Welcome to Professional Sweetheart

"Now, we can have a good time, but we can not be wild."

Hey y’all, it’s my first newsletter! I’m glad to be on this ride together.

First, a few housekeeping things:

• This entry is free for everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter. At some point in the next few weeks, I will be offering a paid option that gets you a weekly newsletter (drops every Friday morning) and another newsletter every other week, likely showing up on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Plus, you’ll get the full archive and commenting privileges.

• I tried to make this paid option as cheap as possible but the lowest Substack will let me set the rate at is $5 a month. I think if you pay the yearly rate ($54), this works out to less per month.

• There’s also a Founding Subscription rate ($80) which is only really there because I couldn’t figure out how to NOT have it there. If for some reason you want to be a Founder, I’ll figure out a way to kick in something extra special for you.

• I’m giving you zero pressure to go paid (for real) but I AM pressuring you to spread the word about the newsletter, if you can, to anyone you know that likes movies. I would really appreciate that.

  ---

  ---

Okay, with all that out of the way — perhaps you’re wondering why I decided to start this thing to begin with? Most people who have either followed me on social media, listened to my podcast, or know me in real life know that I was laid off from my programming job at the end of 2022. It was quite a shock, to say the least. Since then I have been trying to stay busy/positive while watching the film and television business slowly turn into a complex shitshow with no end in sight. I realized, I have a lot of creative energy to burn off! At the same time, I have discovered the absolute bummer that is trying to find any kind of job in entertainment right now. As much as I have resume tweaked, networked, and forced myself to comment every day on LinkedIn just to not be forgotten by their algorithm (sigh) — as long as layoffs are still happening at the major companies, I don’t see the career boards lighting up anytime soon. This goes double for programming, which as a field, is very small. Most people don’t even realize it’s a job, and those of us who have managed to do it in any kind of professional capacity tend to hang on to their situations for dear life. (That’s actually not a joke. I can think of at least two instances where I’ve only been offered a programming opportunity because the person who left the job either retired or just flat out DIED OF OLD AGE.)

So, in the spirit of the adage that states, “When God closes a door, he opens a newsletter”, I started Professional Sweetheart. It is my hope that it will give me space to reflect a bit longer and deeper about movies, film culture, and film programming than I have in some of my other/previous work. Plus, there seems to be cool ways to community build and chat with folks on Substack that I’ll be figuring out as soon as I can (good lord there are so buttons on this thing). In any case, I’m excited to see what can happen here, and hope you are as well.

A Few Things Before I Go:

• A huge, HUGE thank you to Craig Calcaterra of the incredible, daily (!) baseball newsletter Cup of Coffee. He was my guide to starting this whole adventure, and when you consider how big of a rockstar he is in the Substack world, the fact that he gave me the time that he did is greatly appreciated. I would also recommend you subscribe to him if you haven’t already. The overlapping circle of classic movie fans who also like baseball runs deep, and Craig is proof of that.

• If you were wondering: this newsletter is named after a Ginger Rogers movie from 1933. I discovered it many years ago as I was programming a day of Zasu Pitts films at TCM (like, where the hell else would this even happen). The title was so great, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Especially the notion that the movie was not about a sex worker like I’d assumed (though it does employ two of my favorite pre-code film tropes: orphans who get discovered and women who want to party), but instead, was about the radio business (another industry I used to work in — I’m sure I’ll talk about that at some point, too).

Have a great weekend! Talk soon.

Millie