Christin Baker

Someone asked me earlier when we first met and I couldn’t quite pin it down. I think we first met at Toronto Web Fest in 2014.
It feels like longer. Although I guess that’s probably the first time we were actually physically in the same space together.

I feel like I’ve known you online forever. So here’s my first question. It’s quite a conscious thing to go, ‘I’m going to have a network or a platform.’ Was that actually a conscious decision, or was it, ‘I’ve just made a bunch of shows – I should collect them somewhere?’
It definitely went through different iterations and it grew organically. At first it was going to be the ‘lesbian YouTube.’

On YouTube?
No, it was going to be its own site, and it was going to be curated; well, actually not curated, but we wanted people to upload their own projects to our site, just like people were uploading to YouTube, but people knew that if they were coming to our site that it was lesbian focused. So we were open, but to differentiate ourselves, we made our own content.

As in, to differentiate yourselves from [lesbian video curation site] OML (One More Lesbian)?
No, OML was around when we first started.

So when did you start?
We started in 2009. Well, we started with the idea in 2007 and but we formed the business I think in ‘09. In its first iteration it was clunky, and it was ugly. I did raise some angel investor money, but I kept my full time job and my co-founder kept her full time job. So we created the site, and we did interviews. At the time, it was when AfterEllen was starting to blow up, so we did video interviews with actors, actresses who were gay or who had a lesbian following.

We wanted to differentiate ourselves with our own original content, so we thought, ‘we’ll make our own content that’s only on our site, and we’ll go around and have other people upload their content too.’ Well, people just weren’t uploading to our site. And so what we were actually doing was pulling content – much like OML – and just embedding it on our site.

When I started looking at our analytics, I saw we weren’t getting enough traffic to do any ad sales; we had a couple hundred dollars in Google Ads, but it was our original content where we’d done these interviews because that’s what we could afford. We did do one original series [before those].

This was a year and a half in, and I thought, ‘you know what, if I can get ten lesbians to pay me 3.99 a month, that’s more money than I’ll ever make if I tried to build my traffic.’ And, at the same time, OML launched, and they were doing a much better job at content curation.

And I didn’t want to be a content curator, I wanted to be a content maker.

So we totally changed the site. We took down all the videos that were pulled from YouTube. I got a new designer and – I did go into debt – I put money into Cowgirl Up. And I thought, ‘I’m going to get as many high profile stars: Nancylee Myatt…’

Oooh, Bridget McManus was in that!
Yes, Bridget was in that. And because of the interviews that we had done, we had started to build relationships with some of those folks. So we did an interview with Nancylee Myatt after she did South of Nowhere, and she was like, ‘I’ve always wanted to make a lesbian cowgirl movie,’ so I was like, let’s do it.’ And she could get some of the South of Nowhere people who had a huge following; we had Bridget, and we got Marnie Alton.

So we decided to do that. I went into debt, which is never a great idea, but I wanted to do something to show that we’re not kidding: we are a force to be reckoned with, we’re working with good quality people.

We were able to get a lot of things for free because of Nancylee. For example, any time you work with horses, it’s going to be expensive, but we got all of that for free because Nancy Lee had a really good relationship with this polo farm.

Well, yes, I remember watching it with my producer’s head on thinking ‘x amount of money there’ and ‘x amount of money there’.
It looked really expensive. So we were just really lucky that we were able to do all of that and get all of that.

And so that launched. We didn’t have auto-renew, so if you wanted to renew your subscription you had to re-sign up every month.

I went through three or four different web designers and I finally found the one that I have now and he’s amazing. And I think I’ve gone through four or five iterations of the site just trying to make it better, more efficient, mobile friendly.

So it has kind of grown, and we’ve had to constantly be making decisions and challenging ourselves on what’s new and what’s better and different. And that’s how we’ve come up with what we have now, just by always looking at how we can make the site better, and how can we get better content, and put it in a way that makes sense and looks better.

So we probably didn’t become a network until about four years ago.

So step back: because you are a filmmaker, I would think that your first impetus would be to create and make stuff, but not necessarily go, ‘I want to create my own network.’
Yeah, I don’t know why I did that.

