How I Cracked the Story for My First Feature Film with a Used Bookstore Find

Inspiration can come from anywhere, but first-time filmmaker David Ketterer Spencer took that idea to wild ends with his “Souvenir.” He writes for IndieWire about breaking a story with a little piece of found ephemera.

David Ketterer Spencer is a New York-based filmmaker whose debut feature, “Souvenir,” will premiere at this year’s Dances with Films: Los Angeles film festival. It stars Ruby Cruz, Eric Berryman, Mozhan Navabi, Laith Nakli, and Janeane Garofalo. Ahead, he describes how a random find at a New York bookstore became his first feature film.

The stationery was from a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, and the words were written first in pencil, then in red ink. It was a page from someone’s diary. The writer was moving out and, as it read to me, going through a breakup. They said something about Philadelphia (Kenyan letterhead notwithstanding). It ended with the words, “Work, work, I need to work.”

I found the page at a used bookstore in New York City, tucked into an out-of-date atlas. I cut up the atlas to make a piece of wall art for my college dorm room; I kept the diary page in a folder without knowing what to do with it.

It was there when I needed it, fifteen years later, in the summer of 2023. I was a few drafts into the screenplay for my debut feature “Souvenir,” which will premiere this month at Dances with Films: Los Angeles. I had just finished my latest gig as a first assistant director — we had wrapped A24’s action-comedy “Y2K” in May — and with SAG and the WGA on strike, I had unexpected time on my hands.

The early drafts of the script were closely based on a day I spent with a friend in my twenties; it was a hangout movie and it read like a Richard Linklater movie from the ‘90s. It wasn’t bad, but it was too familiar; it needed its own voice. So, I put the journal entry from Nairobi (or Philadelphia or whatever it was) in my protagonists’ paths to see what they would do with it.

Over the next few drafts, the diary turned into a wallet, its owner turned into a recently deceased self-help guru, and the story was walking on its own legs. The backstory of the wallet got zanier as I wrote; now instead of a latter-day mumblecore film, we were making a screwball comedy. I put the diary entry back into storage – it had taken me where I needed to go.

Two years later, we were rolling cameras. 

The film’s financier had been involved with an earlier script I had written, but had scuppered for creative and financial reasons (read: it was too expensive and not good enough). Fortunately, he was willing to recommit the resources to “Souvenir.”

Financing is the thing most filmmakers lack access to, but it’s not enough by itself, even with a solid script. I needed a community that believed in the project.

My first believers were producers Scott DelaCruz and Chandler Wild, friends of mine who had recently come off a festival run on their first narrative feature “The Dancing Monkey.” They got me out from behind my desk and into pre-production. Next came the brilliant casting director Tara Rubin, through whom we found our leads Ruby Cruz and Eric Berryman, and shortly after, our supporting cast: Laith Nakli, Mozhan Navabi, and Janeane Garofalo.

Production itself was a 16-day gallop through the streets of New York. It was hard, but it was hard in a way I knew: after almost 15 years as an AD in New York, the challenges of shooting here are familiar to me. We sweated out long walk-and-talk scenes in the July heat; we sneaked onto the subway to steal unpermitted shots; we hauled gear into narrow walk-up apartments.

I give my crew and cast all the credit for the success of our shoot. Directors carry the most responsibility for the set, but when your team is good, the work doesn’t feel hard. (A director friend of mine, someone I turn to for advice, once said he thinks it’s actually the set’s easiest job.)

Once in post, however, I was on unfamiliar ground again. While the zero-sum game of production is clear to me — spending more resources on one scene means spending less on another — in post, I have a much harder time accepting that our limited resources require us to leave some ideas unexplored. I became commitment-phobic; I cut out scenes and put them back; by turns I became susceptible and defiant toward notes on the cut.

Here again, Chandler and Scott’s experience got us through, and we locked picture just before Christmas of 2025. 

Now we face the (once again, brand-new to me) task of bringing the movie into the world. Our acceptance at Dances with Films has been an incredible first step in this direction, not just because it’s an excellent festival but because of their support for filmmakers in the process of selling an early career film. We’re learning to be our own social media managers, and we’ve already had one clip go viral. The journey ahead, building the audience and finding a distribution partner, will be at least as long as the one behind us.

As someone once wrote in Philadelphia (or Nairobi, or wherever), “Work, work, I need to work.”