The Chair is a 2014 Reality Show on Starz created by Chris Moore, the producer of Good Will Hunting and American Pie, in partnership with executive producer and celebrity sponsor Zachary Quinto. It was a new variation on his previous TV show Project Greenlight, which pioneered the idea of a Set Behind the Scenes Reality Show about directing a film.
Unlike Project Greenlight taking and evaluating pitches from wannabe directors they created themselves, The Chair was an experiment where two filmmakers from very different backgrounds — one graduate of a film school in New York, one YouTube star known for his viral success with raunchy humor — make a movie from an existing unproduced screenplay (How Soon Is Now
by Dan Schoffer) based on their two wildly divergent artistic sensibilities.
The two filmmakers they chose were Anna Martemucci (now known professionally as A.M. Lukas), previously known for her work as part of a Creator Couple with husband Victor Quinaz on the film A Breakup at a Wedding and the Web series Periods, and now-infamous YouTuber Shane Dawson, 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 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.
This series was very quickly Overshadowed by Controversy for two reasons — the Foregone Conclusion 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 the fact that the movie he did make, Not Cool, was so negatively received that Quinto demanded his name be removed from the credits.
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.
(Note: Since this a meta Reality Show about making two movies within a show, please do not move YMMV or Trivia entries about the movies — as opposed to about The Chair itself — off of the main page.)
This series provides examples of:
- Acclaimed Flop: 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 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 Box Office Bomb.)
- Adapted Out: How Soon Is Now had three parallel love stories running through its plot — the Narrator Tori and her crush from high school Scott, Scott's girlfriend Heather who dumps him in the first scene and Scott's best friend William, and Heather's best friend Janie and her brother (and Tori's best friend) Joel. Both finished movies drop one of these stories to save time — Not Cool reduces Heather to a Flat Character Psycho Ex-Girlfriend (removing Janie and Joel's relationship to her and turning Janie into Scott's sister instead) and drops William, while Hollidaysburg completely deletes Janie and Joel (although the character of Katie could, at a stretch, be considered a Composite Character of the two of them).
- Adaptational Job Change: There's some talk of changing the character of Scott in Not Cool from a former Jerk Jock to an aspiring photographer, so Shane can more realistically play him. Shane demands that he be an amateur still photographer and not a videographer or filmmaker because he wants to avoid playing an Author Avatar (but doesn't really succeed).
- Adaptation Name Change: 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). Likewise, the surnames for the characters changed wildly from the script to both adaptations — in How Soon Is Now, Tori's last name was Garvin, in Hollidaysburg it's Humilovich, and in Not Cool it's Gilaspie.
- Adaptation Personality Change: 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 up to eleven (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 Deadpan Snarker and can't deal with Anna turning her into more of a quirky vulnerable heroine.
- Adaptational Sexuality:
- Tori's sister becomes a lesbian in Anna's script. Shane does this to a lesser degree by making a joke out of implying that Tori's sister's fiancé is a closeted gay man.
- 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 Better as Friends. (This is the one case where Not Cool actually removed the problematic Stereotype from the original script, which has Janie decide to sleep with Joel anyway as an If It's You, It's Okay situation Played for Laughs.)
- Adaptational Villainy:
- 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 Slut-Shaming Psycho Ex-Girlfriend 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 Canon Defilement and decides he prefers Shane's script to Anna's anyway.
- 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 Composite Character of Katie (who, like Joel, is Tori's best friend but who has all the Alpha Bitch qualities Janie had in the original script including the 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 No Antagonist story where everyone gets a sympathetic story arc.
