Man Finds Tape Exports Texas Terrors to Tribeca

Small towns are famous for two things: homecomings and dark secrets. The two combine in Man Finds Tape, the debut feature from Austin-based writer/director duo Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman, which debuts this weekend at the Tribeca Festival in New York.

The fake documentary follows Lynn Page (Kelsey Pribilski) as she gets drawn into a strange and terrifying world of conspiracies and dark powers when her YouTuber brother, Lucas (William Magnuson), finds a mysterious recording from the small Texas town where they grew up.

Just as Man Finds Tape is about the sinister side of a community, the fact that Gandersman and Hall got the film made is a tribute to the Austin filmmaking community. Both filmmakers are fixtures of the Austin movie scene – Gandersman as a producer and editor, and Hall as former editor at Cinematical and movies.com and more recently as a South by Southwest programmer. They actually cut their filmmaking teeth as a duo with the 2016 short "Givertaker." However, they haven’t restricted their storytelling to the screen, having found printed success with their Shirley Jackson Award-nominated YA horror, The Dead Friends Society.

Yet there’s a twist there. Dead Friends Society was originally going to be their follow-up feature to “Givertaker” but they converted the script to a manuscript during the pandemic. Similarly, Man Finds Tape started life seven years ago as a scripted podcast. Hall explained, “The journalist was going to be investigating this strange piece of footage in a small town, and it was all going to be audio only.” He started bouncing the idea off Gandersman, “and then, like many things we start to work on, it went into a digital drawer until something clicks and it comes back up again.”

In 2020, something clicked, and the process of it becoming a film began with a little help from their friends. Gandersman credited The Black Phone writer C. Robert Cargill and his wife, Jess, for getting the ball rolling. Every year, they hold an orphans’ party at Christmas for people who don’t have family with whom to celebrate. That year, due to COVID, it transformed into a Zoom call, and Gandersman and his wife, Ashley Landavazo, were virtual guests. Also on the call was Justin Benson, co-founder of Rustic Films, codirector of Spring and Synchronic, who had recently been announced as part of the creative team behind Moon Knight for Disney+.

Gandersman said, “We get off the call and I turn to my wife, and I go, ‘Man, those Rustic guys figured out how to make a tiny little movie and snowball it into the next and the next and the next.’ ... The next day, I call Peter and we discuss how we need to come up with something we can control our destiny on, and no one can tell us ‘No, you can’t make it.’”

Hall and Gandersman started discussing their joint strengths, and what kind of story they could tell with what they had to hand. A horror story, obviously, but then Gandersman started thinking about his years of experience working in the documentary field, and the idea of a faux documentary raised its head. “We asked ourselves, ‘What story can we tell in that format?’ and Peter then brought up the old podcast idea.”

Fast forward to 2025, and Man Finds Tape is premiering this weekend at Tribeca, written and directed by Gandersman and Hall, produced by Landavazo, executive produced by the Cargills, and under the Rustic shingle.

The passage of time had some unexpected impacts on the film, not least on how they shot the fictional town of Larkin. Hall said that they had conceived of it as “this town whose heyday is over,” and when they first started writing the script they were always thinking about the small town of Taylor, just north of Austin. “Then when we did the location scouting we went, ‘Oh, Taylor has turned into this really nice place and they’re rehabbing the downtown area. It doesn’t fit what we’re thinking.’”

Instead, they moved out to smaller nearby towns like Granger, where they were welcomed with open and film-friendly arms. Gandersman said, “We shut down Main Street for $100. It was incredible. In front of the police station!”

“We were filming b-roll,” Hall said, “and some point some guy wandered over to us and we were like, ‘Oh, is he going to tell us to get out of here?’ It was the mayor, and he was just coming to say hi.”

Not that Taylor got cut out completely: While the exteriors were too busy for what they had in mind, the duo were able to film at the new state-of-the-art Texas Film Studio (formerly Renegade Studios) just off Main Street.

It was essential for the pair to get a real sense of small-town Texas, and there’s arguably no element of the movie that sums up that up more than the performance of John Gholson as Reverend Endicott Carr, the local evangelical preacher with an outsize sway over his community. On the page, he was written as a towering and imposing figure (“a Tom Noonan-type,” Gandersman said), and Gholson wasn’t originally auditioning for the role. He was actually up to play Winston Boon, the local BBQ pitmaster. Hall recalled that they finally had him read for three parts: Boon, Carr, and the enigmatic Stranger. “We basically just threw the pages at him,” Hall said, and his reading changed everything. Graham Skipper Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge) would get the part of Boon, while another scene regular, Brian Villalobos (The Crucible, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood), became the Stranger, but Gholson was now the only choice for the soft-spoken man of the cloth.

Having been raised in exactly this kind of environment, Gholson was able to help shape Carr’s role in the script, even advising Hall and Gandersman on suitable Bible passages that the reverend could read to emphasize the themes of a scene. “Everything he brought to it was unbelievable,” Gandersman said. “His opening monologue, that was just him saying, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got an idea. Can I try something?’ That was take one, and we saw it and went, ‘Oh, that’s very important.’”

Another big surprise was getting L.A.-based Rustic Films on board. Even though they were such an inspiration, that partnership was not part of a deliberate plan by the filmmakers. Hall recalled that he and Gandersman watched the 2022 Rustic film Something in the Dirt, which also used multiple media elements in a faux-doc, and so reached out to producer and Rustic co-founder Dave Lawson Jr., just to pick his brains about “the logistics of working in a multi-mixed-media format, ‘and he said, ‘Sure.’”

After all, making a faux documentary is a lot tougher than it sounds. Hall noted that “one of the things that we labored over on the page, which helped us a lot on the days, was always having a justification for where the footage was coming from.”

However, there are also found footage components within the documentary, and so the pair had to be aware of the old issue plaguing the genre. Gandersman said, “There could not be a moment where the audience goes, ‘Why are they still filming?’ So we built it into the characters that they have the need to film, or one character gains it as the other loses it.”

That effort on the writing side paid off. Lawson read the script and offered to run it past Benson and the third member of the Rustic team, Aaron Moorhead. Hall said, “We didn’t hear anything for several months and we thought, ‘Oh, I guess they hated it,’ and then just before South By 2023 they came back and were like, ‘Hey, let’s have a chat,’ and on that chat, a few moments in, they went, ‘Oh, we really loved the script and really want to make it.’”

The quest to give the story that documentary lived-in feel didn’t stop at the script. Throughout shooting and post-production, they made sure that the film never looked too pretty: After all, in story, it’s a documentary assembled by documentarians from local TV broadcasts, location interviews, home movies, and surveillance footage, all of it a little ragged and unpolished. Gandersman explained that, "in post, we added fake focus pulls and stuff like that, just to mess it up more." In fact, they were so successful that they’d just received an email from Tribeca about the DCP for the film. “’There’s a bunch of frame skips. Are you worried about them?’ ‘No, no, they’re supposed to be there, it’s OK.’”

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Man Finds Tape

Escape From Tribeca, World Premiere

Sunday, June 8, 8:30pm, Village East by Angelika
Monday, June 9, 9:15pm, AMC 19th St. East 6
Wednesday, June 11, 9pm, Village East by Angelika