Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 336: From Indie Filmmaker to $1 Billion Sale to Disney with Michael Gallagher

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BPS 336: From Indie Filmmaker to $1 Billion Sale to Disney with Michael Gallagher · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast,
• 0:14
  Episode number three thirty six. Film entrepreneurship is living a few years of
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  your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of
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  your life like most people can't. Mango Wilder broadcasting from a dark, windowless
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  room in Hollywood when we really should be working on that next draft. It's
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  the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching
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  you how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
• 0:44
  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am
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  your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof script
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  Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses
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  on the kind of project you are and the goals of the project you are,
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  So we actually break it down by three categories micro budget, indie film,
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  market and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader
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  that's used to reading temp pole movies when your movie is going to be done
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  for one hundred thousand dollars, and we wanted to focus on that at Bulletproof
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  Script Coverage, our readers have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA, WME,
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  NBC, HBO, Disney, Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist,
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  and many many more. So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered
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  by professional readers, head on over to covermiscreenplay dot com. Now today on
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  the show, we have filmmaker film entrepreneur Michael Gallagher. Michael is one of
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  the co founders of Maker Studios and if you guys aren't familiar with who Maker
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  Studios is, it is the studio that was sold for Disney for one billion
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  dollars give or take one hundred million here and there, and they were basically
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  one of the first YouTube studios. And we're going to go all into how
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  he was able to help create Maker Studios and a few years later was able
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  to sell it to Disney for a scene amount of money and from there he
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  was able to create the YouTube sensation films The Thinning and Internet Famous and now
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  he has his brand new film called Funny Story, and we discussed how he's
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  getting it out there, how he got distribution, how he got screwed over
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  by distribution companies early on in his career on some earlier of his feature films,
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  and we also talked a little bit about how he's doing some gorilla marketing
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  on how to get the word out on Funny Story, and all his tactics
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  on how he's been able to get this film out so much so that when
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  he reached out to me, I knew about his film purely because of his
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  gorilla marketing style and what he was doing that most independent filmmakers aren't doing it.
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  So, without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Gallagher.
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  I like to welcome to the show Michael Gallagher. Man. How you
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  doing, brother, doing well? How are you? Thanks for having me,
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  Thank you for having Thank you for being on the show. Man,
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  I truly appreciate it. Man. I, when you guys reached out to
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  me, I was like super excited to talk to you because I've known of
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  your work in the past, and you're unlike any other guests I've had on
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  the show because of your history with the Internet and with the YouTube and the
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  new wave of entertainment that has kind of moved in. So before we jump
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  into all of that, first and foremost, how did you I'm afraid to
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  ask because you're a little bit younger vintage than I am, But how did
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  you get into the business, because be like, oh, I was five
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  years old, I shot three features. I'm like, shut up, just
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  shut up, that's so funny. Well, I'm probably with San Diego.
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  I'm thirty. So I was born in ninety eighty eight. So yes,
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  But growing up, you know, I was always in love with, you
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  know, storytelling, indie film. You know, I read you know,
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  Rebel Without a Crew when I was like, I don't know, probably thirteen
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  or something, and so I kind of just started getting like obsessed with that
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  sort of like nineties indie film movement of like Tarantino and Rodriguez and Kevin Smith,
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  of like these guys that were just like going off and somehow making a
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  movie. But then as I got older, I started noticing that like the
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  path of those guys, as soon as they did it, that doesn't exist
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  anymore. It's like Sunman's that whole thing that changes as soon as someone like
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  gets in the door, that door shuts and now you got to find a
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  window or crawl space or something to get into the industry. So I was
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  just I kind of kept it open mind, and you know, I was
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  a little daunted of like how do you make feature films? And so I
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  just started, you know, as a kid, just doing short films.
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  I would, you know, with my teachers, try and pitch doing a
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  video project instead of having to you know, write a book report or something.
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  So like even in school, like fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth
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  grade, like even really young like that, I was editing on iMovie and
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  just kind of you know, thinking my dad's camcorder and just going out and
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  shooting stuff. You know, No, none of it was good, let's
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  just start there. None of it was actually good. Actually it just shouldn't
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  be. It should it shouldn't be. Yeah, But I started taking it
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  more seriously. And then in high school, my parents, I'd was like
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  begging my parents, like I got to go to some kind of film school,
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  film camp, whatever I can find. And there was this thing at
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  the New York Film Academy in Burbank that they had a high school summer film
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  program. So I went to that at fourteen and shot sixteen milimeter film and
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  cast sag actors, and I was just like hooked. Like I'm not a
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  drug person, but that was my drug. I was like, all right,
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  I'm fourteen, I can cast stag actors. Game on, Let's do
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  this. So then, from like then on, in high school in San
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  Diego, cap putting out you know, actors, access notices and like casting
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  sag actors and running auditions at like DoubleTree conference rooms, and you know,
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  I'm just being this like ambitious film kid. And then I would submit to
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  local film festivals and you know, just try and get better and you know,
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  do forty eight hour film contests. Like I was just all I'm just
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  all in, just trying to figure it out. And then you know,
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  eventually that led to you know, when YouTube came along and the Partner program.
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  I saw that people were able to just make whatever they want, put
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  it on YouTube and actually get paid for it and get seen, get an
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  audience. And it seemed, you know, I was kind of doing that
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  with these shorts, like not spending a lot of money, just putting it
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  out there, and I was honing my skills. I thought, Okay,
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  well what if I could take the filmmaking side and apply it to this new
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  media kind of concept. And that's how I started totally sketch and I just
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  started making weekly sketch comedy videos, you know, on a whim like that,
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  and you know it took off, no, which is fun The funny
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  thing that you say is that you you were you saw that wave in the
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  nineties. I mean you were very young, obviously, but you saw that
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  whole concept of the nineties. By the times you started to really figure it
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  out, that party was over, so you realize that that wasn't the way
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  to go. I, on the other hand, took twenty years to learn
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  that lesson and thought that it was the nineties all over again. It was
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  trying to do the exact same thing that Robert did and Kevin and Quinton and
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  all those guys. And it took me a long time to figure that out.
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  Because this is this is my truth. I don't know if you know
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  about this or not, but in two thousand and five, I was on
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  YouTube. I was put posting tutorials on how to make films on YouTube in
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  two thousand and five, before anybody had even thought of doing anything like that.
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  And then of course, I said, I said, and you can
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  look, they're still up on YouTube. There's like thirteen years Yeah, they're
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  three years old or something like that. I looked them up the other day.
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  I'm like, oh, my really bad compression, because YouTube was horrible,
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  horribly compressed back then and then, and I just said to myself,
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  I don't know if you ever run across this. I'm a real filmmaker,
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  I don't I don't put stuff on YouTube. I don't teach other filmmakers.
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  How That's not why I went to film school. I'm I'm on a tour
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  and see a classes sort of system of like Vimeo YouTube, And at that
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  time, Vimeo was like the classy place for all film, all filmmakers,
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  short film, and YouTube was sort of like a you know, like a
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  loud party. That was absolutely right, But I just wish I would have
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  just stayed on because I would have literally owned the entire space of making showing
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  you how to make movies at that point. Can you imagine if I would
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  have just made content all the time. It would have been insane? But
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  all right, you don't know, but yeah, but still, but still,
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  I'm still a very angry and bitter filmmaker. But uh, but what
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  I find fascinating is that you were very open minded to this new medium,
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  and I think so many filmmakers, even in today's world, they're not open
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  minded. They stick to their like, oh, I'm only going to do
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  this or I'm only going to do that, And you said, well,
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  wait a minute, that's not working anymore. This is the new thing.
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  Kind of like when guys jumped on vine. When vine was a thing,
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  there was a small window of opportunity there. There was a small window of
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  opportunity when YouTube, like you could make an obscene amount of money on YouTube
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  when the partner program started and things like that. That window close. Now
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  it's like you gotta work a lot harder to make remotely that much money.
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  Am I Is that correct? Yeah? These things like exactly what you're saying.
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  There's like a short window as something's kind of new and exciting and untested,
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  and the people that get in in that moment and just give it they're
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  all Sometimes they succeed, and then as soon as they've succeeded, big business
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  comes in and says, wait a minute, like we can't just let anybody
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  do this. Wait, wait, who made a million dollars? Who did
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  what? And then all of a sudden they just start buying everything up and
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  then close the doors and then no one can get in because it's all corporations
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  now. And then it's like, now you got to find a new wild
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  Wild West to like go in and go make your mark, you know it.
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  Yeah, because because in the nineties it was the indie films where the
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  Wild Wild West sun Dance and those kind of things with the Wallow West and
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  then we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
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  the show. Then it turned into other things, and then eventually YouTube,
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  and now it's streaming and being on streaming shows and things like that, which
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  you have experience on as well. And I'm curious to see what the future
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  i mean lies right now because there's so much competition. Even when you started,
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  there wasn't as much competition, you know, there really weren't that many
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  filmmakers on YouTube, Like I think I'm like a crop of like five people.
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  Maybe when did you start? When did you start on YouTube? On
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  YouTube two thousand and nine, it was like the beginning of two thousand and
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  nine, so you were before the Partner program had like just started, and
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  so it was like right around the time like Freddy Wong. Yeah, I
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  was about to say rocket Jump, Yeah, yeah, rocket Jump pre rocket
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  Jump, Freddie Wong. And then you know Julian Smith, who was you
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  know, great comedian and also just film and edit and do everything behind the
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  scenes. But most of the people on YouTube at that time were person and
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  analoities that were just literally broadcasting themselves. They were just you know, turning
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  on a webcam, you know, dressing up like Sarah Palin or Obama or
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  whatever was popping. Yeah, just like anything that was kind of like to
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  get the clicks, and and they would you know, they would do comedy,
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  but it was sort of unpolished, un you know, presented, And
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  what I saw was, Okay, there's all this talent, like this is
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  a big talent pool, but there's not really anyone guiding that talent. And
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  so I thought my contribution could be, well, what if I bring like
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  the filmmaking I've been you know, honing on my short films and music videos
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  and local commercials. What if I brought that to the talent that's on YouTube.
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  And so literally when I first started totally sketch, I would do you
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  know, sketches with actors and things that I would cast just like I was
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  doing in San Diego. What I would also do is send out emails to
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  the top YouTubers at the time and say, hey, you don't know me,
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  but here's here's my body of works. I had my short films on
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  Vimeo. I had, you know that looked nice? Yeah, And I
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  said like, look, here's my work that I've done. Here's this new
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  channel. I would love to produce for you a free sketch, a music
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  video, parody or whatever. Let me handfle all of the production. You
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  you would just be the talent in it, and in doing so, maybe
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  you could also then be on my channel and we could do a sketch or
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  something together, collaborate. So I was just like giving like, hey,
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  you want a free sketch, Do you want a free music video. I
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  wasn't asking anything of them other than can I give you you know, can
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  I give you my services? And that approach worked really well. Yeah,
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  yeah, because people would see my work and they saw, oh, it's
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  not you know, this isn't like po dunk, like this actually looks good.
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  You know, Oh, this short film played a bunch of festivals,
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  or you know this music video. Maybe I've seen that music video online and
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  so I just started getting you know, it was collaborating. And the first
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  person I collaborated with was this YouTuber Alpha Cat, who was the premiere Obama
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  impersonator on YouTube. And he he was like the guy like he was doing
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  all of these uh it was you know Beyonce sort of spoofs, so you
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  know, like as Obama and it were really funny. But he didn't have
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  like a producer director behind the scenes. And so we produced this whole music
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  video for him that and I wrote, you know, the first draft of
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  the parody, but it was Jamie Fox is blaming on the alcohol. It
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  was called Blame It on the Economy, and it was about like the economic
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  crisis that we were going through. And he was like, oh, let's
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  just get all my pals in and so we called Lisa no Nova, who
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  did Sarah Palin at the time. I called my buddy Richard Bryan to play
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  Joe Biden and we just did this crazy music video. But it looked legit
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  and it actually got picked up and they showed it on the view because it
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  was such a like viral video at that time. And but from there that
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  that kind of helped explode me on the YouTube scene. So then everybody saw
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  that video in the community and said, whoa, who is this guy?
