"Greg Got Fired"

Greg just got fired. It wasn’t his dream job, but it paid the bills.

However, in getting let go, Greg will realize how much his job truly meant to him.

A different kind of young adult story, this is a film about the purgatory years of being 23 to 26 years old on a dying, increasingly corporatized planet.

Greg Got Fired is about what “work” truly means in the digital age, the contentious relationship between material success and true fulfillment. _____

Greg Got Fired started with our writer Max getting uh...ya know...fired.

Channeling that shame into writing, the first draft of the script was completed in the summer of 2019.

After several years in LA trying (and mostly failing) to get stuff made, Max wrote the script to be producible by a team of friends from college, on the cheap. Specifically, the character of Greg was written for actor Ari Golin. Soon after Ari agreed to star, Jake Orlin came on to produce. From there we assembled an entire crew and were set to shoot early April 2020.

Obviously that didn’t work out.

But a year later, we decided to lick our wounds and try again.

We were fortunate enough to bring on The Reggies - a directing duo made up of Clay Driske and Jake Herman - who’ve shot for the likes of Mountain Dew, The Hundreds, Red Bull, Megan Trainer, Diplo, and Young Thug (amongst others). We put together an incredible group of tireless strangers and trusted old collaborators alike - all of whom are now cherished friends - and in a marathon 4 day shoot, we shot the film.

_____

We shot a lot of this movie out of pocket and candidly we’d like to get some of that money back. Lol. We also need to get the film edited, scored, and color corrected.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve seen many a GoFundMe in your day.

You’ve likely funded something by someone involved in this short.

This film is not important. We’re not going to sit here and call our tiny movie essential.

Surely, the world would keep turning even without another short film by a bunch of young filmmakers in LA.

What we will say is this was most of our first time back on set post-quarantine.

The energy making this short was unlike anything most of us had ever experienced.

Everyone was kind, respectful, and truly collaborative. We were all just happy to be on our feet making something we cared about but moreover...after a year of isolation, out of nowhere, everyone on our little set was making new friends. It felt like the first day of school, where nerves subside to make way for genuine excitement for the future.

This got a little schmaltzy but to be honest making Greg was pretty corny.

It was a lot of hugging and applauding, a lot of numbers exchanged and sincere “i’ll see you soons.” There was gratitude in the air. It is genuinely bizarre to see your friends grow as artists over the course of a few days, but that just might be what occurred here.

In that vein, a lot of us have made shorts before. And in doing so, we’ve made mistakes, gone over budget, forgot to charge the camera battery. We’ve learned. And now, with Greg Got Fired, we can recognize when a project has real potential.

Your contributions will help get us into festivals. Your help will allow us to see what all those years of collective trying and failing were worth. Greg Got Fired is the culmination of the purgatory period in a lot of our lives. We’re ready for the bigger stage.

We want to invite more people onto this film's journey. New friends and old.

We want to keep this energy going.

We appreciate your time reading this and we appreciate your help in honoring our crew by making Greg Got Fired the best it can possibly be.