The plan was for Kevin James to post as his character and get some eyeballs, and nobody in the room predicted that strangers would start falling in love with a man who does not exist.
John opens up about the Zoom call where everyone was pitching marketing ideas, and the moment he suggested that Kevin simply make his own account and post as the character. He talks about reading the comments as strangers began giving the character life advice about the coffee shop down the street, which is a plot point. Jeffrey gets candid about how much of that only worked because Kevin committed all the way, including painting every one of the paintings himself. The two of them walk through the Colosseum shot they could not afford, the fifty thousand dollar quote that killed it, and the licensed alternative they matched instead. They also reflect on the Palio horse race and the permission they had to win from every contrada, the actress who learned her English lines phonetically, and what happens in the edit when the person who wrote a scene is the person being told to cut it.
An essential watch for anyone who has ever had to let go of the thing they wrote.
