History Series / TheChair2014

* AdaptationPersonalityChange: Both movies do this to the original script, although arguably Anna's movie does it a lot more than Shane's, which keeps the basic idea of the characters the same but takes them UpToEleven (with the exception of the character of Heather, who turns into a one-dimensional villain). Dan Schoffer ends up taking Shane's side partly because he's so attached to his image of Tori as a tough, cynical DeadpanSnarker and can't deal with Anna turning her into more of a quirky vulnerable heroine.

* UpToEleven: Shane's rewrite of Dan Schoffer's script basically takes every joke and amps up its offensiveness as much as he possibly can (e.g. he changes the opening narration from a joke about everyone in high school knowing Tori "picked her nose until eighth grade" to one that says she "had sex with a zucchini").

In the end, neither Dawson's film ''Not Cool'' nor Martemucci's film ''Film/{{Hollidaysburg}}'' was a financial success, and ratings for ''The Chair'' itself were low enough that the concept was not renewed for a second season. Shane's fans believed he'd been backstabbed by Quinto (and by Martemucci when she spoke up about her negative opinion of Shane online a year later) and saw this series as Hollywood industry snobs being cruel and dismissive toward a scrappy [=YouTuber=]. Meanwhile, the consensus among critics and industry professionals was almost universally that ''Hollidaysburg'' was robbed, that Shane's fans were immature children with no critical judgment, and that ''Not Cool'' winning the prize was a sign of [[NewMediaAreEvil how broken online culture was]].

As of June 2020, there's been a sudden resurgence of interest in ''The Chair'' thanks to Shane Dawson's fallen reputation after the massive backlash against his old content, with many, many of Shane's former fans coming around to the opinion that Quinto had Shane's number as a toxic narcissist all along, with videos covering the series such as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcZ0PXabwt0 Nick DiRamio]]'s postmortem going viral.

The two filmmakers they chose were Anna Martemucci (now known professionally as A.M. Lukas), previously known for her work as part of a CreatorCouple with husband Victor Quinaz on the film ''A Breakup at a Wedding'' and the Web series ''[[https://www.youtube.com/periodsfilms Periods]]'', and now-infamous [=YouTuber=] WebVideo/ShaneDawson, known at the time for shock humor aimed at teenagers.

The premise of the series was that both creators would be given a budget of $600,000 to make a movie based on Schoffer's script with almost total creative control, stipulating only that they not change the basic plot points, the main character names and the setting of UsefulNotes/{{Pittsburgh}} (thanks to the series being funded partially by a grant from the city of Pittsburgh). After having a few months to shoot and produce the films, both films would receive limited theatrical distribution, and moviegoers would be asked to vote on which movie they preferred, with the winner receiving a $250,000 prize.

* CreatorBreakdown[[invoked]]:
** Shane comes close to this at multiple times throughout the film, including threatening to storm out and fly back to LA the moment an American Eagle store delays (not denies, ''delays'') approval for a filming permit. The news that Quinto has pulled his name off the film sends him fully spiraling into one.
** Quinto himself has one after screening Shane's film, going off in a shockingly frank tirade about how offended he is by how bad ''Not Cool'' is and how disrespectfully he thinks his time and his money have been wasted.

* DearNegativeReader[[invoked]]: Shane gives a long and embittered one of these to the camera after he gets the news that Quinto is pulling his name off the movie.

* DownerEnding: Shane wins the contest and the $250,000, despite Zachary Quinto, his co-producer Neal, and every critic who's seen both movies pulling hard for Anna. Anna congratulates him in a blurry farewell video, trying but failing to hide her disappointment. Chris Moore tries to put a positive spin on the whole experiment in his ending speech, but reveals that even if you were pulling for both creators to succeed, the results are disappointing -- neither movie actually breaks out into mainstream success and Shane's movie was only really popular among his existing fanbase (which is exactly what he said he wanted to avoid at the beginning of the show). In RealLife, Shane's movie was still a massive financial loss for his backers (making $30k on a $600k budget), and contrary to Chris' expressed hopes for his future, Shane never made another feature film and this series only reemerged into the public eye in 2020 after his Website/YouTube career went down in the flames of scandal.

