Original Sin: From Preacher’s Kid to the Creation of CinemaSins (and 3.5 billion+ views)

By Jeremy Scott

This book here… is it a memoir? Kind of. Is it a humor book? Yeah, a bit. Is it an instructional tome? Here and there.

Perhaps best known as the snarky narrator and co-founder of the viral YouTube channel CinemaSins, Jeremy Scott cracked the code of turning a passion for film and sarcasm into a full-time job.

Original Sin: From Preacher's Kid to the Creation of CinemaSins (and 3.5 billion+ views) is Jeremy's compelling story of family, career, and deep love for movies that launched him into internet stardom. In his trademark, unapologetic voice, Jeremy gives an irreverent and honest take on the wild ride to creating a YouTube sensation. This memoir-with-a-twist sprinkles readers with his personal advice on the combination of dumb luck, know-how, and je nais se quois it takes to be successful on Youtube while hilariously relaying how two friends stumbled into fame.

With anecdotes of laugh-out-loud misadventures and insightful, actionable advice for aspiring YouTubers, Original Sin is the ultimate behind-the-scenes look into the inception of an internet sensation. But more than that, it's one man's love letter to humankind's greatest escape, a pastime that allows us to dream and dwell on beauty, art, and truth. Original Sin is Jeremy Scott's ode to cinema and how often life can imitate the movies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684425556

Jeremy Scott

Jeremy Scott was born into the eccentric decaying upper classes, he had a spectacularly successful life in advertising in the 1960s and 1970s until reinventing himself, first in Provence and then as an ascetic, whose life was saved by Marcus Aurelius 10 years ago.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

I can’t believe you actually bought this book.

Did you fall for all the flowery words and humorous stories my friends told you in the foreword?! Classic mistake. Never trust the author of a book’s foreword—they are already bought and paid for. I bought Jeff a fucking Jet Ski, for Christ’s sake, and he lives in Ohio!

Look, I am going to level with you. Most of this is just a humorous memoir about how I met Chris and started and grew CinemaSins into a full-time job. If you’re only here for actionable advice regarding YouTube, because you really do want to know what we did that we think helped our success so that you can repeat those things, I did include a chapter just for you.

It’s chapter 11, and if all you’re looking for is the advice I would give to any upstart new YouTube channel, then feel free to skip ahead and get your money’s worth. But I’ll warn you, all the stuff you’re skipping over is fucking hilarious. Your loss, Mr. Fame-Chaser Man. Or Woman.

The most common factor in YouTube success that people take for granted is luck. Blind, dumb, lucky fucking luck.

For instance, our first video, "Everything Wrong With The Amazing Spider-Man," ended up on the home page of Buzzfeed. We didn’t do that. We couldn’t have done that if we wanted to. But it was a huge part of the reason our channel found early success—literally our first video ever got viral views from a massively popular landing spot on the web.

So many of my well-intentioned friends have, post Cinema-Sins, decided they should also try making a living on YouTube. But when their videos don’t go viral, they come to me wondering why. Like it had been so easy for me that they couldn’t fathom their own failure.

Never mind that one of them was posting videos with Canadian Football League analysis, or that another was doing a video podcast about various lesser-known uses for corn. It was my fault their channels weren’t succeeding. I hadn’t given them good enough pointers.

It was a great time of misunderstanding. It was early 2013, and I was making money on YouTube videos, working from home. Our only overhead at the time was the cost of each Bluray disc.

I’ll never forget going to check my mail in mid-2013, after YouTube had become my full-time job, and running into my neighbor from across the street checking his mail at the same time.

He was old and friendly and reminded me of Santa Claus. I hope you find work again soon, he said, sincerely enough, before walking back up his driveway.

That old man cared enough to spy on me and notice that I never left the house, at least not at traditional person who has a job times. And he was concerned enough about my income that he wanted me to know he was concerned.

Which, I mean … nosy much, Santa?

We did wait to quit our other jobs, I’ll be honest. We gathered subscribers quickly and had nearly one hundred thousand in a few months, but we were wary of the whole thing. We waited to leave other employment until we got checks from YouTube for a few solid months. Finally it felt real and not like a pipe dream.

By mid-2013, we were both working full-time on CinemaSins stuff and working from home.

The rest is history.

Today we have four full-time employees beyond Chris and I, which means six full-time CinemaSins peeps. We have offshoot channels like TVSins and MusicVideoSins, bringing our total YouTube audience to eleven million subscribers and growing. And CommercialSins recently launched!

Our Patreon continues to grow, and our podcast gets over two hundred thousand downloads per month. We’re talking about a cooking channel, and suddenly we are your everyday accidental twenty-first-century media brand, making it up as we go.