- Auteur License: One controversial aspect of this contest is that, to compensate for forcing both directors to use the same script and let the documentary crew turn their process into a Reality Show, the directors get final cut on the movies themselves — as long as they stay within their budget, all notes from the producers are just suggestions. Many industry professionals commented that this is a highly unusual situation that in no way resembles the typical experience of a first-time director (or even a veteran director), and this may have been setting their inexperienced contestants up to fail. This opinion ends up vindicated big time with Shane, who suddenly takes his Can't Take Criticism brittle defensiveness up to 11 after shooting wraps and won't let anyone else touch the editing process, being used to editing his own YouTube videos by himself in his room and disastrously trying to apply that same process to a full-length feature film. Problematic content aside, this situation all by itself almost sinks the movie.
- Author Avatar: 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 Jerk Jock to a sensitive guy, but Anna likewise turns Tori into someone who has a lot of the same personality issues she does, like being an Extreme Doormat.
- Birthday Buddies: The first thing Shane Dawson and Cherami Leigh bond over when they meet is the fact that they happen to be the exact same age — born on July 19, 1988. They talk about how they also both use stage names, and "Leigh", which is actually Cherami's middle name, is also Shane's middle name (spelled "Lee").
- Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Shane does this with the female leads for his movie, making Jorie Kosel (who plays Heather) dye her hair a garish bleached-blonde, to round out the blonde/brunette/redhead trio with Michelle Veintimilla (Janie) and Cherami Leigh (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.)
- Box Office Bomb: 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.
- Canon Foreigner: Hollidaysburg adds two major characters who didn't exist in How Soon Is Now, Scott's older brother Phil and Tori's female best friend Katie — part of the reason Dan Schoffer considers Hollidaysburg an In Name Only adaptation and throws his support behind Not Cool instead.
- Can't Take Criticism: Both filmmakers have moments of this, but Anna's pale to nothing compared to Shane's — Shane is so terrified of any negative reaction to his movie that he packs the test screening with friends and family (thus making it not really a valid test screening) and then won't even stay in the room to hear their feedback, and then constantly procrastinates on reading their feedback or talking to anyone about it afterwards, forcing Lauren to hire an outside professional to make the necessary edits.
- Although this is the worst part, this behavior starts far earlier in the film — Shane repeatedly snaps at people whenever they simply inform him he can't have something he wants or something he tried isn't working, and at one point tries to forbid people talking shit about him behind his back.
- Camp Straight: Shane very much presented as this back then, before he officially came out as bisexual a year later in 2015. Part of the controversy surrounding this show was Anna later on attempting to out him on social media.
- Caustic Critic: A reviewer for the LA Times (Robert Abele) goes both barrels on Not Cool; Shane quotes him saying that the only people who could possibly enjoy the movie are "date-rapists, racists and sociopaths". Chris Moore laughs in disbelief that this movie has gotten the worst reviews he's ever seen critics give a movie in his life, going past the point of attacking Shane for making it to attacking him for funding it.
- Cliché Storm: Shane's movie, full stop, and unapologetically (he name-drops the comparison to Superbad or American Pie 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.
- Contrived Proximity: The producers of this show put up the two movies' production teams on two different floors of the same building. This fact isn't explicitly revealed to the audience until after both movies are finished, and afterwards Shane and Anna marvel about the fact that somehow neither of them physically ran into each other at any point in the process.
- Creator Cameo: A very memorable moment in the show is when producer Corey Moosa reveals he's so committed to helping Shane get his movie made he lets Shane film his butt cheeks pressed against a window as Shane's "butt double".
- Creator's Favorite Episode:
- Surprisingly, given how negative so many other people's reactions are to Not Cool, original screenwriter Dan Schoffer greatly prefers Shane's take on his script to Anna's, going so far as to angrily predict Anna's movie will fail and cut ties with her, essentially joining Shane's team.
- Producer Corey Moosa also goes to bat for Shane's movie, breaking with his business partners Zachary Quinto and Neal Dodson over the issue, and going so far as to cameo in the movie himself (standing in for Shane's butt when there's a scene of him mooning people out the window) to get it finished.
- Critical Dissonance: 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.