This series was very quickly OvershadowedByControversy, over the ForegoneConclusion that, with Shane Dawson already having 10 million followers on social media before the contest, the audience would be dominated by his fans and his movie would be certain to win -- and by the fact that the movie he did make, ''Film/NotCool'', was awful enough that Zachary Quinto demanded his name be removed from the credits.

In the end, neither Dawson's film ''Not Cool'' nor Martemucci's film ''Film/{{Hollidaysburg}}'' was a financial success, and ratings for ''The Chair'' itself were low enough that the concept was not renewed for a second season. Shane's fans believed he'd been backstabbed by Zachary Quinto (and by Martemucci when she spoke up about her negative opinion of Shane online a year later) and saw this series as Hollywood industry snobs being cruel and dismissive toward a scrappy [=YouTuber=]. Meanwhile, the consensus among critics and industry professionals was almost universally that ''Hollidaysburg'' was robbed, that Shane's fans were immature children with no critical judgment, and that ''Not Cool'' winning the prize was a sign of [[NewMediaAreEvil how broken online culture was]].

As of June 2020, there's been a sudden resurgence of interest in ''The Chair'' thanks to Shane Dawson's fallen reputation after the massive backlash against his old content thanks to the fallout of his public conflict with Creator/JeffreeStar, with many, many of Shane's former fans coming around to the opinion that Zachary Quinto had Shane's number as a toxic narcissist all along, with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcZ0PXabwt0 Nick DiRamio]]'s postmortem going viral.

''The Chair'' can currently be viewed for free on [[https://tubitv.com/series/3322/the_chair Tubi]], as can both movies that resulted from it, ''[[https://tubitv.com/movies/457532/not_cool Not Cool]]'' and ''[[https://tubitv.com/movies/457531/hollidaysburg Hollidaysburg]]''. There are also separate entries for ''Film/NotCool'' and ''Film/{{Hollidaysburg}}'' on this wiki.

As of June 2020, there's been a sudden resurgence of interest in ''The Chair'' thanks to Shane Dawson's reputation as a DarthWiki/FallenCreator after the massive backlash against his old content thanks to the fallout of his public conflict with Creator/JeffreeStar, with many, many of Shane's former fans coming around to the opinion that Zachary Quinto had Shane's number as a toxic narcissist all along, with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcZ0PXabwt0 Nick DiRamio]]'s postmortem going viral.

** A better parallel than Anna's bit part as Courtney is her brother-in-law and co-producer Phil playing [[TheDanza Scott's brother Phil]], which is a much more significant part and an instance where she may have let her feelings about him as a person lead her to overestimate his acting ability.

* FreezeFrameBonus: One of the SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments in Shane's shoot is their set dresser taking the time to put little homages to various members of Shane's team in the fake records made to fill up the Vinyl Vault.

** Shane angrily tries to explain away his negative reviews by saying his critics hold this trope as a prejudice -- "They just hate me because I'm a [=YouTuber=]" -- but with the critics having pretty much been VindicatedByHistory it seems that to the extent Shane is a legitimate representative of "[=YouTube=] culture" those old-fashioned Luddites were ''right''.

* {{Tuckerization}}: Anna's script gives Scott an older brother named Phil, [[TheDanza named for]] and based on her real-life brother-in-law and co-producer Phil Quinaz, who plays the character.

