How to Lose a Fortune Putting other People’s dreams before your own
I’ve gotta admit, I'm having a hard time. Everybody is stressed to the max after over a year of pandemic lockdowns but life had already put my wife and I through several ringers leading into that.
In August of 2019, my little baby daughter Isabel was born. When she was 6 weeks old, she received an extremely specialized surgery for a rare liver condition that affects one in 20,000 births. I thought I would be gone from my YouTube show for 2 weeks, and left the team I was working with at that time in charge of making videos without me (such is the trust I thought we had). Between blood tests, a spinal tap, the discovery of my daughter's condition, and getting the surgery done, I was gone for 6 weeks. When I returned, the vibe had completely changed. I found out later that members of our cast had been in a group chat on Facebook when someone influential said our videos were cringy, and nothing was the same after that. Every little note of direction or feedback on a script kept turning into little snipy fights. the atmosphere on set grew tense and stressful. It got to the point where the cast said they didn’t want to do it any more, but would carry on and treat it like a job. i brought in some new crew members to help behind the scenes (my dear sister was doing everything behind the camera herself) and besides the fight that it turned into about not giving the cast advance notice, one of those new people wrote to me privately to ask if he had done something wrong because the old cast was treating him and everyone so miserably.
The real confusion for me is why these people who were getting well paid, and who I thought were my friends, would be taking part in giving me more stress instead of helping take stress away in the delicate situation I was in with my Daughter. For better and for worse, I couldn't take the additional stress and my attempt at getting the situation under control resulted in that Squad banding together to quit the show, unfriend and block me on everything, and make a public spectacle on social media about it. On their way out the door, I told them that I hope this can all blow over and we can make videos Together again one day. I told them that they still have a home at my studio and can use it for any of their personal projects any time. You can confirm with my production manager - I even planned to send them a big Christmas bonus to make sure they know I'm thinking of them and there's no hard feelings. Even if they thought I handled my return to work after my daughter's birth and surgery poorly, after all we had been through together, I’d have hoped for a little grace and patience, and I remain shocked at the degree to which they seemed to be making a special point of ending on bad terms.
So when I see them calling me out by name and making a big public spectacle of the whole thing on facebook, I can only imagine how many people are messaging them to ask what happened, and hearing whatever version of the story they’re telling that makes me look like a Jerk. But I'm not one to reply to that sort of thing, I just kept working. And the channel kept doing great with new cast members and the return of Guests the audience hadn't seen in a while.
But then Months go by, and someone tells me that they heard from someone else who heard third hand that the reason that clique quit my show was because I owed them money and wouldn't pay them. Then from someone else, that I got back from the Birth of my daughter and expected everyone to work for free. I don't know whether that came from the actual people involved or it’s Haters talking shit, but either way - that broke my heart. I was accustomed to paying people well, giving out generous cash bonuses when videos performed, and taking people on trips all over the United States for Comic cons. I’d been blessed by the success of my YouTube channel, and I enjoyed Sharing my blessings. That thing about the money really hurt my feelings. I've been keeping this bottled up and when I've asked people close to me if I should make a statement about it, they've been wishy-washy on the idea. I feel like I run the risk of creating more drama instead of settling anything. But there's also a level on which I have to stand up for myself, since the truth has yet to be uttered. It would be one thing to go back and forth about it after the truth is already out there but the truth has not yet been spoken.
Because it's not just about what they got paid or the trips, the cash bonuses, or even the fact that multiple members of that team still have equipment of mine they haven't returned. It's the Monumental scale of the irony to which the inverse is True.
This is a team of people who, after a big day at comic-con, would play a game of sitting in a circle in the hotel room with Friends and collaborators, and everybody goes around to say their Favorite thing about each person in the circle. We were a really, really tight group. Lee Howard in particular, My head writer and one of my lead cast members, called me his brother. This person was my closest collaborator and one of my very best friends. I guess I've seen too many movies because I thought Lee and I had a relationship like Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli in Jersey boys - that we had been through so much together in art and business that our Bond was stronger than the need for a formal agreement. That was my mistake in pitching him on turning his “Quiet Room Bears” horror art project into a film series. He had the vague notion of one day turning it into movies, had ideas for a backstory and mythology, but there wasn't a story or script in place when I offered to finance a Film to take advantage of a Dilapidated building as a filming Location before being demolished.
I offered to put up $5,000 to make a Hollywood quality short film as a proof of concept that we could use to make a full length feature film. I feel incredibly stupid now but at the time I said that $5,000 is an amount I'm okay to gamble with, so we will make the film, hire people with more industry experience than us, and learn everything we can. Then we’d formalize an agreement and business structure based on the newfound knowledge of industry norms we’d acquired.