- Deadpan Snarker: Both Anna and Shane have their moments of this, trying to defuse tension with the camera on them. Of course, Shane is the one who, as an irony-poisoned YouTuber, can't actually seem to turn it off, and in fact frequently gets in serious trouble when people can't tell if he's being sarcastic or genuinely being an asshole. (At one point he tries to play off the fact that he told someone "Send me your notes, I'll never read them" as having been a joke, despite the fact that the guy did send him his notes and he hasn't read them.)
- Dear Negative Reader: Shane gives a long and embittered rant to the camera after he gets the news that Quinto is pulling his name off the movie.
- Denser and Wackier: Shane's script is this compared to the original screenplay, to an absurd degree, while what Anna does with it is essentially Cerebus Syndrome.
- Descended Creator:
- Both films have their directors acting in them, although Shane playing the lead role of Scott is a far more substantial acting burden than Anna taking a Creator Cameo as Tori's sister's fiancée Courtney. Having to both direct and star in the movie predictably ends up making Shane's job far more difficult.
- A better parallel than Anna's bit part as Courtney is her brother-in-law and co-producer Phil playing 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.
- Development Hell: 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 In Name Only adaptation of his screenplay — which both Not Cool and Hollidaysburg ended up being.
- Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: 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".
- Disgusting Public Toilet: One of the lowlights of Shane's film shoot is his locations manager picking a building (a repurposed art gallery) for the record store scene that has no heat and, according to Lauren, one disgusting single-occupancy bathroom with a door that doesn't lock, for a cast and crew of over 100 people. Producer Corey Moosa has to explain why doing this is unacceptable and in fact a violation of labor law.
- Downer Ending: Neither movie breaks into the mainstream, with Shane's bombing critically and financially, only really becoming popular among his existing fanbase-exactly what he said he wanted to avoid at the beginning of the show.(Anna's movie also bombs financially, but at least gets critical acclaim.) Shane still wins the contest, despite Zachary Quinto, his co-producer Neal, and every critic who's seen both movies pulling hard for Anna.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Shane laments Zachary Quinto walking in on a scene during production and finding the scene tasteless. Shane believes that Quinto disapproved of him being in drag, but considering Shane was making racist jokes throughout the scene, it’s much more likely that it was the racism Quinto had a problem with and not the drag. Shane only ever talks about the drag being the problem though, and if he had actually heard out Quinto’s concerns, he may have been able to avoid the outcome of Quinto removing his name from the project.
- Dueling Works: 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.
- Fan Myopia: 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.
- Fictional Social Network: One of the ugliest moments is when Shane blows up at his producer Lauren when she tries to explain to him the whole concept of a Bland-Name Product and why one might want to avoid using the word "Facebook" in the script even if you aren't actually violating IP law by doing so (to avoid attracting attention for a nuisance lawsuit) — something that most film producers understand as just how the business works, but that Shane angrily treats as Lauren making up quibbles just to annoy him.
- Flyover Country: Both films have their production HQ and shooting locations in 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 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 titular location of Hollidaysburg, PA — which in Real Life is almost 100 miles from Pittsburgh — because the Double-Meaning Title 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 they're the ones funding the project. Shane's finished movie does mostly stay away from directly attacking the city in its jokes, but some aspects of it come off as insulting, like making the Duquesne Incline the setting of a full-frontal nudity sight gag.
- Foregone Conclusion: It was always obvious to anyone who knows anything about how the Internet works — or who even just has some common sense about it — that Shane was going to win the contest.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: In Shane's shoot, they decorated their set dresser to put little homages to various members of Shane's team in the fake records made to fill up the Vinyl Vault.
- Genre Deconstruction: 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. Ultimately, however, 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. Everyone loses.
- Genre Shift: The original script starts off as a fairly formulaic coming-of-age dramedy. In Shane's hands it becomes a wacky grossout teen comedy (which he thinks of as an homage to Superbad and American Pie). In Anna's it becomes a far more cerebral, experimental indie film.