Making it up as we go … could be a CinemaSins slogan, or a subtitle for this book!

Is CinemaSins comedy? Yes. Is it criticism? Sometimes. Should it be taken seriously? Only by people who get the joke.

And this book here … is it a memoir? Kind of. Is it a humor book? Yeah, a bit. Is it an instructional tome? Here and there.

Look, I figure … you’re on the second page of the prologue and still reading. Why bother defining it or picking a genre? You already bought it. What do I care?

Anyway, thanks for your money.

CHAPTER 1

Everything Starts Somewhere

I was born not breathing, and for two minutes the doctors worked to revive me. Eventually I choked back to life, and ever since then I have been celebrated in my family as a miracle child. The kid who wasn’t breathing. It’s family lore.

Actually … none of that is true. That’s my brother’s story. He was born two and a half years before me, and yes, he was born not breathing.

My own birth was normal and inconsequential.

I guess I just wanted to open this book with a bang.

I’m sorry. It probably does nothing to build goodwill with the readers if I’m stealing stories this early on in the book, right? Yeah, I can’t pull off the evil con man Artful Dodger type any better than I can pull off the totally innocent Oliver type.

Hmm.

What if I told you I didn’t care so much about goodwill once I’d gotten your money?

Not better? Okay. Moving on.

Anyway … I was born in May of 1975, in Kansas City, Missouri.

My birth included no special circumstances to relay. Nothing unique about me. This was only of note because, of course, my older brother had been born not breathing and then had been revived, as I said … like a miracle. My beginning was like being born to Mary and Joseph after they’d had Jesus.

Or to Mr. and Mrs. Pitt after they’d given birth to Brad.

Anyway, two weeks after I was born, we moved from the Midwest to Baltimore, Maryland. This is where I came of age and learned to talk and walk and appreciate baseball. Oriole baseball, of course.

My love of baseball started when I was very young and lines up nicely with my exposure to baseball.

Baseball was considered a family-friendly sport in the late ’70s and early ’80s. My parents, who were stricter than most, allowed me to not only watch baseball on television but also to go to games with them at Memorial Park.

My family’s favorite story to tell about me is that I fell asleep at Memorial Park during an Orioles game, but when the house organ played the notes calling for us to yell Charge!, I yelled Charge! even in my sleep.

But obsession can grow out of early exposure or from early and constant denial. Which is how I became obsessed with movies.

The Nazarene denomination wasn’t a big fan of Hollywood and movies back in the late ’70s. It was seen as a place where the Devil’s ideas incubated and sprang forth toward unsuspecting youths.

Going to a movie theater was about like going to a strip club or a casino in the eyes of my father’s particular brand of Protestantism.

And if you tell a small child enough times over that he can’t or shouldn’t do a thing … that child starts to want to do the thing. It’s odd to me that most every generation of parents fails to learn this lesson.

So from middle school on, I wanted nothing more than to watch movies … to go to the cinema … to buy the popcorn and overpriced soda … to sit among noisy strangers … I wanted the full experience. But I would only have it a few times before turning eighteen.

Chris Atkinson and I met in the spring of 1999, the opening weekend of The Phantom Menace. I’d been working for the Regal Cinemas Hollywood 27 in Nashville as a manager since April. It was a step up for me from my assistant manager job at a Blockbuster Video. I’d been an assistant manager at a smaller chain of movie theaters prior to the Blockbuster job, which I really only took because it was literally three blocks from my house at the time and I had an unreliable car.

The Phantom Menace was an interesting time for movie theater employees. It was the first new Star Wars film in nearly twenty years, so it created lines around the building, customers in costume, and a host of other previously unforeseen movie theater problems.

Among the issues surrounding the release of The Phantom Menace was a list of theater employee rules sent out by Lucasfilm. And the rules were fucking insane.

Like, you know how ushers sometimes come into your movie and walk up and down the aisles and stairs? They’re checking for loud patrons, people screwing, feet up on chairs, or any other anomalies in the auditorium.

Lucasfilm wanted all ushers doing safety walks of auditoriums to do so with their backs constantly facing the screen so as to avoid them seeing the film without paying. All our auditoriums were stadium seating, so ushers would have had to have backed all the way down the stairs without tripping … if we’d followed those dumbass rules. We did not.

The company also asked theater chains to black out the film for early employee screenings—a Thursday night perk of the job for decades. That one we had to follow because … reasons.

Another concern Lucasfilm had was piracy. So we’d been told to be on the lookout for people videotaping the movie. And I was standing in projection looking through that little window, trying to figure out if this dude in the middle of the audience had a camcorder or just a bright