by Groff, Nick
Finally, I just called Zak and said, “You know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t have any of the timeline from point A to point B of the documentary. All the shit we put together is gone.”
I was panicking, saying over and over that I didn’t know what to do. Zak just kept uttering an occasional “What?” I wasn’t sure if he was confused or if he thought it was a big joke. I ended the conversation by telling him to just bear with me, that I would figure it out.
I hung up the phone and spent the next few minutes bitching and moaning, but then started going through a process to evaluate everything. I started crossing out the lines and trying different things. To be honest, I don’t know how I did it, but I was able to rig one hard drive to another and get the project to open. It was still corrupted and I had to rework some things, but in the end I salvaged the film and you’d never know there had been any issue. The one major loss was a blooper reel I’d cut—that one I never got back after the crash. I wish I still had it. It would have been one for YouTube for sure.
In a way, I’m glad the crash happened. No good lessons are learned without some significant pain. When you’re faced with losing hundreds of hours of work, you get a good scare and a reminder to be more careful in the future.
Aaron wasn’t involved much with the editing because he had to move on to some of his other film projects. When he would come over to hang out, I’d show him different clips and get his feedback. He dug what we were doing, but at the same time the experience had freaked him out. He wasn’t interested in reliving some of those moments any more than he had to.
Other weird things happened early on as we were putting together the documentary. Once we felt the film was ready, I thought it would be cool to have a screening at my parents’ house and invite over some of the neighbors. I wanted them there because our closest friends already knew about the experiences and what we’d captured. I wanted to bring in new people who didn’t know, and see the expressions on their faces when it all played out on the screen.
We created a spooky atmosphere, lighting some candles around the room and turning off the lights. We placed speakers atop the television. About halfway through the film, the speakers inexplicably flew off the TV, hitting the candles and sending wax flying everywhere. The neighbors got up and left the house, they were so scared. Some of them later told me they had nightmares after that, and others felt like something had followed them home.
Now, I don’t know if what happened was anything truly paranormal. It could have been something as mundane as the vibration of the bass causing the speakers to move. But the undeniable fact was that our film had made an impact, even on the people who saw it first.
After everyone else had left scared, the only people remaining were me, Aaron, Zak, and Veronique. I had kind of planned it out so that once we were done watching our film, I could turn on a television special that was coming on about Bobby Mackey’s Music World and the haunting there. The legend was that there was a portal to hell in the basement of this former animal slaughterhouse, because there was a satanic cult that performed rituals there many years ago. Plus there was the ghost of Johanna, the daughter of a former owner who’d killed herself in the building. I had to know more about this place. My cousin Justin loved digging into the past of haunted and notorious buildings. After all the research we had done into this place, I knew it would be the perfect fit for another adventure. Even while I was editing our documentary, I would show clips to Justin and he would keep reminding me about Bobby Mackey’s.
I told Zak and Aaron that we had to go check the place out, but even after they watched the television special, they didn’t seem that excited about it. Their response was basically, “Well, you know, whatever…”
I couldn’t believe they were being so dismissive of a location that was obviously a great fit for our vision. But we eventually made it there, and it turned out Zak and Aaron had some of their craziest personal experiences there. But that wouldn’t come until much later. At this point, all we had was a rough cut of a documentary that a handful of people had seen.
During the documentary editing process, things in our apartment were getting really tough. Veronique and I were broke. That was the point at which we had to move into my parents’ house in Las Vegas. We were bummed out to be losing our own space, but I knew we’d get back on our feet as soon as I finished and sold this documentary.
The first room I unpacked and set up in my parents’ house was my editing studio so I could get right back to work.
Sitting in my new studio, I wondered how we were ever going to get this thing in front of people. We had this unbelievable footage. We had an apparition caught on camera, the brick at the Goldfield Hotel, this poltergeist activity. Yet I was starting to panic that the only people who were going to see it were the media in Las Vegas. While I continued to work on editing, we’d put our first rough cut out to some local media. Vegas Weekly reviewed the documentary and liked it, and the local Fox affiliate had us on their news program for an interview. But nothing came out of that. No big breaks.
I tried to enter the documentary into all the major film festivals, like CineVegas, Sundance, and so on, but it was turned down. We did, however, make it to some of the smaller events and even picked up some accolades. We won the Grand Jury Prize for “Best Documentary Feature” from the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2006, and we were nominated for “Best Feature Film” at the Eerie Horror Film Festival that same year.
I knew smaller film festivals wouldn’t be enough. We’d need an agent to get it out there. This was a powerful documentary; everyone needed to see it. So I started hustling. I looked up hundreds of agents online, then went down the list and called each one. I heard all kinds of responses:
“Send it to us to review.”
“Do you have representation?”
“Have your lawyer send it to us.”
“No, thanks.”
