I got a phone call in 2010 from Tony Yacenda, a filmmaker buddy of mine, who wanted to produce a fake documentary about a delusional director. The project would involve making terrible films with a real cast and crew over 3 years to edit a believable documentary out of the behind-the-scenes footage. He said that he wanted me to play the lead and that we’d call him Jay Calvin.

We started by making Jay’s first short film, Jamie Crossroads. We hired real actors, and created a fake twitter handle and email address to convince people that Jay was a real person. We wrote a terrible movie about a kid who stands up to bullies to defend his cousin who has Asperger’s Syndrome. We told everyone that Jay had been studying Asperger’s for weeks, but he insisted on playing the part dressed like Rainman and came to set acting mentally disabled. Everyone took us at our word, no one asked questions.

I was spending weeks living as Jay, speaking like him, interacting with strangers like him, and Tony even had me perform stand-up comedy as Jay, wanting to see me bomb in front of a group of people with no safety net to ensure that the process would work. One week later, we hired a crew to make Jay’s second film, The Park Bench, and Tony filmed everything.

Tony had been making viral videos with Dan Perrault and PJ McCabe for years and they were brought in as production conspirators, helping to write and act alongside me in this social experiment. But only the four of us were in on the secret, everyone else gave genuine reactions because they had no idea what was really going on.

We purposely ruined Jay’s movies. We had him complain constantly on set. I kept saying that the footage didn’t feel “real” enough and insisted on pointless exercises from the camera team and requested peculiar performances from the actors. I got a nosebleed and we called off the production for twenty minutes so people would have to stare at Jay writhing around on the ground.

I felt so guilty before shooting, like we were going to be making fun of people that didn’t know any better. Tony kept having to assure me that everyone on the production would be well paid, that it wasn’t a “prank movie”, and that people would have an overall positive experience. I started to lose myself a little. I began to feel what I’ve heard that some dictators feel, that once you’ve reached the limits of your power you drive yourself further, just to know how terrible you can be. I yelled at Dan in public, openly took credit for his work on set, and shook him violently when he couldn’t get the birds to be quiet. No one said a thing, everyone just looked away. It was our own little Milgram Experiment, except I was the monster.

We were shooting in the backyard when the sprinklers went off around us. Everyone panicked and covered the gear. When everything settled, one of the actors turned to me and whispered, “For a second there, I thought I was being pranked”, and I had to look him in the eyes and say, “Me too.”

We finished The Park Bench and released it online and only twenty people saw it. So we started posting it to blogs like Reddit and it instantly got traction from people who made fun of it, convinced that it was real. Oddly, after sharing Jay’s films with the production teams, many of them complimented the movies, and the actors have since requested to be considered for Jay’s future work. This seems to be an epidemic in the art world. Everyone that we encountered had such a hard time confessing to Jay that his work was terrible, preferring non-confrontation even at the risk of having their names attached to this work or allowing Jay to continue wasting his time and money on something that was destined to fail.

The movies were having lives of their own online, and all the while we were editing Tony’s film and submitting it to festivals. It was 2013 by now and I had just published a popular article with Ted Hope about the slim odds of succeeding in the the film industry (we based the character Jeff King off of Ted, in case the glasses and pragmatism didn’t give it away). Ted has spent the last two decades identifying the obstacles that filmmakers face and working toward their solutions. His support opened the floodgates to us to hundreds of filmmakers that reached out who were also considering the real problems with the film industry.

Eleven days ago, This is Jay Calvin closed the LA Comedy Shorts Film Festival in front of a theater of short filmmakers. When it ended we were swarmed by people that couldn’t wait to tell us “I know that guy”, or “I can’t believe you did that”, or “I just kept thinking, ‘Oh God, is that me?’”

This question has stuck with me and I think it’s important to consider. When our culture selects its whipping boys (Rebecca Black, Reality TV stars, even George W. Bush to an extent) it’s enlightening to realize how close we are to these people, that they probably share the same dreams and desires that we do, and that their only flaw is their occasional lack of eloquence. This culture of making fun of people stems from our desires to imagine that we are better than them and we’re not. Tony and I set out to make a movie about not judging a book by it’s cover and so did Jay Calvin. This process has taught me how easy it can be to dismiss people for their personalities, and how hard it is to swallow that they don’t choose how they seem, and that neither do we.