member of the team we’d begun to assemble at Article 15 were getting these types of messages on a nearly daily basis. (I still get at least one per week, and I’m boring as fuck now.) It was flattering, and it was yet another indication that we were on to something in the name of good, but more than that it was the spark for two more ideas: If all these people wish they could drink and hang out with us, why don’t we start a whiskey company and do a podcast? So eventually we did.
The whiskey company we called Leadslingers Spirits. The podcast we called Drinkin’ Bros. Both are amazing, but only one was really a good idea. I won’t say which, but word to the wise: If you hate having a fun, profitable, relatively frictionless professional life, the heavily regulated whiskey trade is the perfect business to get into. Brown liquor is great because it fucks you up nice and good. The whiskey business is awful because it fucks you up the butt without any lube and blames you for bleeding on its sheets. In contrast, for the one-hundredth episode of Drinkin’ Bros we had two people have sex in front of us and we commentated it like a UFC fight. I’ll leave it to you to choose which of these experiences you would prefer to be a part of.
In the middle of all this growth and entrepreneurial experimentation, we had our craziest idea yet. When I was overseas, we had this group chat on Facebook Messenger that we called “Kinetic Kill” where we bullshitted and brainstormed the way any company with a distributed workforce might. One night, we were kicking around sketch ideas when Jarred threw out something way more radical than a sketch concept: “Dude, we should make a fucking movie.”
Okay, bro, yeah, we’ll just make a movie. What the fuck are you talking about? Movies aren’t sketches. They’ve got stories and actors. You need grips and shit. Movies cost a lot of money, even the low-budget ones. But the more Jarred talked and the more other guys on the chat chimed in, the more possible the idea seemed. More than a few fans had asked us to do something longer-form in the video space. There was definitely demand. And we could crowdfund it, just to be doubly sure that the demand was big enough. If only our moms donated to the campaign, we’d know it wasn’t real. If we got close enough to our initial goal fairly quickly, then we’d know that success was really just a matter of getting the word out.
Pretty quickly we came to a consensus around an idea: It would be part comedy, part war epic, part zombie movie. The general gist was a group of buddies in the military save the world from a zombie apocalypse by bringing to bear all of their military training. Basically, it would be every military person’s dream of slaying bodies in the name of survival (not that ISIS and zombies are too far apart in their thinking).
I floated the idea to the twenty or so American ███████████████ I was working with overseas at the time who knew what I did on the side. They lost their minds. It was like Santa had come on the 4th of July with a bag full of guns and a team of Victoria’s Secret elves intent on giving up their secret. For America, obviously. The support from my ██████████████████████ was unequivocal, and their feedback followed the same general pattern, like a military Mad Libs:
Bro, that is so fucking [amazing/awesome/ridiculous/cool]. You know what you absolutely HAVE to do? [INSERT grotesque kill or necrophilia sequence]. Dude, can I be in your movie? Just like as an extra or whatever. You don’t have to pay me. I’ll bring my [INSERT frighteningly large private weapons cache].
Okay, so this was definitely the craziest idea we’d ever had, but I was at least convinced now that it wasn’t the stupidest. If we built it, they would come. Also, they would watch it.
Just as quickly as the idea came together, so did everything else. We partnered with another military-themed clothing company, Ranger Up, to produce the film and create the Indiegogo campaign. We hired Ross Patterson as writer-director and worked with him on the script, kicking around the most offensive jokes possible and the most elaborate kill sequences we knew we could pull off, oftentimes over Messenger from thousands of miles away while I