* RealityEnsues: And in a really crushing way, too. Both Shane and Anna are hoping to beat the odds, both seeing themselves as underdogs but in different ways, and both hoping for their own kind of Hollywood ending -- Anna hoping she can somehow win the contest thanks to word getting out about how heartfelt and sincere her movie is, despite completely lacking Shane's fanbase, and Shane hoping that despite his many setbacks and the disdain everyone seems to have for him as a schlocky [=YouTube=] star they'll give his movie a chance and realize he has real filmmaking talent after all. Chris Moore explicitly encourages this narrative for both of them, telling them not to give up and to have faith their talent will outweigh the disadvantages they both face... \\
\\
And he's ''wrong''. The results of the competition are ''exactly'' what anyone would've predicted -- Shane's existing fanbase lets him win in a blowout, nobody actually cares enough about the rave reviews of Anna's quirky artistic indie film to actually pay to see it, and yet at the same time Shane's movie is ''exactly'' the amateurish schlocky mess everyone who had no faith in him predicted it would be. Anna fails to get the money or the career boost she was desperately hoping for, and Shane, who didn't really need the money, fails to earn anyone's respect or grow outside of his niche and, in fact, his already fragile self-esteem gets pounded into the dirt. [[DownerEnding Everyone loses.]]\\
\\
What's worse, Chris Moore tries to put a positive spin on the outcome of the contest by saying they'll learn from this experience and do a better job nurturing their contestants' talent in Season 2, and that he really does believe that the honor of winning this contest will help Shane grow into a mature filmmaking career. He's obviously wrong on both counts -- the scandal of Shane's victory kills any chance of Season 2 of ''The Chair'' happening at all, and the humiliation Shane endures from this experience means he never even tries to make a traditional Hollywood feature film again (and would probably have every door shut in his face if he did).

* BlondeBrunetteRedhead: Shane does this with the female leads for his movie, making Jorie Kosel (who plays Heather) dye her hair a garish bleached-blonde to play Heather, to round out the blonde/brunette/redhead trio with Michelle Veintimilla (Janie) and Creator/CheramiLeigh (Tori). Notably, Anna does ''not'' do this, and thinks that Creator/RachelKeller and Claire Chapelli both being pale-skinned brunettes won't be a problem for viewers telling them apart. (It turns out to be a ''big'' problem.)

* AuthorAvatar: It's not really that subtle that both filmmakers change one of the lead characters to be more like themselves -- Shane obviously plays Scott himself and in the process turns him from a JerkJock to a SensitiveGuy, but Anna likewise turns Tori into someone who has a lot of the same personality issues she does, like being an ExtremeDoormat.

!! This movie provides examples of:

* BlondeBrunetteRedhead: Shane does this with the female leads for his movie, making Jorie Kosel (who plays Heather) dye her hair a garish bleached-blonde to play Heather, to round out the blonde/brunette/redhead trio with Michelle Veintimilla (Janie) and Creator/CheramiLeigh (Tori). Notably, Anna does ''not'' do this, and thinks that Rachel Keller and Claire Chapelli both being pale-skinned brunettes won't be a problem for viewers telling them apart. (It turns out to be a ''big'' problem.)

* OnlySixFaces: Anna runs into a live-action variant of this trope. Her husband warns her that the two girls she's cast as Tori and Heather (Rachel Keller and Claire Chapelli) look pretty similar just from their headshots. She ignores this, saying they're much easier to tell apart in real life. Unfortunately, when they start showing ''Hollidaysburg'' in test screenings, huge numbers of audience members indeed also cannot tell them apart, with many saying they didn't realize Heather and Tori were different people until they actually meet face to face, well into the film. Anna has to do desperate damage control in the final cut of the movie to fix this (by putting Heather and Tori side-by-side along with Scott in split-screen in the opening narration).

* NamesTheSame[[invoked]]: Intentionally enforced on the scripts of ''Not Cool'' and ''Hollidaysburg'', in order to make it easier in theory for audiences to directly compare the two movies and what they changed from the original script. Given how different these two movies became, the effect is often surreal when going from one to the other (''especially'' the different ways both movies treat Heather).

