Game Tape #9: Influencer-as-artform
Kevin James as "Mr. Taylor," the art school teacher
Attention Heads, please rise for this week’s Game Tape guest: Danny Desatnik.
Danny led creator events at #paid, advises Creator Camp as they attempt to fix Hollywood, and now runs Playlist Storytellers, one of the best event series in Toronto (and soon, the world). He also happens to have been my University roommate back in the day during a particularly degenerate summer semester.1 He has been on the frontier of the creator economy for years, and always has a great eye for where the puck’s going.
Today we’re talking about Matt Taylor, a mysterious TikTok account where actor Kevin James has spent the last three months cosplaying as an elementary school art teacher:
Kevin James (as “Mr. Taylor”) posts day-in-the-life style vlogs on TikTok and Instagram, all vertically filmed as though he’s an actual elementary school teacher.
The story progresses over time, with his Dad passing away and him falling in love.
The account posts a marriage proposal, which now officially ties it to Kevin James’s forthcoming movie “Solo Mio.”
The movie itself looks pretty forgettable, but the rollout has been genuinely impressive. Kevin James unfortunately doesn’t have the celebrity firepower that Chalamet does, at least among the young culturati, but I suspect this is the sort of fourth-wall-breaking that we’ll see more of as generative AI makes all of our media more malleable.
[This interview is a transcribed and lightly edited voicenote conversation. We’re recreating podcasting from first principles.]
I. Internet-native context building
Matt Taylor is a great example of influencer-as-artform: performance art that is packaged into the sort of characters that we’re already accustomed to doting over on TikTok or Instagram. Movie rollouts are mostly just context-building. Trailers, for example, are a tool to shed light on a few particular corners of the world that you’ve built, so that people are then willing to pay to see the rest of it. This rollout is fantastic because it takes that principle of context-building, and delivers it in an internet-native format.
SHAIYAN
There’s a lot of talk about “regrettable minutes” on social platforms. When I think about the internet moments that I actually remember or feel good about, they pretty much always have something to do with context; feeling as though you’re part of an in-group joke or at least noticing that there’s an in-group joke happening. On Twitter or TikTok there’s a main character of the day, someone who has done something horribly wrong or funny, and then you have all these riffs and parodies of that original sin.
It seems like Hollywood is figuring out how to do this in an internet native way. The canonical 2025 example was of course Chalamet making his whole world around the rollout of Marty Supreme. It feels good when you go to see the movie and it’s like the DiCaprio pointing meme, like, yeah, I get that, I was there for the buildup.
It feels like Matt Taylor does that in an even more internet-native way.
It’s technically the same thing as the aura edits. Lionsgate has these full-time clippers to clip characters from movies using TikTok aura edit styles, and it’s effectively the same thing as a trailer, right? A trailer is context building. And creating an influencer is just a digitally native way to do the same.
DANNY
There’s two meanings to context here. One is what is the context that you are building for someone, and then there’s where you’re building that context for people.
The what in this case is obviously that there’s an art teacher, and he’s going about his life and he’s interacting with his students, and then there’s love interests and whatever that appear, great. But the where is smart because they’re doing it in a platform-native way: here’s the sort of day in the life vlog that you’re used to seeing, we’ll do it with no production value, we won’t think about camera angles and camera movement.
There’s a creator named Max Zavidow, who goes by @formerteenheartthrob. He makes what he calls “really short films,” two to three minute short films that are shot natively for social media. Lower production value, grungier, sometimes totally absurd, and these shorts have been getting millions of views for a really long time. He’s extremely talented and we’re always talking about, well, imagine if a production company were to give him a real budget, twenty or thirty thousand dollars or whatever, and he’d essentially create a prequel to whatever film they’re promoting.
To your point on context, people should get to live in something and be excited about something before you get them to go take an action and buy a ticket to something.
SHAIYAN
Yeah, the prequel framing is cool because it implies that there’s some causal relationship between these two pieces of content. Marty Supreme’s promo was cool, but it didn’t really feel that it lived in the actual universe of the movie, aside from, sure, the recurring colour orange or to Chalamet to some degree method acting as Marty Mauser. But when you get to the movie, there’s some dissonance there, it’s actually a totally different thing from the rollout.
Matt Taylor, though, they specifically put in little context clues, little Easter eggs that will presumably come up again in the movie. In their most viewed TikTok with 32 million views, it’s just a video of him talking vlog style in the school as usual. But then a woman walks by and he kinda stops talking and looks at her like, oh, whoa, who’s that? Spoiler: it’s the same woman he ends up falling in love with and proposing to a few videos later, and according to the movie trailer it’s also the same woman who eventually stands him up at the altar.
