MX-04-1026
SCARY GARY
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Program
13 selections total- 2000Tribulation
- 2001A Crack in the Floor
- 2007Succubus: Hell-Bent
- 1998Rough Draft
- 2003Frost: Portrait of a Vampire
- 2007Maneater
- 2012Piranha 3DD
- 2015Mansion of Blood
- 2009Hallettsville
- 2005The Gingerdead Man
- 2026Trick and Treats
- 1985Silver Bullet
Feature Presentations
How a Tim Curry tribute, a stubborn Discord problem, and a month of late-night coding accidentally turned a movie marathon into a television station.
The basic origin goes back to Z’Darathon 2026 and Curry On.
By that point I had already spent an unreasonable amount of time making these Discord marathons feel like something more than twelve movies dumped into a playlist. There were trailers, posters, interstitials, scheduling, Main Events, all of it.
During Curry On I kept hearing about people who “might” show up. Friends of friends. People whose parents or family members loved Tim Curry. Somebody close to me mentioned that Discord was kind of a pain in the ass to get onto a television.
And they were right.
Discord was becoming the brick wall.
The Discord Problem
If I wanted somebody’s mom to watch a Tim Curry marathon, the instructions were basically: download Discord, make an account, find our server, join the right room, figure out what is playing and when, then somehow get that onto the television.
That is an absurd amount of friction just to watch a movie.
And even if you did all of that, Discord was still Discord. People might be talking. Maybe you don’t want to listen to me and my friends bullshitting over the movie. Maybe you just want to turn something on.
I had put so much work into Curry On and Z’Darathon 2026 that I kept coming back to the same thought:
There had to be a better way to actually show this stuff to people.
I didn’t really think I could build it.
On September 9th, I registered MaximumExposure.tv.
By the end of that week I had an Owncast page that would play whatever I was sending out through OBS.
I had never used Owncast before.
I had never done any of this before.
It worked.
I also hated how it looked.
So naturally I spent another week building a custom webpage around it.
Then I wanted a schedule.
Not just a list of movies, either. I wanted the website to know what was actually playing. So I built a scheduling system that read the movie metadata coming out of OBS, calculated how much time was left before the next feature, and figured out where everything would land when the marathon looped around again.
If something started at 3:17 in the morning, the website should know that.
Then I wanted an archive.
Z’Darathon 2025 seemed like the natural place to start because that was the first 24-hour Discord marathon I had ever hosted. At that point this thing suddenly had a history, which meant the website needed somewhere to put it.
Then Chromecast had to work.
And AirPlay.
Because the whole point was getting rid of the friction. You should be able to pull up Maximum Exposure on your phone, hit a button and throw it onto the television.
That took an enormous amount of time.
Three dozen hours at least.
Google’s documentation and implementation are not especially intuitive, and the order in which things happen matters in ways that can drive you completely insane. It felt like working through a building full of loops and doors. You open one door, but some loop behind it is closed, so technically everything is working except it is working behind a door you can’t get through.
There were several points where I was convinced the whole thing was impossible.
Eventually it worked.
Then came refinement.
Bug testing.
More refinement.
More features.
More testing.
More more more more.
After establishing that everything at least "worked", I decided that, realistically, I could probably have the whole thing ready sometime in October.
And what is October?
Spooky Season.
So Scary Gary went into production.
Gary Busey had already been one of the actors I started collecting after Z’Darathon. That collecting spree had also produced several other curated marathon ideas by this point, but we’ll get to those eventually.
Scary Gary was simple enough:
Most of the scary movies Gary Busey has been in.
That was basically the program.
There wasn’t some elaborate thesis behind the lineup. Gary Busey has spent a surprising amount of time wandering through horror movies, thrillers and various other unpleasant situations, so I picked the ones I wanted to see and built the marathon around them.
Hider in the House was the obvious Main Event.
It is basically the quintessential Gary Busey performance: sincere, damaged, uncomfortable and then eventually completely insane.
Meanwhile everything around the marathon was being built at the same time as the website.
Trailer.
Interstitials.
Poster.
Lobby music.
Metadata triggers.
Scheduling.
Archive pages.
Streaming setup.
The site itself.
This was a one-man operation, and almost all of it was being done at night and on weekends.
Then, because apparently I did not have enough things to worry about, two days before Scary Gary went live I decided Maximum Exposure needed live captions.
I “had to have” captions.
The original idea was to run the caption model locally on the same computer that was handling everything else.
That lasted about five minutes.
It was too computationally expensive, not accurate enough, and generally a terrible idea to ask one computer to run the broadcast while also trying to listen to it and transcribe everything in real time.
So at essentially the last possible moment I ended up outsourcing the captioning to an AI service running somewhere in a data center.
It worked remarkably well.
It also cost money, required another round of learning how an entirely new system worked, and caused a completely unnecessary amount of heartache two days before launch.
But I “had to have” captions.
So captions went into the live candidate.
Scary Gary ultimately became the proof of concept for Maximum Exposure.
The streaming setup gave me some trouble. There were bugs. There were things I immediately wanted to change. There were things I had spent hours building that suddenly looked completely different once real people were actually using them.
But it worked.
You could go to a website.
You could see what was playing.
You could see what was coming next.
You could cast it to a television.
You didn’t need Discord.
You didn’t need an account.
You didn’t need to know anybody.
You didn’t have to listen to us talk.
You could just turn it on.
That was the entire point.
Scary Gary was the first time Maximum Exposure existed as something more than a Discord marathon with increasingly elaborate production values.
It was a television station.
Or at least I had finally convinced myself it could be one.
