On having something to prove

I listened to a bunch of your interviews to prepare for this, and re-watched a little bit of pioneering web series The Guild.

Oh my god. You did so much homework, my man.

I also am from Texas.

Where are you from?

The Hill Country, outside of Austin.

It’s so pretty there… I’ve been there many times. I used to play weddings a lot when I was in college in Texas, and we would go out to the Hill Country all the time. I played a couple funerals, memorial services. Very weird, but very cool.

In an interview you did, someone said “Austin’s great,” and you gave the exact answer that I give: Austin actually kind of sucks now, since all of the tech companies have moved there.

I will say the tech companies made it real poopy. I mean, I love the food, but I certainly would not want to live there. There’s nothing appealing about it. Barring the weather—which is just awful, awful, awful weather—the vibes aren’t there anymore. It’s sad, because the reason I do what I do is because of the indie film scene that was there in the late ’90s. I was at the very tail end of it, but I kind of still caught the wave of Richard Linklater and Richard Rodriguez, that sort of vibe where it’s like, “Hey, we’re outsiders making cool stuff.” I really do believe that that’s the heart of what I love to do. That’s why I do what I do, because I still believe in the independent spirit. And that’s what Austin embodied. Sadly, it is not there anymore, and that’s okay. It’s other places, and I will find them when I travel. I hear it’s Boise, Idaho. That’s what I hear.

Felicia, you are literally the queen of the geeks. That all started with The Guild. That show was one of the first times where we all just kind of acknowledged that being a geek is something that’s true for so many people. What was the inspiration behind The Guild?

There was my personal journey, and then there was the decision to put it on the internet. They’re actually intertwined. I was a gamer since I was seven years old, and it’s because my mom gamed and put me on her lap when she did Infocom text games. So I had a deep understanding of video gaming. I realized you could do this. I’m probably the very beginning of any generation of understanding that the computer can be a social tool. I think that experience forms everything I did afterwards.

I also was homeschooled. I saw [the computer] as a tool, as my only social outlet, really. I did a lot of lessons and stuff, but they were always supervised and structured. I never messed around with friends, ever. I’m not saying that’s a great way to raise a kid, but that just happens to be how it was: I was alone, and I was at lessons. My brother and I used his computer very, very early on, on CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, ICQ—every early, evolving platform where people were connecting with a computer, and the dial-up of it all.

Cut to having played games all my life. I was in Hollywood; it was after Buffy. I had this amazing experience on that show. I learned so much. I found a world: the geeky world that I wanted to belong to. I went to my first convention as a guest, I went to my first convention as a fan, all that. And then years of nothing go by. I get addicted to this game called World of Warcraft. That was in 2006. I was almost at the very beginning of WoW. And because I was unhappy as a creator, because I wasn’t fitting in anywhere in Hollywood and I had a big anxiety disorder that was pretty hard to overcome when it got to the wire, I got depressed and I played eight hours a day of WoW.

I was depressed, because I was playing for the wrong reasons. I took a sketch writing class, to see what writing is like. I’d never really done it. And I met Kim Evey, my producer, and through meeting her, we made friends, and she invited me to a women’s group, a support group of other women in the industry who were interested in being supportive of each other in their careers. Out of guilt, after showing up with nothing but still raiding the snacks, I wrote a half-hour comedy about my experience as a gamer. Kim uploaded one of her sketches to this new platform YouTube, because she was a sketch writing expert. It got viral in the relative sense of back then. Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show got bought by Sony and she was like, “Hey, you’re about gamers. Let’s do this.” And that’s how The Guild got to be online. Nobody in Hollywood understood… They literally did not understand how people talk together on a computer.

Let’s go back a little. I know you went to UT Austin and studied math and music. You played the violin, is that right? And graduated when you were 19?

Yeah, I was a violin performance major. I was in the Austin Symphony. I never wanted to use either of my degrees. I was there because I had full scholarships. I was 16 when I started, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I always wanted to be an actor, because the only place I really felt like myself and I could have some freedom as a homeschooled kid was on the stage. I did a lot of musical theater. I thought, “Well, this is it. I want to make stuff with people. I don’t need to be the star. I just want to make stuff.”

And that impulse [drove] my experiences volunteering at film festivals in Austin. When I was there in the late ’90s, it was the indie film darling scene. It still has film festivals, but it was just a lot more independent. It was a lot more rebellious. Austin was a very counterculture city. And so was the film scene. Richard Linklater with Slacker, and Robert Rodriguez with El Mariachi; they were bellwethers. Tarantino was around all the time. Everyone was cool. They were rebelling against the system and succeeding. I kind of got involved with that, because my mom just started volunteering and got me to volunteer, and I met a ton of people in Hollywood that way. It was always a plan, like, “Okay, I’m going to get this degree and I’m going to move to LA.” Thank god I had friends here or I definitely would’ve not been sticking around very long. The wake-up call of being a 4.0 in college then going to Hollywood—and being absolutely stupid and not perfect-looking—was not a smooth transition.