- Girl Friday: Lauren is this for Shane, and it's a thankless job. It's implied Anna was this to her husband in the past, and that's what's creating tension between them now with her in the driver's seat (although their relationship isn't even close to being as inequitable as Shane and Lauren's).
- Good Ol' Boy: Chris Moore (who was born in Easton, Maryland) comes off as this, with his Southern accent and laid-back, unjudging attitude, an affect he maintains even as external industry opinion turns violently against Shane's movie and against The Chair itself for funding it.
- Homage: Both Shane and Anna try to defend their films by comparing them to classic teen comedies of the past — Shane repeatedly bringing up raunchy 2000s comedies like Superbad and American Pie (which was one of the big hits on the résumé of The Chair creator Chris Moore), while Anna compares her film to something more wistful like the work of John Hughes, especially Sixteen Candles. Both comparisons get some pushback from critics — Anna's team points out to her that, despite her rose-colored glasses for John Hughes, Sixteen Candles was a much broader, less "artistic" crowd-pleaser than the movie she's making, while Zachary Quinto gets even harsher and bluntly tells Chris Moore that the difference between American Pie and Not Cool is American Pie is actually funny and Not Cool is garbage.
- Hopeless Auditionees: Shane treats his actual, real-life audition process like this one of these montages, getting visibly frustrated with what he sees as the poor quality of actors coming in to read for him with them in the room, and is seemingly totally unrepentant about the unprofessionalism of letting this show.
- Hostility on the Set: 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.)
- Hypocrite: Shane accuses Zachary Quinto especially and all his other critics of being this, claiming that Quinto's work on So Notorious and other "dumb fun" TV shows gives him no right to judge Shane's work. Quinto shoots back that it's not just about the offensiveness or the tone of Shane's humor but its quality.
- Ignored Epiphany: Shane comes into the project wanting to broaden his appeal beyond his YouTube audience, only to repeatedly reject any feedback telling him to adjust his sense of humor, often quite angrily and rudely, and predictably ends up with a movie no one seems to like except his existing fans.
- Improperly Paranoid: 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 deliberately leaking info in order to make him look bad and help Anna win. It's not clear to what extent he actually means this, is doing his usual Deadpan Snarker routine, or is 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.
- Improv: Both productions end up relying heavily on this. Phil improvises a lot of his dialogue on Hollidaysburg, including a line that Anna cites as her favorite line in the finished film; Shane goes through a bunch of old-school improv games to get Drew out of his shell and generates some of the funnier lines in the film as a result.
- I Reject Your Reality: A breathtaking moment toward the end of the show is Shane going on a rant that he's been constantly patient and accommodating throughout his process and that he's not the kind of person who raises his voice or yells at people when they criticize him — when the documentary crew has just shown us him doing this constantly.
- Is This Thing Still On?:
- There's a funny moment of this where Anna is having lunch with a colleague and indulging in frank criticism of the other members of her team, and then realizes the documentary crew is filming them through the window, and then realizes her lav mic is still on and, to her chagrin, they're going to put this whole conversation into the show.
- This doesn't actually happen with Shane — indeed, Shane seems extremely aware that cameras are watching him at all times, and Chris Moore comments that as a YouTuber used to living in public he has a certain advantage in dealing with the Reality Show aspect of this project. The stunning thing about this is that Shane goes into public meltdowns that make him look bad in front of everyone anyway — including at one point having a meltdown about the fact that someone just said something that will make him look bad.
- It's All About Me: Shane, Shane, Shane. It's not like, as people repeatedly point out, you don't need a certain amount of ego in order to do the work of a filmmaker at all — but Shane takes it over the top, treating every conflict like a personal slight, expecting his feelings to be coddled at every moment, and obviously caring more about how people treat him in the moment and how the documentary makes him look as a person than the end goal of making a decent movie. The worst part being how his emotional hang-ups and unwillingness to critique his own work keep him from taking any audience feedback on the movie — literally refusing to be in the room while they talk about it or read any notes after the fact — and almost keep the post-production editing from getting finished at all.