After a few of these phone calls, I got better at pitching it over the phone. No agent wants to deal with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing—which is why breaking into the business is so hard. But I learned the business end of things fast.
My phone calls went from “Hey, could you maybe look at my documentary and represent me?” to “I have this amazing documentary. Some of the most compelling paranormal footage ever caught on tape. It’s already won awards at film festivals.”
I noticed the conversations with the agents were getting longer and more interesting.
I was on the twelfth page of agents when I had a guy say, “All right, sounds interesting. Why don’t you come to LA tomorrow and show it to me.” I agreed. Then I was like, Fuck. How the hell am I going to do that? But you don’t say no to an opportunity like that. I called Zak and convinced him to meet me at my house early the next morning.
At the time I was working for a place called Cashman doing wedding videos. I had to walk in and tell my boss, “Look—you know that documentary project I told you about? I need to take tomorrow off because I’m going to meet with this agent.”
“If you do that, you might get fired,” he said.
I told him I understood, but I had to do this. It was too big of an opportunity. In the end, he respected me for following my dream, and let me off the hook.
Zak and I hopped into my Echo and drove all the way to LA. We got to this house on Mulholland Drive—weird, like in a David Lynch movie. We walked up to the giant mansion and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. “Hello? Hellooo?” we were saying. Finally someone came out and told us the agent wasn’t here. I called him on his cell phone and he told me we’d have to come back later.
Zak and I were pissed. We began arguing—we’d just wasted a four-hour drive from Las Vegas for nothing. We weren’t going to just leave the DVD there, so we decided to head over to Universal Studios and go on rides the rest of the day. Finally, late at night I got a call back from the agent telling us to come over.
It was late
, but we headed back to his house and played the tape for him in his living room. We sat there and watched the whole thing with him. He said he liked it. “I’m in,” he said, but he wanted us to recut it this way and that way. We agreed, and back to Vegas we went.
We worked on trimming some of the fat from the film, eliminating a lot of the on-the-road footage and much of what were our attempts at humor. Looking back, we realized nobody thought we were as funny as we thought we were.
In cutting all that stuff, we really brought the film back to its original core: the pursuit of the paranormal. Without the goofy stuff, the scare factor was really amped up. We knew that was what would make people want to watch it.
I mailed the revised documentary back to LA.
The agent introduced us to a distribution company that had a lot of ins with various networks. The distributors took the project and brought it to the SciFi Channel (which is how they spelled it back in 2006) as well as a few other places, but it was SciFi that showed the most interest. I couldn’t believe it. We had a shot at getting this thing on television on a real network!
At this point, we were talking about trying to get it released as a DVD or a limited run in select theaters. We didn’t know exactly what the best route was; we just knew we wanted people to see it. Zak and I were making phone calls constantly, dealing with a lot of hang-ups and rejection along the way. Finally, we got a response from our distribution company. SciFi was interested!
At the time, SciFi was looking for programming to follow their own paranormal shows, and they loved our film. They thought it would fit right in.
During this time, Veronique and I were on the move again. This time to Laguna Beach, California. I thought it would be good to live closer to Hollywood, and Veronique was able to get transferred to another Ritz-Carlton hotel out there. Life in California wasn’t easier for me, though; I was still commuting to Las Vegas to film weddings.
SciFi had picked up the documentary for seven air dates, and it did extremely well. The first night it ran, it drew a 1.7 rating, which is huge for a cable network. Close to two million people had tuned in to watch it, and the responses we heard were amazing. Everyone loved the fact that we were new, we were underground, and we were different from the other paranormal programming they were used to.
When it aired, we had a party and everybody got together to watch it on TV. I thought it was pretty awesome to see ourselves on television—and not only in the documentary itself, but also in all the trailers and promos that SciFi had put together to promote it. Our film did so well, they even aired it an eighth time, one more than our contract had stipulated. (For anyone out there planning to sign a television contract, read the fine print!)
We were by no means TV stars at this point. From time to time I did get recognized on the street, but I still had to work my regular job. Nor did we really make much money from the SciFi deal—it made it easier to pay some of our bills, sure, but it wasn’t life-changing. In fact, we didn’t even pay back all our loans until well into season two of the Ghost Adventures series.
Once the film aired on the SciFi Channel, it just took off. It was all over the Internet. Back then, MySpace was very popular, and we promoted it all over there. By the time people were seeing it at the festivals, they already knew all about the film and were already fans. It was around this time that we started putting together the Ghost Adventures Crew, or GAC, an organization of like-minded paranormal investigators and fans of the film. We began taking those folks out on ghost hunts as well. It was a way to bring people to the locations where we’d experienced our paranormal encounters in the documentary. We wanted people to have the same experiences as us. Though it took a little convincing, Aaron agreed to be a part of the events. He was ready to get back into the haunts.
