Salt Springs Productions was founded by James Moyer and Michael Affleck after collaborating on a screenplay. As writers, educators, and activists with both philosophical and practical interests in art, labor, peace, and ecology, they envisioned a home for bold projects across diverse media. Moyer continues this vision, building partnerships around a commitment to creative freedom and social questioning where art transforms and sustains conversations.
"Salt: a pungent crystalline mineral formed by the reaction of an acid and a base, essential for life."
James Moyer is a screenwriter, songwriter, and conceptual fine artist. He taught literature, philosophy, and cinema studies at both Moore College of Art and Design and The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.. A former member of NYPIRG"s state board of directors, he founded ECOS (Environmentally Conscious Organized Students) for high school students in central New York.. He received a PhD in English from Princeton University (under Susan Wolfson and Esther Schor), where he also co-founded Scholars in the Schools (SITS) to foster knowledge-sharing between graduate students and public schools. He has published on film theory and on William Blake's poetry and art, and presented on Yasujiro Ozu's films and on philosophical critiques of fine art. He sees cinema as a perceptual apparatus for meditative realism (as in Two Virgins), alongside its visceral story-telling power. Several of his songs combine voices of children and adults on heavy themes,, as in "Song of the Child Brides." HIs fine art is designed to reveal the conceptual role of money in art-world signification--i..e., paradoxically only capital can instantiate the spiritual transformation of commodities in a post-artisanal world.. He is proud to have consulted on Matt Moyer and Amy Toensing's film Inheritance, winner of best documentary at Slamdance '24 in Park City, UT. He divides time between Los Angeles and New York. For more, see jamesmoyer.net.
​A judge, attorney, professor of theology, and environmental activist, Mike Affleck is the former International Coordinator for Greenpeace on the successful campaigns to restore the ozone layer and to change how paper worldwide is made (now chlorine free). Based in Amsterdam, he met with Pope John Paul II to convince the Vatican to use chlorine-free paper, which led to widespread adoption. He had tea with Princess Diana, which led to a meeting with Prince Charles and the latter’s keynote at the historic ozone conference in London. With the assistance of Edgar Bronfman of Seagrams, a large holder of DuPont stock, Mike organized the first Greenpeace campaign in Israel to eliminate ozone-depleting CFCs, almost overnight changing the industry’s practices in Europe and beyond. Founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, he helped lead an international effort to end nuclear weapons testing, which was a danger to peace, an environmental catastrophe, and a crime against the Native peoples whose land was used. (A worldwide test ban was signed in 1996.) He lives in Upstate New York and has a ministry to provide food assistance to families and children of Syracuse, half of whom live in poverty. Mike has a family, a dog named Luna, and two doctorates, grows his own food without chemicals, and finds time to write screenplays, act, draw, and model for artists. For him, life is sweet as honey.​
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Photograph by Amy Toensing
Portrait by Christine Patsos (used by permission)
Partnerships
Producer Catherine Cilek read James Moyer's THE HONEYGUIDE on The Black List and proposed co-creating a TV series, which they developed as HONEYGUIDES.
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Salt Springs Productions is in conversation with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Alliance about partnering on HONEYGUIDES across several platforms.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following for organizational advice and resources: Matt Moyer; Xiaoying Feng, Indaria Jones, and Linda Dickerson (Whitman School of Management/Couri Hatchery Incubator at Syracuse); and Eric Alderman, Esq.