Amy Alyson Fans
Below is a trailer for Amy Alyson Fans, director Jonathan L. Bowen’s first feature film.
SYNPOSIS
Jay (Brendan Bradley) and Amy (Cooper Harris) had similar dreams when moving to Hollywood together — to make a name for themselves as actors. While Amy is living her dream of becoming a working actress and watching her career rise with each project, Jay has no momentum and no career. Stuck with a stack of unpaid bills, student loans, and credit card debt, Jay takes a hint from a guy he met at a party and starts an unofficial fan site for Amy to capitalize on her rising stardom. Uncomfortable with what heʼs doing, Jay hides the truth from Amy, planning to shut the site down once he pays off his bills. He enlists his best friend, Pete (Josh Sussman), to help with the site by taking candid photographs of her when she is around town, allowing Jay to scoop every other gossip site with the best photos.
While Jay delves deeper into the online world of social networking and celebrity blogging, he discovers a hidden talent he never knew he possessed, which leads to unintended but welcome consequences. Instead of just profiting from Amyʼs career, Jayʼs fan site propels her career to new heights, creating an online fan base for her that surpasses most actresses of her stature. Amy, at first disgusted by the fan site, starts to appreciate its power to help her, even while having no idea Jay is involved. Their relationship starts to suffer, however, because Amy, unaccustomed to her newfound fame, has trouble balancing her personal life and professional life, quickly becoming consumed with her image and rising stardom. Meanwhile, another hot-shot young actor, Kevin, becomes interested in Amy and tries to cross the friendship boundary.
Jay, feeling the growing pressure of the lie he has created and now debt-free, wants to shut down the site but he has created a monster he cannot kill. Pete reminds him that if he ceases to run the site, someone else will create a new one to take its place because Amy is now a significant Hollywood presence. Jay decides he has no choice but to continue running the site because he alone can be the online guardian angel for Amyʼs career. While Amyʼs agent, Erik (Lochlyn Munro), has no respect for Jay, little does he know that Jayʼs power behind the scenes outstrips Erikʼs power at the negotiating table. Embracing his newfound power and position as the behind-the-scenes publicist for Amy, Jay briefly believes his relationship with her could not be any better. He sees her happy and successful, knowing that he played a large role in her stardom, and she settles into her fame and her new house with Jay. Their happiness does not last, however; Amy comes home early one day, discovers his secret, and assumes the worst, kicking him out of the house and ending their relationship.
Jay has to live with Pete, while still running the site, but Amyʼs career takes a disastrous turn when her new film receives terrible reviews and bombs commercially. Feeling her world crumble around her, Amy falls into a fit of depression, publicly embarrassing herself during a national television appearance. Her career in shambles, Amy falls off the Hollywood radar, leaving Jayʼs site to crumble along with her career. Just when Jay thinks he has hit a new personal low, he is arrested for forgery charges stemming from his site and the numerous signed photos he sent to fans. Amy reluctantly bails him out, but is still distraught and feels betrayed. Jay, in a moment of inspiration, suggests creating a fake sex tape between the two, rekindling interest in her career online and with her once-vibrant male fan base. He then suggests pulling the non-existent tape off the market, but not before fielding acting offers that revive her career, give Jay a shot as an actor, and give both him and Amy a chance to rediscover the love that made their relationship strong before the glamour of Hollywood lured them from their small-town roots.
Director’s Statement
In high school and the early part of college, I ran several celebrity fan sites, one for Jennifer Love Hewitt and another for Vin Diesel. I was connected to the Internet advertising world and also ran a network of other revenue-generating sites, so I had a strong background in running sites and understanding how to monetize them. I also had several friends in the celebrity Website community so I understood the challenges and potential of such sites. While hanging out at a film festival awards party, I just had a random thought about an actor-actress couple: What if her career was taking off, his was going nowhere, and he started a fan site about her behind her back?
The core of the idea was there from that point forward, but it changed drastically over the coming months. I started with a seven-page short film script called “Ice Queen Amy,” where the actress was a completely unlikeable character and nobody would feel sorry for her, giving the audience a rooting interest in the fan site, which she discovers almost immediately. My lead actor and friend, Brendan Bradley, read the short script and told me simply to play around with it more and that I’m not done writing yet. I took that as an invitation to see where the writing took me. After it ballooned to thirteen pages, I was unhappy with the character development still — Amy wasn’t sympathetic enough — and decided it had to be a feature film script.
What I wanted to do with Amy Alyson Fans is make it a story of a lie growing bigger and bigger, gradually spinning out of control, and creating increasingly awkward (and funny) situations. The biggest inspiration for that plot thread is a film like Simone, written and directed masterfully by Andrew Niccol. In the film, Simone is much like Jay’s fansite, a lie that starts out to solve a temporary issue, merely a bandaid. Jay eventually realizes he cannot kill AmyAlysonFans.com because it has become bigger than just him; she is an Internet sensation. Likewise, Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) tries to kill Simone in the film, but nobody believes she is just a computer simulation, so he is charged with murder until he revives her. Both men, Jay and Viktor, create something in the digital realm that gives them immediate and desirable benefits, but have permanent consequences. The theme of a man losing control over his creation goes far back, with one of the most obvious examples being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
A lot of the comedic value of Amy Alyson Fans comes from dramatic irony, specifically that the audience knows what Amy only finds out late in the film. To both Amy and Jay, the events are not funny, because the stakes are high, but Pete is able to laugh at the situation and represent the audience perspective. He has a front-seat view of the impending train wreck. One of the biggest challenges, though, was to make Jay a sympathetic character, a flawed character who makes mistakes but for the right reasons and has his heart in the right place. I didn’t want him to come across as a creep, where you immediately lose the female audience especially, so I had to show that while he started the site for the money, he continued it because of his love for Amy.
Huster Hollywood for Props
After editing together a rough version of the film, we realized that having Jay stare at the computer monitor and talk about the dominatrix scene while on the phone with Pete was just not cinematically compelling. Furthermore, audiences would want to see the scene and instead be left wondering about it. We knew we had to do a pickup day where we filmed the dominatrix scene, but with limited funding and just a few people to help on the crew, I had to put it all together. Our actress, Cooper Harris, agreed to find suitable clothing, but that left me in charge of finding pink handcuffs, a whip, and knee-high dominatrix boots. Because it was October, I tried a few Halloween-themed stores, but nobody had what I needed. Finally, I realized Hustler Hollywood had everything I needed, so I had to drive there and buy these three random items and explain to the guy that we were shooting a romantic comedy scene and they were props. I’m not sure if he believed me. I still have the handcuffs, the pink and black leather whip, and the size 9 knee-high boots as mementos from a truly bizarre shopping trip.
Playing Video Games on Set
We had cleared Gears of War 2, one of my favorite video games for the XBox 360, to use in the film several times. I have spent countless hours playing both online and with friends, but I never realized my skills would be useful for anything in the real world. When we were preparing to shoot the scene where Pete is playing the game while talking to Jay on the phone, Josh Sussman tells me he never plays video games and has no clue how to play. I looked around at the crew and asked if anyone knew how to play, but there was silence. Pete needed to be good at the game, because his character is a die-hard gamer, so I decided to be Josh Sussman’s video game double. Who knew directing could be so much fun and that hundreds of hours playing Gears of War 2 would come in handy professionally?