Because it’s not a little undertaking either.
Well, YouTube wasn’t what YouTube [is now]. YouTube didn’t have the multi channel network capability, and it wasn’t known for that at the time.

And we were really early in getting people to pay for content. We were before Netflix did their thing and Hulu flipped to subscription; we were there when other people were going, ‘crap, we need to have people pay for this.’

If I were creating it now, I probably would’ve made different choices. But because it wasn’t out there, we had to create it.

Have you always worked in film or were you one of those people that trained in theatre and transitioned over?
No, I went to college for film, and worked in the industry in Los Angeles, and then just got burned out and frustrated. I think it’s really hard to be in LA when you’re in your early 20s. I went to school in Tennessee, and then moved to LA; I was really lucky to get a job in a small studio.

I feel like I was a little pinball, bouncing around to try and find what space I wanted. I ended up actually leaving it and going to work for non-profits.

And then I got this itch to go back and make videos so I made fundraising videos for the non-profit; I got to use and flex that muscle.

I think, once you have that creative bug and that filmmaking bug, it just doesn’t really leave you. So I had a full time job, and I decided to start tello when I was living in Chicago. I had totally left the industry and lived in non-profit and thought that was what I was going to do, but it just kept tapping me on the shoulder.

As a credited writer / director / producer, do you have a bias towards any one discipline?
I’m a crappy writer. I’ve written: I have writing credits and have written first drafts of many things that have been subsequently re-written by people, and they should have been. I would say I’m a producer and a director. I do those things the best, and I write because sometimes it’s necessary just to get something out, and then have people re-write me.

I don’t love my writing; I think there are other people who are better at it and smarter than me who are just writers. I’m a really good producer. I’m probably a better producer than director, but I like directing.

Did you intend to be a producer though?
So here’s what I did: in order to make my projects, I had to produce them, and if I didn’t want to pay a director – which I don’t – I had to direct them. So I kind of became a director more out of necessity, but then I realised, ‘oh, I really like this.’ But I’m not, well, when I hear other directors talk about it, I’m like, ‘I don’t think about things like that.’

As in, their process?
Yes, and I know that everyone has a different way of going about creating things, but I do love working with actors. I think that I probably come at it with a theatre mindset when I come to directing because I really like for the [Director of Photography] to worry about the aesthetics and the lighting; my big thing is ‘just make them beautiful.’ I’ll say to a DP, I’ll be very upfront, ‘look, I’m not going to give you colours to work with: I want to work with the actors, I want to make sure that they look good and that the scene is good and that we communicate things, but I’m going to trust you with what angles we need to have, what’s going to look the best, and also what’s going to be efficient.’ I try to stay away from inserts – I hate inserts – or where someone cuts away to this weird angle in the scene for aesthetic purposes but has no real plot point. I hate that shit.

I just want the actors to show up and have an amazing performance, and that’s why I love working with actors as a director. So that’s why I think I come from a theatre perspective, as opposed to where I’m concerned where the camera angles are going to be where as I think some directors might be.

When you went to film school, what was your focus?
Originally, I thought I wanted to go into broadcasting – I thought I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. So it was multi-cam: newsroom, three cameras, get ready for camera two… And I was like, ‘oh, I don’t like this; I want to do single cam stuff.’

So I changed my trajectory and I did a little bit of everything. I learned to edit, and it was right when non-linear editing was coming out, so I cut my teeth on early, early Avid, and software that’s not out any more. I could’ve done reel to reel, but I just focused on digital. So I did editing, directing, producing; they didn’t get into budgets as much at that time, but I just learnt a little bit of everything – more producing, storytelling and directing.

Like I said, I went to a multi-camera discipline school, and so I had to create my own path.

So with regards to the content that you have on tello, is there a particular style that you shoot for; is there a ‘house brand’ so to speak?
No, there’s not. In fact, I was telling a story where, in the last project, someone sent me a concept, like, a first episode. And I didn’t like the style. I’m not a big fan of things that are like a vlog and then things happen in the background – it’s just not my thing. But this person made this project, and that’s what it was. It was her talking to the camera and then her buddy talking to the camera, and it was so cute and so endearing. And I really liked it, and I thought, ‘well, it’s not for me, but I have a group of people who would really like this and like this kind of storytelling.’

