Gurus the Meta Movie

Brian asked me to be an extra in a film he was shooting, so I brought my boy Jeff along for the ride. He and I go back—thirteen years deep, since I first started hopping back and forth to L.A. We clicked fast. Nights out, six nights a week, stumbling in at 2 or 3 a.m., chasing dreams and laughter. Some of the funniest moments I’ve ever lived came standing beside that man.

The shoot had about thirty people, extras filling out the background of a house party scene. Backyard barbecue. Mid-conversation chatter. Everyone blending into the set. While I was standing near the grill, Brian’s creative partner on The Knight’s Young, Chadwick, strolled up like a familiar breeze.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.

“Brooo!” I pulled him in for a hug. Chad is one of those spirits you connect with instantly. I’ve known him almost as long as Brian—Brian introduced us just a month after I met him.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said.

“Likewise! You been good?”

“Man, I’m alive. Waking up in Southern California sunshine every morning—I’ll take it.”

Chad and Brian had been pumping out indie films for years. Streaming projects. YouTube pilots. Meanwhile, I’d been working on my one-man spoken word special—trying to get it clean enough for a real platform. They knew the maze.

“So let me ask,” I said. “How’d y’all get How We Met on Amazon?”

He nodded, like he’d been waiting for this question. “Alright. Five things you gotta nail. First—clear audio. No shortcuts. Second—closed captions. Word for word. If it doesn’t match, they bounce it.”

I laughed. “That’s it?”

“It sounds simple,” he said, leaning in like he was handing me a prophecy. “But they’re strict. You gotta give it to them exactly how they want it.” Then his tone shifted. He looked at me with the eyes of a friend but the urgency of a prophet. “You know what you need to do?”

“What’s that?”

“Take all that old Gurus footage... and turn it into a feature film.”

“Gurus?” I repeated, unsure if I heard right.

“How many voices you got recorded?”

“Thirty? Maybe more.”

I had nearly a hundred Gurus videos on YouTube—episodes, shorts, side series. It had been dormant for a while, but I’d never buried it. I was the show’s only animator, and animating… well, let’s just say it’s the gift I enjoy the least. I hadn’t figured out where to take it next.

Chad pressed on. “Now think about all those people with IMDb credits.”

My eyes narrowed. “Yeah…”

“Take those names. Take the archive. Stitch it into a narrative. Give it a spine. You do that—and now you’re not just ‘some cartoon on YouTube.’ Now you’re a filmmaker. You’re a streaming platform creator.”

It clicked. That lightbulb moment people talk about? Mine was more like a thunderclap. I saw it all—clearer than I’d seen anything in weeks.

“Aww shit,” Jeff said, catching the shift in my face. “You tryna get outta here already, huh?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know I am.”

Jeff turned to Chad, grinning. “This man don’t sleep. We used to party hard, come in drunk, I’d knock out. He’d sit down at his laptop and get to work. I’d wake up, head to my job—he’d still be there. Same spot. Typing. Creating. Like the night never ended.”

“Okay, okay,” I chuckled. “I sleep!”

“Dawg, I ain’t never seen you sleep!”

Chad and I were cracking up when Brian walked over, catching our energy mid-bounce. “Y’all good?” he asked.

I hit him with it. “Gurus. Movie. It’s happening.”

He smirked, cautiously. “Alright… let’s just make sure it meets the marks.”

Brian’s always been the grounding force to my fire. Where I burn with ideas, he tempers with structure. I need that. I respect that.

I dropped into my fake British accent—“I told you, Brian, you’d work with this voice one day.”

He laughed, shaking his head at the voice he once hated that became the soul of our cartoon.

Later that night, after dropping Jeff off, I raced home and got to work. I started digging through old Gurus files—cutting, pasting, connecting scenes. The narratives came flooding back. I wrote 95% of the scripts, voiced a third of the characters, edited every inch. The bones were already there.

Three days in, I hadn’t budged from my screen. Yummy walked in and caught me mid-cut. “I’m doing a Gurus movie,” I said without looking up.

Her eyes lit up like a star had winked at her. “This stuff is great.”

I nodded, slicing through timelines like a surgeon. My screen lit up like a cosmic map. I wasn’t just editing—I was constructing a portal.

Alan Watts. Terence McKenna. Philosophers turned cartoon prophets. I felt honored to animate their voices, to carry their ideas into new timelines.

I called Brian. “Bro,” I said, holding back my own disbelief. “I just outlined five full Gurus movies. Each with a theme. All near an hour long. We’ll need to fill in a few scenes—but the structure’s there.”

He paused. Then, simply: “Well, holy fuck.”