You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (23 page)

In the “getting views” department, I had no shame.

“Yes, Grandma, that’s the right video, the one with my face. Now all you have to do is hit the triangle and play the video. And when it stops, just play it over and over again.”

“How many times, hon?”

“All day every day. Have Poppy do it on his computer, too. Love you!”

I forced all my relatives and friends to go through YouTube view-scumming training. I probably contributed ten thousand views to the show myself, running the show on mute in the background of my browser as I replied day and night with a personal “Thank you!” to every single blog entry, forum comment, or tweet related to the show. I needed to convey personally to every single person in the world HOW AWESOME
THE GUILD
WAS. DO YOU HEAR ME, WORLD? IT’S AWESOME!
HAVE SOME MORE CAPS!

I think part of why I glommed on to the task so much (besides more than a touch of OCD) is because crusades are part of my DNA. My mom was into politics my whole life, and I have vivid memories of helping her stuff envelopes as a preschooler in the “John Glenn for President” headquarters while Michael Jackson played on the radio. She always worked for a losing, underdog candidate, and was super active in the Independent Ross Perot campaign in 1992. (How do I describe this . . . it was the Tea Party movement of the early ’90s? Tons of people just got angry at me. Oh, well.)

We would hold signs on street corners, travel over state lines to
rally after rally (thanks to the “illegally not attending school” thing), all the while believing that we had the power to tear the establishment down. Advocating for my own web show kinda felt like standing on a street corner all day, handing out fliers, takin’ down “the man.” And the minute real actual humans started responding back, well, that’s when I truly got hooked. Viva la Webolution!

It was thrilling to refresh the video page over and over again and see comments roll in about our work. I’d love to say Kim and Jane and I focused on the compliments, but it’s the internet. You can’t help but pay attention to the mean things more. We traded the “best” back and forth:

“Webisode . . . uh . . . no. Which writer from
MADtv
wrote this?”

“. . . which high-school did you get those actors out of?”

“that’s the lady from the T-Mobile commercial. And the
Transformers
Chevy commercial. What a low-rent bitch.”

“wasn’t really funny, but the girl was decent.” *Or to put it in words the OT can comprehend* “I’d pee in her butt.”

But whatever was written, it was feedback. And I discovered that internet feedback, in any format, is pretty seductive.

I don’t say this to exaggerate the feel-goods, but the day we uploaded the first episode of
The Guild
was the day my life was transformed. Outside the fun of making it, we also had the faint hope in the back of our minds that someone “mainstream” would see the show and say, “Hey! Let’s take this
Guild
thing off the internet and put it on television!” But as soon as I saw the view count tick upwards and the comments section fill up with “Hey, I’d do that chick!,” the people I wanted to please in life shifted from Hollywood insiders, who’d shoved me into the quirky secretary box for so many years, to the people online who actually liked what I was doing. Or hated it. Either way, the feeling of “THEY LIKE US, KINDA!” was magical.

A week after our third (and last) episode was uploaded, I was acting in a terrible, low-budget Western movie. The kind you see in the bargain bin and say, “Wow that looks cheap.” While riding to set in a van, wearing a hideous prairie woman outfit, my phone started going crazy, buzzing like a lady’s pleasure toy with text after text.

“You’re on the front page of YouTube!”

“Your face is on YouTube!”

“Do you have a show on YouTube? I swear this is you on the front page!”

Back then, YouTube handpicked cool videos to share with the community on the front page. Most old-school YouTube stars were created this way. And on that day in late 2007, our hard work was blessed by their magic wand.

It paid off big-time.

Tons of people found us through that featured spot. Seeing “Where’s the next one?!” typed in the comments section over and over wasn’t a
BAD thing for the ego. Our views for the first episode skyrocketed past one million, and the brand-new episode three was up 200,000 in twelve hours. With that boost, I knew someone would be knocking on our door to help us make more episodes!

I held up the phone to the other actors in the van. “My show is on the front page of YouTube!”

They all looked over at me, confused. “You can make a show for the internet?”

[
 A Series of “You Go, Girl!” Events 
]

After the influx of fairy godmother YouTube views, we were able to get a snazzy Hollywood agent and started taking meetings with “the fancies” to pay for more episodes. I won’t lie; it was pretty awesome to be courted. I’d always wanted a “coming-out” party, like seventeen-year-olds had in Regency romance novels. Taking meetings around town felt like my version of being presented to the Queen. I always held my left hand out like it should be kissed when I was introduced to people at meetings. “Lovely to meet you, sir and/or madam.” (No one ever kissed it. The hoi polloi are so uncouth.)

The truth was, we were like the pauper girl trying to snag a prince. We literally didn’t have any money to make even ONE more episode on our own. But we thought by meeting with tons of web video companies and networks, someone would just write us a check, no strings attached, so we could get on with filming our next season.
Fund us! Our hymen is intact, take us to the altar, Prince Hollywood!

The first episode of
The Guild
is titled “Wake-Up Call.” That’s exactly what I got out of those meetings.

“But I don’t understand why you have to own the show completely.”
I squinted at the digital executive across from me. We were meeting for breakfast in a douchey hotel restaurant, and for the fiftieth time I thought to myself,
Why am I bothering with this Hollywood meeting thing again? Oh, right. I have to, if I want to keep making my show.

“Writers don’t own their work in this business.” He patted me on my hand, and I looked down, wanting to wipe it on my jeans.

“But there wouldn’t BE a show if it wasn’t for the person who thought it up in the first place.”