So I commissioned it: here’s some money, go and make five episodes, and send me the script. I did give a couple of notes because the way she ended it, I was like, ‘you can’t end it like that because you need this piece at the end, ‘and she was like, ‘ok,’ and re-did the last episode and sent it back. So that’s something you would never have seen on tello because I don’t like it so I would never have made it, but when someone else did, I was like, ‘that’s great!’

I also don’t like making documentaries. But we have two or three documentaries on the site because someone sent me their first, and I was like, ‘that’s fantastic!’

The one I like was the one with all the Prides in the south…
I Kissed A Girl. I loved it: that’s another example of where I thought her storytelling was great, and she had found this woman that just kind of got it. I gave very few notes, I gave a little bit of money, and I told her to send me four more episodes and we’ll put it up and you’ll make your money back. And she has.

So I don’t like making documentaries, but I like viewing them, and so if someone else wants to make it, great: we’ll put that on the site.

So there’s not really a brand as such, it’s all different types.

But if there was a common thread through tello content?
Strong female leads. They’re usually lesbian. And I think it’s that powerful female voice that you don’t always see. If you look at the ratio of men to women in our series, it’s probably like, anti diversity on the male side. So that’s what I would say our brand is.

Amongst the Netflix and Hulus, being a platform that is for a lesbian audience, how do you find jostling in that space? Is that even a consideration for you at the moment? I remember when we were on a panel once, someone in the audience said they were surprised [at your niche] and I thought, ‘Why? There’s sports channels, and there’s all kinds of channels for people that make everything…’ And you were like, ‘if you happen to like my content, that’s great, but I don’t make it for you.’
It was a white guy, and I think he was genuinely surprised that I didn’t care about him as an audience person. White men usually find that people care a lot about them, and I just looked at him and said, ‘I don’t care about you.’ I mean, I was very cheeky, but he was being an asshole and not understanding why I wouldn’t go for a huge broad audience.

And I’m unapologetic about who I go after. I’ve had very few people just say, ‘but it’s good content and you should go for everyone.’ And I just don’t agree with that. I think that, if you stay true to your niche and your audience… I mean, a good example is when that rash of lesbian character deaths came out on UK and American television. We made a very conscious decision at the beginning of tello where I said, ‘there will be no lesbians who die in the end.’ If we have a project where, for plot purposes, someone’s lover is killed, that has to happen because it drives the plot forward, so I can’t say we don’t ever kill lesbians, but we don’t kill the only lesbian character in the end.

We had someone from England who pitched me their short, and in the end the two women slit their wrists and killed themselves. And I said, ‘listen, this is a really lovely project and you’ve done a good job, but I can’t use this because it’s against what we do at tello.’ And she got very upset, and she was lesbian, and she was like, ‘well, this is what happened,’ and I was like, ‘yes, it did, and you can put that up on many other channels but I am not going to distribute it.’

I actually also said no to a project that was making fun of the lesbian fan base a little bit. It was poking fun at a particular fandom and I don’t like that either. I’m not going to make fun of or mock my audience. I’m not going to kill any lesbians for tropey reasons, and I’m not going to mock my audience. That was a new one that I didn’t think was going to come up, but it did, and so I had to say, I can’t make this.

How’ve you seen your audience change?
They’ve gotten younger. And I was very surprised by that.

Why?
Because I’ve always felt that the younger generation didn’t want to pay for content and the older generation somehow saw that paying for content was necessary to support it. But I’ve found that to be the opposite. I’ve found that some of the older lesbians don’t want to pay for content, but the younger ones are like, ‘yeah, here you go: here’s my 4.99.’

I think that’s what’s happened. Our audience has gotten younger, and that’s kind of cool. It hasn’t dramatically changed; it is mostly lesbians, mostly women. I think their standards have gotten higher. I think they’re less willing to take shit and say that it’s great.