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  Like, we need to hire him to bring bring him in and so he
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  can just sort of bring that filmmaking style to what we're doing. And then
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  that's kind of, you know, that's how I got in in the club,
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  so to speak. So again for everyone listening, take some notes here.
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  You offered your services for free because you were smart enough to provide well,
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  provide service and be a value to people who you are trying to to
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  connect with and to work with in one way, shape or form. And
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  all you had to offer at the moment was I've got some skills, I've
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  got some production i got something that you don't have. I'm not asking for
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  anything in return, just let me work with you. And it worked out.
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  It worked out for fairly, okay for you. Yeah, well it
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  was. It was funny because just like in high school, anytime I had
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  any money, if I made any money, if I you know, for
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  like Grandma gave me like a check for one hundred bucks or something for you
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  know, birthday, there's like any money I would get, I would put
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  it into film equipment. So like at the time, I like save it
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  up. I got an HVX. You know, I got a you know,
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  fans out of HBX. At the time, it was like a big
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  deal. Yeah, oh yeah I can. And then I really saved up
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  and you know, like summer jobs and doing like short films and such.
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  I I got a Keynote float kit. I got two or makes just rock
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  and dude, you're like a pimpin' you're pimp. Can you can you imagine
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  that time of time of YouTube. To show up with like an HVX and
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  a Kino kit. It was like literally showing up with it like a freaking
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  steady cam and a Panavision camera like full thirty five on a student film back
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  in the eighties. I mean seriously, yeah, So I was like I
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  had a pretty you know, robust because I had like an airy I had
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  a three point airy lighting kit and that I was used that I ran into
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  the ground, and then I had the Kino flows. So within my setup
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  for the shorts and things I was doing, I could light pretty much any
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  scene as long as there were you know, no more than like five people
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  and a frame. So but it would look really good. So it kind
• 15:46
  of helps set things apart because lighting is such an important part of filmmaking and
• 15:48
  just kind of elevating that sort of HG look. But but yeah, that
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  that really helped, just because people would see and I was calling in favors
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  left and right, you know kids I went to film school with for as,
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  I met parties that you know, was DP, someone in sound,
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  and I would try and pay people as much as they could. But in
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  the early days, it's like, you don't have money, so you're just
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  you know, you're all in favors. You're you're finding collaborative, excited people
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  around you that want to participate. And that's what I did in the early
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  days of YouTube, and then as it, you know, kind of spread,
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  I still kept that mentality of keeping it small, keeping it low budget,
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  because you know, you can make money doing YouTube, but the more
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  money you spend doing it, just the less money you can make, because
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  there's sort of a sort of a cap on the whole thing. At that
• 16:33
  time, at least, yeah, there was, you were there wasn't the
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  millionaires weren't being made just yet on YouTube. It was it was pre pre
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  millionaire days at that point. But but yeah, they didn't very very true.
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  Now you you also came up with a fairly and that cool idea called
• 16:48
  Maker Studios. If I'm not mistake, you're one of the co founders of
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  Maker Studios. So yeah, I'm one of the co founders of Maker Studios.
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  But it wasn't my original idea. It was actually so from that music
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  video shoot that I did without the cat. So Lisa Nova came and h
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  Danny's Appen was her boyfriend at the time, and her brother Ben Donovan.
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  They both the three of them all came to the shoot and they saw what
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  I was doing and they said, oh, well, we got to talk
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  to this kid, because we're about to start a company and we need some
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  filmmakers to be a part of it because right now we have the talent.
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  What they had been doing is they had been going out and they had this
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  idea of creating sort of like the Saturday Night Live of YouTube, Like what
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  if we got the top you know, performers and put them all together and
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  made a super channel. And then we all promoted that super channel and you
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  know, got it to a million subscribers in like a day, and then
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  what if from there we got brand deals and we kind of just helped get
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  everyone paid. That was sort of the concept of early day. It wasn't
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  even called maker then. They didn't have a name for it, and so
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  they I remember going to Starbucks over in Venice with Danny after that shoot,
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  and he's like, Yeah, we're gonna do this thing. We're gonna we're
• 17:55
  gonna mess. We're gonna disrupt the whole industry. And he's just like,
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  you know, we're like clothes from Target, like drinking a coffee, saying
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  like, yeah, I got I got all the top YouTubers involved, and
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  it's gonna be great. Like you in, like you gonna dedicate the next
• 18:08
  year to this thing, man, And I you know, it sounded good,
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  but it also sounded like maybe a Ponzi scheme. Maybe maybe I'm gonna
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  be selling microwaves door to door in like a week. I have no idea.
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  I mean, it was just like you know, sometimes people are all
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  talk and you have no idea in this business. I can't see a non
• 18:27
  in this business. No, I'm stopping. But but I vetted him out
• 18:33
  and I talked to some people around him, and it seemed legit and it
• 18:37
  seemed like he did have these people. So I agreed. I said Okay,
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  I'm in, you know, I will, I will come on.
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  Because they didn't really have any money, they didn't have, you know,
• 18:44
  much to start, it was like, we're all gonna just donate our time,
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  We're gonna we're gonna come in and invest in ourselves and collaborate on this
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  thing. And so it was really like, if we're not all part of
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  this, not all lock lock step, it's not gonna happen. And I
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  showed up and I remember going to their house and it was, you know,
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  it was all the top people on YouTube at that time, which you
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  know, this is two thousand and nine, so it's like Phil DeFranco,
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  Shay Carl, Shane Dawson, Dave Days, lest the Nova. There are
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  more. But at cassim G it was like all the people that had like
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  hundreds of thousands, if not over a million subscribers at that time and getting
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  millions of views on every video. So it was like, oh my god,
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  I'm with the illuminati of YouTube, and I'm like, me and Danny
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  are like the only filmmakers on this thing. Everyone else is out there on
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  camera talent, and you know, and we want to like, okay,
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  kids play nights. Let's all come together, let's come up with the name,
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  let's figure out what our videos are going to be. Because we were
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  just making sketches, we want to start stockpiling and putting them out there.
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  And so that was really the beginning of what Maker was. But but from
• 19:47
  that process, you had so many cooks in the kitchen and you had so
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  much creative you know, kind of like top talent. We'll be right back
• 19:55
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. For
• 20:03
  the medium that it was really difficult to get everyone to agree on what was
• 20:10
  comedy, what was the funniest thing to do, what was our style and
• 20:14
  taste? And so some people had r rated senses of humor, some people
• 20:17
  were really family oriented, and so it was just a lot of debating of
• 20:21
  what are we even going to make? And from that kind of creative friction
• 20:26
  came this idea of, well, rather than all of us doing one channel,
• 20:30
  what if we empower each creator and give them the resources and tools and
• 20:37
  support them for whatever they want to make, rather than force everyone to work
• 20:41
  together. And that's really what Maker became, is like, how do we
• 20:44
  empower the creators to go off and make whatever they want? Because you know,
• 20:48
  all these people are just in their bedrooms kind of doing their thing.
• 20:51
  And if we gave them a crew, if we gave them, you know,
• 20:53
  a production budget, if we gave them you know, resources, locations,
• 20:57
  producer, you know, we can up everything. And so that was
• 21:02
  kind of the model, and it just took off because all the top creators
• 21:04
  they wanted to make cool look and ship and so that's you know that that
• 21:08
  spread and then it was like, hey, everybody whoever wants to join just
• 21:11
  kept scaling up from there and getting attention in Hollywood, et cetera. So
• 21:15
  yeah, I mean this is still on a time. So Maker Studios started
• 21:18
  in what like twenty ten nine, it was two thousand, because I started
• 21:23
  totally Sketch in March of two thousand and nine and Maker started July. I
• 21:30
  think it was like, yeah, July fourth, So I spreads. That's
• 21:33
  a pretty quick pretty quick. You didn't spend a whole lot of time grinding
• 21:38
  it on YouTube before things started up. For you man, you were what
• 21:42
  we like to call that the right place at the right time. It's kind
• 21:45
  of like Michael Gladway's book Outliers is like that have you read that book?
• 21:51
  Oh? I love that book. Yeah, it's it's it's it's kind of
• 21:53
  like everyone's like, oh, it's they're they're perfect, their geniuses. They
• 21:56
  never have to do anything. No, they were born at the right plays,
• 22:00
  at the right time, and they had the right skills when they showed
• 22:02
  up, Like Robert Rodriguez shows up in ninety one with al Mariachi. You
• 22:06
  can't show up now with al Mariachi because he'll never he would never even be
• 22:08
  seen, no one would even know who he was. So it was all
• 22:11
  about those specific timing and you, man, you hit it. You were
• 22:14
  close though you were you were only about three month window. This could have
• 22:19
  passed you right by. Dude, this could have passed you right by.
• 22:22
  I just want you to be aware of I want you to be aware how
• 22:26
  close you can. Oh no, I'm a hashtag blast. So you started
• 22:30
  two thousand and nine and then and then at that point, YouTube is still
• 22:34
  fairly much of a oh what the heck'sta thing? No way, OLLI was
• 22:38
  sat at the time. Everyone thought we were nuts. Everyone thought the company
• 22:41
  was like, what you're gonna start, You're gonna double down on YouTube?
• 22:44
  Everyone called it was He's like, you're doubling down on the internet streaming thing
• 22:48
  Netflix whatever. Uh so, yes, it kind of like when Blockbuster had
• 22:53
  the opportunity to buy Netflix for fifty million bucks and they said, now we're
• 22:56
  good, We're good, We're good, We've got these renals. Things were
• 23:00
  good. Yeah, brick and mortar is the way to get that's the sure
• 23:03
  the cricket. This internet thinks a fad. Uh so. So yeah,
• 23:07
  so hollywoods when did Hollywood start taking notice? And when did you guys start
• 23:10
  making some like serious money because you started. I mean it is looking back,
• 23:14
  it's a fairly genius move. It's insane at the time, and that's
• 23:17
  generally the way all these movements start when you look at it at the time
• 23:19
  to like you were insane streaming movies over the internet. Who's gonna be what
• 23:25
  it seems to say now you look at it and going, well, that
• 23:27
  was genius. So you guys had a small, a small version of that,
• 23:30
  well not that small, but a version of that in the YouTube community
• 23:33
  where you the whole town on YouTube, which I would have told you the
• 23:37
  same thing, like, you guys are nuts, like no one's watching.
• 23:41
  But it seemed to work out for people like Gary Vee and those other guys
• 23:45
  who just kept making videos and nobody was watching. But one day someone watched
• 23:51
  and it kept going. So this this small time. So you start building
• 23:55
  building this up, and you start building up the accounts, and you start
• 23:56
  kind of like, I can't say it would be like an agency, would
• 24:02
  it like are you report your representing them? It's kind of what would you
• 24:04
  call it? It was The term was multi channel network, and so it
• 24:11
  was the first it was the first idea of well, what if you know,
• 24:14
  each person would own their YouTube channel. I mean they already you already
• 24:18
  have a split with YouTube if you're doing ads with them, and so what
• 24:22
  maker would do was it would kind of represent your channel. So rather than
• 24:26
  represent you as a talent, it would say, Okay, your channel,
• 24:30
  we're going to help sell premium ads on this channel by talking to advertisers if
• 24:33
  we get a brand deal that fits, you know, like let's say,
• 24:37
  you know, any film muscle. If you're a sort of maker, would
• 24:38
  be like, okay, we want we got this you know film company or
• 24:41
  a big movie that's coming out as an indie movie, but you know Fox
• 24:45
  Social Light's releasing, and what if we partner with you so you can you
• 24:49
  know, do something with the filmmakers and then get paid to do it.
• 24:52
  And so it was like they were kind of brokering those deals sort of like
• 24:56
  what an ad agency would do. It multiple things. It was a provide
• 25:00
  production resources. It was kind of serving as an ad agency and then also
• 25:03
  make it being a content hub sort of you know how Netflix or a lot
• 25:07
  of places like they'll acquire things, but then they'll also you know, provide
• 25:11
  the resources. I mean they had full production studio, they had equipment,
• 25:15
  they had you know everything at Maker for you know, especially DIY stuff.
• 25:19
  It was DIY, but also for DIY plus where I'd be like a three
• 25:23
  person crew or five person crew or something to go out and shoot YouTube videos.
