How I Became A Producer At Smosh
Living in Beirut got me my first real job in LA
Before I got the opportunity to make food for Smosh’s Eat It or Yeet It, I spent a lot of my life wandering. The things I learned by exploring with an open mind helped me generate ideas years later when it came time make my dishes. Even before I took my first trip to the Balkans in 2006 my family moved around a lot. After college I tried on a lot of different jobs — ranch hand, assistant on Wall Street, theater teacher — to find what I want to do with my life so I can afford to live in America. I always hoped my wanderings would add up to a career that I never could have thought up on my own or had someone else guide me to. I spent a lot of my 20s trying to figure out what I wanted to specialize in. For a stretch I had a new plan each year for what I wanted to get a Masters in: Ethnomusicology, Urban Planning, Theater, Architecture. I figured if one of those stood out among the others for over a year I’d do that for my career, but one never did. What does a serial wanderer do with their life?
Moving to LA
When I moved to LA in 2016 I knew I had to start over. For the past 7 years I had been a producer for a theater company, Baby Wants Candy, producing their shows in Edinburgh, London, Reykjavik, and Adelaide. All that experience was for the stage and I needed to learn how to produce for the screen. So I started to work as a Production Assistant. At 34 I was always the oldest PA on set and in the world of YouTube I was often the oldest person on set.
LA is all about who you know that can vouch for you as someone who is ok to spend 12 hours on set with. A friend from Baby got me a PA gig for Funny or Die. Another acquaintance got me a short regular job PAing for some College Humor sketches. It was strange seeing comedians I came up with at Upright Citizen’s Brigade in NYC shining and becoming stars as I got their coffees and lunches, but it beat my other job at the time: delivering for Postmates. I got through it by looking to my grandfather, who I had a lot of respect for. After becoming a Captain in the Navy and working at The Hague, he returned to civilian life and became a shoe salesman to provide for his family. Jobs like PA, delivery, or retail initially felt below me. “I was a producer for a hit international show,” my ego screamed. Once I got past my ego and remembered that no job is too small I was able to just focus on doing good work. (Although, never do an app delivery job - after paying for gas and wear and tear on your car you don’t make enough to make it worth the lie of freedom and money the tech companies sell you.)
My old roommate from NYC worked at DEFY in the post department and he connected me with all the channels there. The one that bit was Smosh. After several months of PAing for Smosh sketches (my first being Business Boy Emoji Curse) they saw that I was somewhat responsible, which is all you really need to be to start in production, so they brought me on as an Associate Producer. I started coming in everyday, working on making all the shows they produced go. After a few months of APing, a potential brand deal for Assassin’s Creed came along. This is where my travel experience came in handy.
Living in Beirut
In 2012 I was crashing in my friend Anil’s home office in Beirut. Him and his wife were teaching at the American School and were generously letting me stay for free for what turned out to be 3 months. I had just volunteered as an Associate Producer at the Festival au Désert, a music festival in Timbuktu, Mali, where we had to sneak into Al Qaida held territory to put the show on, and had traveled a bit of West Africa. My goal was to hang out in Beirut until the war in Syria ended and I could travel on to Damascus. Anil assured me I’d be able to travel there soon. All my stuff was at my parents in Oregon and I no longer had an apartment in Brooklyn, so Beirut was home for the Winter and Spring.
While I was there I did my best to get out of their hair. I spent most of my days wandering the streets of Beirut looking for hummus and falafel (Lebanon is one of my favorite places to eat as a vegetarian); taking shared cabs to the souk in Sidon (one of my favorite places in the world); going to a new Lebanese town to walk around; or sitting in my favorite coffeeshop, Cafe Younes, writing and rewriting the first page of my novel. I got a job for a day teaching improv to the theater kids at the American High School, and dropped in on Anil’s class as a “detective from America” named Phil Jackson to teach a lesson on deductive reasoning - and while we’re at it could the students help me with a case I’m having trouble with back home?
Other than that I explored the streets of Beirut. From the street view Beirut feels like it’s always ready for war. Military defenses are built up throughout the city. There are 18 different recognized religions in Lebanon - 5 Muslim, 12 Christian, and the Druze. Each one has a sort of family court and some have their own militias.
I also took 2 trips out of Lebanon: one to Turkey to see the neighborhood my great grandparents lived in before they left for the US, and one to Cairo because I figured I was supposed to see the Pyramids.
