On this week's episode of 9/11 Free Fall, filmmaker Dylan Avery and AE911Truth COO Kelly David join host Andy Steele to discuss the release of SEVEN, which tells the story of Dr. Leroy Hulsey's four-year study into the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7, conducted at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
David, who is the film's executive producer, and Avery recount the decisions that went into making the film and talk about the many platforms where it can be viewed (Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, and Microsoft) as AE911Truth strives to bring the film to millions of viewers worldwide.
We invite you to listen or to read the interview below.
Andy Steele:
Welcome to 9/11 Free Fall. I'm the host, Andy Steele. Today we're joined by Dylan Avery and Kelly David. Dylan Avery is a legendary filmmaker, and I will say legendary, because his film Loose Change, I believe, lit the spark, not just for 9/11 Truth but for the overall trend towards ordinary citizens making videos that question official narratives. And this is a trend that has blown up over the past many decades. And it provides me hope to this day. Of course, as I just mentioned, he's the maker of Loose Change, as well as other films such as Black and Blue and Buzzkill. He recently completed an AE911Truth produced film called SEVEN, which we'll talk about today.
And of course, he's joined by Kelly David, one of the lead producers of SEVEN. She's also the chief operating officer of AE911Truth. She's a very dedicated, hardworking woman. And I'm not just saying that because she's my boss and she's sitting here, but I've seen this demonstrated time and time again, especially with this film. So guys, welcome back to the show.
Kelly David:
Thanks for having us.
Dylan Avery:
Thank you.
Andy Steele:
All right. So we're all about SEVEN this week because this film is coming out. We’re always picking up new listeners, Dylan, so we want to catch them up as quickly as possible. Please remind our audience what SEVEN is all about.
Dylan Avery:
SEVEN is a documentary that exclusively focuses on Dr. Leroy Hulsey. He's an engineering professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He just recently had wrapped up his four-year study on the collapse of Building 7 and his findings within. And so AE wanted to have a little documentary to go along with the study. So we filmed it last December, spent all year working on it, and now, a year later, it's finally coming out.
Andy Steele:
And that study is such a huge deal; we've talked about it for a number of years. All of the hard work that went into it from Dr. Leroy Hulsey's team. And, of course, the funding of our supporters and to try to have this important study come out, which completely refutes what NIST said, as if we didn't know already. But this just puts the final nail in the coffin. And so what do you do when you have a study like this and you've got a hostile corporate media and a hostile government that just wants to bury this issue and pile a bunch of other issues on top of the public and keep them distracted? You got to publicize it. What better way to do it than with a film like this. And I've seen clips of SEVEN already, and I'm going to tell everybody this is going to look very different than a lot of other 9/11 truth documentaries that you've seen. This is very high quality. Kelly, and you sort of helped out a little bit during the production of this film. You want to talk about that experience?
Kelly David:
Sure. I was there for all of the interviews, and we flew to Alaska together with the crew to get the interview with Dr. Leroy Hulsey and also to get some shots of Alaska for the film. And our director of photography, Ryan Patrick O'Hara, is fantastic. And we also got some amazing drone shots. Thank you, Dylan, for those. And…
Dylan Avery:
You're welcome.
Kelly David:
And if I could just add something different to what we're typically used to with 9/11 and documentaries in the style of this is much more cinematic, much more artistic than what you typically would see where it's just more informational rather than focusing a lot on the style. So I think that will go a long way in helping to make this documentary better. But yeah, it was great to be there for all the interviews, and we had a great time doing it and we have a fantastic crew, and yeah, I can't believe it's exactly a year ago to the day that the film came out where we were actually shooting interviews on that day. So, yeah, it's exciting.
Andy Steele:
You're talking about the cinematic aspect of this film, and that is so important. We've gone from a movement that relied largely on ordinary people. I'm an ordinary person. I mean, I didn't make full length documentaries, but I might make a YouTube video here and there back in the day to just illustrate my point. Very low production quality, I think a white on black title screens and then just the clip and that was it. And that was the large part of the 9/11 truth movement for a very long time. That's what we became used to. But most people out there are going to respond to what you see in Hollywood. A lot of that high production value going to grab more people's attention. I know people are more inclined to watch it. That's what we want to do. We want to break into the mainstream. We want to make 9/11 truth an issue that everybody says that they were agreeing with even before they really were. We want to make it cool. We want to make it something everybody wants to be a part of. I think something like this can blast that even further.
