Trivia / The Chair (2014)

• All There in the Manual: The original script by Dan Schoffer was made available on the Starz website for viewers to compare with the finished films.
• Creator Breakdown: Nobody involved in this series wants to be reminded of it. It was only after about a year that Shane pretty much started trying to pretend Not Cool never happened and laughing it off when people asked him about it, Anna had a minor breakdown over the experience on social media and changed her professional name to "A.M. Lukas" to distance herself from it, and Chris Moore himself basically walked away from the Reality Show world to help produce Manchester by the Sea instead.
• Deleted Scenes: After the show aired it was revealed that there was a lot of footage that was deleted from the final show at the request of the principals, because it was too personal and not relevant enough to their filmmaking process. On Anna's side, this involved a lot of conversations with her husband and brother-in-law about family issues and their relationships with each other that, while they inform a lot of the on-set tension and unspoken power struggles in her storyline, had little enough to do with the movie itself that the producers agreed to cut them. On Shane's side — the side most fans and haters are interested in — there were apparently some very revealing conversations with Shane and his mother about Shane's life situation at the time and his ongoing battle with depression that could've possibly made him a more sympathetic character by giving him a Freudian Excuse. (It is pretty clear, even in the finished version of the story where he's essentially a villain, that by the end of the post-production process his stress levels have become a full-blown mental health crisis.)
• Money, Dear Boy: Chris Moore bluntly admitted, in hindsight, that this is why Shane Dawson was chosen to represent YouTube on the show — the sheer size of his built-in audience, and the fact that it was an audience that producers like Moore didn't feel like they understood at all and had no idea how to make money from.
• One Degree of Separation: Although Claire Chapelli, who plays Heather in Hollidaysburg, and Michelle Veintimilla, who plays Janie in Not Cool, are never onscreen together in the course of this series, just one year later they'd both have minor roles in the 2015 Russell Crowe and Amanda Seyfried film Fathers and Daughters.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The series arguably goes off the rails because of a random external event — executive producer Zachary Quinto has to leave town because he's been cast in a movie (the romantic comedy We'll Never Have Paris) and can't be around for most of the shooting schedule of both films. This means he's absent for most of the filming of Not Cool and isn't around to see how offensive the movie gets and to put his foot down over what he will and won't accept in a project with his name on it. (You can tell, when he does pop in for an on-set visit early on before he leaves, that he's already uncomfortable with the direction it's going but doesn't want to be too harsh.) Had this not happened, he likely wouldn't have recoiled so much at the finished product when it was too late to substantially change it, and the massive news story overshadowing this whole series of Quinto feeling he had to publicly pull his name off the film wouldn't have happened.
  • Everyone who's seen this show has asked why Chris Moore couldn't just have had a panel of jurors — film critics or industry professionals or even just pre-selected members of the public who hadn't heard of Shane or Anna before — to vote on the movies instead of opening it up to an online poll, the one method that made Shane's victory a Foregone Conclusion. Moore has revealed that he did toy with this idea, but he wasn't willing to have panelists unless they were willing to appear onscreen and discuss the process behind their decisions — in order to maintain the "integrity" of the Reality Show concept — and no potential judges he approached were willing to do this. (Partly because of the awareness that Dawson and other YouTubers' fanbases have a tendency to harass critics to extreme degrees when their idols get called out, which just indicates why picking someone like Dawson was a bad idea to begin with.)
  • Zachary Quinto, in hindsight, expresses extreme regret that he didn't come into the show until Moore had already brought Shane Dawson in as one of the filmmakers, and that Moore apparently differs from him in what minimum standards of quality and good taste a contest like this requires. As pointed out on the main page, while this show did have a long tail of people hatewatching it because of Dawson being a controversial figure, there are hundreds of other YouTubers — many of them who could've used the career boost much more than him — who could've given us a look at "nontraditional", "New Media" filmmaking that didn't revolve around trying to get away with as much Vulgar Humor as possible.
  • Dan Schoffer's How Soon Is Now screenplay was for a very different movie than either Not Cool or Hollidaysburg, being a fairly light, inoffensive romcom without either Shane Dawson's trademark wall-to-wall grossout humor or Anna Martemucci's melancholy, philosophical tone. It's not Shakespeare — which is probably why it languished so long in Development Hell and eventually drove Schoffer to sell it for this show — but now a movie matching Schoffer's original vision will never be made. It's a common story in Hollywood for screenwriters, but one that's obviously particularly upsetting for Schoffer, who had to watch his work being chopped up and remixed on TV (and who hasn't sold any screenplays since).