* AcclaimedFlop: Critics aren't universally positive on ''Hollidaysburg'', but it got ''much'' better reviews than ''Not Cool'', and as word spread about how awful ''Not Cool'' was people began openly campaigning for people to see it and vote for it (including Zachary Quinto's co-producer [[https://www.thewrap.com/why-hollidaysburg-should-win-starzs-the-chair-guest-blog/ Neal Dodson]]). Unfortunately, it didn't help -- Anna is forced to endure the humiliation of consistently empty theaters and a box office take of only around $1,000. (But see BoxOfficeBomb.)

** The {{Reveal}} that Janie is a lesbian in ''How Soon Is Now'' is also completely dropped from ''Not Cool'', with Janie instead deciding she and Joel are BetterAsFriends. (This is the one case where ''Not Cool'' actually ''removed'' UnfortunateImplications from the original script, which has Janie decide to sleep with Joel anyway as an IfItsYouItsOkay situation PlayedForLaughs.)

** One of the very jarring differences between Shane's and Anna's script is how Anna's script uses Heather's character as an exploration of high-achieving gifted kids falling into depression when they enter adult life, and Shane's script turns her into a one-dimensional SlutShaming PsychoExGirlfriend stereotype. It doesn't really make Dan Schoffer look good that he immediately accepts Shane destroying one of his female characters to the point of CanonDefilement and decides he prefers Shane's script to Anna's anyway.

* BoxOfficeBomb: Despite Shane winning the popular vote by a landslide, ''both'' movies are bombs in the financial sense, and really bad ones -- Shane's $30,000 take is much more impressive than Anna's take of only $1,000 but still a tremendous loss on the $600,000 budget of the movie, which makes an even bigger loss when added to the $250,000 cash prize the studio is forced to give him. This, plus the fact that ''The Chair'' itself got fairly poor ratings (with only 33,000 households tuning in to the final episode), played a big role in everyone deciding not to repeat the experiment with a Season 2.

* ClicheStorm: Shane's movie, full stop, and unapologetically (he name-drops the comparison to ''Film/{{Superbad}}'' or ''Film/AmericanPie'' almost every other sentence). Anna's endless rewrites on her script that bog down the production seem to be because she's trying as hard as she can to avoid this.

* CreatorBreakdown:

* CreatorsFavoriteEpisode:

* CriticalDissonance: The outcome of the contest is one of the most blatant examples in history, with Shane overwhelmingly winning in both box office and audience voting despite critics giving Anna's movie mixed-to-glowing reviews while unanimously calling Shane's movie the worst insult to filmmaking they've ever seen. That said, unlike most examples of this trope, the dissonance has mostly been resolved as of 2020, with the ''critics'' the ones VindicatedByHistory -- ''The Chair'' and ''Not Cool'' resurfaced online as a result of an endless parade of Shane's former fans commenting that in hindsight they don't know what the hell they were thinking giving him this much support.

* DearNegativeReader: Shane gives a long and embittered one of these to the camera after he gets the news that Quinto is pulling his name off the movie.

* DescendedCreator:

* DevelopmentHell: Dan Schoffer tells us that his script ''How Soon Is Now'' has been languishing for years as one of the many screenplays that circulates through producers' offices in Hollywood, generating countless meetings expressing interest but no actual bites. It's because of this that he was willing to offer up his work for this "experiment", even though the terms of the experiment said the directors would get the right to do a page-one rewrite, essentially making an InNameOnly adaptation of his screenplay -- which both ''Not Cool'' and ''Hollidaysburg'' ended up being.
* DisabledCharacterDisabledActor: Shane does not see the point in adhering to this principle and decides both to make Tori's sister Marissa blind in his version of the show -- mostly as a source of cheap jokes -- and to cast his very much ''not'' blind girlfriend Lisa in the role. It's a deeply uncomfortable moment the first time he asks her to put on her "blind face".

