By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2010
One of FishbowlLA’s reliable pleasures was the small story about an outsider talking his way inside. In late 2010 that outsider was Douglas McFarlane, a London-based Scotsman with a day job in bank security and a tongue-in-cheek DVD to sell.
Then
By profession, Douglas McFarlane advised banks on security and internet projects. By hobby, he was a sometime actor and blogger who had figured out how to obtain foreign-press accreditation for some of the most heavily credentialed events in entertainment.
Across 2006 through 2008 he had collected press access to two Academy Awards ceremonies, the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, a Film London event and the BAFTA Awards. He cut the resulting first-person footage together with celebrity sightings and interviews into a self-deprecating DVD called Making It in Hollywood.
McFarlane told FishbowlLA by email that the UK release was set for January 31, with a US-format disc already available on Amazon and video-on-demand to follow after the platform’s 60-day lead time. He mentioned a next, ‘top-secret’ film project already shooting in Italy, and a resume that ran from independent films Ticking Man and Ouija Board to West End theatre and a long-running AOL broadband ad.
Now
The DVD-and-VOD distribution path McFarlane was navigating in 2010 effectively disappeared within a few years. Amazon’s physical-disc storefront faded as a route for independent producers, and the home-video window that a project like Making It in Hollywood depended on collapsed into the streaming era.
His real subject — an amateur using festival press credentials to film inside Cannes, Sundance and the Oscars — turned out to be ahead of its time. The credentialed-outsider-with-a-camera became, a decade later, simply how a great deal of awards-season content gets made, only now the camera is a phone and the DVD is a channel.
The piece survives best as a reminder of what FishbowlLA covered between the masthead news: the margins of the entertainment-press world, where a banker in a kilt could still find a way onto the red carpet.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.