He smiled condescendingly. “The show wouldn’t get made without the producer and network, though. We provide the money. It’s 101.”

Did he seriously just throw a “101” at me? How dare he. I have a 4.0!
I leaned forward. “But it says here you can’t guarantee me to star if it ever goes to TV. That’s the whole point of why I wrote . . .”

“Don’t worry, those issues are way down the line! We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” His “Aren’t you cute!” attitude was really starting to piss me off.

“But . . .”

“We’re offering to fund your show! Doesn’t that make you happy?”

“You’re giving me two thousand dollars a season. Total.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Since we’re gonna work together, tell me the truth. You didn’t ACTUALLY write this yourself, did you?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, girls don’t really game, so . . .”

What. An. Asshole.

We got about a dozen offers for the show, opportunities most people trying to make it in Hollywood would kill for. Every time we got an offer, I tried to tell myself,
Yay, you did it! You’re on the path to get in that hot tub with Johnny Depp! Accept the deal, fool!

Then, when the paperwork finally hit my desk . . . I couldn’t bring myself to sign.

I think at the heart of it, I was afraid that by giving up control, I would lose the sense of fulfillment I’d found through making
The Guild
. Working on the show meant more to me than a business deal. It felt like I’d finally found what I’d been searching for ever since I left my violin career behind: a sense of purpose. Of meaning. That the blind leap of faith I took after college, with all the ups and downs, had been worth it.

And I couldn’t help feeling a little snotty.
What are these fancy-pants companies doing on the internet that’s better than what we’re doing on our own? None of them has produced web shows BIGGER than what the three of us have built in our garages. We can keep doing this ourselves, surviving on hoagies and favors . . . somehow!
Was I being delusional?

Yeah. I was.

During one of our last pitch meetings, a nice female executive who wasn’t as slick as the rest said, “We can’t invest right now, but why don’t you ask your fans to help you out?”

Kim and Jane and I nodded and said, “What a great idea!” and then looked at each other as we left. “Is that chick nuts?”

This was the end of 2007, before Kickstarter or Indiegogo existed (they started in 2009 and 2008 respectively), so the idea that random people would be willing to help us fund videos was ridiculous. I mean, she might as well have suggested standing on the corner of an intersection with an “Unemployed, Need Help with Web Series!” sign. I was willing to do that, but didn’t think I’d get a lot of donations on the corner of Vine and Sunset. For my vagina, yes. A web series? Nope.

But after a few more suit-douche meetings, I got desperate. And thought,
Sure! Let’s go cyber-panhandling!

I added a PayPal donation button to the sidebar of our website, right above our crucial Myspace icon. I had no expectations and did very little to publicize the button. The only perk I offered was that if you donated, you got your name listed in the show credits. I created all the credit pages in Photoshop myself, and sticking them on the ends of the videos was a pain. But I was willing to put in a small amount of effort. Even if I had to study more stupid video tutorials.

The next morning, I woke up to dozens of emails in my in-box.
Donation notifications? What the hell?!
Within two weeks we had enough money to make another episode. Even arrogant little me couldn’t believe it. I called up Kim.

“Uh, we have enough money to shoot another episode.”

“What? How? With the PayPal thingie?”

“Yup.”

“That is so weird!”

“I KNOW!”

The process was surreal. And it made me paranoid. I was sure someone was playing a trick on us, like when I was ten, and my mom was certain that the Cuban mafia was conspiring to kidnap us into prostitution when we won a “Pick 3” lottery ticket in Florida. I could smell the same kind of nonconspiracy here, and I was not going to be taken in! When one dude in Indonesia donated three hundred dollars, I emailed him back immediately.

“Hello, thank you for your donation, I think your decimal point was in the wrong place? Happy to refund if it was a mistake! BTW, not traveling to Indonesia anytime soon, and no, you can’t have my address or phone number.”

It wasn’t a mistake. People were willing to support us in order to make more
Guild
. Of their own volition.

It was the best compliment I ever got.

In total we had about five hundred people donate over six months, enough to fund the rest of my pilot script, rewritten and expanded into ten episodes. We didn’t collect enough to pay the actors (or ourselves), but we were able to bring on more crew to help us, pay for locations outside our own houses, and buy a boom microphone that wasn’t held together with duct tape. Toward the end of the first season, I even had to take the PayPal button off the website.

Why? Because so many people kept donating, I couldn’t fit all of them into the end credits. That was smarter than, you know, LENGTHENING THE CREDIT MUSIC TO FIT MORE DONORS, FELICIA.

Viewer by viewer, our show was proving that we didn’t need the Hollywood establishment in order to succeed. We were gonna break the system and take over the world!

Thank you, Ross Perot!

[
 Bad Ideas Seem Good Sometimes! 
]

“I can’t go on, Kim. I just can’t.”

We were sitting in the middle of my kitchen floor, the linoleum tiles covered with DVDs stacked five feet high around us. Kim was operating the label maker (that took us two days to figure out how to set up), and I was filling out my fiftieth customs form of the day. By hand. I’d never sent anything overseas before, or I’d have told our international customers to go to hell. No offense.

Kim reached over and patted my shoulder.

“We’re almost finished. Two more piles for today!”

“But it’s so much. My hand is cramping. I . . . I can’t do it
anymore. Whose idea was this DVD thing in the first place? Oh, God, it was mine. Why do people in Israel want to watch our show? I can’t fill out another form, I just can’t!” Tears exploded from my face.

If you live in Israel and received a
Guild
season 1 DVD and your ink was smudged, now you know why. I’d reached my manual labor tipping point.