Now, Dylan, when you started this project, I know how these things go, is that you start off a project. It's about Building 7; it's about the Hulsey study. So you've got this very technical subject here that you have to cover, but there is still creativity involved in it. You get an idea, a vision of where things are going to go. I know that sometimes on the field things can change. Did anything like that happened with you? Did this morph in any way from your original vision from when you started?
Dylan Avery:
Well, one of the main things going into it, because the focus of the documentary was always engineering and technical analysis as you said. So going into it, I assumed that we were going to start the film with the three engineers that we had interviewed, Roland, Kamal and Scott and then eventually get to Leroy at the end of the project. And what happened after shooting, and even I think after like a day or two in Alaska, it was like this needs to be front and center. Not only did we get the most, I hate to keep saying the word, but the most cinematic material in Alaska, but to me Professor Hulsey was the focus; he was the point. And he was always supposed to be, but in terms of the edit and the approach and just the story, I felt that he was the most important part and that he needed to be front and center before we even talked about 9/11.
And it was really just the experience of walking around the campus with him, seeing the way he interacted with his students. There's a legitimate respect that Professor Hulsey commands on the campus. And so I really wanted to try and convey that to the audience as much as possible. Granted, you know, the first day we were just meeting and talking and getting to know him. So there's a lot of stuff that happened during that tour of the campus that obviously we didn't capture because we weren't shooting, but it definitely informed the rest of the shoot and informed what we did want to get on our one day of shooting. And we didn't want to just sit down and get an interview with Leroy. I keep calling him Leroy, even though you don't even call him Professor Hulsey, you just call them Hulsey on campus anyway. But that was one of the things is that we didn't just want to get the interview with Hulsey. We wanted to see him walking around the campus, take us on a tour, kind of build up UAF as much as we could as a legitimate institution.
So anybody who's tuning in for the first time, anybody who thinks, oh, these are just a bunch of cranks and crackpots, we can at least put our best foot forward with Hulsey and go, no, look, this is the guy. This is the guy that's behind the study that we're about to spend 40, 45 minutes talking about." So to me that was very important is to make sure that Hulsey was front and center. At least introduce him a little bit. And it was one less thing to have to do later in the film too. So start the film, introduce Hulsey, tease the audience a little bit about what this is about, opening credits, Building 7.
Kelly David:
Exactly. Well said. And I have to say it was the exact same experience for me. We had this completely, not completely different, but we had this different idea going into it. And then once getting there on the campus, especially the first day, I mean we didn't even have any cameras with us. We were just walking around and talking to him, getting to know him, watching him interact with the students. And then we see that they have this $120-million facility in their engineering department where they have this core story test bay area where civil engineering, undergraduate students are able to test things then build airplane wings and bridges. And it's just stuff that does not normally happen as far as I know. I'm not an engineer and I haven't studied every university. But according to Leroy, that's just something that does not happen, especially for undergraduate students.
So it really was impressive to see all of that. And that's when I think Dylan and I started talking about how this needs to change a little bit. This needs to be a spine of the story. This really needs to be about him. He's not just some guy who did a study. And as you mentioned that he really does command respect on the campus. His students loved him. And I loved that about him, getting to see him interact with them. And he's just a great person all around.
Andy Steele:
Absolutely. Dr. Leroy Hulsey has been on this show a few times. Very nice man. I spoke to him in person over in California and you know that he really knows his stuff. What's interesting when Dylan was talking about focusing in on Leroy Hulsey, when I stepped back from the seriousness of this issue, stepped back from just the day-to-day work that we do involve with it, what I find most interesting is just the human stories that encompass this entire movement. So many times just people in general are looking for some kind of hero to come from the sky and solve all their problems for them. That's why we get people so rallied behind political candidates when we have elections come up for president or whatever, that they treat these people like they're going to come down off of model Olympus and somehow fix everything.
