I’ve always had a camera in my hand since I was 11 years old. Me and my friends would film pretend wrestling because we thought we were like Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart, and then we pretended to re-do Mad TV skits. We started making our own skits, trying to make our own movies and all that stuff. When I was 20 years old, turning 21, I ran for mayor of Haddon Heights, my town. Because of that, I started doing a lot of the local radio stations. I went on 94.1’s Loud and Local, and they thought I was funny because I was dressing in a suit, and all my friends dressed up as bodyguards—they were "Tommy’s Angels." They asked me to join what was called the "Extreme Team," which was their promotional team that went to different bars to set up banners and stuff like that. At the time, I was also doing karaoke where I would scream children's songs. A CBS morning show station in Texas liked that and would play them. Eventually, they came here, so I worked on their afternoon show and then eventually their morning show. When they got let go, the station wanted to keep hiring me. I stayed on to do video content for the radio, and that's where I met my wife. I didn't necessarily like the job, but I had an email that ended in "@CBSRadio" or "CBS Philadelphia." When I was trying to make movies, I would email people from that CBS email so I seemed official. I started making movies because of that, and eventually, I got laid off. And then I just made the movie thing my full-time thing. I've been doing that for about 11 years or so, getting into documentaries.
I love Fuddruckers; Fuddruckers is everything. There used to be a Fuddruckers in Voorhees, NJ that I would go to all the time, and one in Turnersville. They eventually closed and I was very upset about that. Then I started traveling when making movies and realized there are Fuddruckers in other locations. Whenever we would go to Detroit, Texas, or any different spot for filming for the documentaries I was doing, we would find a Fuddruckers. In doing so, I've been to 37 different Fuddruckers locations! So much so that the president or CEO has acknowledged me as the number one Fuddruckers fan. They opened up a new place in Washington, D.C., and they invited me to the opener. We were also filming in Albuquerque for two days, and there's three Fuddruckers there—we went to all three in the two days.
I have a video store in my basement. I used to work at Watchdog Video in New Jersey because I was a huge Clerks fan. I would lock it up, walk down and get pizza; it was great. When that went under, I got a lot of their racks and some of their old VHS tapes. When we moved back to New Jersey from LA, I tried to decorate the basement to look like my own Watchdog Video scenario. I even have sections of movies, like summer movies, a Richard Linklater collection, a Kevin Smith collection, a Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig collection, but also sections like "Movies About Bank Robbing" or "TV Stars That Wanted to Go Crazy". I also have a section called "I'm So Famous I Need to Be in a Movie," which has Kid 'n Play (Class Act) or Cheech & Chong movies—someone who was so big they just put them in movies.
My first group of CDs were Green Day's Dookie , the Batman Forever soundtrack, and the Hulk Hogan album. If you remember, when Hulk Hogan went into WCW, he put out an album with Jimmy "Muscle" South Heart, and the music is unbelievable. So those were my three first CDs I ever bought. I might have had cassettes before that, like WrestleMania: The Album, or my dad had Quiet Riot or Mike + The Mechanics, but those were the first three CDs I ever owned.
I guess it's two things. When I first started making documentaries back in 2012, docs weren't as big as they are now. But Barry Blaustein was one of my favorites. He did "Beyond the Mat," wrote for Saturday Night Live, did a lot of the Eddie Murphy stuff, "Coming to America," and "The Nutty Professor." He was a big writer, but he did "Beyond the Mat," which is this great wrestling documentary. We were doing "I Am Santa Claus" at the time, which featured Mick Foley. It was very much like we were doing "Beyond the Mat" but with Santas. I remember at the time, I was nervous that Mick Foley wasn't fully into the project. Barry taught me: "You have to realize what's important to you is maybe not the most important thing to someone else." They are saying yes and they are willing to do it, but it's not the thing they wake up thinking about in the middle of the night or in the morning. You have to understand and respect that. The second piece of advice also came when I was doing "I Am Santa Claus." There were a lot of different Santa Claus documentaries being made, and a lot of their takes were about the made-up character of Santa. When we were talking to the Santas, they constantly wanted to talk about Santa. I realized I didn't necessarily care about Santa; I cared about them as people. The way someone boiled it down to me was: "A caterpillar is not interesting. But the person who is obsessed with the caterpillar is very interesting." So that's the way we sort of approached it. It's not the what, it's the why that's always interesting.
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