* DuelingWorks: Obviously, the whole point of the show. Notable because this ended up being a highly atypical version of this phenomenon -- under normal circumstances no one would compare a trashy teen comedy like ''Not Cool'' to an artsy movie like ''Hollidaysburg'' at all, the two genres being as apples and oranges as you can get, and the obvious linkages between the two feel kind of strange watching them back-to-back.
* FanMyopia: In hindsight, this whole show is a portrait of Shane's fans having a massive case of this, and how this has affected Shane's personality and creative judgment.

* FlyoverCountry: Both films have their production HQ and shooting locations in UsefulNotes/{{Pittsburgh}}, thanks to this series being partially funded by a grant from a Pittsburgh arts organization (and Zachary Quinto himself being a Pittsburgh native). Dan Schoffer's original script is revised from taking place in UsefulNotes/{{Philadelphia}} to Pittsburgh, and both teams are asked to keep Pittsburgh as the setting in their revisions. (Anna ends up bending this rule, setting her film in the [[ThePlace titular location]] of Hollidaysburg, PA -- which in RealLife is [[ArtisticLicenseGeography almost 100 miles from Pittsburgh]] -- because the DoubleMeaningTitle is too good to pass up.) This ends up becoming an issue between Quinto and Shane Dawson, with Quinto repeatedly asking Dawson to stay away from referring to Pittsburgh as a "shithole" or otherwise disparaging the city since [[BitingTheHandHumor they're the ones funding the project]]. Shane's finished movie does mostly stay away from directly attacking the city in its jokes, but honestly is so fundamentally offensive it comes off as an attack anyway, including [[CanonDefilement defiling]] well-known city landmarks like the [[http://duquesneincline.org/ Duquesne Incline]] by making it the setting of a full-frontal nudity sight gag.

* HostilityOnTheSet: Emotions run high due to stress on both movies' sets, but it gets a ''lot'' worse with Shane, who is prone to openly snapping and shouting at people. There's a notable moment where things get really heated between Anna, her husband Victor and her brother-in-law Phil for Victor essentially giving Phil directing notes over her head, which they manage to resolve with open, amicable discussion of where everyone is coming from and why everyone is upset -- something Shane ''never'' does with his team. (The closest he comes to doing this is shooting people phone calls or emails apologizing for a meltdown after the fact, and often he doesn't even manage that.)

* ImproperlyParanoid: When Shane first starts hearing that actors are passing on auditioning because they've heard about the offensive content in his script, he starts to lose his temper and demands to know if someone on his team has been [[ContentLeak deliberately leaking info]] in order to [[TheMole make him look bad and help Anna win]]. It's not clear to what extent he actually means this, is doing his usual DeadpanSnarker routine, or is [[JustJokingJustification blurring the line between them]], but this attitude of making himself the victim and blaming other people for making him "look bad" continues to escalate as the show goes on.

* NamesTheSame: Intentionally enforced on the scripts of ''Not Cool'' and ''Hollidaysburg'', in order to make it easier in theory for audiences to directly compare the two movies and what they changed from the original script. Given how different these two movies became, the effect is often surreal when going from one to the other (''especially'' the different ways both movies treat Heather).

* NoBudget: Money problems constantly plague both productions, as well as the behind-the-scenes documentary itself -- the $600,000 budget they were promised isn't actually very much to make a film, and it ends up being a struggle for Chris Moore to actually get the money into the teams' bank accounts on time.

* PraisingShowsYouDontWatch: A deeply frustrating problem for Anna. Everyone seems to love ''Hollidaysburg'', but almost nobody is willing to actually pay to see it (it earns about $1,000 total). A lot of people only ever seem to talk about it to say that it should've won the contest over ''Not Cool'' -- which, since ''Not Cool'' was reviewed as one of the worst movies ever made, is basically damning her with faint praise.
* ProductionPosse: Part of the point of this show is showing us that both Anna and Shane have one that they're dependent on, and the difficulties they have keeping their professional lives separate from their personal relationships.