Or give it a pass.
Right, or give it a pass because it’s lesbian content. I hope that they know that, because it’s on tello, they’re probably going to enjoy it, that it’s going to be something that they like, and that makes me feel good.

I’m curious: particularly in the early days, whenever I spoke to someone that wasn’t in LGBTQ+ media at all, it would take me the longest time to describe having a web series on a site that promotes content for women that like women. And everyone used to be like, ‘so… it’s a porn site!?’ When you’ve engaged with the world outside of LGBTQ+ media, how have you circumnavigated these conversations? Because I’m assuming it has come up.
It’s interesting phraseology. So if I were to say, ‘I make lesbian content,’ people automatically think of porn. But if I say, ‘I make content for the lesbian community,’ that changes everything. There’s not an assumption there.

There was one time when I was partnering with OML they were going to write in a press release, ‘we’re the largest non-porn lesbian site’, and I said, ‘take that out: I don’t want that word anywhere in a press release where my site’s name is.’

And then I had one guy that I was talking to about banking with whom I was looking at getting a business loan, who really pushed that question, and I finally said to him, ‘you know what, you have asked me way too many times: this is not a porn site, it’s like Netflix, and I’m not going to do business with you.’ And it was a white cis man, and I was angry, and I hung up, and I’m not going to do business with them.

But it has only happened twice. And I think it’s because I said ‘I make content for the lesbian community’ – there’s something about that phrasing that – * snaps fingers * – you know? There’s something around that. But I didn’t get a lot of that. I probably just don’t talk to a lot of cis white guys though.

So let’s step back. Are you from a creative family?
My Mum is very creative and I get that quite honestly from her. She did theatre for kids.

Did you always know that you wanted to be a filmmaker?
No, not until college. Well, I knew I probably wanted to do something in entertainment because I played around with the VHS camera. We would do fake SNL sketches and music videos. I was always doing something with the camera but I didn’t realise that I could make a living [from it]. I got into college, and thought, ‘oh, I want to be in front of the camera, but I hate news…’

Why did you gravitate towards news? That’s such a specific focus.
I don’t know, I think at some point my Mum said, ‘you would be a good broadcaster, you’re very well spoken, you’d do well in front of the camera…’

Wait, you were going for in front of the camera?
Yes, so in college, I was the sports broadcaster for my college news channel. I always thought that I would be in front of the camera; then I did an internship at a news affiliate, and then I realised, ‘crap, I hate news – what am I doing?’

That same summer, I was an extra for two weeks on a really dumb movie and I loved it. So I was like, ‘oh, this is what I want to do.’ So that one summer totally changed my life.

Wow, so you went from three camera, front of camera, broadcast news to single cam, behind it, running around with cowgirls and horses.
Exactly.

Well, this is the thing: you can go, ‘I make content for the lesbian community ergo there’s going to be lesbian stuff in it, maybe even some lesbians. Therefore, it’s just fact, and we can get rid of [defining that box].’ It’s not as if it’s another place where we have to go, ‘ok, let’s establish that this is a lesbian,’ because it just is what it is.
Right, and now we’re moving on. All of our projects have been plot driven by something that is lesbian-ish.

I’ve never thought of that. But when you’ve articulated it in that way… my head is just going through all of your back catalogue. It feels to me like quite a seismic shift; for example, if I was developing a pilot, which had very strong female leads but there were no lesbians in it, could it still be a tello project?
If tello were to make it, there would have to be at least one person that had a girlfriend. Or something like that. But again, it wouldn’t be a plot driven lesbian piece. It would be, e.g. two women and two men, and one of them would happen to be a lesbian, but really, it would be about them fighting crime. I would say that if you could turn one of your women into a lesbian but not change anything else in the plot, we’d make it.

So I wouldn’t say we’d have something in there where there was no lesbian – because that wouldn’t be true to our brand – but if it hops to network, and they do make that adjustment, I’m not going to prevent it hopping to network – maybe they’ll take it out or maybe they won’t. But I’m not going to prevent something hopping to network.