But a lot of times it's not those people, it's the people that come from the rank and file of America. And I've seen it so many times demonstrated on the show from all the guests that I've interviewed, just ordinary people, engineers, architects, people like Richard who founded this organization to begin with, people like Leroy Hulsey who didn't commit to doing this at first, but then eventually did and then came up with a study and it shows exactly what we've known for years. I want people to see that because I want people to know that ordinary people can make a huge difference in this country. Even if the corporate media is not acknowledging it, even if half the people yet don't know about the work that they're doing, you can have a major impact. So Kelly, now that you have a final product, what are you most proud of about this film?
Kelly David:
Oh, that's an interesting question. What am I most proud of?
Dylan Avery:
You can't say me, that's cheating.
Kelly David:
Well, obviously that was the second. The idea pops into our heads to make a documentary, I didn't even think twice about it. I was like, okay, so Dylan's going to be directing it; I hope he says yes. But yeah, that of course had a lot to do with it. But I think probably I would say the thing I'm most proud about is probably how it was difficult for us to take what is a very heavily engineering focused content, where you have to try to break it down into layman terms. And I know that any engineer watching this, it'll be almost impossible for them to not want to look into this further or even at least question it on some level. But we knew that regular people were going to be watching this as well.
And because the study is so technical, having the work that Dylan and I did on the editing and trying to come up with different ways so that regular people could understand it. And we did that through the use of Dylan with his crazy, amazing editing skills of explaining things. And then the use of graphics that we did and we got some animations done so that it was easier to explain to people. I think that is probably the thing that I'm most proud of because I really was afraid that it may be too focused on the engineering aspect and that this would be great for engineers, but for regular people they might struggle with it or get bored. And now, looking at the final product, I don't feel that way. I think it worked out perfectly.
Andy Steele:
Dylan, same question.
Dylan Avery:
The part that I'm the most proud of? Shoot, and I can't say Kelly. Yeah, I don't know. I'm proud of the crew, I'm proud of what we managed to accomplish in a very short amount of time. And really, as Kelly mentioned, half the battle was just the edit and trying to figure out how much was going to be too much for the audience. And as she said, we were half targeting this for engineers and half targeting it for regular people who were either new to the subject or feel that they're sick of it and want to hopefully get a fresh take on it.
Yeah, I'm proud of it in general. I'm proud of the legend, Ed Asner narrating the film. That's pretty cool. And that was another part of the battle of why this took so long because we had one narrator, and then he didn't really work out, unfortunately. And then I begrudgingly did some narration and I was like, "I hate this. I hate everything about this. I don't want to narrate this." And not just... Yeah, well, no. It's mainly because like I can understand, there's a certain audience out there to reach with my voiceover I'm sure. But to me the project required some form of legitimacy in the narration. You have these engineers in suits talking about very technical things and then you have me coming in with some voiceover. It didn't work for me. But thankfully it worked out.
Richard specifically emailed Ed and was just like, "Hey, we got this new documentary on Building 7." And he agreed without even asking to read a script or to watch anything from the movie. He's like, "Yeah, sure. Send me a script." And so we did. We had the voiceover like two weeks later, incorporated it, did a round of final edits and final notes from everybody and then sent it off to 1091 Media where it has been released as of not when you're hearing this, but as of the day that this is being recorded, the movie is out.
Andy Steele:
I wanted to ask about 1091 Media. Because I've learned a lot of stuff just watching you guys do this work about how film production happens and how it gets distributed. What does 1091 Media do and where will people be able to watch this film?
Dylan Avery:
Well, 1091 is what's known as a distribution company. So generally, you make a film and you either have to just put it on Amazon prime free to watch yourself, do all the marketing, throw it up on YouTube and hope to monetize it on there. The issue that we have is the subject material and that YouTube specifically has become very censor happy when it comes to pretty much anything at this point. There used to be a time where they were just targeting the stuff that was kind of more on the fringe and possibly a little bit more harmful to public health and well-being, to now where they're basically just flagging everything. Everything gets buried by the algorithm, search results don't show up the way they should.
