The Best New Director out of Tribeca Film Festival is not from a fancy film school. Moses Verneau is from the school of YouTube, and the meteoric rise of his web series Money&Violence might be this year’s greatest example of when the need to tell an untold story meets the democratic authoring tools of today. Money & Violence – whose first season has racked up 22M views and counting – is an authentic look into the complicated lives of those who hustle to survive, but never takes a definite moral stance on violence and crime. Verneau and his three main collaborators say the show’s content is inspired by their experiences growing up in Brooklyn. It plays as a candid peek into the lives of a group of people historically underrepresented on screen. And its audiences are passionate that the show is the voice of a community that has too often had their humanity overlooked on the small screen.
Money & Violence shows the realities of living through poverty in a hyper-policed community and the lengths to which people will go to survive, drawing on a diverse palette of experiences: the anger, pain, and fear of living outside the law. “There is a void that needs to be filled,” says Verneau. “That void is the voice of the older brother or father figure. The figure whom because he is respected, his words are taken as advice rather than landing on deaf ears. I wanted “Money & Violence” to serve as that voice which would reacquaint the viewer with a set of morals and principles that have seem to be long lost. I wanted it to serve as a teaching tool rather than entertainment.”
Verneau is a completely self-realized filmmaker – in fact, the entire team started the series as amateurs and have emerged as professionals both through their own work and incredible dedication to learning as they went. As the collaborators – actors, writers, directors, crew – worked around other jobs and kids, Verneau taught himself sound mixing and color correction through YouTube tutorials. To watch the series is not just to follow the story of the characters, but to witness the entire team learn their craft. Verneau created a ritual each week to create and release the show: He wrote the show on Wednesday and Thursday, shot Friday through Sunday,edited Sunday and Monday, and released each new episode on Tuesday.
The regularity of the release and the steady improvement of the series has garnered them incredibly loyal fans – fans who draw direct comparisons to what they’re not currently getting on TV, or who reference The Wire, which was on television almost 15 years ago. Fans were vocal very early on about a Season 2.
Their popularity is not lost on big media outfits: Lionsgate offered them six figures to produce the second season, and the team turned it down in favor of maintaining their independence, choosing instead to launch a crowdfunding campaign. Aware that their community is relatively new to crowdfunding and many live below the poverty line, their goal is get $1 each from 250,000 supporters for the second season of their show. They’ve been deeply engaged in educating their community about how and why to support the project, as well as receiving hundreds of messages of support and encouragement.
Says Verneau, “Things are very different for me now in my neighborhood. I cannot walk to the store without being noticed or asked to take a picture with someone. People are so happy when they bump in to me and always express how much they love the series and respect me for the lessons that I implanted within the storyline. It’s amazing to see how much joy to others can come out of a project that myself and a few friends put together from nothing. We are currently at about twenty-one million total views and it’s very humbling to see the love and attention that we’re receiving for something that at a time not too long ago was just a thought in my head. Nonetheless I constantly remind myself that this is a privilege.”
(It’s a privilege that others are interested in leveraging: a fake GoFundMe page and a fake Instagram account popped up last week promising starring roles in the series in exchange for contributions.)
In some cases, the team has had to go as far as walking their fans through the steps needed to make a credit card contribution to the campaign. Supporters are rabidly encouraging one another to get involved, and coming back to the campaign as paychecks allow.
The highest profile television out of Brooklyn in the last several years has come from Girls and, more recently, HBO’s new web series pickup High Maintenance, both shows rooted in a largely white Brooklyn. Money & Violence’s 22M views and counting serve as a testament to the underserved audience, and the powerful combination of will, ambition, cheap cameras and the internet.
The Seed & Spark campaign can be found here: www.seedandspark.com