- "Just Joking" Justification: Shane's all-purpose excuse, both for the content of his movie itself and for his off-color jokes and inappropriate behavior while making it.
- Male Frontal Nudity:
- Anna gets in a fight with her husband because she really, really wants to put in a shot during her movie's opening sex scene of Scott putting on a condom in full view of the camera, only to be told there's no way to show an erect penis onscreen without getting an automatic NC-17 rating (which isn't allowed by the rules of the contest). She protests, tongue-in-cheek, that this is sexism and that she wants to normalize male nudity as a blow for gender equality (which gets quoted out of context in later episode recaps).
- Meanwhile, Shane is insistent on putting a (non-erect) penis in his film as a random sight gag (with possibly racist implications), where a crazy homeless black man is flashing bystanders through a window. Since no actor they can find in Pittsburgh is willing to do this for real, this sets off a quest to find a "black stunt penis" to finish this scene in post, which they aren't able to do until they get back to LA.
- Monochrome Casting: This issue comes up for both filmmakers, since unfortunately Pittsburgh, while not an all-white city by any means, has a fairly small talent pool of actors of color to pick from; Shane and Anna both state their intention to have a diverse cast but then end up casting mostly white people as their leads. Heads into unfortunate territory with Anna ending up fighting hard with her husband insisting on casting a white actress (Claire Chapelli) over an Asian actress as Heather despite already casting an Asian actress to play Heather's mom. Heads into way more unfortunate territory with the revelation that Shane's insistence on "diverse casting" really means making people into the butt of racial jokes, culminating in a cringey sequence of desperately calling strip clubs and escort agencies to find a black guy willing to be a "stunt penis" for a gag involving full frontal nudity from a crazy homeless guy.
- Nepotism: It's easy to accuse Zachary Quinto of this, since he came into the project in the first place as a longtime friend of Anna's husband who'd worked with their company on indie projects in the past, and he ends up complaining that he had no idea who Shane was or what his content was like before signing on. That said, even if his eventual opposition to Shane was purely based on favoritism, it clearly didn't work, and Shane still took home the money.
- Never My Fault: Shane, almost constantly. Also characteristic of the people Shane hires, like his locations manager shrugging off the fact that he's asked over a hundred people to spend the day in a building with no heat and no working bathrooms.
- Never Trust a Trailer: Trailers and recaps for this show frequently used a clip of Anna saying "I do see this as an issue of gender equality", which they use to make it sound like a mission statement for her movie as a whole or for her decision to participate in this contest. While that's not necessarily untrue of her motivations as a filmmaker, the actual context of this quote is Anna arguing about why she should be allowed to put Male Frontal Nudity in her film without getting an automatic NC-17 rating.
- New Media Are Evil:
- A possibly unintentional Aesop of the finished form of this documentary, where it's very difficult in hindsight to defend Shane as having deserved to win the competition. It's especially hard to watch Shane being essentially worshiped by a fanbase of underage girls who clearly don't know any better.
- 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 history having proven the critics right, it seems that to the extent Shane is a legitimate representative of "YouTube culture" those old-fashioned Luddites were right.
- No Budget: 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.
- Nouveau Riche: Shane is substantially more financially successful than Anna as an individual but happily dresses and acts like a slob, and has little experience with how a professional film set works.
- The Oner: The opening scene of Shane's movie is a long Steadicam tracking shot, which he does for no real reason other than that it's cool to have one (and turns out to, predictably, eat up a lot of money and time he can't afford).
- Only Sane Man: It becomes obvious, when Zachary Quinto gets back from LA and finally watches the rough cut of Shane's film, that Quinto sees himself as this, and is quietly flabbergasted that everyone else just let this fiasco happen without doing anything to stop it.
- Only Six Faces: 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).