So the good thing about 1091 is that with them, we have the ability to transcend all of that, and we don't have to rely on Amazon prime. We don't have to rely on YouTube and hope it shows up in searches. They're in a position where they can just directly send it out to Amazon, iTunes, Vudu. So basically the film right now is in what's known as a transactional period. So most distributors will usually run this transactional period for about three months. Any purchases that they're going to get out of it, anybody who actually wants to buy and own the film outright. Once that window's over with, then they start pitching it to the more widespread and mainstream, specifically what's known as SVOD or streaming video on demand, which means Netflix, Hulu, again, Amazon Prime, but it would be pushed through by a distributor, which gives it a little bit more visibility than the stuff that someone like me would just throw up on there for example.
Dylan Avery:
So 1091, they're currently distributing it to U.S. and Latin American markets. I don't know if other international markets are there. And then I don't think that means that it's explicitly limited to the U.S., it just means that the film has specifically been translated to Latin American subtitles for the purposes of hopefully getting the Latin American market. So they have the ability to get it out there. They not only have the pedigree of Ed Asner being attached to it, but they also have their own pedigree as a distributor. I mean, granted, they do cover and distribute a lot of code conspiracy theory documentaries, but at the same time, they do have clout and they do have the ability to get those films out there. So it's what they specialize in at this point. So we're hoping that through them we get through this transactional period. We'll hope that we can get a debut on Netflix or Hulu.
Again, subject material might make it a little tight, but the best thing about having someone like them in your corner is they have to do all the work. Like you hand the film off to them and any PR and any interviews you do are obviously a bonus, but the onus is on them now to get the film out there and to get it distributed. And so you not only have to worry, on the flip side of it, where you have to worry about writing the film, shooting it, editing it, and then finding a place for people to actually watch it. 1091 is taking care of that very important last step. And that was really the main reason that we decided to go with them is not only, like I said, the instability of current DIY platforms like YouTube, but we get an extra bump of legitimacy and maybe get it out to a couple more platforms, maybe get some TV or institutional sales, who knows.
And the great thing about the deal also is that they are specifically handling the digital rights, which means that the DVD rights remain squarely in the hands of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The DVDs for the donors are being made up right now. And I imagine it will appear in the store. So anyone who's more into the traditional analog distribution, which is a funny thing to say, because it's really only changed so dramatically in the last couple of years, but anyone who wants to own it on a disc, DVD, Blu-ray, whatever, that'll be handled through Architects & Engineers. Anyone who wants to watch it on iTunes, etc., will do that through 1091.
Andy Steele:
Now, we had a five-minute version that came out before this. It was part of PBS's Spotlight On segments that I guess plays between other shows. This is up to the local PBS stations. They determine when it plays, so it's different everywhere. And Kelly, you just got an audit from PBS about that. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Kelly David:
Yeah, sure. So it aired in August, and we just got an audit back from PBS Spotlight On. And basically we got some pretty good results saying that it aired 835 times in about... Some of this that they have to estimate this. And that's about 44% of all us television households, and their estimate is reaching a gross audience of 4.1 million. So that's pretty good for a five-minute version. And when I was in touch with the vice president of communications over there, he wrote to me saying, this got really good results and got a lot of airtime. And he sent me a full audit, which will be available by the time this airs. Actually it should be available up on our website where you can actually go and look and it'll show you exactly which channel it was on and how many times it aired.
And so, yeah, that was great. So that was like a good indicator of how people were picking up on... I mean, we don't know how the audience thought of it, but the fact that the stations where the satellite stations of PBS were picking this up, and the fact that 1091 Media got in touch with us after just seeing the teaser when we first sent it out. So that gives me a lot of hope that if these people are seeing the worth in it, that we'll have viewers feeling the same way and hopefully getting the message across that we were so desperately trying to do with the film.
Andy Steele:
Right. And again, not to keep on beating on this point, but I think it's so important especially at this stage in the game is that it's reaching new people. So every time we can break into a new venue, break into a new audience, new minds, that is always a great thing. Now we're almost at the end of the show, Dylan, but I did want to ask you about this because I thought you were just a documentary filmmaker, but I learned recently that you are also a fictional filmmaker. It sounds like it's science fiction, I don't know anything about the film yet, so you're going to illuminate our audience as much as you want, but it's a movie called Asteroid that you're working on. Please tell our audience about it.