Even as we watched the documentary over and over again, we never really saw things we wanted to change. We stood behind our film, and people liked what they were seeing. From our provoking style of investigation to the raw feel of the film, it was a hit on every level.
Well… except for one guy. To be honest, it was the only criticism I can remember. In a magazine article, some guy bashed us on every little detail of the film, including our provocation. It was pretty harsh. Our intention was never to piss anyone off. It was just to find our own way in the paranormal and take those who wanted to watch along for the ride. Unfortunately, though, most people are only going to love you or hate you. That’s a tough lesson to learn. There are still times when I dwell on the negative things I read online or in print. Even if it’s one complaint for every hundred compliments, it’s tough to not think about that one.
With all these successful showings on SciFi, we continued promoting ourselves online as best we could. We had about ten thousand friends on MySpace—a far cry from the two-million-plus followers Ghost Adventures now has on Facebook—and we were constantly filming small vignettes and posting them on YouTube, which was just starting to hit big around that time. From there, various media outlets found out about us, and soon we were the darlings of the paranormal television world.
Even as we were basking in the success we had created, we also had to start looking forward. Would we continue doing more documentaries? Would this concept have a life as a weekly television series? Zak’s brother-in-law knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a production company and had an in at a couple of networks. Sometimes, that really is the only way to get a foot in the door. So we stuck our feet out firmly and met with the guy in New York City… Maybe this documentary, this team of Zak, Aaron, and myself was destined for our own series. The circumstances that had brought us together were strange enough, but now something bigger was brewing on the horizon.
CHAPTER 8
SELLING THE SERIES
When we were pitching ourselves to television networks, all we really had was a loose outline of what we wanted the show to be. We wanted the main focus to be the investigations themselves, but we’d also include the history, background, and a walk-through tour of the locations, as well as interviews with historians and witnesses to paranormal phenomena. Those were the essential elements, which we would need to turn into a formula. The three of us—Zak, Aaron, and myself—pitched the series as something that would always be real, always be raw. I didn’t know yet about a “sizzle reel,” which is a short version of your intended show that you put together to wow network executives and give them an idea of what it would be about, but I knew enough to cobble together some of our best moments of footage from the documentary along with some footage of the GAC events we’d filmed. It was four and a half minutes of the best of what we were all about.
Eventually, we had a meeting with Travel Channel. We sat in a huge room with a very large table in the center, dominated by a gargantuan monitor. I felt like we were sitting in Frank Cross’s office in Scrooged, all spread out around the table and pitching to just this one guy. After visiting so many networks, we had become kind of nonchalant about the whole thing, not as gung ho as we might have been when we were first starting out.
We started talking with this exec, telling him about the film. Right as Zak was in the middle of the pitch, the guy got up and said, “Hold on a second.” He’d just seen a friend of his walking by the door, someone named Matt Butler, a guy who would change our lives.
The exec told Matt he had to come check out our film. As it turned out, Matt is really into the paranormal—he’s the guy who brought Most Haunted from British television over to the Travel Channel in the United States.
So we all watched the DVD together. When it was over, Matt said, “Wow, that’s amazing. Awesome.” We could tell he was really into it. We started talking more about it, and when we saw his enthusiasm, it really gave us a good feeling about where the meeting was going. We’d come so far doing everything we’d done—all the craziness that had led up to this moment. I tried to express that to Matt as best I could, and I could see he understood. There was a moment where I felt like we just connected, almost as if I ha
d known this guy for a long time. We were all kindred souls, and the whole thing started taking on an “it was meant to be” feeling, which we so often hear about but so infrequently experience.
We left the meeting feeling great. Since it was one of our first times in New York, the three of us decided to head over to the Statue of Liberty. It was while we were waiting for the boat that we got the phone call from the production company that had set up our pitch meeting.
They basically said, “Travel Channel is really interested. They gave us an offer. They want to do it. They’re going to give us eight episodes.” And our response was, “Hell, yeah!” Before this point, we’d had offers from Discovery, Biography, and some other networks, but they all wanted us to film a pilot. We felt we had essentially done that already with the documentary. Travel Channel was offering the promise of something real—eight episodes—and that was the opportunity we truly wanted.
We got to the Statue of Liberty feeling like we owned New York, even after exhausting ourselves climbing all those stairs to the top. As we stood there and admired the expanse of the world around us, I could feel like it was ours for the taking. After all our hard work, opportunity had come knocking. But now, instead of just opening the door, we had to invite it in, make it feel at home, even cook it dinner. It wasn’t going to be an easy undertaking turning our ghost adventures into a series, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
Right away I thought about how now we could explore Bobby Mackey’s Music World, Moundsville Penitentiary, and all those other places my cousin Justin and I had been researching for the last couple of years in the hopes of filming a second documentary. We could investigate the paranormal on our terms, gain access to the places where others might not dare to go. It was all happening the way I’d dreamed.