• 25:29
  That's insane. And how long did it take before Hollywood start taking notice?
• 25:33
  Pretty quick? I think within like before the end of the first year.
• 25:37
  I think we were raising like some VC money and you know kind of
• 25:42
  big Yeah, I know, it just started. It just started growing,
• 25:45
  and then people were leaving their jobs at you know kind of whether it was
• 25:51
  a big tech company or you know, a film studio. They were coming
• 25:55
  in like all of a sudden. We were having executives that were just had
• 26:00
  that's been at you know, Disney or they had been at Warner Zoni.
• 26:03
  Yeah, and everyone all of a sudden, it's just like, yeah,
• 26:06
  no, I want to work at Maker. That's the hot new thing.
• 26:07
  So, and you guys were right at that, you were in the middle
• 26:11
  of the storm. I mean, that's that's amazing. It's like you as
• 26:14
  were there was nobody around you, There was no competition, there was nothing
• 26:17
  that even was close to what you guys were doing at the time. The
• 26:19
  only Yeah, things start popping up pretty quick thereafter. So and it's always
• 26:25
  it's hard to say, like what the first thing. I think Maker might
• 26:29
  have been the first multi channel network that really had done this. And then
• 26:32
  very soon around that time was Awesome Thiss TV, which if you remember,
• 26:37
  I've heard I've heard of them awesome too. Yeah. They focused on like
• 26:40
  kind of more specifically teen oriented content because they really were trying to get bought
• 26:45
  by like a Nickelodeon or you know, a Disney channel or something like.
• 26:48
  They wanted a content that was safe, like kind of age appropriate, and
• 26:52
  Maker was a little bit wild west of you know, we're not going to
• 26:56
  censor you. Whatever you want to do, that's your thing. And of
• 26:59
  course I try all the talent because it was those leasership exactly has no censorship
• 27:03
  and we're not going to try and control you. Yeah, you can do
• 27:06
  you can just continue what you're doing, and we're going to empower you.
• 27:07
  So I think I think that model really appealed to, you know, the
• 27:12
  every level of YouTuber, top bottom, whatever. And yeah, in twenty
• 27:17
  fourteen is when Disney came in and yeah, I heard bus I heard,
• 27:19
  yeah, I heard something about that there was a small company called Disney that
• 27:22
  decided to buy you guys, and it was a you know, it wasn't
• 27:26
  in the news at all at the time, but if I do remember correctly,
• 27:30
  and I don't like to talk money on the show, but it's pretty
• 27:33
  publicly known that the Maker Studios was purchased for four hundred and fifty million cash
• 27:40
  and then with a performance bonus up to almost a billion. Is that is
• 27:42
  that accurate? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I don't know how much
• 27:45
  is public of like where it landed or whatever, but I think those numbers
• 27:49
  are in the ballpark for sure. Yeah, that's not a bad deal for
• 27:53
  you know, young guys who's just kind of like got the HVX two hundred
• 27:57
  and the area kid out and you know, shout with some YouTubers. That's
• 28:03
  you know that that shook. That definitely sent you know, shock waves through
• 28:07
  the industry. I remember when that happened. It was about a year before
• 28:10
  I launched Any Film Hustle. I launched Any Film Huston on twenty fifteen.
• 28:12
  Oh yeah, and when I heard that, I was like, wow,
• 28:15
  this is this you and I saw like an old fart, but like,
• 28:18
  oh yeah this YouTube. Things really kind of started to blow up. Now
• 28:22
  I should have stayed on there, like what was I thinking? But that
• 28:27
  that I have to ask you, man, what was that like? Man?
• 28:30
  You were like, you know, when Disney's like, okay, here's
• 28:33
  a check, and I'm not going to ask you know, percentages or anything
• 28:36
  like that, but you obviously did fairly okay being one of the co founders
• 28:38
  of it. So what was that they like as a filmmaker, man,
• 28:42
  like, when you you know you Disney is buying you that at a very
• 28:48
  yeah, very good rate, a good rate if you don't mind, Yeah,
• 28:51
  no, it was. It was pretty outrageous. Well, it's interesting
• 28:53
  because we started in two thousand and nine and I had been like day to
• 28:56
  day with the company until about twenty eleven. Like you know, in about
• 29:03
  twenty eleven, I was like there kind of making you know, helping everyone
• 29:07
  making videos, you know, kind of working on different you know, branded
• 29:11
  content and interact I was doing a lot of interactive actually, and so but
• 29:15
  my my day to day wasn't really it didn't really go on beyond twenty eleven.
• 29:19
  I was still my channel. I eventually brought my channel totally sketch into
• 29:23
  the network and then you know, would work on you know as a director
• 29:26
  for hire for them and kind of consulting and things. But I wasn't really
• 29:30
  in the thick of it. So it was fun to actually see every time
• 29:33
  I would go there, it was like, oh, we're going to a
• 29:36
  new office. Oh we got a sound stage. Oh we got a whole
• 29:38
  block of offices. And then it's like and then you're you're you're trying to
• 29:45
  make your YouTube videos there, and all of a sudden, it's like,
• 29:47
  hey, James Franco's in today. We'll be right back after a word from
• 29:52
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. It's like, Hey,
• 30:00
  Snoop Dogg, He's going to shoot four videos and It's like wait, what
• 30:03
  what's going on? Right? And then I was, you know, they
• 30:07
  because I was, you know, very film or a filmmaker oriented, they
• 30:12
  would you know, they partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival. I remember meeting
• 30:17
  with like, uh, you know, I remember they flew us out there
• 30:21
  for you know, doing promotion and kind of cross promoting Tribeca, and they
• 30:25
  were like, oh, do you want to do you know, we want
• 30:26
  to do like a forty eight hour like film thing at Tribeca. Do you
• 30:30
  want to make a forty hour film in Tribeca? I said, sure?
• 30:33
  Like it it's like a bunch of groups like no, just you and so
• 30:36
  you'll just do it and we'll have the full support of the festival and then
• 30:38
  we're gonna screen at the festival and like oh okay, and so I don't
• 30:44
  know, I'm like twenty three, twenty two years old, and like we're
• 30:47
  running around New York and literally like they had like roberts Niro make a video
• 30:51
  being like okay, Michael, here's your you know, here are the things
• 30:53
  you're going to do in your forty eight hour video. And it's like,
• 30:56
  what what the fuck is going off? Like it was just you know,
• 30:59
  this is a small group of friends in that apartment, and now it's like
• 31:03
  they somehow got Robert de Niro roped into this thing like talking to me like,
• 31:07
  can you Mac, I can imagine can you imagine that conversation with Robert,
• 31:11
  Like like you're just like, all right, so we're gonna do this
• 31:12
  thing with these guys called Maker Studio. They're on YouTube and you've got it.
• 31:17
  There has to be a moment when Robert de Niro goes, what is
• 31:19
  YouTube? What is this goal? What's going on? I don't understand this.
• 31:25
  It's like Bobby, Bobby's you gotta do this. Just trust me.
• 31:26
  These guys are big. Just get on the camera. And I'm sure.
• 31:30
  I'm sure. I'm sure. He's like, all right, who's this guy's
• 31:33
  name? Michael? Michael? Alrighty Michael. I know it was it just
• 31:37
  kind of it felt really surreal. So he's sort of like, you know,
• 31:41
  just kind of had to accept it. Like at a certain point I
• 31:44
  let go of you know, how craz this happened, and just started to
• 31:48
  say Okay, yeah, all right, and we're gonna and we're gonna roll
• 31:51
  with it. We're gonna roll with it. Yeah, And but definitely.
• 31:53
  You know. Uh, and just to be clear, I don't have like
• 31:56
  a hundred million dollars fair enough, I didn't. I didn't like come out
• 32:00
  like a bandit and own and I don't own like Johnny Depp level islands and
• 32:05
  things. You know, I gotcha, gotcha. It's just know that.
• 32:07
  But I definitely, I definitely benefited from the sale, as did everyone who
• 32:12
  was a part of it. And the great thing about it was it all
• 32:17
  it won. It set us up in the industry, as you know,
• 32:21
  look at these guys. They they bet on themselves, They went out there
• 32:23
  and invested in this, this kind of idea that nobody really thought would be
• 32:29
  anything, and look at it now. And so it just sort of gave
• 32:31
  you that sort of like creative capital to then go out and say, oh,
• 32:35
  I want to make a film, I want to do this. You
• 32:37
  know, you just got people's attention a little bit more because you had sort
• 32:40
  of a proof of concept of saying, we started this from nothing, and
• 32:44
  look where it got to, you know, moving forward, whether it's just
• 32:46
  a you know, you want to do a look web series, you want
• 32:50
  to do a movie, you want to do something, it's you know,
• 32:52
  people take notice because it just it did so well. So yeah, that's
• 32:57
  the biggest thing that I've taken away from the whole experien I feel like Maker
• 33:00
  was kind of like the Google or the Facebook of the film industry was like
• 33:04
  this little startup that kind of shook things up, and it was kind of
• 33:07
  leading the way into a new technology or a new space within the industry that
• 33:12
  nobody else saw coming. Kind of like you know when Facebook came in and
• 33:15
  did their thing, or Google came in, like, oh, we're going
• 33:17
  to do a search engine. Oh right, yes, search engine s here
• 33:20
  like everybody else, Like I like Alta Vista and Lycos got it. Uh,
• 33:24
  And then of course it turned into what it did. And similarly to
• 33:28
  you guys, you were kind of like the Google of the film is an
• 33:30
  industry in a sense because it was all Internet based and it was a bunch
• 33:35
  of crazy kids somewhere doing some crazy stuff and it all turned out until finally
• 33:39
  the big boys finally took notice. But that also sent the message to the
• 33:43
  whole industry. Is like, when someone like Disney does spend that kind of
• 33:46
  money on a company that's outside the norm, it sent to the industry,
• 33:52
  Hey, this is where we're going this is the future. This is not
• 33:55
  you know, this is not a joke because we're not spending this kind of
• 33:59
  money. A little bit of a fad, if you will. Yeah,
• 34:02
  Well, all the film studios I think reached a point where they weren't investing
• 34:08
  in digital you know, they weren't investing in online content, but they were
• 34:12
  seeing, like ay on our on our sheets every month or year, like
• 34:16
  quarter, we're looking and seeing how much we're spending on digital advertising. We're
• 34:21
  seeing how much we are spending on a company like Maker to promote our stuff.
• 34:25
  Wouldn't it make sense for us to have our own digital shingle here so
• 34:30
  we don't have to pay somebody else, Like shouldn't shouldn't we already have that?
• 34:32
  Like why are we paying them to tell the thing? Like they're making
• 34:36
  it? Just it was some kind of confusing loop for them, and so
• 34:39
  they I think they ran the numbers and they said, well, how much
• 34:42
  would it cost for us to start our own And they ran those numbers and
• 34:45
  said, Okay, it's going to cost billions. What if we just acquire
• 34:51
  these companies that have been doing it independently that seem to have success, and
• 34:53
  then we will just absorb all their knowledge, what they've learned, their tactics,
• 34:58
  their crew, and and we'll go from there. And so that's what
• 35:00
  happened. And then you saw that with Maker's Out with Awesomeness and Full Screen,
• 35:05
  a bunch of other places, and that each studio kind of was eyeing
• 35:07
  the different media companies and just sort of plucking them up and saying, Okay,
• 35:10
  now we have our branch. And that's I think that's what really sparked.
• 35:15
  It was was that move of the eyeballs, especially like the you know,
• 35:20
  the eighteen to twenty four and teenager demographic, like everyone, you know
• 35:23
  what, they weren't watching TV anymore. They were just watching YouTube. They
• 35:25
  were just addicted to online content, and so they needed to be in the
• 35:30
  game so to just market their movies if nothing else, right, And it's
• 35:34
  kind of like what Netflix did for the business. Well, now everybody has
• 35:37
  a streaming service coming out. You know, I own a streaming service.
