HAVING YOUR SHORT film premiere at Sundance is incredibly exciting, but there is nothing quite like the moment when they call and tell you that your first feature film has been accepted. In November 2004, Jay and I got the call from a friend that we’d barely squeaked into the festival lineup with The Puffy Chair. We later learned that the head programmer at the time thought the film sucked but that all the younger programmers really liked it and pushed us through.

This is when our careers really started.

A feature film is something that can save you from being broke as shit. Which is what we were at the time and what we were looking to not be anymore. The previous Sundance had seen the $4 million sale of a small film called Napoleon Dynamite. Since we had made The Puffy Chair for $10,000 with a loan from our parents, we couldn’t help but wonder: “What if we are the breakout hit of Sundance? Is it possible that someone is going to buy our film for a multimillion-dollar price tag?” Stranger things had happened, so we both went in with cautious optimism and fairly intense cases of diarrhea.

In a random act of programming cruelty, our film wouldn’t premiere until an entire week after the festival began. So we waited. Impatiently. As other films popped and got bought. And others fizzled and disappeared. It was torture, but finally our premiere came on a Wednesday night at the Library Center Theatre (now our favorite theater in Park City). We tribed up with our parents and Katie in the middle of the sold-out crowd and waited anxiously to see if we got that first laugh. We knew that if we didn’t get it, it meant the audience wasn’t going to like our film and we’d be in for a long ninety minutes. Then something crazy happened…they laughed before the first laugh in the film. At something super subtle and nuanced. We all looked at one another and burst into tears. And watched as our movie played through the roof. Our Q&A session was a total lovefest. Buyers, agents, managers, producers, and studio executives were all swarming us and the film’s sales agents. It was the moment we had been waiting for. It was utterly surreal. We could feel it. We were going to be the breakout movie!

And then…things slowed down a bit. Everyone certainly loved the movie, but there was some hesitation on the part of buyers to purchase a film that had “no big stars and a rather rough-hewn production value.” In many ways, it seemed that everyone wanted to finance our next movie, but they were having trouble pulling the trigger on the movie that they so adamantly claimed they were in love with.

So the festival ended. And still the movie hadn’t sold. But this wasn’t an anomaly. Sometimes it took a bit of time to find the right buyer. Our sales agents kept assuring us that it would all work out eventually, but one by one all the big buyers were passing, and soon we were hoping for any paycheck, let alone a multimillion-dollar sale.

In the meantime, Katie and I (who both starred in the film) decided to go to Los Angeles for a few months to ride the wave of the film’s critical popularity. Jay would go back to New York, where we were all living at the time, and take all the East Coast meetings. This was an early example of what would become our “divide and conquer” approach, which we have since mastered. Sort of.

It turned out that most of the business happens in L.A. (go figure), so Jay spent a ton of time flying out there, sleeping on Katie’s and my couch, and taking rounds of meetings all over Los Angeles with me. And everywhere we went the message was the same: “We LOVED The Puffy Chair. What’s your next movie? We want to make it!” It all seemed so simple. We had literally hundreds of options of producers and studios who all seemed to be clamoring to make our next film.

During this time, we were also traveling to film festivals around the world in support of The Puffy Chair. And while those festivals would pay for our travel, put us up, and feed us, we certainly weren’t making any money, and we had yet to pay back our parents’ $10,000 loan for the movie. In short, we seemed to be in demand, but we couldn’t figure out how to actually make money.

So we started pitching new movie ideas. And we took a TV show idea around town that was about my life in bands. All the TV studios who’d said, “We want your next project,” rejected it. As it turned out, they didn’t want our next project, they just wanted the option to buy our next project. Which meant that we would pitch them an idea, they would turn it down, and they would then ask to buy our next one after that. Rinse and repeat. We also were approached to rewrite some of the studios’ broken scripts that they had in their back catalogue and were looking to breathe new life into. To bring that “honest, raw, emotional comedy” to it that we had put into The Puffy Chair. Great! We’ll do that! So we took their broken scripts and made pitches to deepen them. Make them, ideally, more true and honest. Those pitches were also rejected. As most of those pitches involved losing the very ridiculous set pieces that were making the scripts broken in the first place. It seems they were all for emotional honesty, as long as we didn’t get rid of the “diarrhea out the fourth-floor window” set piece.

Meanwhile, almost all of the buyers had passed on The Puffy Chair by now, and six months had elapsed since Sundance. It was starting to look like an old film that no one wanted to buy. We weren’t able to get any jobs in L.A. And all the noise around us was starting to quiet.

So we started to panic. I, in particular, became afraid that if we didn’t act quickly we would lose our momentum. We both were looking to build a normal life with our girlfriends. Get married. Find a way to make money. And it all seemed to be slipping away.

Then, in late fall 2005, we finally got a legitimate offer on The Puffy Chair. And it was good, $150,000. It included a TV sale and a nice DVD release. But it wouldn’t go into theaters. Our sales agent and good friend Liesl Copland presented it to us, and without blinking we both said, “WE’LL TAKE IT.” But she urged us to pause. She did have one more offer for us to consider. It was a combined offer for a small (at the time) but reputable theatrical company called Roadside Attractions and a new digital-space pioneer called Netflix that was renting DVDs through the mail. This offer would take our movie into theaters, get it reviewed, and give us a chance as directors to really pop in the world. It would be more of an investment in our future. Painfully, it was a “no advance” offer. This meant that we got no money upfront but would share the profits if the film was a success.

And it hit us like a ton of bricks. We had $150,000 on the table with that first offer. The chance to pay back our parents. To share the rest of the profits with our cast and crew. Rent money for at least two years if we lived cheaply. It offered so much. But Liesl knew, and we knew deep down, that we had to take the long play. We had to go with Roadside Attractions and Netflix. Roadside would put us in theaters. Netflix would advertise us on the inside of their DVD mailer envelopes. They were even discussing getting into the business of streaming their movies online, and we could be pioneers in that space with them.

So with heavy, sad hearts, we turned down the $150,000 (FUCK YOOOOUUUUUUUU!) and went with the Roadside/Netflix deal. It almost killed us to do it. But even our parents, who would have to wait over a year to get paid back, were supportive of the move. And in the end, Liesl was right. What those companies did in terms of getting our film into the world and our names along with it proved to be invaluable in launching our careers. And even though the money part was tough to give up, we ultimately made more on the backend due to how well the film performed, particularly on Netflix’s new streaming service.

We were feeling emboldened. We were feeling that indie film would take care of us if we stayed true to it. That we didn’t need Hollywood one bit. And then, because life is a strange person with many strange hats, within two weeks of this realization we were offered our first deal to write and direct a multimillion-dollar feature film with a major studio.