- Pacing Problems: The main problem that develops in the final arc of the series is Shane being unwilling to acknowledge the rough cut of his movie has serious pacing issues and is unfamiliar with the basic standard of "tightening" that professional-quality films require.
- The Perfectionist: Anna, who starts shooting two weeks later than Shane because she's working so hard on getting the script exactly right, and who ends up turning in her first rough cut much later than he does for the same reason. We hear criticism from her crew about her difficulty prioritizing, like spending all day on trying to get a single shot where Scott collapses onto his bed exactly right and therefore losing time she could be spending working on much more plot-significant and dialogue-heavy scenes.
- Pet the Dog: Even Shane's haters have to admit there are some sweet moments he has with his friends on the show — the biggest one probably being him getting choked up about how his longtime friend and collaborator Drew Monson (who was only eighteen at the time) got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to act in a feature film because of him.
- Praising Shows You Don't Watch: 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.
- Production Posse: 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.
- Product Placement: One of the dramatic arcs for Shane's movie is about securing the right to film in an American Eagle Outfitters store (thanks to their HQ being in Pittsburgh and wanting to help promote the city) in return for Not Cool — and Hollidaysburg — featuring their clothes.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Both teams are like this, neither of them being able to afford top-notch talent on their budget, but Shane's far more so — early on, producer Corey Moosa comments on Shane's decision to save money by hiring younger, less experienced employees he gets along with better (everyone in his Real Life social circle being under 30) and how this might cause problems later on. Sure enough, the fact that his Director of Photography and his Locations Manager — both extremely important roles with a ton of responsibility — are both kids fresh out of college bites him in the ass hard.
- Reaction Shot: Zachary Quinto's completely silent, motionless expression of total disgust while watching Shane ham it up in drag as the bus driver during Quinto's one set visit for Not Cool is some pretty great Foreshadowing to what his reaction will be at the screening of the finished product several episodes down the line.
- Real Is Brown: You can immediately tell at a glance that Anna's film is a "realistic" indie movie in tone while Shane's is a commercial teen comedy that takes place in a fantasyland just from the cinematography — Anna's film is washed out and desaturated to really feel like it's the dead of winter in central Pennsylvania, while Shane eschews natural light and spends as much time in colorful, brightly lit indoor sets as he can. This also applies to the costume design — both films got a Product Placement deal with American Eagle Outfitters but Anna resists having her characters decked out in a full American Eagle ensemble as opposed to having one or two identifiable pieces mixed in with drab normal clothes, so it'll feel like these are "real people" and not catalog models.
- Real-Life Relative: 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 Phil and cast herself as Courtney, the fiancée of Tori's sister (who in Hollidaysburg is named Angela).
- Recycled Script: 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.
- It's notable that even though there's supposed to be no creative communication at all between the two teams, they both share the original screenwriter, Dan Schoffer, who has the contractual right to do a first-pass revision on his script. Schoffer clearly reused ideas when doing the scripts for both Not Cool and Hollidaysburg, even if in wildly different contexts — both scripts spice up Scott's story arc by having his parent(s) be the one moving to Florida, not Heather's, both add the "field trip" storyline where Scott and Tori spend Black Friday exploring the city, and both have an emotional climax where Scott and Tori have a heart-to-heart at a Pittsburgh landmark (Carrie Furnaces for Hollidaysburg, Heinz Stadium for Not Cool).
- This even extends to Dan apparently having recycled a joke for both movies, where one of the hijinks Scott gets up to when he's with Tori is using someone else's yard as a restroom (although the context of the joke is very different in each film).
- Both finished movies also escalate the theme of homesickness by having one of the major characters seriously consider dropping out of college and moving back home permanently, with their newfound Love Interest getting mad at them for this and chewing them out for their immaturity. (In Hollidaysburg this interaction occurs between Heather and William; in Not Cool it's Scott and Tori, and leads to their Second-Act Breakup.)