And he's ''wrong''. The results of the competition are ''exactly'' what anyone would've predicted -- Shane's existing fanbase lets him win in a blowout, nobody actually cares enough about the rave reviews of Anna's quirky artistic indie film to actually pay to see it, and yet at the same time Shane's movie is ''exactly'' the amateurish schlocky mess everyone who had no faith in him predicted it would be. Anna fails to get the money or the career boost she was desperately hoping for, and Shane, who didn't really need the money, fails to earn anyone's respect or grow outside of his niche and, in fact, his already fragile self-esteem gets pounded into the dirt. [[DownerEnding Everyone loses.]]
** What's worse, Chris Moore tries to put a positive spin on the outcome of the contest by saying they'll learn from this experience and do a better job nurturing their contestants' talent in Season 2, and that he really does believe that the honor of winning this contest will help Shane grow into a mature filmmaking career. He's obviously wrong on both counts -- the scandal of Shane's victory kills any chance of Season 2 of ''The Chair'' happening at all, and the humiliation Shane endures from this experience means he never even tries to make a traditional Hollywood feature film again (and would probably have every door shut in his face if he did).
* RealLifeRelative: Shane plays Scott in ''Not Cool'' himself and cast his real-life girlfriend, Lisa Schwartz, in a minor role as Tori's sister Marissa. Anna cast her brother-in-law Phil as the male lead's brother [[TheDanza Phil]] and cast herself as Courtney, the fiancée of Tori's sister (who in ''Hollidaysburg'' is named Angela).
* RecycledScript: Mandated by the rules of the contest, but the huge difference between Shane and Anna's creative styles makes this a very extreme version of this trope -- the kind of thing you'd see in a comedy parodying the idea of recycling a script.

* RomanceOnTheSet: Shane cracks a joke about expecting this to happen between him and Creator/CheramiLeigh but immediately follows it up with SelfDeprecation that she'll probably throw up as soon as she touches him.

* SmurfetteBreakout: Anna has always been the only woman or one of a few women on a male-dominated team in the past, and has previously been seen as an assistant to her husband Victor. Her journey in this series is about trying to break out from that mold and be seen as a capable writer/director in her own right.

* StreisandEffect:

* TroubledProduction: Applies to both films, thanks to the [[NoBudget fairly harsh constraints of money and time]] they were made under. It gets a lot worse for Shane's movie, though.
* TrueArtIsAngsty: Shane strongly believes that everyone is biased in favor of Anna's movie against his because hers is much slower-paced and less "fun".

* ValuesDissonance: Shane ''constantly'' insists that everyone criticizing his movie's content is old and out of touch and doesn't understand that his sense of humor is completely normal for the younger generation these days. In hindsight, to the extent that he was right about this, it doesn't speak well for his own considerable influence on that youth culture.

* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids: It's a fairly glaring issue that Shane is very much making a "hard R"-rated movie, including full frontal nudity PlayedForLaughs, and yet his fanbase that comes out to see the trailer at Vidcon is ''almost 100% underage children'' -- not only are most of them under 18, the bulk of them are under ''16'', with several of them age 13 and younger. Shane's shamelessness about exposing underage audiences to inappropriate material would come back to bite him, hard, in 2020.
* WriteWhatYouKnow:

** It's also an issue that the contest stipulates both films have to take place in or around the Pittsburgh area. Anna actually did grow up in small-town Pennsylvania (State College), as did Zachary Quinto (Green Tree), and her film very obviously has an eye for the characteristic landscapes of that part of the country that Shane's does not. Shane Dawson is from California and had never traveled outside the state before becoming a celebrity, and early on Quinto repeatedly warns him to stay away from putting down Pittsburgh or FlyoverCountry in general in his humor.

** Anna's film also sort of does this -- the characters of Janie and Joel (Heather and Tori's best friends from high school, respectively) become the CompositeCharacter of Katie (who, like Joel, is Tori's best friend but who has all the AlphaBitch qualities Janie had in the original script [[spoiler: including the [[SuddenlySexuality surprise reveal that she's a lesbian]]]]). Anna tells us directly that she did this because, like Shane, she felt the story needed an antagonist of some kind, since Dan's original script was very much a NoAntagonist story where everyone gets a sympathetic story arc.

