, when I get too stressed out about the constant grind of doing my newsletter, I always have in the back of my mind, "Well, I could stop doing this at any point. The only person I'm really going to be letting down is myself." That's freeing, but it's also like, "OK, so if I'm letting myself down I should keep doing it, because I don't want to let myself down." Then, you have to also remember not to be too hard on yourself. I gotta live my life, too. It's kind of a split thing.
Of course, I think about closing Screen Slate every single day of my life. I can just imagine what it's like to be able to wake up and be like, "It's Saturday. I could ride a motorcycle to the ship graveyard in Staten Island. I could go to a county fair in Massachusetts. I can do whatever the fuck I want to do." That's been a challenge for the last 15 years. But, not to be too heavy about it, it starts to feel like—I'll use the woke phraseology of "unaliving ideation" [Laughs]—it would almost be like dying if I stopped doing it. In a way, that returns to how I feel about competition. If you want to actually try to like be a competitor, you are against someone who sees this as—and you can mention that I'm chuckling as I say this—a mission from God. It's kind of my reason for existence. I'm not trying to create a cult of personality, or a quasi-religious vibe around it. It's just my passion, and it's something that's shared with a large community, and I think a lot of people do understand and appreciate that. That's not something you can create with AI or with venture capital, even.

I mean, you can't grindset a sense of purpose.
Although I may try to argue otherwise and sell Screen Slate grindset manuals on hats.

I saw you talk on Twitter a few years ago about the usefulness of gaming in between work—running dungeons in Diablo to keep the synapses firing—which I do all the time.
What are you playing?

A lot of Diablo and loot-shooter stuff. This is so humiliating every time I tell somebody this, but I've been playing a lot of Minecraft Dungeons, which is like baby Diablo. What have you been playing?
I was in Speranza this morning, Arc Raid-ing. I'm working on a new version of the website that will hopefully come out soon. I want to thoroughly test it, I don't want to release garbage—but there is a feature that's directly inspired by Diablo 4 that I don't want to spoil. Speaking of embarrassing games to be playing, I got really into Valorant during the pandemic, which is like Counter-Strike for children. I had some people I met through the game, and it helped me understand how younger people were grappling with the pandemic and their relationship to social media. In that sense, gaming had a way of providing intergenerational perspective at a moment when I was dealing with a lot of meme-based warfare directed at me from people on the Thiel payroll. I'd be talking to people around the world like, "OK, so there's this place called Dimes Square, and they're making memes, and there's this guy Peter Thiel." It's like when Ralph Wiggum says, "My cat's breath smells like cat food."

The character of New York is always changing in general. You've been here long enough that I think you could have some observations about the changing character of the city, especially with regards to the newfound interest in cinephilia.
There's been a massive tectonic shift. Anyone would be crazy to deny that. There are nonprofit types who have been blind to it. You used to go to movies, and it would be you and four people rustling a bag—slightly askew trust-fund people in their 70s. And some of those people are awesome. Some of them, in fact, are literally my friends, so respect to them. But now it's tons of young people, and things that would never have a chance of selling out are completely packed. It's frankly difficult, a lot of times, to get tickets. I see something I want to go to, and I'm like, "How is this 2 p.m. Thursday screening sold out?"

Something I want to shout myself out for—because I do think this actually has been maybe a bit ignored—I think Screen Slate has played a huge role in that. Most people who are attending these screenings don't go to the venue's websites or learn about something through their own newsletter. They learn about it through Screen Slate, and the types of writers and coverage we've worked with have made it feel more welcoming for wider audiences. A lot of people talk about the Letterboxd effect, but I want to claw that back, because other cities aren't having the same experience. There's a reason programmers around the country are emailing me saying, "Please open Screen Slate in this city." I took a look at our stats last year, and I can't see exactly what's converting into ticket sales, but if we did a super modest, conservative estimate, we're probably referring at least $2 million in ticket sales with a total budget of $100,000 divided among the 200 people who contribute.

Let's talk about social media. From our general conversation here, it definitely sounds like something you don't enjoy taking part in.
Instagram is an interesting spot. A couple months ago, that whole story broke about Geese and digital marketing. The way that filmmakers have become subject to fandoms and parasocial relationships through the internet, the exact same marketing apparatus has existed. A couple months ago, all these accounts popped up out of nowhere on Instagram called Occupy Cinema, Occupy Directors—all with the same kind of style. They were doing these posts that were going huge and viral, and I was seeing major filmmakers—people I know who I know have brains—engaging with this stuff, interacting with it, following it. Many of their posts generated engagement around anti-AI sentiment, pro-union sentiment, and Palestine. These accounts all exist under the same umbrella of marketing. They create a bunch of accounts, use AI to identify trending topics within niches, use AI to offer them in a way that will go viral in terms of choosing imagery, text, subjects, and slides, and then they generate engagement through that. They're not being paid to do a buzzy pro-union or Palestine post, but they use that to generate big figures, and then they take that data and they sell it to studios for marketing.

It hurts to see the literacy plummeting in real time amongst people who think they know better. Millennials are now in the Facebook boomer phase from 15 years ago, where they're getting suckered by all of this like AI generated engagement. They need to get smarter. I don't understand why people aren't thinking that this account that pops out of nowhere, with an authoritative headline on an image that's not connected to any publication...people need to get smart, because it does affect real stuff.

What have you seen lately that you like?
Just last night, I watched The Fan by Tony Scott. 'm not just saying it because it was the last movie I watched, but it was phenomenal. Tony Scott is one of those directors where—I mean, the most vile piece of so-called film criticism I've ever read, the worst piece of film writing that I've ever encountered in my lifetime of studying film criticism—was the film critic for Jacobin saying, "Now that Tony Scott's dead, people are going to pretend he was this great filmmaker, but all his movies suck." And this was published, like the day after he died. It was not only insulting someone who had just committed suicide, but it was insulting all the people who love his movies, which is quite a lot. But, also, the movies are fucking brilliant. We've been talking about ebbs, flows, and shifts—if you asked anyone for the longest time, they'd be like, "Ridley Scott's the talented Scott, and Tony Scott's the popcorn one." At this point, it's almost accepted now that's wrong. I even watched Gladiator the other night, and there's a lot of great lines and great moments in it—but it doesn't have the same juice as virtually any Tony Scott movie.