From YouTube to reality TV to empty theaters case file #74: Not Cool

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.
YouTube has been a ubiquitous, massively influential cultural force for a good decade, yet its homegrown superstars remain confined to a pop-culture ghetto. Teenagers and tweens worship the format’s cute, accessible Justin Bieber clones who have earned a vast fortune making goofy comedy videos and makeup tutorials and drunken cooking shows and other assorted online ephemera. Yet the entertainment establishment still seems to view the whole scene as a dumb fad.
It does not help that some of YouTube’s biggest stars are best known for being irritating, like Lucas Cruikshank’s screechingly obnoxious Fred Figglehorn, who was sadistically gifted his own film trilogy, which skipped theaters in the United States. Other movies starring YouTube gods have similarly been released quietly to fans via home video and online streaming. The whole movement still lacks a breakout movie that would prove to Hollywood that YouTube superstars are more than just a way for 11-year-olds to waste time.
The riveting 2014 Starz reality competition The Chair consequently constituted two experiments. On one level, the show was about what happens when the same screenplay—in this case a coming-of-age romantic comedy—is given to two very different filmmakers to make a movie with many of the same producers in the same city. The filmmakers are Anna Martemucci, an adorably neurotic independent filmmaker, and Shane Dawson, a controversial YouTube superstar with 10 million followers as well as an unfortunate love of racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes. On another level, The Chair was about whether a man who has achieved astonishing success with homemade videos can transition to making movies for a general audience. Can a YouTube star become a real filmmaker?
There’s a moment late in The Chair that indelibly captures the curious professional state Dawson is in. He travels to VidCon, the big festival for YouTube superstars and their most obsessive fans. He poses for photos with a pained, forced smile while 12-year-old girls who grew up on his work weep, overwhelmed by being in the presence of their hero. Yet as he reflects on camera, the minute the convention ends, he’s thrust back into a world where most people have no idea who he is.
Dawson seizes upon The Chair as an opportunity to prove himself to the Hollywood establishment. It was intended as a springboard to a film career as a director and a star. The upside and the downside were both huge. Dawson wouldn’t just be judged on the movie that he made. He’d also be judged on how he conducted himself on set, how he interacted with collaborators, and how he handled being the star of a reality competition. The show doubled as an involved, onscreen audition for any future work.
Every possibly humanizing moment Dawson experiences on The Chair happens in front of a camera. He emerges as a moody man-child who rages and pouts with bratty indignation when the Pittsburgh acting community doesn’t rush to fill roles in his debut because it contains elements like feces-eating and glory holes. Dawson is told that some of the film’s content is offensive to everyone, but he fights for the film to retain its poop-eating with a solemn seriousness. He seems to have an iPhone where his soul should be.
Dawson’s resulting film, Not Cool, has the distinction of being one of only a handful of films awarded a single point on Metacritic. That one point is on a 0-to-100 scale, so the only other films to have scored so low include all-time-worst dreck like Inappropriate Comedy, Bio-Dome, and The Human Centipede III.