by Felicia Day
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.
Over the summer of 2008, we continued taking meetings about the show, but at that point we’d stopped counting on a big company to come in and help us keep filming. We knew we could keep The Guild going. All by our lady lonesomes.
Of course, we needed to somehow get money to back-pay the cast so they’d keep working with us. (A year seemed kind of excessive to go without being compensated.) I hadn’t had an acting job in a while because I was so busy online cheerleading for the show 24/7. So all that was a problem . . . yeah . . .
“We could make a DVD and sell it to fund another season? Would that work?” During a breakfast burrito brainstorming session with Kim, I threw that out, not knowing how it could be achieved, but it sounded smart to my ears.
Kim thought about it for a second. “People like DVDs. Yeah! Let’s do it.”
At that point we were high on our own independence. Empowered anarchists. We could do anything!
Oh, boy.
I wrote season two of the show while Kim tried to figure out how to make a DVD from scratch. (Jane had moved on after season one to direct other things.) Heads up: There are jobs that you can DIY, and there are others that are worth paying someone else to do. DVD fulfillment is one of those you should NEVER TRY BY YOURSELF UNLESS YOU THINK PUNCHING YOURSELF IN THE FACE IS A FUN WEEKEND ACTIVITY.
I changed the PayPal button on the website to be a preorder for the DVD and estimated we’d sell around a hundred copies. There were more than a thousand orders in a week. It was a sphincter-puckering windfall. The plan had always been to send them out ourselves, but never at that volume. After endless stuffing and addressing of envelopes and the inevitable “Oops, Kim! I forgot to charge people shipping!,” I’d reached my limit.
Kim sat down next to me and tried to calm me down, as usual.
“Would you rather be at a fast-food commercial audition?”
“No.”
“Would you rather have sold the show and have other people tell us what to do?”
“No.” Sniff.
“Then we’ll finish these DVDs, back pay the cast, then invest our share back into the show, and start shooting again. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Yes. Good plan. Yes.”
“Maybe we can ask some volunteers from Twitter to come help us with the labeling.”
“Better plan, yes.”
“Give me the customs forms, I’ll do the rest.”
Kim grabbed my pile of papers and shoved the return address stamper at me instead. “Stamp for a while. It’s therapeutic. Pretend you’re mushing it on somebody’s face.”
I stamped a few dozen packages imagining I was mushing the face of that particularly annoying douche-suit guy I’d met, and it helped. She was right. Damnit.
As the DVD orders slowed to a trickle, I finished writing the script for The Guild season two and we prepped to shoot the first episode on our DVD savings. It was going to be the shoestring way again, with only a few hoagies to split amongst everyone for lunch, but that was the only way to do it. We’d go for as long as we could! Or something plan-ish like that.
The week before we started shooting, I got a call from our snazzy Hollywood agent, George.
“Felicia, do you know Xbox?”
“Uh, of course I do. I’m a gamer. Duh.”
“They want to talk about making new Guild episodes.”
Ugh. I was so burned on meetings at that point, I got uppity.
“You know how I feel about . . .”
He was used to my antiestablishment tirades and interrupted before I could build up to my “strident” voice.
“They’re willing to be flexible. Just take the meeting, please.”
“Really?” A gaming company that would pay for the show and be okay with my anarchist demands? I decided to take the meeting. Because if nothing else, I thought, Maybe I can scam a free Xbox!
And over pancakes (because I ALWAYS take meetings over pancakes), surprise, surprise, the Xbox guy seemed . . . flexible. And not condescending. They didn’t need to own the show, they’d leave creative decisions up to us, and they would give us a decent budget so we could pay everyone reasonably and feed them something besides cheap hoagies. In fact, they replied to literally everything I asked for with, “Sure, that’s reasonable.”
It made me flustered. Because it’s one thing to ask for what you want and another thing to GET it.
Checkmate, Felicia Day.
And that’s how we made four more seasons over four years with Xbox. Because I dug in my heels and was unreasonable, and got rewarded for it. (Definitely adding that to the coffee mug slogan bin.)
We started shooting the first two episodes of season two the weekend after the meeting, knowing that we would be 100 percent guaranteed to shoot the rest of the season, and no one on set would be working for free anymore. In a quiet moment during filming, I pulled Kim aside with tears in my eyes and hugged her.
“No more hoagies!” I whispered into her ear.
She nodded. “No more hoagies.”
Over the nex
t several years, we found more ways to pioneer in the world of web video. I wrote a Guild comic book series, the show was the first web series released on Netflix. We even released a music video single that was number one on iTunes for a week. Beat Taylor Swift. (A song that was recorded in a friend’s closet, staring at his socks.) Sure, all the business things we did with The Guild are cool, but it was the relationship that developed between us and the fans and, for me, my own family, that made every rebellious step of the way worth it.
One of the drawbacks of being a homeschooled kid was that I don’t think I learned to be as independent as regular kids. My mother got me into violin, my grandfather got me into math, I killed myself getting a 4.0 in college; a lot of my life I did things because OTHER people guided my behavior. When I dove into acting with such naïve confidence, for the first time I was following something for myself. Problem was, my family didn’t understand the movie business, so they worried. A lot. Chances were high in their minds that I might end up becoming a porn actress and/or a heroin addict. (They had seen that happen once on Law & Order.)
When I tried to prove to them, “Hey! This is the thing I’m meant to do!” I’d frequently get egg on my face, like when I made everyone stay up until 12:01 a.m. to watch my first professional job, a Starburst commercial, not knowing I’d gotten cut completely out of it. My mom was confused.
“Where were you? Did I miss you?”
“No. I guess I got cut out of it, Mom.”
“Oh, honey. What happened? Were you bad?” Mortifying.
Over the years, when my career didn’t seem to be building to anything significant, my dad in particular became a fan of the “backup plan.” He’s a very practical and business-savvy guy, and in a helpful way he hinted here and there in phone calls, “If you need to come home, I’ll pay for your law school . . .”