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Local filmmakers pull off the greatest prank in Indiegogo history

More than two years ago, three Chicago filmmakers launched an Indiegogo campaign with the hopes of funding their first feature-length project: “It’s All Good.”

“Can we have some f*cking money?” the three of them asked in a video posted to their FND Films YouTube channel, now with nearly 176,000 subscribers.

They reached their goal with the support of their YouTube-built fanbase, pocketed the nearly $78,000 and disappeared. No updates. No posts. No movie.

The radio silence—punctuated by intermittent Instagrams on yachts or vacationing in Italy—created suspicion among their backers.

“Can you guys give us an update on this project?” one commenter asked. “… The lack of communications with your backers (and fans) is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.”

“Damn at this point I’ll be happy if it ever even gets done but in all likelihood all of us got burned with this one,” another read.

“So … these guys just stole our money right?” said another.

This speculation went on for two years, until the trio, made up of Cooper Johnson, Aaron Fronk and Vinny DeGaetano, posted a video on Sept. 13, 2016, explaining that due to “complications and things beyond [their] control” the movie wouldn’t be made.

The more than 600 backers of the campaign were, understandably, infuriated.

“I got an email that just said the word ‘MURDER’ in all caps over a hundred times in a row, just copied and pasted,” Fronk said. Others threatened legal action (though, according to Indiegogo’s policy, once you donate to a campaign, there’s no way to get that money back).

For two weeks, swarms of angry commenters and hate mail hounded them to return the cash they had, for all intents and purposes, stolen. But the three leaned into it.

“We were pushing for as much bad publicity as possible,” Fronk said. “We kept wanting to fuel that fire and keep people fired up. Man, does bad publicity spread.”

They needed people to be fired up because—wait for it—they actually did make the film.

You read that correctly. The three pretended to run away with the money from their crowdfunding campaign … to make a movie about three guys who run away with the money from a crowdfunding campaign.

“It was all planned from the start,” Fronk said. “We just had to figure out exactly how to orchestrate it once we got started.”

Production for the film was already two months in before the three even opened the Indiegogo campaign in 2014, something Fronk recalled as particularly reckless, but “we knew we wanted to make it, regardless,” he said.

Two weeks after posting their apology video, they blew the lid off their secret, uploading a trailer for their movie, “It’s All Good,” the tale of three filmmakers who pocket money from their crowdfunding campaign and then must weather the consequences.

The riskiness of it all—including the threat of alienating their fanbase—wasn’t lost on the trio. But that wasn’t their only worry.

“Our biggest concern was that people wouldn’t care after we said we couldn’t make it,” Fronk said. “We needed to make it believable that we had actually run away with the money so that people wouldn’t be forgiving like, ‘It’s OK, just try better next time!’ We wanted to give them a reason to get angry.”

And thus began their two-year quest to make it seem like they had blown nearly $78,000. A pre-planned trip to Italy became an opportunity for a glamorous vacation Instagram post. A friend’s event on a yacht became a prime photo-op for poppin’ bubbly.

“Out of context, people would be like, ‘What the hell are they doing drinking on a yacht?’ ” Fronk said. “But in reality, we didn’t spend any money on it. We couldn’t really afford to actually do the expensive stuff we were making it seem like we were doing.”

When the fan outrage hit following their apology video in mid-September, the three scrambled to remove those posts from their social media accounts—or, at least, they wanted to give the appearance of scrambling to make it seem like they had something to hide.

They did have something to hide; it just wasn’t what their fans thought it was. How do you keep an entire film production secret for two years? Very carefully.

Filming exclusively in Chicago, Johnson, Fronk and DeGaetano relied heavily on the goodwill of the local indie film community to not let the cat out of the bag.

“There was this weird camaraderie where they were just as excited as us to keep it hidden,” Fronk said of the local crew members and actors who worked on the film.

But not everybody on the project was privy to the entire breadth of the project.

“We kept it very limited in who knew the actual premise of the film,” Fronk said. “Even people who were involved in the actual filming, they would just know specifically what their scene was about and not the higher plot.”

Despite the trustworthiness of those participating in the project, when the time came to gain the ire of their entire community of fans, Fronk’s biggest concern were these fellow castmembers.

“We were very concerned about people who had worked on the movie coming out to defend us like, ‘This isn’t the case, I worked on this film, I know they made it,’ ” Fronk said.

But, for better or for worse, nobody leapt to their defense. For two weeks, Fronk, Johnson and DeGaetano kept their lips sealed as they watched the bad press and furious comments roll in. They even went so far as to allow a news team to interview them, maintaining their lie the entire time.

“[A TV interview] was the perfect outlet to intertwine with the plot of the film,” Fronk said. Other news organizations, like the Daily Dot, got the silent treatment from FND.

The three debuted the film at the Music Box Theatre on Oct. 20. The following day, it became available on the trio’s website (find it now at itsallgoodfilm.com) and on Amazon, with more than 2,000 combined downloads already. If “It’s All Good” is any indication, according to Fronk, the old adage holds true: “No publicity is bad publicity.”

@shelbielbostedt | sbostedt@redeyechicago.com