You’re a musician, you’re a writer, you’re an actor, you’re an artist. You’re a very hard person to introduce.

My hyphens are exhausting. I am so sorry.

No, it’s great. I’m just curious what drives that creative diversity in you? Why so many tendrils?

I don’t know. I get very bored if I’m doing something too long. I love acting, but if I’m on a set more than two weeks, I just want to go home. When I’m writing, I’ll write really intensely, and then I’ll be like, “I really don’t want to pick up a pencil for a while.” I get excited about new tools to invent with. It’s like my kid when I give her a new Lego set: “Ooh, what are we going to do with this?”

I just can’t see myself doing one thing. And it’s not a competition. I can’t say that I’m an A student in all the areas that I work in, but I love doing things that people haven’t done before… There’s something in me, as sort of a non-standard female person, that I always want to show up and prove to other people that they’re wrong about whatever it is that they think my outsides say. I had a casting agent once tell me, “Your outsides don’t match your insides.” And I never understood it until maybe a couple of years ago when I was like, “People will treat you one way, and then you’re angry that they treat you that way, and then you want to prove something to them.” And that’s my driving factor.

Any creator could create in any world, and a lot of my creative impulse is sharing with other people. Probably I’m just in the right time. I live in the right time to be able to jump from expression to expression. The sharing of creativity and personality is the driver, in a unique way that wouldn’t have been the case a hundred years ago.

You have said before that nobody in Hollywood cared about some of the work that you were doing.

They still don’t, believe me. They don’t.

Do you get caught up in those rejections? How many of your creative works are on the cutting room floor as a result of them?

Well, listen, I don’t know what happened. Covid was the start of it. I’m writing another autobiography now, and this is a big part of my journey. Even though I was always rebelling, I was still secretly wanting to be in. That’s what was the sabotaging force in my life, with some of the digital stuff that I did. It was so new that there was no regard given to it except by other creatives who were as frustrated with the system they were working in as anything. All my acting roles—almost everything except for Buffy and my early stuff—was not achieved by auditions. It was gotten by other creative people being inspired that I was making a TV show essentially in my house, and having millions of fans outside of being hired by a network who crushes your spirit. And they would write me a role because I was showing them a kind of girl that wasn’t in the mainstream. It was something new and fresh. That’s what creative people are excited about: new and fresh. People on the business side are like, “What can we prove works? Let’s do more of that.”

There’s inherent disconnect between what I’ve always pitched. The Guild, I think only one Hollywood producer ever really wanted to buy it, and I just didn’t give over the IP because I thought, “I don’t think they’re doing better than me right now.” Thank goodness. I still own it all. But half of me still wanted to get more acknowledgement by the people who were making something that I aspired to make. I was making mini TV. I was making mini reality shows when I did Geek & Sundry. I was always straddling these worlds, hoping that somehow people would see in something worth investing in, to make it easier for me. I was just too early. It was 2012 and I was doing long-form tabletop play-throughs when everybody said long-form will not work online.

I decided to do this Kickstarter for The Guild: Reunion Movie. I think it was a year and a half ago or something. And I’d been working on The Guild: The Musical, which I’m still working on, which had given me a little softening to my burnout on the characters. But when a Hollywood exec called me—and this is the first time since 2008, I believe, that anybody in Hollywood inquired about the rights to the show or anything—I was excited until she was like, “Yeah, we’re just really excited about you as a writer reinterpreting the show for modern times and younger gamers. What would a younger Guild be like nowadays?” And I literally froze up. My rage against the system is such that I just want to throw my phone across the room. I got so enraged that I was being thrown away by Hollywood after I became a mom, after I turned 40. The rage of being rejected. The one thing that was mine, they were going to take from me and give to somebody else—that’s what made me do this Kickstarter. Now seeing all the opportunities for creators that I never had when I was working earlier—from accountants, to t-shirt fulfillment, to streamlining every single bit of being a creator—it is just so wonderful. I feel like it’s just a great time to be alive and making anything that you love.

Why come back to The Guild after all this time? You mentioned that you felt a little burnout on the characters. It sounds like coming back was a matter of almost righteous indignation. Am I reading that right?

Listen, man. Most of my career is driven by spite. I’m never good when people are nice to me and embrace me. I get really nervous. When they reject me is when I get fueled. You could see that as a very self-destructive thing, or just that I like to burn a path for myself in the high grasses versus taking the path that’s been trampled down.

What would you tell a creator who is feeling the rejections and the failures in this moment?

Well, I would first say to go examine yourself. Is what you’re making something you’re making for the right reasons? Is it something that’s personal? Is it something that only you can do? Is it something that’s coming from creative need, or is it coming because you’re seeking fame, money, anything else? If you want money, there’s so many other places to do that. If you want fame, there are probably other ways to do it, too. But as a creator, especially if you want to make an impact in this world, you have to be doing something so authentic that nobody else could do it. That’s my opinion. You have to find that reason in you to keep going through the hard stuff. And if you’re an online creator, you’re not signing up for one project, you’re signing up for a lifetime of relationships.