In mid-2015 I was suffering from a crisis of success…rather, a crisis of lacking success. I had been in Hollywood for nine years working to achieve success in the industry and I felt like I had finally made it. I made a well-received first feature film for $6000 and been hired to direct my first real professional project: a series for Hulu. It had a real (though still small) budget, the project already had distribution on a major digital network and I was sure this was going to help launch me into the next phase of my career. I threw myself into it. I moved to Miami for seven months, I sacrificed more than I will publicly admit, and I wrapped the project feeling satisfied that I had met its demands and would be rewarded for it.
To be clear, I didn’t think I would suddenly become the next big thing, but I did think it would lead to more work and better projects and that, surely, I would be propelled upward. After all, sizable digital series with distribution on Hulu should mean something and I was confident the project, with so much invested in it, would be backed by solid marketing.
But in the summer of 2015, the show was released to so little fanfare or attention that it was as if it had never been released at all. Zero marketing was invested in it. No one reviewed it (which turned out to be a blessing in disguise), no one was talking about it, no one watched it and I found myself in pretty much the exact same position I was before I made the series. I had spent seven months away from my wife and son, from my home in LA, from working on other projects and the response was worse than bad, it was non-existent.
It felt like another failure after a string of so many. So many projects that I felt would lead to something, anything! and were instead DOA and never got much beyond me sharing them on YouTube and hoping someone would watch it. As a result, I was in a place of really questioning what the hell it was I was doing.