- There's a few other stray Creator Thumbprint moments scattered through the script, like Scott mentioning "eating his feelings", Tori getting guilted by a friend for ignoring said friend's sick relative (Joel's grandmother in Not Cool, Katie's mother in Hollidaysburg), etc.
- It's notable that even though there's supposed to be no creative communication at all between the two teams, they both share the original screenwriter, Dan Schoffer, who has the contractual right to do a first-pass revision on his script. Schoffer clearly reused ideas when doing the scripts for both Not Cool and Hollidaysburg, even if in wildly different contexts — both scripts spice up Scott's story arc by having his parent(s) be the one moving to Florida, not Heather's, both add the "field trip" storyline where Scott and Tori spend Black Friday exploring the city, and both have an emotional climax where Scott and Tori have a heart-to-heart at a Pittsburgh landmark (Carrie Furnaces
- Refuge in Audacity: Shane's whole strategy both for actually making his movie and for how he conducts himself on camera. Unfortunately, the "real-life" audience he was playing to didn't take this as well as his YouTube audience did at the time.
- Related in the Adaptation: The original script has a pretty big part of Scott's background be that he's an only child; both movies try to make Scott's home life more interesting by giving him a sibling (Not Cool makes Janie his sister, Hollidaysburg gives him an older brother named Phil).
- Romance on the Set: Shane cracks a joke about expecting this to happen between him and Cherami Leigh but immediately follows it up with Self-Deprecation that she'll probably throw up as soon as she touches him.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Anna's vision for the sex scene that opens up the film is a role reversal of male vs. female nudity, where Heather is wearing a baggy sweatshirt (the same one she wears for most of the film) covering her up while Scott is fully nude and we can see his genitals. When her husband nixes this idea since there's no way showing a penis in a sexual situation doesn't get you an NC-17 rating, she ends up reluctantly playing this trope straight (rather than going the traditional route of gunning for the R rating by showing an actress topless).
- Slobs vs. Snobs: A variation on this trope — the producers clearly meant Anna to be the "snob" and Shane to be the "slob" in this equation, but unlike most instances of this trope Anna is clearly the underdog throughout the whole process. Her film school degree, her industry connections, and her much greater experience and knowledge about filmmaking are all of very little help to winning the contest compared to Shane's Internet success.
- Small Name, Big Ego:
- Despite constant Self-Deprecation about how he wants to break out from the tiny pond of YouTube and become a real Hollywood director, Shane obviously thinks very highly of himself based on his online success, and you can see him visibly recharging his self-esteem when basking in applause from his fans at Vidcon.
- Shane is, however, obviously aware that YouTube is a small pond compared to the rest of the entertainment industry, and is deeply insecure about this, which fuels his negative behaviors. He gives a very candid talking-head interview after the Vidcon sequence confessing that Vidcon appearances almost make him feel worse about himself because of the huge letdown of leaving Vidcon to find out that on the streets of LA absolutely nobody recognizes him or cares who he is.
- Smurfette Breakout: 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.
- Social Media Before Reason:
- Shane is obsessed with how people see him online and how the process of making this movie will affect his reputation.
- Shane tries to make the movie have this as an Aesop, with the first scene showing a Wild Teen Party where everyone is tweeting and they all come off as self-absorbed hypocrites, but this message is completely forgotten until the ending narration suddenly brings it up again.
- Stealing the Credit: A conflict erupts early on about Shane wanting "co-writer" credit on Dan Schoffer's script because of all the jokes he's added as the director, despite the fact that WGA union rules specifically prohibit directors getting co-writer credit in situations exactly like this. Despite this, Schoffer ends up taking Shane's side over Anna's in the contest.
