On September 12, 2012, an aspiring actor named Tim Dax woke early and took his two rescue dogs, Peanut and Lily, for a walk near his apartment, off Venice Boulevard, not far from Sony Studios, in Culver City. In an alley where he often sees old people picking through Dumpsters, Dax came across a gray-haired woman who seemed particularly startled to see him. Dax scares a lot of people: he’s a five-foot-nine, 200-pound bodybuilder whose face and shaved head, along with much of the rest of his body, are almost covered with elaborate tattoos, including padlocked cuffs around his neck and ankles and a medieval helmet covering his head. This time, however, it was Dax who was taken aback.
“You are the one!” the woman said, raising one arm and pointing. “You’re the man in that movie on the news!”
Dax was confused. Despite hard work and high hopes, even his best-known roles—in low-budget horror movies such as I Spill Your Guts and Mr. Bricks: A Heavy Metal Murder Musical—weren’t exactly making headlines. When Dax asked the woman what she meant, she said something about riots in Benghazi that had killed four Americans. The Libyan riots, according to initial news reports, had been sparked by a film critical of Islam that had been produced in the U.S. A trailer had been posted on YouTube.
Now Dax was even more confused: he had never acted in a movie that had anything to do with Islam. He hurried home, went to his computer, and made a horrifying discovery. His face was indeed now familiar to millions—a long-cherished dream—but for a reason he could not possibly have imagined.
In the days after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, demonstrations spread across the Muslim world, and the convoluted genesis of The Innocence of Muslims, whose trailer had gone viral, began to emerge in fragments. A man who called himself Sam Bacile and claimed to be an Israeli-American real-estate developer told reporters that he had directed the film, on a budget of $5 million provided by Jewish donors. That story proved to be false. “Sam Bacile” was one of many pseudonyms used by a man who was born Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian Coptic Christian living in California whose criminal record included convictions for bank fraud and intent to manufacture methamphetamine. Nakoula changed his name in 2002 to Mark Basseley Youssef and again in 2009 to Ebrahem Fawzy Youssef.
Nakoula did, however, write the screenplay for a film called Desert Warrior, which was shot in August 2011, primarily on a soundstage at a Duarte, California, facility called Media for Christ. A feature-length cut of the movie, retitled The Innocence of Bin Laden, was shown exactly once, to an audience of fewer than 10 people, at the Vine Cinema, on Hollywood Boulevard, in June 2012. A month later, “Sam Bacile” posted a 14-minute trailer for the film, retitled this time as The Innocence of Muslims, on YouTube, and then posted it again, using yet another title, Muhammed Movie Trailer. Exceptionally amateurish, with disjointed dialogue, jumpy editing, and performances that would have looked melodramatic even in a silent movie, the clip is clearly designed to offend Muslims, portraying Mohammed as a bloodthirsty murderer and Lothario and pedophile with omnidirectional sexual appetites. “Is the messenger of God gay?” one character asks rhetorically. “Is the master dominant or submissive?”
The clip attracted no significant attention until the beginning of September, when an Arabic-language version of the trailer appeared on YouTube. Coptic Christian activists in the Washington, D.C., area, possibly working in conjunction with a fundamentalist preacher in Florida named Terry Jones, who has staged a public Koran burning, promoted the trailer to journalists and via social media. On September 8, an Islamic TV program in Egypt showed scenes from the trailer. A clip from that broadcast attracted hundreds of thousands of views online.
What happened next remains murky. Many, including the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, initially attributed the Libyan Consulate attack to a spontaneous demonstration against the video. It is now known that a deliberate terrorist attack was involved. Regardless, protests against the movie, which had started in Egypt, flared in Yemen, Nigeria, Iran, Jordan, Malaysia, and elsewhere. As the protests raged, a group of the approximately 130 cast and crew members who worked on the film stated in an e-mail to CNN that they were “grossly misled about [the film’s] intent and purpose.” (CNN did not name the individuals who prepared that statement.) Reporters confirmed that all explicit references to Islam had been dubbed in during postproduction. On September 27, Nakoula was arrested for violating parole on a prior conviction, for bank fraud; he has since been sentenced to one year in federal prison. Both Nakoula and his lawyer, Steven A. Seiden, declined to comment for this article. The day of his arrest, Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress who played the mother of a woman offered as a wife to Mohammed, filed a federal lawsuit asking that the trailer be removed from YouTube.
Fearing for their personal safety—or, just as likely, for their future careers—most of the cast and crew have chosen to remain anonymous. Conversations with eight of them, however, reveal the outlines of two basic stories beneath all the confusion. The first is a tale as old as The Day of the Locust, about struggling young actors trying to make their way or at least survive on the fringe of the movie industry. The second is a technological saga that has just begun: the flourishing of high-impact, Web-borne viral videos featuring people whose images are manipulated without their knowledge or consent.
