A Film Screening in a Google Sheet

I love using products wrong.

I love using them for things that the people who built the product would have never predicted. It’s ironic because as someone who creates products for a living, I spend a significant amount of time doing research, conducting interviews, and impishly instigating creative friction with my colleagues to winnow down the mess posed by imagination and focus in on building for select “use cases.” And then in my personal life… well, let’s say there’s a pleasure in irreverent misuse that is not unfamiliar to me.

For example, last year I created a nostalgic 5 minutes of Tumblr on Are.na for my best friend’s birthday. A feed of quotes, images, and videos to allow her a moment of scroll straight out of 2013.

I’ve used a SurveyMonkey survey to do my own private Cognitive Behavioral Therapy check-in, asking myself questions to identify “thinking errors.”

I have written poetry with file names, organizing stanzas into folders.

But my favorite (the best one (the one my friends still mention)) is when I hosted a film screening party in a Google Sheet.

The year is 2021 and we’re in the thick of Covid. I’ve gone through a canonical event as a filmmaker, finishing my “Covid film,” made in total isolation on a laptop. My film is a desktop documentary called Drawing in the Future about the word “contract” (referring to both agreement and shrinking) and it wins the competition I’d entered. Buoyed, I want to show all my friends.

Well, conditions weren’t ideal for booking a theater or cafe and inviting my friends to risk their health to gather in person, and anyway, so many of my friends live all over — New York to LA — and I wanted to bring them into the social fold of the screening. All the fun of a screening happens in the lobby immediately after, when you’re hearing everyone’s accolades and complaints as you bounce from friend to friend.

So, inspired by Marie Foulston’s Party in a Shared Google Doc, I thought maybe I could do the same.

I kept the invite light on instruction, so the first tab of the Google Sheet explained what was happening. You would enter the “theater” tab, grab the password and link to the film, watch it, and meet up in the tab titled “lounge” for the party.