• 35:39
  I have my own streaming service. For God's sake. You know, it
• 35:43
  was all because of Netflix and they opened up the doors. And now everybody's
• 35:46
  like, wait a minute, we got to jump on this train. This
• 35:49
  is kind of where the future is going to be so. And now how
• 35:52
  did you parlay you know, from make or into the into the world of
• 35:58
  like legit directing. Yeah, and I don't say it. I don't mean
• 36:00
  that in a derogatory statement at all. No, you know what I mean
• 36:04
  by legit, like like true indie, a tour filmmaker, if you will,
• 36:08
  kind of like the guys you were looking up to when you were coming
• 36:10
  up, like Robert Rodriguez and stuff. You know, how did you turn
• 36:14
  from you know, making sketch comedies on YouTube to like, hey, I'm
• 36:16
  you know, I did this inning and the whole you know, the whole
• 36:21
  series, and another movie that you just came up with, Funny Story,
• 36:23
  and all these kind of real legit films with like budgets and like actors.
• 36:30
  I know, I keep full on them. I don't know. But what
• 36:35
  happened was when we were at Maker, I really you know, we've been
• 36:37
  doing sketches for a few years. It was like, yeah, twenty ten,
• 36:40
  and I really wanted to do you know, I wanted to figure out
• 36:44
  how am I going to make a feature? How am I going to get
• 36:45
  in And I would meet with people and you would say, oh, it's
• 36:50
  great, that you've done sketches and had this, you know, millions of
• 36:52
  views, and that didn't really matter. They you know, I was like,
• 36:54
  Oh, where's the proof of concept? The first each you've done it
• 36:58
  for? Why? I mean, you've done a first sure, already show
• 37:00
  it to us and then we'll talk. So I was like, okay,
• 37:04
  it says the chicken in the egg. Oh, I know, how do
• 37:07
  I get the java out of the movie, but out of the java?
• 37:09
  And then how I can make money? And so at that point, you
• 37:14
  know, I lived pretty frugably. I was just saving up and I had
• 37:15
  a lot of success with Totally Sketch and Maker and just you know, everything
• 37:19
  was kind of going with brand deals and you know, they're paying a ton
• 37:22
  of money for doing you know, a couple of days worth of work,
• 37:25
  and so I was just saving all this money. I'm not going on vacation
• 37:29
  doing anything with it. I'm just saving it. And so at a certain
• 37:31
  point at Maker, this guy Glasgow Phillips, who had written out south Park
• 37:36
  and a bunch of other cool things he on spec wrote this idea for what
• 37:42
  became Smiley, which was a horror film that I was my first feature that
• 37:45
  I directed, and He wrote it as an idea of, well, what
• 37:49
  if we take our resources at Maker and just rather than just do a bunch
• 37:52
  of YouTube videos, we spend you know, three weeks and go shoot a
• 37:54
  feature. Why don't we do that? And Maker was interested at the time,
• 37:59
  and they said, okay, well Gallagher can direct it. And so
• 38:01
  all of a sudden, I'm like attached to direct the movie. I'm super
• 38:06
  excited. And you know, cause I just at that point it wasn't about
• 38:09
  oh I have this really personal story I gotta tell it was I got to
• 38:13
  make my first feature. I want. I wanted to make the movie more
• 38:15
  than it mattered what the exact movie was. Like. I wanted to just
• 38:20
  show what I could do and just get out there and just you know,
• 38:22
  start playing on the in the big leagues and playing on the field and making
• 38:27
  something, you know, uh, feature length. And so what happened was
• 38:31
  Maker almost did it, and then they didn't, and then they said,
• 38:35
  you know, we're really focused on you know, the short form, but
• 38:37
  if you guys want to go off and find the money for this thing,
• 38:39
  go for it. And so then I became obsessed with just getting Smiley made.
• 38:45
  And so we'd go around and we started pitching it and doing that whole
• 38:47
  thing, and and we had some interest from places, but they were like,
• 38:51
  wait, you want to cast YouTube stars of this movie. You want
• 38:53
  to cast people who have millions of fans on theline to come see a movie
• 38:58
  like good Luck, Like we don't see it. Oh, these people don't
• 39:00
  see anything. I mean, like you would think that you're part of Maker
• 39:02
  Studios, which was crazy in the first place. And they're like, hey,
• 39:05
  guys, we have another idea. You don't listen to that, Like
• 39:08
  and I'm assuming the budget wasn't one hundred million, so like why wouldn't you
• 39:12
  take that chance? No, I know, we were like, we can
• 39:15
  do this for you know, not like by your staying is nothing, but
• 39:17
  you know, like a couple of hundred thousand dollars Max, Like we can
• 39:21
  do the whole thing. It's be great. Everyone's signed on, you know.
• 39:23
  At Yeah, it was just sort of crickets, Like people were like,
• 39:28
  I don't know, it hasn't been done, hasn't been proven yet.
• 39:30
  And so we said, all right, assholes, we're just gonna go make
• 39:34
  this movie. And so literally at that point, I my producer Michael Warmser,
• 39:38
  who had worked at Makers had a production he had he had gone off
• 39:42
  from then, and we had just been like dedicated to this movie. And
• 39:44
  I said, okay, warms are, if we're gonna make this thing independently,
• 39:49
  what's the lowest number we can do it for, like, you know,
• 39:52
  get the movie in the can, Like, what's the number. So
• 39:53
  he crunched the numbers and did it. We'll be right back after a word
• 39:59
  from our spot answer and now back to the show. And I think at
• 40:07
  the time he's like, I think we can get it in the can for
• 40:09
  like one hundred and twenty thousand if everyone's getting paid, and you know,
• 40:13
  we're shooting in fifteen days and the whole thing. And I said, okay,
• 40:16
  that's all the money I have greenlit. Let's go. And so so
• 40:22
  then from then on we just went and made the movie just you know,
• 40:24
  self funded, and we didn't look for any more money. We just you
• 40:28
  know said, okay, this is the resources we got, Let's get this
• 40:30
  thing in the can, let's shoot it. And so so it was just
• 40:32
  kind of a you know, a mad rush in twenty eleven in the summer
• 40:37
  to just go make this movie. And so we did. We shot it
• 40:38
  fifteen days. Uh you know, we brought on the best crew we could.
• 40:43
  We just you know, kind of went out and made it. And
• 40:45
  from there the movie. We then raised a little bit more money for post
• 40:50
  and then for uh, you know, for the release, because what ended
• 40:52
  up happening is we partnered with AMC Independent, which they have this this great
• 40:57
  program where they will release your film theatrically if you can provide the marketing and
• 41:02
  if they liked the movie. And so what we did was we presented this
• 41:06
  whole plan to them with YouTube stars, with everything, and we said,
• 41:08
  we're gonna go promote this thing. We're gonna you know, we want as
• 41:10
  many theaters as you can give us, and we will get it out there.
• 41:15
  And look at how many impressions we can get from videos from trailer because
• 41:16
  our trailer went out. We put our trailer out like after we shot the
• 41:20
  movie November, and it got like a million views in a day, and
• 41:23
  then after that it was like ten million views in a week, and now
• 41:25
  it's I think at like forty million views or something crazy. And so it
• 41:29
  was just like it kept exploding, and so Hollywood started calling and people were
• 41:32
  just freaking out, being like what is this movie how can we never heard
• 41:36
  of it? There's a horror movie like a YouTube star like you know.
• 41:38
  So then that really just kind of became for beacon for the industry and saying
• 41:44
  like, who's Mike Gallagher? What what? What? He made a movie?
• 41:47
  I don't understand? Were you at ours? And you're like, I
• 41:51
  was in your office six months ago? Ass literally literally we're doing that and
• 41:58
  so yeah, so then we so, but we did it all independence.
• 42:00
  So that was really my film school was taking is Smiley from the development process,
• 42:06
  through production, through posts and then through marketing, distributing and getting it
• 42:09
  out there. And we did a twenty eight screen theatrical release through AMC Independent
• 42:15
  and it was in fourteen markets and then yeah, it came and then we
• 42:19
  sold territories at you know, AFM through our sales agent, and you know,
• 42:24
  it's played theatrically in like Italy and the Philippines and Japan, and it
• 42:29
  was just like this this kind of crazy indie phenomenon, like it's surprising how
• 42:35
  well the movie did, like how far it got out there, because even
• 42:37
  today, like around Halloween time, if you go like on Instagram and go
• 42:42
  hashtag Smiley, people in Argentina are dressing up as Smiley like still like from
• 42:47
  last year, just like thousands of people I keep seeing every year, like
• 42:51
  people sending me photos and things, and just the reach of this this character
• 42:55
  was quite crazy. And this was just a really small endie for me for
• 42:59
  undertune or thousand dollars, So it's uh, it was pretty wild. So
• 43:04
  did you have any other that helped prove that as an indie filmmaker we can
• 43:08
  still have a big impact. You don't necessarily need you know, big budget
• 43:12
  and you know, huge stars like you can. You can work with the
• 43:14
  team you have around you and really, you know, exploded out. Did
• 43:16
  you have any other ancillary revenue streams for that movie? Like T shirts,
• 43:21
  hats, other things like that? Did you have any merch at the time?
• 43:23
  We should have, we didn't. You left money on the table,
• 43:29
  sir, left money at the table. Yeah, definitely, definitely mine on
• 43:31
  the table. But no, the movie did great and people saw it,
• 43:35
  and you know, even though it wasn't like uh, And it's funny because
• 43:38
  even though it got out so far, I still I didn't do everything independently,
• 43:43
  and I really should have because what happened is my domestic distributor that I
• 43:46
  brought on from home video and stuff. Uh, oh, they screwed us.
• 43:51
  Oh shocking, I again, And just when we're calling them on it,
• 43:55
  they go bankrupt. So I'd never of a story like that. It
• 44:00
  doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. It's never happened before. But you know,
• 44:06
  and so there's like there's some heartbreaking lessons and things you learn along in
• 44:08
  the way of like, oh, we did all the work, we got
• 44:12
  the muscle out there, and then just at the finish line, you know,
• 44:15
  someone is like, thank you so much, and we'll take you for
• 44:17
  we'll we'll take it from here. Did you guys, did you have a
• 44:21
  did you have a clause that if they go bankrupt the right to go back
• 44:24
  to you? You didn't. Was there a closet there? No? So
• 44:29
  and I we're a few years away, we're going to get a back.
• 44:30
  So it's a commute. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, because it's the
• 44:32
  thing, all right, So you'll get it back eventually. Yeah yeah,
• 44:36
  so it'll be all right. But still, but that process, the good,
• 44:39
  the bad, the ugly of making your own movie and distributing it and
• 44:43
  doing everything that that has those lessons I'm still learning because because even with my
• 44:49
  new movie Funny Story, it almost feels like that was my my my first
• 44:53
  feature, because that was what I did, was I told the personal story.
• 44:57
  It was something I had to tell, and I did it with friends,
• 44:59
  and I did it as small as I could, just like the Smiley.
• 45:00
  But but Smiley wasn't a personal story. It was like it was almost
• 45:04
  like I hired myself for a job. It was like I saw an opportunity
• 45:08
  and I took the opportunity and tried to make it the best and the biggest
• 45:13
  it could. But it wasn't. It didn't have any personal connection to me.
• 45:15
  It felt like I I felt like multiple people, like I'm I'm I'm
• 45:21
  the financier hiring the director who's then going to produce it and then going to
• 45:24
  distribute. So it was like I had different hats on all the things you
• 45:27
  were fighting with yourself constantly. Yeah, exactly. But but in terms of
• 45:31
  like a creative thing, it's like, I'm really proud of the movie and
• 45:34
  what we've done with it, But in terms of what I can do as
• 45:37
  a storyteller and and the kind of movies that I want to make, it's
• 45:39
  it didn't really line up with that, and I think people saw that when
• 45:43
  you know, they write reviews or you know whatever, but to all that
• 45:47
  aspect of it, you know, you can kind of just do things and
• 45:50
  put it out there. But that's the other thing. I think people thought
• 45:52
  we had a huge budget for Smiley because it got We had billboards and Times
• 45:58
  Square, we had you know kind of promotion all around Los Angeles and you
• 46:00
  know, big release. But it was just it was Michael Warmsow and I
• 46:04
  was like these, you know, two little producers just going out and call
• 46:07
  a clear channel and saying, hey, can we get a billboard? Hey,
• 46:10
  we have no money, what can we do? And then people were
• 46:13
  just you know, wanting to help because they thought it was a cool idea
• 46:15
  and why not they had the inventory. So we were able to make a
• 46:19
  pretty big splash with with you know, a couple of pennies and then and
• 46:22
  then you started making some films directly for YouTube bread as well, like The
• 46:27
  Ink. Yeah, so the thinning came about an interesting way because post Smiley,
• 46:31
  I had all these you know, I was repped it. You know,
• 46:34
  I'm still repped at the UTA and you know, Management three sixty in
• 46:38
  all these great places. Because they had seen Smiley and they'd seen the trailer
• 46:43
  and all the kind of ruckus we were creating, and they said, Okay,
• 46:45
  we want to bet on this guy. So they put me in rooms
• 46:49
  with every studio, all these production companies, and they're like, what do
• 46:51
  you want to do next? And I'm like, I'm exhausted, I have
• 46:53
  no idea. What do you guys got And they're like, all right,
• 46:57
  well, why don't you go write a script and then call us? So
• 47:00
  I was like, okay, that's another lesson learned. Always have your next
• 47:04
  thing ready. I have three things, next three things, right, yeah,
• 47:07
  next three things. Definitely you get to have options. I say,
• 47:10
  well, like the first one, but they might like the third one.