So it’s an interesting way of using internet native narrative devices. You’re giving context without leaning on something like a flashback in the movie.
II. Media you can play with
Emerging forms of media mimic their predecessors before they actually become something new. The earliest slates of TV programming were just recordings of theatre productions. And then we realized that we can play with sets and zooms and SFX, and suddenly we’ve invented TV-native formats that could never be accomplished by theatre. I suspect generative AI will follow a similar pattern. We’re in the “recreate movies with no production cost” phase. But that’s not actually that interesting! The real version of the medium will probably look more like a world that you can step into and mould into your own. To be clear, this Matt Taylor rollout is not at all generative AI. But it feels like it’s intentionally designed as a universe that you can actually play with.
SHAIYAN
It’s interesting that this rollout, prequel, whatever, intentionally feels like a thing that you can actually touch and play with a little bit. People in the comments, for example, are getting in there saying, “Oh, why do you people think this is Kevin James? This is actually my fourth grade teacher.” People are actually getting involved with the bit.
For most of us who have grown up on the internet, it feels like media being interactive is a given: comments and remixes and parodies. High production Hollywood movies by comparison feel one dimensional. You watch the thing and you know that there’s actors on screens and you know that it’s a separate universe, which is part of the joy of it, of course. It takes you out of your lived experience.
But with Matt Taylor stepping into the “real” world, the movie becomes a thing you can interact with on your own terms, a character that you can actually develop a relationship with, in the ways that we’re already accustomed to building parasocial relationships. If we fast forward to a world where generative AI is the baseline, you can imagine stepping into these movie worlds in your own ways, and genuinely interact with more than just the comments.
DANNY
Yeah it’s more than just comments, you get these spinoff pages and these memes and these sayings and these cultural moments. When there’s a complete story to be involved in, which there is because they’ve been running this Matt Taylor page for three months, there’s just so much to interact with. It gives people the chance to slowly build on it on their own and they can take what happened in the past video and apply it to what they’re watching now. There’s lore to call back to, there’s references to be made that people are gonna keep showing up across videos.
The other thing to talk about is this balance between interactivity and context. Because of the way that the videos are shot, it actually feels like a 50-year-old who doesn’t really know how to use social, and really is just clicking a button and sharing his thoughts straight to the camera. It feels more natural to the context of the platform or the ecosystem that they’re in.
SHAIYAN
Not to be a McLuhan glazer, but yeah basically the medium is the message, right? It’s like, by shooting it low-production iPhone style, influencer-as-artform, the message of the rollout is in the unique form they’ve chosen for it: this is the the sort of character that you are used to interacting on this platform, and we want you to interact with this character in a way that you don’t typically get a chance to with characters in movies or even movie actors generally.
“Organic” is a stretch though. Definitionally as a marketing campaign, it’s inorganic, right? If you look through the comment section, the day the trailer dropped, after like three months of this TikTok buildup, suddenly there’s an account called “Matt Taylor Fan Club.” It becomes the top comment on one of his videos the day the trailer drops, and the account is like “oh my god the movie trailer dropped.” If you click onto the fanpage, obviously the first post is ON the day the trailer drops, and it’s a TikTok native clip edit. 95% sure it’s like coordinated by the production company or whatever, but it’s cool because they actually get how this ecosystem works.
But that begs the question: now that all these organic behaviours are being done in inorganic ways, what happens next? Everyone’s saying “silence brand” when a brand appears in their TikTok comments, presumably that’ll start to happen soon when movie rollouts are also eerily organic. Eventually that becomes cringe and you’re like, okay, brands are doing it, what’s next?
DANNY
I don’t think it’s cringe. If you build up this whole world and then there’s this fan account that acts as a new door to open to get to the trailer, and then there’s aura edits, or whatever you need to do to get people to watch the movie. At the end of the day, you’re respecting the medium the way the behaviour really is. It’s not just like, oh, let me clip up a horizontal 16 by 9 dimension trailer for short form and hope people go see the movie. It’s more: we’re playing your game so you’re actually invested and interested, and then we’ll ask you to go to watch a movie or buy a product, which is normal.
If a consumer’s like, oh, that’s cringe, or oh, they duped us…no, they didn’t. They gave you exactly what you wanted in your way, and now it’s leading to something you will hopefully actually enjoy.
Email me at shaiyankhan@gmail.com if you see any interesting media businesses or properties that you think I should discuss on Game Tape. And again, reply and lmk how you’re feeling about this new format!
“University,” not “College.” I will not submit to your American vernacular.