* AdaptationPersonalityChange: Both movies do this to the original script, although arguably Anna's movie does it a lot more than Shane's, which keeps the basic idea of the characters the same but takes them UpToEleven (with the exception of the character of Heather, who turns into a one-dimensional villain). Dan Schoffer ends up taking Shane's side partly because he's so attached to his image of Tori as a tough, cynical DeadpanSnarker and can't deal with Anna turning her into more of a quirky {{Adorkable}} vulnerable heroine.

* MeanCharacterNiceActor: Back in 2014 Shane Dawson's image on his channel was very much a crude asshole prankster, and you can tell that he very much tries to give the impression that this is all an act and to give the first impression of a charming {{Adorkable}} sweetheart to everyone he meets. The problem is that, with the cameras continuing to roll as he gets stressed out over time, it's revealed that he really is not that different from the "character" he plays after all. ([[WebVideo/DrHorriblesSingAlongBlog Like with pie.]])

* AdaptationNameChange: None of the ''main'' characters' names were changed (as part of the contest rules), but ''Hollidaysburg'' changes the name of Tori's older sister from "Marissa" to "Angela", and her fiancé goes from a man named Gil to a woman named Courtney (played by Anna herself).

** Anna's film also sort of does this -- the characters of Janie and Joel (Heather and Tori's best friends from high school, respectively) become the CompositeCharacter of Katie (who, like Joel, is Tori's best friend but who has all the AlphaBitch qualities Janie had in the original script). Anna tells us directly that she did this because, like Shane, she felt the story needed an antagonist of some kind, since Dan's original script was very much a NoAntagonist story where everyone gets a sympathetic story arc.

In the end, neither Dawson's film ''Not Cool'' nor Martemucci's film ''Hollidaysburg'' was a financial success, and ratings for ''The Chair'' itself were low enough that the concept was not renewed for a second season. Shane's fans believed he'd been backstabbed by Zachary Quinto (and by Martemucci when she spoke up about her negative opinion of Shane online a year later) and saw this series as Hollywood industry snobs being cruel and dismissive toward a scrappy [=YouTuber=]. Meanwhile, the consensus among critics and industry professionals was almost universally that ''Hollidaysburg'' was robbed, that Shane's fans were immature children with no critical judgment, and that ''Not Cool'' winning the prize was a sign of [[NewMediaAreEvil how broken online culture was]].

''The Chair'' can currently be viewed for free on [[https://tubitv.com/series/3322/the_chair Tubi]], as can both movies that resulted from it, ''[[https://tubitv.com/movies/457532/not_cool Not Cool]]'' and ''[[https://tubitv.com/movies/457531/hollidaysburg Hollidaysburg]]''.

* RomanceOnTheSet:
** Shane cracks a joke about expecting this to happen between him and Creator/CheramiLeigh but immediately follows it up with SelfDeprecation that she'll probably throw up as soon as she touches him.
** This is a lot less funny when he makes a similar joke a second time, to a third party -- asking Michelle Veintimilla if she might "get together for real" with Drew Monson, Shane's friend who plays her love interest. Lauren really unsubtly breaks the awkward silence and rescues her from having to answer this question by bringing up the [[BlandNameProduct legal issue of mentioning Facebook]].

* AdaptationalVillainy: One of the very jarring differences between Shane's and Anna's script is how Anna's script uses Heather's character as an exploration of high-achieving gifted kids falling into depression when they enter adult life, and Shane's script turns her into a one-dimensional SlutShaming PsychoExGirlfriend stereotype. It doesn't really make Dan Schoffer look good that he immediately accepts Shane destroying one of his female characters to the point of CanonDefilement and decides he prefers Shane's script to Anna's anyway.