Egypt - On My Own
I went to Egypt for two weeks in the Spring of 2012. The effects of the Arab Spring were still being felt, Tahrir Square was still occupied, President Mubarak had been kicked out, and no one was currently in charge. In the cafes students were approaching people with pamphlets to get them to participate in the upcoming election. Most people wondered what I was doing there.
My main objective in Egypt was to give my friends back in Beirut some space.
At the time I was into a community called Couch Surfing. My friend, Lina, who Anil and I met in Sarajevo in 2006, told me about it. It’s every broke traveller’s dream: free Airbnb. People let you stay on their couches or spare rooms and in exchange you maybe buy them a drink or a meal. Understandably, it was difficult for single men to find places to stay. A lot of men were trying to use it as a hookup site at the time. I just wanted a place to sleep. I reached out to many people and eventually one connected me to a guy who had a spare bedroom, a local Egyptian med student who loved having people stay.
When I arrived I found out I was sharing a room with another couch surfer from Switzerland and it ended up being the best thing that could have happened. Our host at times pushed us to tell him everything about our sex lives and his apartment was covered in moldy unwashed dishes. He was a sweet guy, but I felt overwhelmed by him. The Swiss and I spent most of our time wandering the city. He was on vacation from Gaza where he was working as a photographer documenting life under Israeli rule, so I followed him around Cairo and cosplayed as a street photographer.
We met a lot of people once we got out of the tourist areas. People would join our table at cafes, curious what we were doing there and wanting to talk. We had a lot of great conversations: some told us about their travels around the world, some worked for CNN during the Arab Spring, and everyone loved their country but were nervous for the upcoming elections.
In the Coptic neighborhood a little old lady made us dance with everyone at her daughter’s birthday. We of course put our cameras away and danced in the streets.
Wandering the streets with this photographer during an important time in Egypt’s modern history got me thinking: maybe this is what I should do? Maybe I’m meant to be a passive observer. I belong in the mix, but apart from it. I enjoyed finding moments, meeting people, and photographing them. Just before Cairo I had a side gig taking travel photos and writing essays for a small news outlet in Colorado.
One of my favorite nights was spent in the The Khan el-Khalili Bazaar, the great market in Cairo. A group of merchants included us in their conversation circle. They all gravitated to one vendor who was the most animated, leading the conversation and letting us in.
They switched to English for us. The main topic of conversation that night was the vendor who was suffering from Erectile Disfunction. The butt of their jokes smiled and shrugged it off in a “yeah, I got ED, what’re you going to do?" type way. (I have a photo of the guy looking sheepish, but I’m not going to put him on blast like that. I draw the line at posting a photo with the caption “This man has Erectile Disfunction.”)
When a customer stopped at one of their stalls in the alley they would slowly make their way back, more interested in the conversation than making the sale. A bread vendor stopped to chat and let me follow him for a bit. This was their life, selling stuff while hanging with their friends. Once they started making fun of us I knew we were in. This was a night where our host wanted to take us out partying to meet women.
I’ve always struggled with guides, and my host wanted to be my guide. I’m ok with a guide for short stretches of time, they have great insight to a place and it’s people in that moment that a guidebook would be years behind. My host showed me some fun spots in Cairo I never would have found on my own. It’s when they want to control my experience that I struggle, and my host wanted to make me do the things he thought was fun that I wasn’t into, like go out clubbing. My host was a sweet guy, and I told him a few times that I wasn’t interested in going out to meet women, that that’s not what I was here to do, but he had a bit of a one track mind. It was complicated because it wasn’t my place to lecture anyone on Western relations between men and women and I was in his home. The best I could think to do was talk about how I’m used to doing things and what I was looking for in my trip, and then to give myself space.
After the Swiss returned to Gaza, I got my hotel in the center of the city. I told my host I wanted to just get a hotel overlooking a plaza to sit and read in, and I did because one of my favorite pastimes when I’m traveling and I need some introvert time is to sit in my room with a good view of the life outside. I also wanted to just get out of his apartment and be able to keep on wandering.
During these last days I went out on my own. I witnessed mob justice, following a crowd chasing a driver who had hit a young woman with his car. A police officer walked and observed alongside me, stepping in after they dragged the driver out of his car to arrest him and take him away. I wandered over to Tahrir Square where there was still an encampment. I watched for a while, but once I started taking photos a kid came up to me, pulled out a knife and called me a spy. Seeing the knife I realized I was in over my head and I quickly apologized, put my camera away, and went the other way.