• 47:13
  You never know, and you're not going to get back in that room again
• 47:15
  easily. It's not that easy yet. And so I, you know,
• 47:20
  had that water bottle tour of meeting with everybody without a movie, oh,
• 47:24
  without a project. Yeah, but basically I mean, yeah, nothing to
• 47:27
  pitch. There's it's Hollywood masturbation like we like to call it. Yeah,
• 47:30
  I got a lot of free waters. It was great. And then but
• 47:35
  from that I learned, Okay, it's not about me coming over and seeing
• 47:38
  what they have. They want to see what I got. I'm the generator.
• 47:42
  So okay, that's how as a filmmaker you need to look at these
• 47:45
  things. And so what I did was I spent the next couple of years
• 47:47
  just head down writing. And so I enlisted Steve Green, who's my best
• 47:52
  friend, and we'd been doing all these sketches into writing, you know,
• 47:55
  comedy bits. I said, hey, let's break movies. We could figure
• 47:59
  it out. And so because I never really i'd never finished a feature from
• 48:04
  scratch with Smiley, I came on it and did some rewrites and polishes and
• 48:08
  kind of the justice and things. But but it wasn't it. I didn't
• 48:12
  start. It didn't start and end with me, And so that was a
• 48:14
  new process. So Steve and I just kind of like head down wrote every
• 48:16
  read every screenwriting book there is, and we just started going. And so
• 48:22
  everyone was saying, you know, maybe write something, you know, maybe
• 48:23
  write from a personal place. So the first thing we wrote was Internet Famous,
• 48:27
  which was a parody of all these YouTube stars and the ego trip and
• 48:30
  the ridiculousness of the YouTube world. So we wrote that as like a mockumentary
• 48:36
  comedy kind of like a best in show in Tone or spinal Tap and uh
• 48:40
  yeah, and everyone was really excited about that. So we partnered with Lake
• 48:43
  Shore and they financed the movie through their Off the Dock, which is their
• 48:46
  digital division, and they said, okay, well, what you do with
• 48:50
  Smile, let's try and do that with with Internet famous, but do it
• 48:52
  with YouTube stars making fun of themselves in at the comedy. It's all lining
• 48:57
  up. So then we just kind of we but now it's a store that
• 49:00
  it's like I have some basis in that because I generated the thing. And
• 49:04
  so we we put this great cast together and we went out and shot it
• 49:08
  and then uh, Netflix bought it and so it's on Netflix now, and
• 49:13
  that was that was cool. That budget was under a million, but it
• 49:15
  was but it was definitely a huge step up from where I had gone before.
• 49:19
  And and then at the same time, when we were writing all those
• 49:22
  scripts, like you said to have three projects, right it, we had
• 49:24
  written five scripts and we took out you know, we were taking them out
• 49:28
  and seeing what the agents were responding to. And the other one we wrote
• 49:30
  was The Thinning, which was you know, the DOBI and teen thriller,
• 49:34
  And so we came with the idea for that. It was sort of like
• 49:36
  a what if we what if we created a Hunger Games event but for YouTube?
• 49:39
  What if we created like this big kind of spectacle that But but it
• 49:45
  was really just aidm to never come out in theaters, but just like be
• 49:49
  an event on the Internet, because most people they were just dumping things that
• 49:52
  they couldn't get distribution on the Internet, as opposed to like, what did
• 49:55
  you make a spectacle for the internet. We'll be right back after a word
• 50:00
  from our sponsor and now back to the show. And so we thought that
• 50:08
  would be cool, and so we pitched that around and then Legendary they had
• 50:12
  started a digital division and they loved the script and so and it was funny
• 50:16
  because when I met with them, they were only interested in series. And
• 50:20
  then there had been like one or two other like digital movies that came out
• 50:22
  post Smiley that started getting like good press that like, oh, they're making
• 50:25
  money, they can do this. As soon as they heard that they can
• 50:28
  make money making features for the Internet, all of a sudden, our phone
• 50:31
  rang oh, well, of course, because they made it. Because it's
• 50:34
  like, oh, how much is it? How much do you need?
• 50:36
  That's coffee? Down, He's sure here exactly. So we went off and
• 50:40
  got to make that thnning with Legendary and then they sold it to YouTube read
• 50:45
  at the time, which was I think they had just started that as like
• 50:51
  a premium content division and uh and then it became like the biggest movie that
• 50:54
  they had ever you know, the biggest show or anything that they had ever
• 50:57
  released, like in terms of viewership. That could just explode it. And
• 51:00
  so immediately they green led a sequel. So we did Sending New World Order,
• 51:04
  and you know, it was just kind of like all of a sudden,
• 51:07
  you know, all this hard work and like putting your head down writing,
• 51:09
  it's like, oh, now we're just making movies every you know,
• 51:12
  it's like we were doing like two movies every other year. It was like
• 51:15
  just oh my god, we're doing two a year, like going from zero
• 51:16
  to a thousand. It's crazy, right, but it was fun. I
• 51:22
  mean, it's it's been a kind of a wild process to go from having
• 51:27
  everyone question you and kind of like not understand what you're going for, to
• 51:30
  and then everyone calling and saying like how do we work with you? How
• 51:34
  you know, sending scripts, sending digital stars over being like can you put
• 51:37
  them in a movie. You know, we got we got three hundred thousand
• 51:42
  dollars. Can we make a movie with this kid? It's like, what,
• 51:46
  I don't that's all really how you make a movie. But all they
• 51:50
  do, they trust me, they do make movies just like that. I
• 51:54
  know. I've had to turn some of those down, you know what.
• 51:57
  You know what's funny because I'm looking I'm looking forward in the future, and
• 52:00
  you're going to be one day sixty and you're going to look back and you're
• 52:04
  going to be like, yeah, I was there, you do when it
• 52:06
  started? Yeah? I was just like, yeah, can you tell these
• 52:09
  stories that people were like, you mean there was a world when there was
• 52:13
  no video on the internet? Like, is that a world that I would
• 52:16
  want to live in? I don't understand one day. Your generations are interesting,
• 52:20
  like our generation, my generations Gen X are like we're the in betweeners.
• 52:23
  We're like we had one foot in the old and one foot in the
• 52:27
  news, so like we were around before the Internet, but we definitely were
• 52:29
  there when it popped. And you have no idea, Like you said you
• 52:34
  were born in eighty eight. I was walking, I was going into high
• 52:36
  school in eighty eight. So there's a slight difference, slight difference in perspective,
• 52:42
  but it's fascinating. That's what I love talking to young filmmakers like yourself,
• 52:45
  especially once I've had a lot of success in what they're doing, because
• 52:50
  I'm always fascinated with stories like how these different windows that open up, and
• 52:54
  then how you leverage that window to take it to the next step and so
• 52:59
  on, which brings me to your new movie Funny Story that I've actually been
• 53:02
  seeing billboards all around town. I've been like as a drive by and I'm
• 53:07
  like like, and that's why when it came through, I was like,
• 53:08
  oh, Funny Story, Yeah, that's that movie. I keep seeing everywhere
• 53:12
  on like every second bust thing I see is there. So I don't know
• 53:16
  who's your marketing pr people, but they're doing a good job spending that money
• 53:21
  because that's out there, no question. So because this one looks more serious,
• 53:24
  it does. It looks a lot more serious. It's not smiley,
• 53:29
  it's definitely not it's the famous. It's it's definitely a little bit more like
• 53:34
  a serious filmmaker. So tell me a little bit about that. Well,
• 53:37
  I think after doing I don't know, I guess it was like four or
• 53:40
  five of these kind of YouTube because sort of digital features. I was known
• 53:46
  as the digital guy, and so I could get into any room, you
• 53:50
  know, as long as it was starting someone with X amount of followers.
• 53:52
  You know, I was up for that job. Good place to be,
• 53:57
  it's a good place to be. It's a great place to be. But
• 54:00
  also there's a frustration because I didn't. I never intended for that to become,
• 54:05
  you know, sort of the branded digital guy. I wanted to be
• 54:08
  more, you know, just a filmmaker amongst all filmmakers, and I was
• 54:13
  working in the specific medium and kind of trying to break open this this area
• 54:16
  that we thought that we thought needed to be open. And so with funny
• 54:22
  story, it was kind of a a going back to, you know,
• 54:27
  the filmmakers that I grew up on and the people that inspired me to first
• 54:30
  start and try and tell a movie and try and tell a story that didn't
• 54:35
  require the you know, you have to have cast somebody that has X amount
• 54:38
  of followers that you know, has has this many Instagram things, and it's
• 54:44
  like this, it's not about the result. I wanted to do something that
• 54:47
  wasn't result oriented, that was really just we're going to go make this because
• 54:51
  we're all passionate about the story and the characters, and I want to show
• 54:54
  as a filmmaker I can do And so that was the that was the spirit
• 54:59
  of making fun story. So to wrote this movie, and I was really
• 55:02
  inspired by like the Duplaus brothers and Joe Swanberg and these guys that were just
• 55:07
  like going off. You know, they call it mumblecore or whatever, but
• 55:08
  it's like go off without really a script, maybe just an outline, and
• 55:12
  we're just gonna go, you know, make this. That's how I made
• 55:15
  How so I made my first two features I love this, yeah, which
• 55:17
  is which is great. And so I started with, okay, well what
• 55:22
  can I do? You know, I need limited location. I started thinking
• 55:24
  back to like you know, the YouTube days of like how do I just
• 55:28
  go off and make something right? And so I was like looking at all
• 55:30
  the resources I had and the people I knew, and I started writing parts
• 55:34
  for to the people around me and really talented actors that I had kind of
• 55:37
  gotten the pleasure to work with and putting this thing together. I outlined,
• 55:43
  you know, full feature. It was like maybe thirty pages. It was
• 55:45
  like a script that just didn't have any dialogue. It's it's a technical term.
• 55:50
  Script. Yes, oh, thank you. Yes. So I wrote
• 55:52
  a script, yes, yes, and it was the whole movie, but
• 55:55
  I had no dialogue. And I tried. I was like, you know,
• 55:59
  it was a little because I made some other movie that they're like,
• 56:00
  Okay, I think I can get funded off of script met of it can't
• 56:04
  be that hard. And everyone was like, no dialogue. Interesting, an,
• 56:07
  your last name is that du plus not gonna work, buddy, you've
• 56:10
  ever done this before. I don't know. I don't know about this.
• 56:15
  And then so then they started making me kind of question it, and I
• 56:17
  was like, a shit, maybe I should maybe I should add some dial
• 56:21
  to this thing. Maybe, And so I started, I said, And
• 56:23
  then I started thinking about, well, if I really go and do this
• 56:27
  on the budget that I think I could just go off and make it.
• 56:30
  I think it's it's too much money where I want to risk the idea of
• 56:36
  maybe I don't have the answer, because I think it is sort of like
• 56:38
  jumping out of an airplane without without the dialogue, because you really have to
• 56:43
  trust in everyone around you. And I just got cold, fat honestly about
• 56:47
  trying to do that, and I still want to do it someday, but
• 56:50
  at that time, I was like, I don't think I'm ready to do
• 56:52
  no dialogue script ment. Go make it. It takes a certain amount of
• 56:57
  balls, sir. It does truly take a certain amount of balls to do
• 57:00
  that. So my balls were up in my body and saying I tripped yet.
