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 Iʼm 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 wasnʼt 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 Jayʼs 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 Shelleyʼs 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 didnʼt 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.

“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 Sussmanʼs 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?

“Hustler 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 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. Iʼm not sure if he believed me. I still have the handcuffs, the pink and black leather whip, and the size 9 knee-high boots, so I hope my next girlfriend is kinky.