10 Ways to Abuse the Talent You Hire as a Wannabe Director

10 Ways to Abuse the Talent You Hire as a Wannabe Director

A very Yi Zhou-esque adventure…

Are you a Chinese-Italian director trying to make it big in Hollywood? Did your “Asian diversity-hire card” decline and the Asian (AAPI) community told you to bugger off?

Step 0:

B*tch about the AAPI community, assert dominance!

Now, do you have any talent? No? Are you willing to actually work to make a watchable movie? Also no? Fret not!

Step 1:

Suck up to a Hollywood celebrity! Get close through your connections. Hell, catfish them with AI-generated pictures of a much younger woman you look nothing alike if you have to! Secure that bag!

Try to rope them into a relationship to move up in Hollywood. If they aren’t budging, just run to a tabloid and gush how in love you two are on their behalf, it’s fine! Lie through your teeth about your age while you’re at it, it definitely won’t come back to bite you in the ass!

Step 2:

Is the Talent passionate about charity work? Convince them to take part in your next movie on the pretense of giving their foundation some of the proceeds. Ah-ah-ah! Don’t grind your teeth just yet! You aren’t actually gonna give the actor anything, come on! He’s rich already, he can afford to work for free, lol!

Step 3:

Draw up a vague contract.

One documentary. A little bit of Talent’s music, some footage from their other works, a chunk of interview here and there. Let them think they’ll have the final say approving all sorts of bullshit, like marketing materials and social media posts. Don’t worry, you’re gonna ask them to waiver their right of publicity and their right for defamation protection at the end, effectively canceling the “final say” bullshit.

Here's how you do it:

 

Clause 1 pacifies your Talent, making them think they have the authority over the stuff they sign up for, and then you drop a doozy taking away their rights at the very end of the contract, how fun!

Step 4:

Now, you got a song, some interviews and B-roll footage from past projects the Talent worked on. Bo-o-oring! Yawn! You don’t want to make another documentary about other people in the movie industry! You want to be up there on top of the movie world, making your own film! Well, you don’t want to make it, you just want to be called a Hollywood director, but that’s no problem!

Crank up that AI slop machine, ask chat GPT to write you the most pretentious-sounding plot prompt for a movie and voila! Is the result boring slop? Yes! But that’s what you have your Hollywood star for! Their name will get asses in the seats! This is your chance!

Use the Talent’s voice and likeness from the interviews to AI generate their model and slap it in your AI movie! Great job!

Step 5:

This is where things get tricky. You just stole your Talent’s likeness without consent (“Consent” is that word your best friends Brett Ratner and Russell Simmons laugh at, Zhou, ask them about it). The personal relationship didn’t work out (they have eyes and realized they’ve been catfished once they met you). Things don’t look too good… Get ready for Plan В!

Take as many pictures of their house, their car, pets, furniture – snap pics like you’re a rookie forensics tech at your first crime scene! Take pictures of the Talent doing absolutely nothing without them knowing. Yes, it’s creepy! But you will need it for further steps, so chop-chop!

Create a fake conversation with a “coworker”, discussing Talent’s volatile behavior. Stress how much it worries you, but refuse any help. Don’t worry about not having any audio recordings of the alleged hours-long “tirades” you witnessed! The pictures of your hired Talent looking sleepy or talking on their phone should do, who cares?

Step 6:

Uh-oh! The Talent realized you used their likeness and voice for a completely different film! They’re big mad! Threatening legal action! Refusing to promote the film they never signed up for! The nerve!

Quick, make an excuse to confuse the living hell out of them!

The documentary the Talent signed up for is part of a series of documentaries about movie makers and the movie-making process? Wedge your AI cartoon about bullshit visions of the future into the series! Yeah, it doesn’t match the theme of the series whatsoever, but you need to buy some time!

Now, does hastily adding your AI cartoon to a series of unrelated documentaries allow you to exploit the likeness and voice of the Talent after they signed up for just one movie within the said series? Hell nah!

 

 

You needed to ask the Talent to sign a specific contract for the second movie. But you knew you could never pay them for that kind of work! So you stole their likeness and now it’s time for some smoke and mirrors!

Step 7:

Does your Talent have a following? Awesome! Start looking for a reason for a fall-out by demonizing any fan asking questions about your contract discrepancies! Use fake accounts and bots to try and provoke them into saying something nasty. Then screen whatever answer they give, post it on social media and act like they just made coffee with your grandma’s ashes! Context be damned!

Once you got a few posts, start demanding respect from the Talent’s fans. Then ask the Talent to scold their fanbase for questioning your bullshit! Act like the Talent and the fanbase operate on a hive-mind level and the actor rules over thousands of random people like a queen bee!

You will obviously get told off – and that’s your que for the next step!

Step 8:

Remember the MeToo movement? All those victims of sexual misconduct finally mastering the courage to come out and expose their abusers? I know you want to get on that bandwagon, hun! Maybe you’ve actually tried claiming you were a victim already? So what if it was you calling a collaborator an abuser after he refused to leave his pregnant partner to be with you? No one’s gonna find out!

Remember those pictures and fake convos about the Talent you’ve been collecting? Post them and cry “abuse”! Did you get some racy pics or messages during the catfishing phase? Time to sling that dirt!

Find a tabloid reporter your Talent snobbed for an interview and leak everything you got to them. Context? Cross references? Actual evidence? Who cares? You’re a woman, random gawkers have to believe you or they’re bigots!

Gather old scandals about your target,.. I mean, the Talent! Yeah, TMZ articles will definitely do as a credible source! Talk to his exes to get more dirt! If they tell you they weren’t mistreated – just block them and use their name as if they were victimized! No one’s gonna fact-check that, come on!

Step 9:

Keep spreading gossip about your Talent, work on it harder than you did on your movies! You need to overwhelm their lawyer, keep inventing more and more atrocious stories, slander their charity, too! It won’t backfire, ain’t no way anyone’s gonna dig deeper into your own past!

Send some bots to comment sections where his fans discuss the scandal and your allegations and ask the bots to tell the fans to kill themselves for supporting the Talent. Telling people to off themselves on the Internet is always a good idea!

Ta-da! Your Talent is too distracted with the accusations and an onslaught of gossip to care about you defrauding them!

Step 10:

Launch your AI film premiere. Avoid posting any news about it during the entire run time at your theatre of choice. Once it’s over, blame lack of attendance on the Talent and his fans and skip donating any proceeds to the Talent’s foundation you’ve been slandering for months! Or, you know, send them a dollar to avoid a lawsuit, whatever.

Success!

Warning: this instruction comes with a number of downsides, including, but not limited to: getting sued; getting caught lying; people actually reading the contract you keep pushing as evidence; summoning an amateur reporter who will take a closer look at your own past; getting exposed for being a massive hypocrite; getting investigated by the IRS for fake charities you ran; getting asked why you abuse the MeToo movement while supporting actual rapists and groomers, as well as making an absolute ass of yourself.

Happy clout chasing!