• 57:07
  So then I called Steve Green. I was like, Steve, I
• 57:10
  got a script, met I want to turn into a script. Let's let's
• 57:14
  do this. And so we we powered together. I think it was like
• 57:17
  four or five days of just like twelve hour sessions of us just locked in
• 57:22
  a room, just you know, acting it out, writing dialogue, making
• 57:27
  each other crack up. And and then I had the full script and it
• 57:30
  was like a ninety something page script and we went off and I just cast
• 57:35
  people that I had either worked with before or met with that I knew,
• 57:37
  we're just going to be passionate about this thing. That the crew, everybody,
• 57:40
  everyone got paid. But it was from the spirit of we don't know
• 57:45
  what's going to happen with this thing, We're just going to go and do
• 57:46
  it. And that set is the best set experience I've ever had because everyone
• 57:52
  was there for the right reason. I'd never actually felt that before with everything
• 57:55
  else I had done. There'd maybe been a few people who were really excited
• 57:59
  about a project, but at a certain level, like your your crew,
• 58:02
  your cast, like they're making a lot of stuff, it's hard to get
• 58:07
  that genuine enthusiasm of like this, we're doing this because we love it,
• 58:12
  we love making movies, we love we love this story. And that set,
• 58:15
  it felt like everyone was there for the right reason. They had this
• 58:17
  spirit and this excitement, and it just, I don't know, it just
• 58:22
  it shows in the movie, I think. And so we went out and
• 58:25
  we submitted to film festivals and last year, yeah, we've been touring with
• 58:30
  the film. It got into the slam Dance Film Festival and they're beyond category
• 58:34
  because I had already done more than it was my first feature. And so
• 58:37
  from there it kind of like all the film festivals were reaching out and then
• 58:42
  we just kind of bored with it for the last year. And so it
• 58:45
  played, you know, like in one crazy awards like Breckenridge Film Festival and
• 58:50
  woods Hole, what Washington West. I mean, there's just like a million,
• 58:54
  like all these regional film festivals that just the movie was really resonating with
• 58:59
  audiences, and you know, we were like it would play at places and
• 59:04
  they'd add screenings that would sell out, and it was just like there was
• 59:07
  this weird buzz about the movie just you know, within these communities. We
• 59:10
  weren't really promoting it. It didn't have any There wasn't much to promote on
• 59:14
  the film festival circuit. You know, you can put flyers up in things,
• 59:17
  but but we didn't even really do that. It was just word of
• 59:20
  mouth. So it was kind of spreading and other film festivals were asking us
• 59:22
  to play. And and then this last year we got it out with Blue
• 59:27
  Box Entertainment and we did a few screen theatrical day and date with VOD and
• 59:31
  such, and yeah, the movies just you know, it's gotten great reviews.
• 59:36
  It's just been really warmly received, and it's you know, it's this
• 59:39
  little movie that we went off and made that you know, we didn't have
• 59:43
  a marketing and so I all I did was you know the advertising you've seen,
• 59:47
  that's just me calling up places I did with Smiley, saying like,
• 59:51
  hey, we made another indie. You have any inventory? What do you
• 59:53
  got? Like, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and
• 1:00:02
  now back to the show. What kind of deal? And so you know,
• 1:00:07
  we just call these places up and then you know, got billboards and
• 1:00:09
  got you know, bus benches and all that kind of stuff. Can I
• 1:00:14
  ask you, I don't know if you if you're able to tell me this
• 1:00:15
  or not, but what are those things kind of cost? I have no
• 1:00:17
  idea what a bus bench costs or like those like I've always seen them and
• 1:00:22
  you always think they're like these like fifty thousands, like crazy expensive? Like
• 1:00:27
  is it is it literally affordable to do that, like if you have a
• 1:00:30
  little bit of money, If you have a little bit of money, it
• 1:00:31
  is affordable. Yeah, I think I don't have the exact numbers offhand,
• 1:00:36
  but I do know that you know, we negotiated with the companies and just
• 1:00:39
  you know, we said, look, we're not you know, Lionsgate or
• 1:00:43
  a small indie you know movie coming out. So if there's inventory that you
• 1:00:46
  have or if there's a deal you can cut us, like, let us
• 1:00:49
  know because we'd love to consider, you know, working with you guys.
• 1:00:52
  And so I think for bus benches, I think the company we went with
• 1:00:54
  they do a minimum of ten and so you have to get ten of them.
• 1:00:59
  But unit they're not crazy expenses. It's like three hundred dollars or something
• 1:01:01
  per bench. I think like three thousand, around three thousand. I think
• 1:01:06
  you can get ten benches in LA for a month, for a month,
• 1:01:09
  yeah, for four weeks. That's insane, right, it's insane. Oh,
• 1:01:15
  guys, anyone listening, you're gonna start seeing indie film hustle banners all
• 1:01:19
  over Los Angeles. I'm just saying, you're gonna be like, is that
• 1:01:22
  a pull? Is that a podcast with a bus bench? Like? Is
• 1:01:25
  that a thing? I'm like, Oh yeah, it's gonna be a thing.
• 1:01:30
  That's insane. The thing is like, I don't know. I guess
• 1:01:32
  I was never afraid of like just trying to google something or looking and just
• 1:01:37
  asking yeah, because the worst thing that's gonna happen is they're gonna say no,
• 1:01:39
  get lost. And I've had that happen to me and that's okay.
• 1:01:44
  And it's like there's a few outdoor advertising companies that are not they'll make her
• 1:01:47
  friendly and that's okay, But then there's other ones that say, you know,
• 1:01:51
  you have a connection with somebody and you tell them your story and they
• 1:01:54
  want to help you. I mean, people want to help each other,
• 1:01:57
  it's just we so rarely are we offering our help to others? Are we
• 1:02:00
  asking? It's hard to even ask for help sometimes. But if you,
• 1:02:05
  if you can be willing to accept whatever the answer is, then you might
• 1:02:08
  be surprised by people because I don't know, there's there's other passionate filmmakers out
• 1:02:12
  there. Maybe I have a desk job at a marketing on an ad agency
• 1:02:15
  and they're like, yeah, I want to help you in LA You in
• 1:02:17
  that position someday in La Never, I can't believe that. What I find
• 1:02:23
  fascinating is that you are known for being online, being on YouTube, understanding
• 1:02:30
  online marketing, understanding online branding, and yet you use legacy advertising methods as
• 1:02:37
  part of your whole overall you know, plan, why do you what kind
• 1:02:42
  of return? What ROI do you think you get from these kinds? Like
• 1:02:44
  when it makes more sense to spend those three thousand dollars on you know,
• 1:02:47
  focused Facebook ads or YouTube ads as opposed to are you going to get a
• 1:02:52
  better ROI on that than bus benches? Look, bus benches are cool as
• 1:02:54
  hell, and I'm seriously thinking of getting some. But but on an ROI
• 1:02:59
  standpoint, like what is it really going to do? Well? There's there's
• 1:03:05
  different ways to think about it if you're just concerned about ROI or just like
• 1:03:09
  the kind of money you're going to make, you know, from sales.
• 1:03:14
  I don't know that outdoor there's like a one to one of you know,
• 1:03:19
  a bus bench equals as many downloads or rent No, of course, of
• 1:03:21
  course, yeah. I do have a theory about advertising and about selling something,
• 1:03:29
  which is that if I haven't heard of it, if I haven't seen
• 1:03:31
  it out in the wild, then it's harder for me to as a consumer
• 1:03:37
  just to watch a movie, to listen to a song, to stuff like
• 1:03:40
  I need to I need to have been in I need to have almost been
• 1:03:44
  bombarded by it in three different ways, Like if I saw it out in
• 1:03:47
  public, I saw a pre roll ad on on YouTube, and then I
• 1:03:51
  see it on Apple TV on you know, as like a premium movie,
• 1:03:53
  then it's like, oh, I've seen this before, and then I'm going
• 1:03:57
  to check it out, as opposed to something like I'm never seen it all
• 1:04:00
  of a sudden it's just on iTunes or it's just on Amazon. I think
• 1:04:02
  it's a harder it's a harder purchase for me to just go and blind and
• 1:04:09
  just search around to see what's out true, it's true. Where whereas if
• 1:04:12
  I had the impression I've seen the key art a few different times and especially
• 1:04:17
  different mediums, I think really hell like even and I really toyed with this,
• 1:04:20
  and I think next time I'll do it. Is you know, getting
• 1:04:24
  pre roles on podcasts because so many people are listening to podcasts. They're in
• 1:04:28
  your ear, I'm available, I'm available, sir, I'm available. You
• 1:04:32
  let me know how you want to cut that deal. Will make that work?
• 1:04:36
  I mean like and it's like, oh, in your ear, you're
• 1:04:40
  hearing funny Story May twenty fourth on you know, in theaters on demand,
• 1:04:43
  and then you're seeing it. And then it's like now you're on Apple TV
• 1:04:45
  and it's like, oh, I've been told it, I watched it,
• 1:04:46
  I saw a trailer, and now the movie is you know, trending or
• 1:04:49
  whatever it's in you know recent discoveries. Now I'm going to watch it.
• 1:04:54
  You know what this funny thing is, though, what your theory is is
• 1:04:57
  exactly happened because it happened to me. Because when your poster showed up in
• 1:05:00
  my email box. I said, oh, that's that movie that I saw
• 1:05:04
  on the bus bench around the corner, and it added a sense before I
• 1:05:09
  even knew who you were and like and got and delved into who you are
• 1:05:12
  in your backstory, I automatically associated, oh, this is a real movie,
• 1:05:18
  purely because of the legacy, the legacy marketing that you were using,
• 1:05:23
  like because I know, the impression in my mind is a YouTube is not
• 1:05:27
  going to cost nearly as much as a bunch a bus bench, not nearly
• 1:05:30
  as much as a billboard. For God's sake, that's like, that's what
• 1:05:34
  the studios do. So you already for your small little indie movie. You've
• 1:05:38
  already put yourself in the box with the studios because of that specific move.
• 1:05:44
  So it is working. It worked on me that that was the first time
• 1:05:47
  I because honestly I was like, oh, yeah this, and I saw
• 1:05:50
  that post, I'm like, oh, let me dig in a little bit,
• 1:05:53
  because I get bombarded with requests to be on the show all the time.
• 1:05:56
  But when I saw that, it stopped me and then I said,
• 1:05:59
  oh, let me dig in and let me investigate Who's Who's Michael Galim Like,
• 1:06:02
  Oh, okay, fine, this makes a lot of sense now,
• 1:06:05
  but it was. It was the initial. But honestly, it was the
• 1:06:09
  initial looking up and it's not one billboard. By the way, I've seen
• 1:06:12
  it like three four times all around, all around LA. So it it
• 1:06:16
  works, it works. That's good. I'm glad. I'm glad it's working.
• 1:06:19
  And yeah, just so you know, it's not like, oh,
• 1:06:21
  we hired some big company to do this. It's like, no, it's
• 1:06:24
  it's me be making phone calls. Like it's not STI it's still hustling,
• 1:06:29
  you know, you think it's that point. I don't know. I haven't
• 1:06:31
  gotten to that point where I'm like, oh, I have a whole staff
• 1:06:33
  and everyone's just doing everything. It's like, no, I'm still I'm looking
• 1:06:36
  at I'm creating marketing assets, I'm cutting trailers. Did you make the poster?
• 1:06:41
  Did you make the poster? I didn't make the poster, but I
• 1:06:44
  you know, I know my limits. There's a nice person say it's a
• 1:06:47
  nice poster. It's good. But but the the bus benches I did make.
• 1:06:51
  So I took the key art and then I remixed the elements. I
• 1:06:56
  can do that. You're like, you know what I mean. So it's
• 1:06:57
  like I can. I still want to. You know, I saw that
• 1:07:00
  indie film Spirit Enemy of like, I'm just gonna go up and do this.
