The MoviePass Tell-All
Or the reason why I have trust issues…
[Originally published on April 29, 2020]
In the 2 years I worked at MoviePass I made some of the best friends I’ll ever have. Shelby and I know each other through her boyfriend, Zack, who I worked with at MoviePass and consider one of my closest friends. I also met people I thought were my friends, but weren’t. I would do it all over, the drinking problem, the depression, all of it, just to meet these people again. I am so happy that I now get to watch them live and grow and see who they become. I just wanted to preface the rest of this piece with that because it’s going to sound like everything was terrible, and it was, but I got to meet some incredible human beings. So this piece is dedicated to Ally, Zack, Stephen, Madison, and Ryan.
In 2017, I began working for this little tech start-up called MoviePass. I was already a huge fan, having been a subscriber since 2012. After 9 months at a job I hated, I was thrilled to be moving on to my dream company. When I started there were maybe 12 employees. I was in customer service, answering emails, chats, and calls from some of our 15k subscribers. My co-workers were great, my job was enjoyable, and everything seemed to be on the up and up for the company. I felt like I was on the ground floor of something super special and I wasn’t wrong.
That summer we dropped the price of our subscription service to $9.99. For ten dollars a month you could go see a movie, in theaters, once every single day. Now, that sounds really dumb, right? You’re thinking, what’s the catch? How do you make money? There was no catch. We were really just that dumb. In a matter of weeks, we became the fastest-growing subscription service, surpassing Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu.
The saga of MoviePass has been well documented. I mean, if you don’t know, you can just google MoviePass, and thousands of articles will come up chronicling the rise and decline of this promising startup. There was even a journalist at Business Insider dedicated to documenting every shitty thing we did to customers. Chief executives at the company hated him. Some employees felt like he was beating a dead horse or like he had nothing better to do except stalk us. I felt like they were just mad that he was right.
The downfall started the moment we dropped the price, but it didn’t really become clear to me, and those around me, until the following summer when Mission Impossible: Fallout was suddenly unavailable in the app despite heavy marketing to our customers that they should see it opening weekend. I cannot confirm or deny if this was done on purpose, but it only got worse from there. I could go on and on about the shitty and likely illegal business that went on during my time at MoviePass, but I signed an NDA.
What I want to talk about is the personal toll this job took on me and that personal toll it took on me was deeply, deeply traumatic and affects me to this day. When I started my job at MoviePass, I’d like to think I was a self-assured, relatively confident, and free person. Today, I don’t think I am any of those things and I think my experience at MoviePass is a major factor in that.
I left my job at MoviePass and March of 2019, shortly after my 2 year anniversary. In reality, I hadn’t been present at the job in 6 months. Shortly after being promoted into marketing (my second promotion during my tenure), the department fell apart. The 5 person team shrank to 2 in a matter of weeks as 2 senior members of the team gave their notice and 1 went on short-term disability. This left 2 entry-level coordinators to run the department with little support from management. A contracted CMO was hired in October. He was a personal friend of Ahmad*, Executive Vice President of the company, from their boarding school days. He also had no experience with in-house marketing or technology or start-ups. He undermined and discredited me and my co-worker every step of the way, continuously talking down to and mansplaining to us.
This was around the time that an unofficial club formed within the company: Monday Madness. Although named for an after-hours party that happened on a Monday, the excessive and borderline dangerous partying happened most nights of the week. The catalyst being a company-sponsored event at a Times Square bowling alley that ended with Ted Farnsworth (CEO of MoviePass parent company HMNY) throwing down his AmEx Black Card at a sports bar and us partying until the morning. I did my first, second, and third Irish Car Bomb that night. I also slept with the Chief of Staff, but I don’t remember it. He later blocked me on Instagram for suspecting I was the company “mole”. I wasn’t, but I commend the person who was. To this day I have no idea what happened after 11 pm that night. This past spring he LinkedIn messaged me to try and do business with my job at the time. All class right there.
This party was the kick-off for a blurry 6 months. This was around the time that Sam died and that combination was enough for me to dive headfirst into a pretty serious drinking problem. I’d spend 4 nights a week drinking heavily, most of the time starting at 4 pm (or earlier), with my MoviePass co-workers. Most of this time is a blur of alcohol and karaoke. The week of Christmas 2018 we began working from home and I don’t really think I ever went back to work. We worked from home the last 2 weeks of the year, I went to Israel for the first 2 weeks of the year, then my CMO went to Sundance for the last 2 weeks of January. I didn’t see him for 6 weeks. He was completely inept and absent from there on out. I didn’t have anything to do so I stopped going to work, or I’d go in for an hour before heading out for Monday Madness.
On a Thursday in late February, I was given the heads-up by Derek*, SVP of Operations, and generally incompetent person (weirdly another personal friend of Ahmad), that I would be let go the following Tuesday. He and Ahmad would also be giving their notice. I thought I’d be scared, but I was relieved. FINALLY. I had a decent severance and I could wash my hands of this toxic place. Anyone with any brains had been fired for being “detractors” and those that were left were morally corrupt executives with dollar signs for eyes. I spent the weekend partying (shocker) upstate with some co-workers and Monday morning I had no plan to come in. Unfortunately, I got a text from Derek saying the “press” had gotten wind that all of LA had been laid off and they were halting all layoffs in New York. Sigh. Dreams of a MoviePass free world shattered, I continued not going to work.
Luckily, I only had to fake it for another month. I received a job offer and quite literally sobbed with relief at the thought of being free from this job. The weirdest feeling is knowing you have to tell someone you are quitting and quite literally not knowing who you are supposed to tell. HR was fired for not being “necessary”. I didn’t have any kind of manager. I reported directly to a contracted employee (who was reportedly being paid 30k a month to do literally nothing btw). With a loss for what to do, I had to FaceTime my “boss”, the contracted CMO, to tell him I was quitting and I drafted an email to Michael* that I am not altogether sure I received an answer to. It was done.
What I didn’t expect from leaving that job was the lasting mental and emotional effects this job would have on me. Starting a new job, I was constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough or doing enough. I’d make what I would now consider a small mistake and I would die inside. The thing about leaving a dysfunctional work environment and entering into a new and healthy environment is that you no longer understand the line between what’s normal and what isn’t. All of your norms are thrown off. To this day, I feel like I have no idea when I am doing well or when I need to do better.
What I want the takeaway to be for each of you is if you feel like you are in a toxic workplace, you are worth more than you feel right now. You do not have to stay there. I stayed way too long because I had a lack of boundaries between my work life and my personal life. Leaving MoviePass meant leaving life as I knew it. I should have valued myself more because I really deserved better than the way I was being treated. I should have spoken up when I saw me and other female coworkers being passed over in every sense while male voices were lifted up and applauded at every level. That job is not worth it. MoviePass was not worth the time, energy, and care I poured into it.
I’d do it again just to meet these incredible friends, but hindsight is 20/20. I would have quit the first time I wanted to. I wouldn’t have let myself be lied to. I wouldn’t have let myself be walked all over or talked down to and you shouldn’t either.
*names have been changed.