- Streisand Effect:
- Shane at one point gets in a snit against his co-producer Lauren for a full day because he thinks a critique she brings up of his rough cut of Not Cool — which echoes a critique Chris Moore gave at the initial table read — will be used by the documentary film crew to "make him look bad". He seems to fail to realize that obsessing over this and berating her over it while the cameras are still on him guarantees that the film crew will use this to make him look bad, and will use the fact that he cares so much about it to make him look worse.
- A variant of this happens when Anna tries to ban Chris Moore and the other producers from watching the filming of the movie's sex scene, for the sake of the actors' privacy, and Moore then insists on being to see the sex scene, seemingly out of general principle since he's financing the movie. The ensuing conflict over this is catnip for the documentary crew and doesn't make anyone look good.
- Thanksgiving Episode: Dan Schoffer's original idea for his screenplay was to explore the awkward "first Thanksgiving home" after going away to college and how it's often a defining moment for a young adult realizing how much they've changed since childhood. Requiring that the movie take place within the five days of Thanksgiving break (from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after) ends up being one of the constraints the producers put on both films.
- Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup:
- This narrative quickly develops about Anna's film, that her biggest challenge is maintaining a coherent vision while her brother-in-law, her husband and other well-meaning interlopers keep giving her advice and undermining her authority on her own project. This contrasts to Shane, who gets a lot of praise for being "decisive" and sticking to his guns — the problem being he has no awareness that his decisions are terrible.
- Despite Shane clearly seeing himself as the sole creative mind behind his film, this ends up becoming an issue for him too — in the sense that quite a lot of the actual day-to-day work of running the production ends up being done by Lauren and his other collaborators, which leads to miscommunications.
- Tranquil Fury: Zachary Quinto's distaste for Shane just builds and builds over time into this. The cold, calm tone of voice in which he finally declares Shane's finished film to be absolutely worthless is worthy of Sylar or Spock.
- Troubled Production: Applies to both films, thanks to the fairly harsh constraints of money and time they were made under. It gets a lot worse for Shane's movie, though.
- True Art Is Angsty: Shane strongly believes that everyone is biased in favor of Anna's movie against his because hers is much slower-paced and less "fun".
- Tuckerization: Anna's script gives Scott an older brother named Phil, named for and based on her real-life brother-in-law and co-producer Phil Quinaz, who plays the character.
- Untrusting Community: Word gets around Pittsburgh pretty quickly about the kind of content Shane creates, and it becomes a serious obstacle to him getting actors and locations as people don't want to be associated with him. Rather than rethinking his public image as a result of this, it just sends him into tirades about people being Ungrateful Bastards.
- Values Dissonance: 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.
- Viewers Are Morons: Everyone else's frustrated reaction to Shane winning the contest comes off as this cynical Aesop, although it bears pointing out that Shane's fanbase that propels him to victory is all young teenage girls — as Corey points out, viewers "like you and me" (the implied adult audience of the documentary) mostly didn't show any interest in either of the movies.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The first thing Shane does when entering pre-production is test out a state-of-the-art "vomit rig". He confesses to the camera that he's been looking forward to this, since vomit jokes have been a staple for him since day one.
- Vulgar Humor: Shane compulsively cannot stop engaging in this, both in the content of the movie he makes and in mugging for the cameras for the behind-the-scenes documentary. A notable moment is where for no other reason than wanting to "give them what they want to see" he lets the camera crew film him using a neti pot, then drinks the water that just passed through his sinuses.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: It's a fairly glaring issue that Shane is very much making a "hard R"-rated movie, including full frontal nudity Played for Laughs, 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.
- Write What You Know:
- It becomes an issue that Dan Schoffer wrote his original screenplay based on his experiences leaving home for college and looking back on his history of drinking and partying as a teenager, and Anna took off from his script to write about her and her friends' similar experiences — but Shane Dawson never had any such experiences, as someone who never went to college and has never been a drinker or partier (and has a past as a NEET). It quickly becomes apparent that most of the knowledge he's drawing on for this movie is just having watched popular movies about teen partying.
- 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 Flyover Country in general in his humor.