• 1:07:03
  That's great, man, that's awesome. Now, I wanted to ask
• 1:07:05
  you something in regards to this whole influencer phenomenon, which is basically going on
• 1:07:11
  right now and has been going on for many years. Do you think that
• 1:07:14
  this is gonna like in twenty years, are we going to talk about influencers
• 1:07:15
  anymore? Like do you think there's a window that's going to close? I
• 1:07:19
  mean, I think the window to be an influencer is is tighter now than
• 1:07:23
  it was five years ago. On YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook.
• 1:07:27
  You know, there's specific places where certain people are making their name. I
• 1:07:30
  remember all the guys at Vine in girls at mine, they were like,
• 1:07:33
  I'm a huge Vine person. Well Vine's gone, and then you're just like,
• 1:07:36
  oh, let's just post them all on YouTube. See what happens.
• 1:07:40
  Like it's like, yeah, so do you what do you? Yeah?
• 1:07:43
  Where do you think you know? From your I'd love to hear your perspective,
• 1:07:45
  but where do you think this influencer phenomenon is like influence marketing, which
• 1:07:47
  is you know, you guys kind of your world. One of the first
• 1:07:50
  people to actually do influencer marketing, and now it's become a thing. What
• 1:07:55
  do you think in how it's going to pan out in the future. Yeah,
• 1:07:59
  I think you see someone like Dayne the Rock Johnson, you know,
• 1:08:04
  and I think we're not far off from him just releasing his own movies on
• 1:08:09
  his own app or something, you know where, because you have somebody who
• 1:08:13
  is just a brand, and it doesn't matter if he's doing Fallers on HBO
• 1:08:17
  or if he's in you know, Jumanji or something. It's like, at
• 1:08:21
  a certain point, when he makes enough money, he doesn't need the studio.
• 1:08:26
  Yeah, and so you have a brand, and it's like if you
• 1:08:29
  like Duayne the Rock Johnson, like you just you need to subscribe to his
• 1:08:32
  app or it's like he can just mark it directly to his fans. And
• 1:08:36
  so I think the follower kind of concept of all these different social media platforms,
• 1:08:41
  I think it might collapse into an app or something like that where every
• 1:08:45
  everyone just has a base and then they're just you know, providing content to
• 1:08:48
  that base and they can sell fun and whether that's Kim Kardashian or you know,
• 1:08:54
  Al Ferrari or first of all, stop putting my name in the same
• 1:08:59
  sense as we Dwayne Rod Johnson or god forbid, Kim K. But please
• 1:09:05
  please stop it. Yeah, I've got you, I've got you, foold
• 1:09:09
  sir, But you know what I'm saying. But it doesn't you know,
• 1:09:13
  it doesn't matter what your brand is. But I think each person, what
• 1:09:16
  influencers are they are a brand and what do they sell? It's themselves,
• 1:09:20
  it's some it's something about them and some people you could argue have talent.
• 1:09:25
  Some people don't and they're just personalities, but they can attract people and whether
• 1:09:30
  and it could be from from anything. But I think the collapsing of the
• 1:09:34
  different platforms will happen at some point, and I think it'll take someone and
• 1:09:41
  it could be you know, you have these traditional folks like Tom Cruise or
• 1:09:45
  something, or it could be you know, uh, you know some kid
• 1:09:48
  on YouTube with the you know, just doing those whole thing, and it's
• 1:09:50
  like we learn that, like, okay, all of a sudden, pewty
• 1:09:54
  Pi has his whole little empire off his app and he's making forty million dollars
• 1:09:58
  a month or something, and everyone's like, wait what, But we'll be
• 1:10:01
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show,
• 1:10:10
  and then it'll take something like that happening where then everyone jumps in and
• 1:10:15
  it's not that far away, far off, not at all. Yeah,
• 1:10:18
  I mean, I got I mean, I literally have a streaming service which
• 1:10:23
  is an app which you download. I'm not making forty million a month.
• 1:10:26
  Let everybody know that, I'm not even close to as many zeros. I'm
• 1:10:30
  not even close to that many zeros, trust me, but it is it
• 1:10:32
  is at a certain point that is something where I think, like I think,
• 1:10:36
  I think someone like Tom Cruise, who's a little bit more traditional as
• 1:10:40
  far as his age and where he came from. I don't think he's he's
• 1:10:43
  not on the he's just not there. But I think the Rock is that
• 1:10:45
  hybrid. He's the guy who came up. He's like the middle. He's
• 1:10:48
  in the middle. He's like, I'm before the but I'm embracing it and
• 1:10:53
  I'm built for this medium, and he is. He's built for the medium
• 1:10:57
  where the young and the older following him, and that's who you need,
• 1:11:00
  uh Bill Smith, Yeah, he's yeah, he's like he is right,
• 1:11:08
  He's like literally like on the set of Bad Boys three with like the guy
• 1:11:11
  who did bel Air, that that that great, great trailer for bel Air,
• 1:11:15
  like if they then you saw that, right, Oh, it's so
• 1:11:17
  great. It's so good for everyone, know everyone. It's like the dark,
• 1:11:23
  dawn and dirty like eminem style, eight mile style of Prince Prince of
• 1:11:27
  bel Air and it's so fricking good. And you got Will Smith like talking
• 1:11:31
  to that filmmaker on a balcony in Miami. He's just like, hey man,
• 1:11:35
  where you're like, are you vlogging? Will Smith? Are you really?
• 1:11:39
  Are you vlogging? Will Smith? He's a weekly bogger. Yeah he
• 1:11:42
  is, he is, and he does these motivational things. He's yeah,
• 1:11:45
  so like he he saw it, he saw He's like, oh, I
• 1:11:47
  gotta jump on this. This is this is where it's going to be.
• 1:11:50
  And he can leverage's traditional fame to a platform like that where people like me
• 1:11:57
  would follow him and young, younger people who watch the gen you will follow
• 1:12:00
  him exactly. I think I think we're going to see more of that in
• 1:12:08
  the future, and whether that's people jumping onto pre existing platforms and just utilizing
• 1:12:13
  their celebrity to kind of bring people in. But I do think, you
• 1:12:16
  know, with the subscription models and the apps and things, I think we're
• 1:12:20
  kind of getting to a place where if they could have it all under one
• 1:12:24
  hub, and you know, trying to do that, the apples try and
• 1:12:28
  do that, and I think it'll take a really big personality to just triple
• 1:12:32
  down on themselves and do it. Who has the capital And maybe it's a
• 1:12:35
  company investing in the rock industries, just like doing it that way. I
• 1:12:41
  don't know seven Bucks. I think his company is called seven bucks, so
• 1:12:44
  because he hits seven buckets, seven bucks bucks me start it. No,
• 1:12:50
  this is fascinating, and I have to ask this question because I think people
• 1:12:54
  would hurt me if I didn't ask this question. Do you have any advice
• 1:12:57
  on building a YouTube channel? It's a day's world in today's world, not
• 1:13:01
  in nineteen in two thousand and nine, not into day's world. That's a
• 1:13:05
  good question. Well, I think there's there's things that you probably heard that
• 1:13:11
  I think still apply, which is you've got to come up with a brand,
• 1:13:15
  whether that's yourself or you're a gamer, you know gaming, or if
• 1:13:18
  it's in the film, it's tips be consistent to whatever your brand is,
• 1:13:24
  because so when you go to the grocery store and you want orange juice.
• 1:13:28
  If you take an orange juice container and there's milk in, it doesn't matter
• 1:13:30
  how good the milk is. People want orange juice. Like, in terms
• 1:13:34
  of branding, like, I think that's really important for YouTube, Like you
• 1:13:38
  think of it like a product that you are selling, and it's you,
• 1:13:40
  it's your story, it's you, know, your your film's your content.
• 1:13:43
  And so if you create that brand, be then set a schedule and be
• 1:13:47
  consistent to that schedule, like live or die by that schedule. So it's
• 1:13:50
  weekly, if it's daily, Just do something manageable that you can commit to.
• 1:13:55
  And before you launch, I would stockpile at least a month so that
• 1:14:00
  way you're not like, you know, if something comes up, then you're
• 1:14:02
  not screwed or you know, having to be like, hey guys, sorry
• 1:14:05
  I couldn't post this week, Like I don't think people watching that. Just
• 1:14:11
  do it, you know, just like commit to it and do it and
• 1:14:13
  then and then also don't be afraid to collaborate with people who are similar to
• 1:14:18
  you. Don't be like, oh, everyone's competition. It's like I wouldn't
• 1:14:21
  think of everyone as competition and think of them more as your peers and collaborators,
• 1:14:26
  and there's maybe a way that you can provide value to them. So
• 1:14:29
  in the same way that I was just cold reaching out to the personalities and
• 1:14:32
  saying like, hey, let me make you a star of your own,
• 1:14:35
  you know, video creation that I will produce for you. Whatever you can
• 1:14:40
  provide. If you have audio equipment, and you notice somebody who's doing a
• 1:14:43
  podcast doesn't have audio equipment or that they should they should have that, maybe
• 1:14:46
  you could offer to you know, let them use your studio or whatever.
• 1:14:50
  I mean, there's a million different ways you could think about this stuff of
• 1:14:54
  what you can provide to people, whether that's in person, whether that's you
• 1:14:57
  know, just shouting them out, there's no in different ways, but I
• 1:15:00
  think offering value in exchange for collaborating is always a good way to go.
• 1:15:05
  And yeah, and then I think I think just being consistent in doing those
• 1:15:10
  things. I think that's like the groundwork, because it's hard to give advice
• 1:15:15
  when you don't have like a specific no, it's a very it's a very
• 1:15:18
  broad but like you look at something like Gary Vee was who was who's arguably
• 1:15:23
  one of the godfathers of the Internet, streaming space because he was there before
• 1:15:28
  YouTube and he and for people who don't know who Gary Vanderchuk is, please
• 1:15:31
  look him up. I mentioned him on the show before. He's he's doing
• 1:15:34
  okay for himself now. But he created that wine Channel's Wine tea Wine Library
• 1:15:39
  TV thing, and he would just every week just do these wine tasting videos
• 1:15:44
  like what's what's a good wine with Oreos, what's a good wine with this?
• 1:15:47
  And he did it for like, I think, like two years,
• 1:15:49
  with like barely anyone watching because nobody was online. And then one day Conan
• 1:15:55
  O'Brien called because when they let hey, we need a wine expert, and
• 1:15:58
  they looked them up and he was the only guy, and he said,
• 1:16:00
  well, he's got two hundred episodes. He must know what he's doing.
• 1:16:03
  And then the rest as the rest, as they say, is history.
• 1:16:05
  And that's why a lot of people ask me about my podcast and like how
• 1:16:09
  do you, like, how'd you get there? I'm like, dude,
• 1:16:11
  like I got three hundred and twenty as of this recording, I think like
• 1:16:14
  three hundred and twenty something episodes, and I'm like it's because I did two
• 1:16:17
  podcasts a week because I'm psychotic, and I just kept and I just every
• 1:16:21
  week, every dingy and well it's because you you kept consistent, but more
• 1:16:26
  importantly because you started a lot of people don't even say yes yes as a
• 1:16:30
  as a as a quote, it says like the best the best, right.
• 1:16:33
  I think it was like the best writing, the best writing you never
• 1:16:36
  did is better than the worst writing. You know, the best writing you
• 1:16:41
  did is the worst writing you never did, or something along those lies.
• 1:16:44
  You know what I'm trying to say, like, just get up and do
• 1:16:46
  it. Yeah, And I think Mark Deploth has a quote it's like the
• 1:16:49
  eighty percent rule because he's a perfectionist. And I know a lot of people
• 1:16:53
  are perfectionists. They're like, I can't start something else as perfect. He
• 1:16:56
  has an eighty percent rule that you know, if it's eighty percent there,
• 1:16:59
  and it's like they might be like this twenty percent fucked up. It's okay,
• 1:17:02
  just like accept it, say eighty percent is good enough and go because
• 1:17:06
  I don't know if you'll ever get to one hundred percent. I don't.