When I got home to Beirut I went through my photos. I didn’t know what to do with them. I edited them and it turned out they weren’t that great. I still enjoy photography, but I don’t really see myself doing it as a career.
Egypt - With Smosh
I told a condensed version of this story to our lead producer at Smosh who thought there was no way this job sending us to Egypt would come through. Since no one else in the office wanted to go to Egypt (everyone else was an “indoor kid” as they put it), they bumped me up to a full producer to start developing the project on the off chance it came through.
I worked with the creative team of Assassin’s Creed, finding out what inspired them to set the game in Egypt. They had done a lot of research to become experts, traveling Egypt and digging into the history of the Ptolemaic period to create the game. I got to play early versions and I read about the era and what remained in Egypt from the period.
The creative part of the shoot came together pretty easily. I found places and activities throughout the Cairo area to use in the series. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out how we could make it all happen. And that was the main part of my job.
The brand deal was starting to look like it was going to happen. Ubisoft was ready to spend the money and liked our idea. This meant that all the work I was doing to prep to be ready just in case wasn’t going to be in vain, but also that, as with most brand deals, we had a tight turnaround to actually see it through. We needed to be in Cairo next month, and everything I read was that it would take most of the year to get all the permits and permissions. Everyone in Egypt needed to have their say and find their way to get a cut of what we were spending.
After much googling of “how to make a travel show” I discovered people use fixers. Fixers are local producers living in the location you’re going to shoot in. They know how to get the permits, they meet with people ahead of time to lock in shoot days and ideas, and they know the people who need to get paid. Baksheesh - a tip, donation, or bribe - is how things operate in a lot of places, including Egypt. I don’t know who needs these tips, a fixer does.
I had to fight to use a fixer, the higher ups at DEFY didn’t believe we needed one. It was one of the few times in my life where I said “this is how it’s being done” to those in charge and charged ahead. The higher ups let me do my thing, but I could tell if the fixer didn’t work out this would be my last job at Smosh.
Landing in Cairo I was the most nervous I have ever been. I’ve been to some frightening places that maybe weren’t the smartest ideas, but never with a team of people dependent on me. Will the fixer be there to help us through customs? Did the fixer’s agency take our payment of half the agreed amount and run? Was I about to be in Cairo with a team looking at me, wondering what to do, and have no answers for them?
My fear was short lived as our fixer and his team found us right away, taking us a special route through customs. We shot all over the Cairo area for the week. A lot of what I had set up we ended up not using, but that’s the nature of unscripted. Our days were short, in the afternoons half of us did my favorite activity - wandering. Mari and half of the crew joined me most days in exploring the streets around our hotel in Giza as the self proclaimed “indoor kids” took full advantage of the hotel amenities.
We shot in The Khan el-Khalili Bazaar, but I didn’t get to see my old friends. Our fixer arranged escorts from the different groups that run the market. We traveled outside of Cairo, our bus flanked on either side by the military to some Ptolemaic era — sites that were far from any tourist zones and completely empty — and to Faiyum, a fertile region south of Cairo where much of Assassin’s Creed: Origins takes place. Both places had higher threats of kidnapping so we had to stay with our military guides. We even had an hour to ourselves inside one of the Pyramids.
Working in foreign countries is a great way to get to know people that live there in a way you often can’t as a tourist. Spending days with them on a project shows both them and you a side of the other person often left at home. Collaborating with locals forms a deeper bond and you get to meet people who don’t normally work in the tourism industry. In a lot of ways, it is similar to being guided, which I do struggle with, but places you can go are often more unique than anywhere a guide takes you.
Producing, specifically for travel, was the combination of everything I wanted. I got to be a generalist finding all the different specialists (creative team at Ubisoft, the fixer) who could teach me what I needed to know to make the project happen. I know now what I want to do: everything. I’m ok being a generalist, for me it’s much more interesting. As it turns out being a generalist with a lot of different experiences is good preparation for producing. You can watch episode one of our series below.
This is awesome! I love hearing people's stories; how they got to where they are. Thank you for putting in the time to tell yours. I'd love to hear what inspired you to see the world and why you went the places you ended up at. So cool how you were able to use that experience for defy/smosh. Those assassin's creed videos were incredible, too bad that kinda budget are rare opportunities!
What an awesome story Garrett! Love that picture of the camp at Tahir Square and the kid way down in the bottom of the frame. There must have been so much fear in the moment but what an incredible privilege to witness that kind of history firsthand.