Trivia / Hollidaysburg

• Acclaimed Flop: Most fans of The Chair are very fond of this movie despite the fact that it lost in both box office and audience voting to Not Cool in a landslide. Zachary Quinto's co-producer Neal Dodson, who also took his name off the credits for Not Cool when Quinto did, even wrote an op-ed imploring readers to watch Hollidaysburg and vote for it, to no avail.
• Box Office Bomb: During the limited theatrical release given to Hollidaysburg and its competitor Not Cool by The Chair (2014), almost nobody bought a ticket to see Hollidaysburg and all the attention to the series came from fans of Shane Dawson. Martemucci only made back a few thousand dollars from a movie made on a $600,000 budget.
• California Doubling: A rare case of a bigger, more expensive location doubling for a smaller and cheaper one — Pittsburgh, PA doubles for Altoona, PA (and its suburb of Hollidaysburg) here, thanks to The Chair requiring both productions film in Pittsburgh. Extra notable since in Anna Martemucci's version of the script Tori is coming home from CMU, which is in Pittsburgh.
• Creator Breakdown: A year after this film was made, creator Anna Martemucci lashed out at Shane Dawson after his publicly coming out as bisexual, ranting at length on Twitter about her disgust at Dawson's history of rape jokes and inappropriate behavior with minors, the social media abuse she took from Dawson's fanbase as a result of being on The Chair as his competitor, and her general dislike of YouTube influencer culture. Even her supporters felt she might have gone too far, particularly by insinuating she had knowledge of Shane cheating on his girlfriend with a man during the show and openly comparing Shane to Hitler. In the aftermath, she left social media and changed her professional name to "A.M. Lukas".
  • As of 2020, a lot of Martemucci's reaction has been Vindicated by History, with much of Shane's fanbase having come to turn against him after looking at his past YouTube content and his actions on The Chair in a new light.
• Creator Couple: Victor Quinaz and Anna Martemucci had been one for a long time, including on their first big feature film Breakup at a Wedding; Hollidaysburg was their first movie where Anna took the lead as the writer/director rather than acting as her husband's assistant.
• Critical Dissonance: The praise wasn't unanimous, but The Chair showed that critics generally supported this movie and considered it by far the superior film to Shane Dawson's Not Cool, which has gone down in history as one of the worst-reviewed movies ever made. This made no difference either to their box office or to the eventual popular vote on which filmmaker received The Chair's $250,000 cash prize.
• The Danza: Philip Quinaz plays a character whose first name is also Phil, continuing a tradition from when he played the lead in Anna Martemucci and Victor Quinaz's earlier film Breakup at a Wedding. In a lesser example, Heather's father is named Kenny, sharing the first name of his actor, Kenneth Champion.
• Descended Creator: Phil, Scott's older brother, is played by Philip Quinaz, Anna Martemucci's brother-in-law and a co-producer on the film. (Anna alludes on The Chair to Phil being a Tuckerization who shares many of the real Phil's personality traits, if not his station in life.) Martemucci herself has a more minor role as Courtney, the fiancée of Tori's sister Angela.
• Dueling Works: Even now, it's rare to find someone who watched this movie outside of the context of the Reality Show The Chair, for a purpose other than comparing it to Shane Dawson's Not Cool. Anna Martemucci ended up pretty unhappy over this fact and over her reputation being tied to Dawson's as a result.
• Fake Mixed Race: Heather, who is a (white-passing) Latina actress playing a character with a white father and Chinese mother.
• Franchise Killer: Hollidaysburg bears much less responsibility for this than Not Cool, but the fact that the obviously "better" movie to come out of The Chair made even less money than Not Cool did — in fact, made almost no money at all and was a total loss — was one reason The Chair ended up not getting renewed for another season.
• No Budget: $600,000 is a lot of money for an indie filmmaker just coming up to play with — enough for Anna Martemucci to agree to the discomfort of letting her own filmmaking process be filmed as a Reality Show and to having her film's release turn into a competition against a raunchy YouTuber — but it's still a very tight budget for a feature-length film, and reviewers agreed that the budget and time limitations are pretty clearly visible.
• Production Posse: Part of the point of The Chair was giving the filmmakers enough budget to hire professional talent they didn't have access to before — and to give jobs to Pittsburgh locals in the industry — but both teams still brought along a lot of their familiar coworkers. This was especially true for Anna's side of The Chair, where she brings in her family posse consisting of her husband and brother-in-law Victor and Philip Quinaz and a lot of their old buddies from Periods and Breakup at a Wedding. Much of Anna's story in The Chair was about her "graduating" from being her husband's Girl Friday to being the creative lead of this film.
• Real-Life Relative: Phil is played by Philip Quinaz, the brother-in-law of director Anna Martemucci, who has a Creator Cameo as Courtney. The voice of Scott and Phil's mom on the phone is played by Barbara Quinaz, the mother of Philip Quinaz. (Co-producer Victor Quinaz, Martemucci's husband and Philip's brother, also has an extremely minor role as the voice of Donny, who casually greets Trish from offscreen after she chases Scott off her property with a baseball bat.)
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: One major reason Martemucci was so excited by casting Tobin Mitnick as Scott is he really does look like he could be Phil Quinaz's younger brother.
• Troubled Production:
  • The Chair documented much of the drama behind the making of Hollidaysburg, most of it focusing on the Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup situation of Victor and Philip Quinaz not being able to stand back and let Anna take charge of the project. There's also the fact that being on The Chair at all added a fair bit of stress and trouble to the project, with Anna's naturally non-confrontational personality making it difficult to make tough decisions or criticize her team knowing that it would be broadcast on national TV.
  • The Chair shows Anna running into a full-blown last-minute crisis when it turns out that test audiences can't tell Rachel Keller and Claire Chapelli apart, with many of them assuming that Tori and Heather were the same character being shown at different points in time until they actually meet at the convenience store well into the film. Emergency surgery had to be done in post-production, giving us an Opening Narration where Tori, Scott and Heather are shown next to each other in split-screen.