The Conituning Legacy

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Earl W. Potter is carrying forward the legacy of his father, H.C. Potter, the acclaimed American theatrical producer and director, by bringing the family’s storytelling tradition into a new century of nonfiction film. His first documentary as producer and director, H.C. Potter: A Son’s Story to His Theatrical and Cinematic Career (2017), is a deeply personal portrait that pays homage to his father’s life and work on stage and screen. The film was an official selection of the Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) and has screened at other festivals, marking the first creative collaboration with filmmaker Tim Harrier, a partnership that has become central to Potter Pictures. ​

 

A Five & Dime Story represents Earl’s second major foray into filmmaking and their second collaboration, an intimate, character-driven film that continues Earl’s commitment to stories about community, place, and perseverance. Their third collaboration, NMSA - The Story About a School’s Becoming, extends that vision into the world of arts education, tracing how a small public charter school for the arts in New Mexico grew into a statewide force for creative opportunity and youth development. NMSA was also an official selection of the Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) and has gone on to appear at additional festivals, further cementing Potter Pictures’ presence on the documentary circuit.

 

​ Earl’s path to producing began far from a soundstage. After graduating from Yale University and Stanford Law School, he joined VISTA (often described as the domestic Peace Corps) in 1969. His first assignment brought him to New Mexico, where he was hired by Santa Fe Mayor George Abrán Gonzales, father of future mayor Javier Gonzales, to establish the Santa Fe Legal Aid office. That work set the tone for a career defined by service, advocacy, and a belief that institutions should answer to the people they serve. ​

 

Following his tenure in Legal Aid, Earl and his wife, Deborah, founded their own law firm, specializing in complex land-use approvals in business and real estate law. For 32 years, they were also partners in Hotel Santa Fe, co-owned with the Picuris Pueblo, a Native American tribe, an enduring collaboration that reflects Earl’s respect for place, culture, and long-term partnership. ​

 

Today, through Potter Pictures, Earl brings all of this experience, legal, civic, and deeply personal, into the producing role, honoring his father’s cinematic legacy while building his own, one story at a time. In every film he brings to life, he is not merely tending the embers of an inheritance, but forging a new legacy, tempered in justice, anchored in community, and cast in the flicker between memory and change. The son of a director who knew the grammar of stage and screen, he now turns his lens toward classrooms, courtrooms, pueblos, and downtown streets, insisting that these, too, are theaters where history is made and unmade in real time. In doing so, he leaves behind more than a family archive: he is constructing a living body of work in which stories long overlooked step into the light, and the world, nudged by his quiet persistence, wakes up a little more sharply to itself.