Dylan Avery:
Well, thanks to Asteroid I can now say that I'm a narrative filmmaker because leading up to that point. It's really all I ever wanted to do. The only reason Loose Change even exists is because it originally started out as a narrative feature, and one thing led to another, and I realized I didn't have the time or resources or, most importantly, the money to shoot the film that I wanted to shoot at age 18. So this past summer, I finally directed my first narrative feature film called Asteroid. It's mostly comedy with a little bit of action, a little bit of drama in it. I hate to use the term dramedy. So I don't know, it's got a little bit of everything in there. It's got some modern day commentary, it's got some joke about limited on limited cell phone plans.
It's got some cute moments between the husband and wife and the daughter. It's got some fun supporting characters. It was a lot of fun and we shot it over two-and-a-half weeks back in August back when New York, specifically upstate New York in Otsego County where we were, was one of the safest places in the nation. So if anybody was going to film a movie during a pandemic, upstate New York in August was a great time to do it. And the other reason we chose that timeframe is because that's the time period in Oneonta where normally the college kids are gone, the baseball families are out of town. So we had an opportunity to have a mostly empty city, basically carte blanche with all local businesses. Again, thanks to the pandemic, a lot of these places were, and continue to be hurting really bad. So we were able to put a little bit of money in their pockets and usually filmed on their day off. So they weren't even losing business. They were just getting a couple hundred bucks on top of whatever they were getting during the week.
So we shot in August, we edited through September and October. We had a test screening here in Oneonta on the 1st of November with cast and crew. And we've just been tightening up the edit. We handed out feedback forms to everybody, so we got to know what everyone's favorite scene was and wasn't. Miscellaneous notes we might've gotten. My general rule of notes is that if one person says it's an issue for them, it's probably not a big deal. If two people mentioned it, then it definitely should be looked at. And if three people mentioned it, then you definitely have a problem.
So that was a pretty easy system, I was just finding the first major cuts that had to happen and any major issues we had. But I mean, generally everybody loved it. The cast and crew is really happy with it. Everyone said that it turned out exactly the way they pictured in their head, which with scripts doesn't happen very often. There's usually some variable either the way it's shot, or actors that were cast. But even on set everybody was just like, "I can't believe how well this was cast," which is amazing. Because that was one of the first concerns going into it. It was like, how are we going to shoot a movie in upstate New York when I'm used to dealing with Los Angeles, when you put out a casting call and you have a thousand submissions that night, you have a pile of head shots that you have to go through. The role of Zoe, for example, we got over a thousand submissions for that role alone. She was definitely the top contender. But we got a couple of hundred for the wife, a couple of hundred for the male lead. But even that was inspiring, and to find our first cast member, Lejon Woods, who played Kenny, as soon as I saw his audition and I was like, "All right, well this might actually work. Because we got an amazing actor right here that's perfect for Kenny, so let's just keep on going.”
Andy Steele:
You are actually, whether you know it or not, doing exactly what I wanted people to do for a number of years. Take away the power of Hollywood, start setting these things in various places around the country and put power back in the hands of independent filmmakers. I think you actually get a better product that way, too, and then people don't have to go gravel to the system so much to be able to break into acting and all of these things. Plus you might find some really talented person who maybe just didn't have a ticket to L.A., but this opportunity came up for him and who knows what it'll balloon up to.
So we are definitely going to check that out when it comes out. Dylan will let me know where you'll be able to watch it and I'll make an announcement here on 9/11 Free Fall. I know the 9/11 Truth Movement's going to be interested in seeing it because we all want to see where it came from your imagination there. So guys, we are out of time. Thank you so much for all the work you're doing, for all your work on SEVEN. Good luck. And thank you for coming out on 9/11 Free Fall today.
Kelly David:
Thanks for having us, Andy.
Dylan Avery:
Yeah. Thanks for having us on, man. Great to be back.
