By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2010
In mid-December 2010, FishbowlLA covered Douglas McFarlane — a London-based Scotsman who by day advised banks on security and internet projects — and his tongue-in-cheek DVD Making It in Hollywood, the result of his accredited-foreign-press tours of the Oscars, Cannes, Sundance, and the BAFTAs. The original framing treated the kilt-wearing-showbiz-reporter project with warm amusement.
Then
McFarlane’s project was a small, characteristic artifact of the late-2000s film-festival-and-awards-circuit culture. He had gotten himself accredited as foreign press for the 2006 and 2007 Oscars, the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and the BAFTA Awards — and had assembled the resulting first-person footage, celebrity sightings, and interviews into a DVD.
The “kilt-wearing showbiz reporter” framing captured the project’s tongue-in-cheek character — a Scotsman with a day job in bank-security consulting, working the international film-festival circuit as a self-made accredited journalist. It was structurally a story about the porousness of the press-accreditation system and the do-it-yourself film-culture-documentation that the cheap-video-and-DVD era enabled.
The DVD was released on Amazon in the US-format edition; McFarlane was, the original piece noted, already filming a follow-up project in Italy. The piece was characteristic of the lighter end of FishbowlLA’s editorial register — a small, amused look at a self-made film-circuit documentarian.
Now
The do-it-yourself film-culture-documentation that McFarlane’s project represented has been substantially transformed — and democratized far further — by the subsequent decade. The DVD as a distribution format has effectively disappeared; the kind of first-person festival-circuit footage McFarlane assembled onto a disc would now be YouTube content, or a podcast, or social-media video.
The broader phenomenon the 2010 piece touched — the porousness of press accreditation, and the rise of self-made, non-institutional film-culture documentation — has only accelerated. The film festivals now accredit a vastly wider range of online creators, influencers, and independent video-makers than the 2006-2008 system McFarlane navigated; the line between institutional press and self-made coverage has continued to blur.
The 2010 piece reads now as a small, light documented artifact of a transitional moment — a self-made showbiz-reporter project on a DVD, captured just before the streaming-and-social-video era made that exact kind of do-it-yourself film-circuit documentation both far easier and far more common.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.