How To Fail at Filmmaking

Before I made YouTube videos, I made low-budget horror movies for the direct-to-DVD market. This is how that all crashed and burned.

Note: The following few issues of this newsletter will be longer than normal. In 2014, I wrote and self-published a book about YouTube. I sold it exclusively on Kindle, and it sold really well. There weren’t that many How-To books about YouTube available at the time. After a year or two, several of the chapters were out of date. It also barely touched on Yoga With Adriene. I never found time to update it, so I turned off the ability to buy it.

I still get questions about it at least once a week. So I’ve decided to publish it in segments here. I’m updating and expending it as I go. So you can consider this the “directors cut.”

On location of The Spider Babies in the Texas Hill Country.

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Spring 2009

It was the last day of production, and I was dirty, sunburnt, and completely exhausted.

I was at the end of a multi-year struggle to make a post-apocalyptic feature-length comedy called The Spider Babies. I had spent a year writing the script and another year trying to find financing. This was a bigger-budget project than I had ever attempted before.

My last feature was completed in 2006, and I felt like the clock was ticking. I quit my job, sold all my stuff, and was committed to doing whatever it took to make this movie.

The production got off to a rocky start when our lead actor broke his leg in a motorcycle accident, and we had to quickly recast. Then, we lost our primary location the week before production was scheduled to begin. We had already built several sets in that location, so we were behind schedule before we even started. Believe it or not, things got progressively worse from there.

On this last day of shooting, all I knew was that the movie would never see the light of day.

The last shot of the day was a party scene at the bank of a pond at a ranch in the middle of nowhere. My co-writer and production designer, Craig Staggs, had taken the rest of the budget and driven to a fireworks stand. He spent all of it and returned with a trunk full of patriotic explosives. He was on the other side of the pond, staging an impressive fireworks show. We got the shots we needed, but there were still fireworks left. So he kept going.

I told the camera guys to go crazy and shoot whatever looked cool. I grabbed a beer, sat down in the tall grass, and watched the explosions of light bloom over the pond's surface.

We were wrapping up production, but we had not completed the script. We were still missing a big chunk of the movie, everybody was worn out, and we were out of money. Also, I wasn’t sure if anything we’d shot was any good.

As a director, this is what you call a complete and utter failure.

I failed my primary task: I didn’t get the movie in the can.

So, as I watched the fireworks explode, I decided to GIVE UP. Maybe forever. But definitely for a year.

I had spent years trying to get movies made, and so far, all I had to show for it were a few short films and a micro-budget feature that got an international distribution deal, but from which I hadn’t seen a dime.

I was bone-tired and broken-hearted. Maybe I could just get a job and enjoy life like regular people. I had put everything into getting this movie made, but now I had no money and no place to live. So, after I called “cut” for the last time, I finished my beer and did what any reasonable person would do.

I drove to my mom’s house.

On the set of The Spider Babies directing Hilah Johnson on the greenscreen. This was intended as part of an animated opening sequence.

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Summer 2009

It’s easy to get discouraged when you’re in your 30s, living with your mom, have no money, and have no idea what you will do to get a job. I’d spent most of my adult life trying to make a living in the film industry with limited financial success. As far as “real jobs” were concerned, I was unemployable. This was also in the middle of a massive recession, and the economy was still shedding jobs like crazy.

I spent a few weeks wallowing in self-pity and reflecting on the journey that had brought me to this point. In hindsight, my life and career decisions weren’t looking so bright. Why the hell did I go to film school instead of law school? Or any kind of school where you can get a job when you graduate? Why had I spent so much money making movies and comedy videos instead of investing in a Roth IRA? Why had I never just settled down and figured out how to be happy with an everyday life?

Looking back, I saw that my entire life had been a strange combination of creativity and entrepreneurship, but I had never found the right balance—the balance that would result in both creative happiness and financial prosperity.

But there wasn’t much time for soul-searching or feeling sorry for myself. I was dead-broke. All my physical possessions fit into my 2000 Honda Civic.

Luckily, I still had my MacBook. And a video camera.

The cast of The Spider Babies! Left to Right: Adriene Mishler, David Petschel, Sarah Rogers, Michael Johnson, Hilah Johnson.

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My most immediate concern was money.

I needed some.

I figured my best bet at getting some was to find some kind of internet job. So I learned how to do search engine optimization. I signed up for a one-dollar trial of an online class that taught SEO and how to build niche websites. I figured if I could learn SEO while polishing up my web design skills I could get a nice government job with insurance, benefits and a regular paycheck.

For the next six months, I did nothing but study SEO, HTML, and CSS. I was motivated and relentless. Other than filmmaking, I had never taken something so seriously. The course had an online community. Members shared their stories of building their own profitable niche websites. And they shared their numbers. This whole thing seemed very legit. I became very involved in the community. I made some good friends there that I still talk to today.

Around the third month, something clicked. Everything suddenly made sense. It was like I could actually see how the internet worked.

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Winter 2009

I built a few incredibly boring websites and got them ranked for some pretty competitive terms. I was starting to rank for terms like “weight loss drinks” and “high thread-count sheets.” The traffic was building steadily. I put some Adsense on them and even had a little income trickling it. But it wasn’t coming in fast enough. I still needed a job because I wanted to get back to Austin.

I started sending out resumes and driving to Austin for interviews. Eventually, I got the boring desk job of my dreams. I was hired as a Website Content Specialist for the State Bar of Texas. I moved back to Austin, found an apartment, and started showing up to my cubicle every day.

For the first time in my life, I had successfully given up. I wasn’t even thinking about trying to make a new movie or get a new project off the ground. I was just going to work, punching a clock, and living life like I thought normal people did. I had health insurance. I had a 401k. I had just enough cash and plenty of free time. Life was feeling pretty great.

Mission accomplished.

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Little did I know how soon I would get restless.

Or how fast everything I had just learned about the internet would collide with my love of filmmaking.

It would send me off in an entirely unexpected direction: YouTube.

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Next Week: How To Start a YouTube Channel