Hollywood as Home, and Friends Making Movies

Hollywood is a fun place to live. In so many movies each year you see stores, buildings, corners and sites that you drive by every day. It's kind of surreal in that way, the fictionalizing of your reality around you, and I can only imagine what it will be like when Ava realizes that it's actually uncommon to have a film crew take your front yard over to shoot a scene.

Beachbody has its own brush with Hollywood from time to time, as companies license videos and infomercials from us from time to time to fill a TV screen in the background of a scene, or our editing equipment gets repurposed overnight to edit one of our staff's very own shot at filmmaking big time. (More on this in future blog posts)

Currently there's a documentary in theaters which is getting great reviews, and with which Beachbody has deep roots. Chris Paine directed a movie about his enthusiasm for, and disappointment with the loss of, GM's electric car, called "Who Killed The Electric Car."

I met Chris years ago when Tony Horton invited me on a ski weekend, years before Power 90. Chris was one of the five who headed of to Utah. Chris was a brilliant guy, who was thoughtful and fascinated with life in general. He was also running a very successful web-design/development company. As I got to know Chris, I got invited to barbecues at his Santa Monica home, and one weekend he was particularly excited about his leased Electric Car. One by one everyone at the party got a sixty second trip around a parking lot to experience Chris at the wheel with the same comments to each of us -- "It's absolutely silent, you don't even know it's on!" and "Can you believe how fast it accelerates?"

He loved the thing. And I can remember getting an email from him announcing his disappointment with the notice that GM was collecting the cars. I thought it would have ended there.

Chris had just sold his company, an event which was lucky for me, because we picked up the core of our early web development team in Rich Abronson and Erick Hoppe from them, standouts at Chris' company who were looking for the next entrepreneurial mountain to climb. We hired them, and the look and feel of Beachbody.com was born.

Meanwhile, I kept getting emails from Chris. He had begun to investigate and document the demise of his precious car. And what felt like it would be a hobby or pet project that would go away the next time Chris got a big business idea, the email updates kept coming.

It's a couple years later, and I'm reading about Chris at Sundance, Chris in France, and his film is now in wide release, getting paired up with Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth directed by Davis Guggenheim! This is a feat. I've seen dozens of great directors and great films get completely ignored. The filmmaking process is hard, but the film distribution process is almost impossible, so it's incredibly exciting to see a guy take his personal curiosity and interests, and create something magnificent from it that really gets seen.

I hope millions of people see this film, not just because it was made by a good guy who's eye for talent had a significant impact on Beachbody.com, but because it's a well balanced documentary on the fate of the electric car which is entertaining and important to understand. Congratulations Chris!