What I learned during the course of making that film was the truth about "Good, Fast, Cheap: you can only have two". I kept choosing good & fast, and the film ended up costing over $15,000 plus thousands more in terms of my company resources - locations, computers, etc. to say nothing of my time and expertise. Lee and I were the only ones on the production not getting paid. We hired the right people and paid them... If not well, then definitely more than what would be the norm on an indie project at this scale. and the film looked totally slick! it was a home run success in terms of the concept and the gore effects. Everyone who talks about it says it’s Amazing.
We raised over $3000 on indiegogo for "finishing funds" that were supposed to offset the overspending on the film. Even then, I was happy to invest the money because I so believed in this guy's brand. In fact, when we finally had that meeting to create the business structure we said we were going to create, We met at a coffee shop near his place and we agreed on the following (people have asked me why I didn’t get it in writing and I feel so naive and stupid - I thought forming the corporation *was* getting it in writing):
we would Form a new corporation, Quiet Room Bears Inc. He would own the brand personally and keep doing his indie art hustle as he always had, but give this new company the exclusive license for merchandising, film, media, etc.
I'd increase my total cash investment to $20,000 and put the difference in the new company's account for his use so he wouldn't have to go out of pocket doing the Indie Art Hustle while marketing the film.
he would be the majority shareholder, 60/40 split in his favor.
And then we would get to work releasing our short film and take it straight to the Horror Movie production company who was my neighbor at the studio to rope them into development of the feature film.
Except that when I called Lee to congratulate him and have him sign the papers, that was the first I got of any indication at all that he was unhappy. Like I said, we were a super-tight unit until that moment. He said he wasn't sure and he wanted more time to think about it. Week by week he was still coming into my studio to work on my YouTube show, and every week I'd ask him about our unfinished business. the crowdfunding campaign was successful, people were excited to see the film, we had to get it out. But he just kept saying he needed to think about it, while continuing to collect a paycheque to work on my YouTube show. It seemed to me that he was having cold feet, or a classic case of fear of success, imposter syndrome, something like that. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured we could successfully launch the thing the following summer for the next Comic-Con season. The topic faded into the background until I realized that a full year had gone by. It didn't make sense to me why this person would even be okay with leaving the film unreleased for that long. And this all overlaps with the period of time in which my wife became pregnant so my focus was shifting to my family. And I don't mean to be immodest but this was also a period when my YouTube channel was experiencing its most explosive growth so my mind was on other things and I figured we would put the film out when he was ready.
I didn't totally clue in until after Lee and the rest of that main cast had exited my show together, that it had been over a year since we last talked about the film. We had missed another entire year’s worth of Comic Cons and opportunities to get eyes on the film and the brand. This was all a terrific mess by this point so I talked to the Firm of the guy who wrote the textbook that Law students use when they are studying entertainment law in Canada. He’s the one who told me that, with nothing in writing between me and the other person, I owned the film outright as the one who paid for it, and that the other party would have a hard time in court arguing that it was an unauthorized use of his trademark when it's got his name on it as writer and director.
So when I reached out to Lee to ask what he wanted to do about the film, his best idea was basically that he take the film for free, do the business that was my idea in the first place, and pay me back what I spent on it over time as he markets it. Suffice it to say that a person who would leave a film he wrote and directed on a Hard Drive, unreleased for over a year, until I'm the one who has to bring it up. . . I don’t think that person has the wherewithal to market the film successfully enough to ever pay me back. He’s not open to me participating in the success of any future films in the series, so that’s where things are left right now.
At the end of the day, I trusted and cared about somebody so much that I went through walls and invested a small fortune trying to give him his dream - only for him to block the release of our film, slowly antagonize me, and block me on all social media - All while I'm still reeling from my newborn daughter being born with a life threatening illness. I see other people who worked on the film have unfriended me as well so I know I’m a topic of conversation in certain circles. . . If anyone’s got any additional context that helps explain how I'm the bad guy of this story, I'd love to hear it. It would go a long way towards me trying to figure out how to work through the last 2 years sitting with this, basically alone in the dark, wondering how it happened.
The other people involved in this story... it’s not as exciting. With them it’s more about just being confused and disappointed in their role in all of this. Makenzie, I thought we were really close. I’ve got many projects that were written with her participation in mind that now aren’t going anywhere. Emily i had no relationship with before Makenzie brought her to be in a video - she simply fell ass backwards into a good thing. Violet was Lee’s girlfriend so she wasn’t going to do anything with me that didn’t involve him. In fact, as a last hail mary attempt to get the situation sorted out, I asked her if she would come have a one on one meeting with me. Her answer was that “it’s not worth it” to go all the way to see me without having Lee drive her. And since I knew by then that Lee needed to be fired for what he was doing to me with the film, I figured I already had my answer about whether she would be willing to continue working for me if I fired her boyfriend.
If you actually read all of this then thank you for hearing me out. Watch for updates on the movies that I'll make over the next 10 years now that my time is freed from being the producer of Quiet Room Bears movies.