• 1:17:09
  I never feel like anything I've ever done is one hundred percent. And that's
• 1:17:13
  like perfection is I think unattainable. But eighty percent is attainable. It helps
• 1:17:18
  sometimes in a pinch. Yeah, And I think eighty percent or perfectionists,
• 1:17:23
  I think a lot of it is just as a cloak for fear. You're
• 1:17:27
  just afraid of moving. You just that's a great excuse. I'm like,
• 1:17:29
  oh, it's not perfect. I gotta go. Oh I need that red
• 1:17:30
  camera. I can't shoot. I can't shoot with that without a red camera.
• 1:17:34
  I know I need this actor or I need this much money to make
• 1:17:36
  this movie. You don't have these illnesses. You just went out and said
• 1:17:41
  like, hey, I'm gonna go make stuff, and I'm gonna go do
• 1:17:43
  stuff. And I'm sure that the videos that you guys were doing at Maker
• 1:17:45
  Studios are not one hundred percent. They're not. They just like, let's
• 1:17:49
  look no, but they're definitely not. But like if you look even at
• 1:17:54
  the Marktuplau, you look at Puffy Chair, he just went out with a
• 1:17:58
  camera and he just shot and he's like it was I don't even think it
• 1:18:00
  was an eighty percent. I think that movie was like a forty or fifty
• 1:18:02
  percent. When he started, He's like, let's just go make something.
• 1:18:05
  But yet he made something. I always tell people there was something there.
• 1:18:09
  There was something there. There's something there, but at least you got to
• 1:18:12
  just go out and try it. And if you fail, you fail,
• 1:18:15
  just do it a little budget. I can speak as someone who's gone out.
• 1:18:18
  You know, it's like that whole like live life in the arena.
• 1:18:20
  You know, it's like, don't be afraid to go out there and just
• 1:18:24
  you know, get attacked and have tomatoes thrown at you, and you know,
• 1:18:27
  get stabbed. Every once in a while. I've had I think I'm
• 1:18:30
  every mean thing has ever been said to me, and every bad thing's ever
• 1:18:33
  happened. So I can tell you I bounce back. So it's gonna be
• 1:18:38
  okay, You're gonna be all right. Now I'm going to ask you a
• 1:18:40
  few questions, ask all of my guests if you don't mind, if you
• 1:18:43
  have to use some time. Uh yeah, all right, cool. What
• 1:18:45
  advice would you give a filmmaker wanting to break into the business today? The
• 1:18:50
  advice I would give for a filmmaker breaking into the business today is to do
• 1:18:57
  something that you're passionate about. Don't worry about the result. Alt talk about
• 1:19:00
  something that you care about and put it out into the world and and things
• 1:19:04
  will be Uh, things will be good. Now, can you tell me
• 1:19:09
  what book had the biggest impact on your life or career. I would say
• 1:19:15
  Rob Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew, definitely. I read that book like ten
• 1:19:18
  times, so good. It's like this great diary of his time in you
• 1:19:24
  know, doing like lab research and like trying to like fund his movie,
• 1:19:28
  and he's like doing like all these experiments of food and things, and he's
• 1:19:31
  like going off and like how he made El Mariachi and then the whole process
• 1:19:34
  of taking it to Hollywood and then getting funding and then just kind of going
• 1:19:39
  off to the races. And it's a really it's a really cool book.
• 1:19:42
  And even though that path doesn't necessarily exist for us now, it's a great
• 1:19:46
  way to see like the hutspu that somebody has in their early stages of like
• 1:19:51
  just got to go off and go make it with the resources you have around
• 1:19:55
  you, the locations that people will be right back after a word from our
• 1:20:00
  sponsor and now back to the show, and you know, tell your story.
• 1:20:09
  Have you read it? Have you ever read his second book about the
• 1:20:12
  making of the making of his second movie, Road Racers. I have it
• 1:20:15
  now, so if you can find a copy, because I had a copy.
• 1:20:19
  I sold it because it's so damn expensive. Now it's rare because they
• 1:20:24
  pulled it off the because I think his agents pulled it off the market.
• 1:20:30
  Because so this is why it happened. Just just a little bit of a
• 1:20:32
  knowledge about this. Some of a huge Robert fans, I'd go deep with
• 1:20:35
  Robert. It's about his movie, second movie, road Racers, which was
• 1:20:39
  like I think a Showtime or Cinemax movie. Right before he did it,
• 1:20:44
  he did Desperado. They wanted to give him something else to kind of,
• 1:20:45
  you know, cut his teeth on. And it's his entire experience working with
• 1:20:49
  a film crew, like a professional film crew. And he hated it because
• 1:20:54
  he was like there like he's talking crap about the dp's talking crap about everybody.
• 1:20:58
  He's just like laying you know, and everybody these guys are because it's
• 1:21:00
  his diary. Again, it's the same process as Rebel without a group,
• 1:21:04
  but for this and he's like I just trying to get on my wheelchair and
• 1:21:08
  push but no one wants to push me, like do my dollary shots and
• 1:21:11
  the like what do you do? That's not how we do things. He
• 1:21:13
  had a horrible time with that but I read that book. I did get
• 1:21:15
  it. Took me like six months of waiting, but it's available Amazon.
• 1:21:18
  It's like one hundred and some dollars now if you want to buy, it's
• 1:21:19
  a paperback, but it's it's so good, so good. Now, what
• 1:21:26
  is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in the film
• 1:21:28
  business or in life. Yeah, I think the lesson the lesson I've learned
• 1:21:34
  that took the longest. That's interesting. I would say I would say that
• 1:21:42
  you know through the process of making things that you never really know how to
• 1:21:47
  make something until you've made it. And then once you like, say you
• 1:21:50
  film, like what as soon as I'm finished making a film, I'm like,
• 1:21:54
  now I want to start because now I know. Now I know that
• 1:21:57
  I get it Alex yeah and that fun stuff. Yeah, And then then
• 1:22:01
  then you have to apply it to the next one. But unfortunately, if
• 1:22:03
  like those lessons would be so great if you could then start from your endpoint
• 1:22:08
  to just go back in time, have that Groundhog Day sort of device,
• 1:22:11
  and then just go start again, because I always feel like it takes making
• 1:22:15
  a movie to learn how to make that movie, and each one is unique
• 1:22:18
  and special in that way. But but you try and take whatever lessons you
• 1:22:21
  can apply it to the next one is as best as possible. You know,
• 1:22:26
  Spielberg's Spielberg still learning. He still says like on every movie, I
• 1:22:29
  learned something you. So Steve is still at learning. If we're all still
• 1:22:32
  learning. Now, what is the biggest fear you had to overcome in making
• 1:22:39
  your first features or your or your first work in general? I think my
• 1:22:44
  first fear is my first fear is not is not finding collaborators that want to
• 1:22:53
  collaborate or want to listen to you being steamrolled by others, you know,
• 1:22:57
  because I started young, and so when I was on set of my first
• 1:23:01
  feature, I was the youngest person on set, like younger than the pas,
• 1:23:06
  and so I was staken. I nobody knew who the hell I was,
• 1:23:12
  and so it was just I don't know. It was like the feeling
• 1:23:15
  of like being a fraud. I had to get over that imposture syndrome.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah I'm yeah. I had to get over this imposter syndrome of like I
• 1:23:21
  what am I doing here? Why how come I'm the director? Like this
• 1:23:26
  shouldn't happen, And so I had to get I had to find that confidence
• 1:23:30
  in myself to say no, I should be here and this is why.
• 1:23:32
  And then that that just made it like and it's not yelling at people or
• 1:23:38
  being rude or doing anything to like throw around your power. It's more of
• 1:23:42
  just like an internal thing. And so that that took me a few projects
• 1:23:45
  to really get down being confident in what you're doing, the story you're telling,
• 1:23:48
  and how you're going to do it. Because then if anyone comes up
• 1:23:51
  with the idea or questions you on something, it's not like, oh,
• 1:23:54
  they're attacking me, because that's like an insecure way to think about it.
• 1:23:58
  It's more, no, they want to understand it, so they're asking you
• 1:24:01
  a question. And then if you're confident in yourself, then you can you
• 1:24:03
  can always be able to articulate that to any crew member. So it's having
• 1:24:08
  the confidence of in yourself of what you're doing. Yeah, but by the
• 1:24:14
  way, I used to be the youngest guy and the crew two, so
• 1:24:15
  enjoy it. Well. Lesser sailed already. I see everybody down set now
• 1:24:23
  and they're like texting like hey, what's going on and they're like, oh
• 1:24:26
  yeah, and then they say something that sounds like gibberish and it's like,
• 1:24:29
  oh, you're talking about some some app I've never heard of, some old
• 1:24:31
  man like it was like earlier, Like you're like, oh god, YouTube
• 1:24:38
  back in the day, I tell you now. And this is the toughest
• 1:24:44
  question of all three of your favorite films of all time? Oh my god.
• 1:24:46
  All right, well I'll just say the ones that come to the top
• 1:24:49
  of your head. And he's perfect. All right. So there's Biglebowski.
• 1:24:56
  Yes, that's very high up. I think the next one I'm gonna say
• 1:25:02
  ish ed Wood by Tim Burton. I love Edwood so much, dude.
• 1:25:08
  I saw that in the theater when it came out, and I was like
• 1:25:11
  crying, not because it was funny, because I was in pain for ed
• 1:25:15
  as a director. Oh, every direct every director should watch that movie.
• 1:25:17
  It's so beautiful. It's so good. And then another one that I love
• 1:25:24
  that doesn't get a lot of love, and that's why I'm gonna mention it
• 1:25:26
  is Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and it's Sidney Lamette's last movie. Oh
• 1:25:30
  yeah, starring Keithan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marissa Tome, Albert Finney.
• 1:25:34
  Incredible movie. Oh my god, it's so badass. Michael Shannon's everyone's
• 1:25:39
  in it, and the acting is incredible. The filmmaking, it's like it's
• 1:25:44
  so aggressive. He's like eighty something years old doing in this movie. And
• 1:25:46
  it feels like a like a really badass indie director went off and made their
• 1:25:51
  first gritty crime movie. It's so cool. I don't know what happened.
• 1:25:56
  I think it was a distribution thing. It just didn't get a lot of
• 1:25:58
  love. But that movie is great and I recommend it to anyone. Did
• 1:26:01
  you read his book Making Movies? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I read
• 1:26:04
  that before making anything. It's so good. It's such a good book.
• 1:26:08
  I read that too. I was like, oh my god, you're in
• 1:26:11
  there with him. You're like they're going through it with him. It's so
• 1:26:15
  awesome. Now where can people find uh a funny story and find people and
• 1:26:19
  find more about you? Yeah, so you go to Funny storymovie dot com.
• 1:26:24
  But it's also available on Apple, TV, Amazon, bel Able to
• 1:26:28
  Render by and you know, Spectrum on demand, all that kind of stuff.
• 1:26:31
  And then you can find me at totally sketch on Twitter, Instagram.
• 1:26:39
  Yeah I'm not that hard to find. Just look for the dumb face and
• 1:26:44
  Michael Man it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you, man, and
• 1:26:45
  it's been great getting into the the history of YouTube, almost like you're you're
• 1:26:51
  like a historian, sir, of of the of the of that movement.
• 1:26:56
  It's it's great and it really is great. I had had one of the
• 1:26:58
  co founders of of Rocket Jump in as well and we talked about their days.
• 1:27:03
  But you have a very unique perspective on it all. And again,
• 1:27:09
  if everyone listening, there isn't just one way to do it anymore. Like
• 1:27:11
  before there was just one way to make it in this business. Now there's
• 1:27:15
  thousands of ways, which is scary but exciting at the same time. And
• 1:27:18
  you're a breafact definitely proof of that, sir. So thank you for sharing
• 1:27:23
  your knowledge bombs with the tribe today. No, thank you. It's a
• 1:27:26
  pleasure to be here at honor. Thank you. I want to thank Michael
• 1:27:30
  so much for being on the show. I really really appreciate him coming on
• 1:27:33
  and being so transparent and honest about his failings, his successes and everything in
• 1:27:40
  between. So thank you Michael, very very much. If you want to
• 1:27:43
  get links to anything we discussed in this episode, just head over to the
• 1:27:45
  show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot TV Forward Slash three thirty six. Thank you
• 1:27:50
  so much for listening. Guys, as always, keep on writing no matter
• 1:27:55
  what. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting
• 1:27:59
  podcast at Full of Group Screenwriting dot TV. Mm hmm