In recent years, the number of films produced in California has dropped precipitously, and it has become harder than ever for performers and crew members to find work. Still, the dreamers come in droves. In 2010, Tim Dax was among the new arrivals. He had already left a 13-year career in the world of interior design and tried to find acting jobs in Manhattan, but because of his tattoos the only agency that gave him the time of day was one called Ugly New York.
When Dax first showed up in Los Angeles, his prospects weren’t much better. So he did what many actors do: uploaded his résumé and photos, for free, to the Web sites of casting agencies such as Actors Access and L.A. Casting, that serve the lowest of low-budget productions. On one of these sites, Dax saw a call for an action-adventure movie set “in ancient Arabia” called Desert Warrior. The listing was short on detail, but Dax envisioned a character like the one Arnold Schwarzenegger played in Conan the Barbarian—“How perfect would I be for something like that?” he asks—and applied for what he fantasized might be a big-budget studio production.
Weeks later, when he showed up for his audition at a dingy, run-down commercial building, reality sank in. As he recalls, “It couldn’t be anybody important, since this is a shithole.” But Dax read for a part, and Nakoula, who had introduced himself as the producer Sam Bacile and was clearly running the show, seemed to like him. As Dax walked out, Nakoula hollered one final question—“Are you sag?”—a member of the Screen Actors Guild—and when Dax answered no, Nakoula smiled and lifted Dax’s spirits with the words “You will be!”
The cast of Desert Warrior arrived on set in Duarte, 70 miles outside L.A., in early August 2011. They were in the middle of nowhere, on a set that was unusually chaotic. No one, at first, had the slightest idea what the movie was actually about. Dax learned that he would be playing a slave (soon after that he was given a second role, as a warrior named Sampson) but knew little else. “This was just a bunch of people like ants crawling on a hill,” recalls actor Dan Sutter, who played the part of Abdo el Mutlab, a desert chieftain. “No one was introduced to anyone. No one knew anything.” Several cast members said they had not even learned they would be in the movie until the day before they stepped in front of the camera. “Out of nowhere, while on lunch at work, I get a call. ‘I’m just calling to remind you that your call time is seven a.m. tomorrow,’” one actor says. “Uh, excuse me? Reminder? I didn’t even know I was cast!”
All of the actors I interviewed say they asked to see *Desert Warrior’*s full script before shooting started. Some were promised copies, but scripts never appeared. Instead, when they arrived in Duarte, each performer received “sides”—a few pages, covering only the scenes to be filmed that day—which they were asked to return before they left the set. (Robert Woodruff, a novice film actor who played the part of a “Caravan Man,” says he resigned himself to ignorance about the script out of sheer need. “I’m just starting out. I have to take what I get. I need work. I need the money.”)
The sides were crudely written, at times almost nonsensical. The actors were struck by the odd use of Anglo-Saxon names for ancient Arab characters. The character that would eventually be identified as Mohammed in The Innocence of Muslims was, in the Desert Warrior script and on set, referred to as “George.” A female extra in the film says, “I asked, ‘Who, 2,000 years ago in the Middle East, was named George?’ And I was told, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’”
More questions arose when the actors went to wardrobe and makeup. One actor says, “I’m a very, very white man. They painted me orange. I looked like Snooki or an Oompa Loompa. I ended up asking why there were no Arab-looking actors on set, because I assumed they would want more ethnically ambiguous people. Most of us were very white, very Caucasian. The answer was something like ‘It’s a sensitive thing for Arab people; we didn’t want to bring them in and make any of them feel uncomfortable, and we didn’t want any media coverage.’ Without me asking about media coverage, they’re already giving a reason why they don’t want media coverage? It was like, Give me an answer to what I asked.”
During filming, as in the auditions, everyone associated with the production got the sense that Sam Bacile was in charge. It was also clear that “Sam didn’t know what he was doing,” as one crew member says, but that was par for the course. “At this level of filmmaking, a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing.” Physically, Nakoula was unprepossessing: small and soft, poorly dressed, with bad hygiene, according to cast and crew. “He smelled like maybe he only showered every few days,” one person says. Dax remembers, “He struck me as a hardworking guy, very downtrodden, always sighing and pulling his hair like he had the weight of the world on him.” One crew member says Nakoula was also capable of extreme rage and eccentric behavior. “Sometimes he would disappear for a couple of hours,” the crew member says, “and we’d find him asleep somewhere, on a pile of pillows and blankets.”
The film’s titular director was Alan Roberts, whose long list of B-movie credits includes soft-core films such as Young Lady Chatterley. (Roberts did not respond to an interview request.) He was generally perceived to be Nakoula’s lackey, and he kept his distance from most people on the set. One of the more experienced cast members, who spoke with Roberts at length, got the impression that the director was utterly disconnected from reality. He says Roberts “told me his whole motivation for this was doing this film so he could present it to grad school as a template for a course on filmmaking. He was talking about how green-screen movies are the wave of the future”—most of Desert Warrior was filmed against the background of a plain green screen; photographic backgrounds were added later—“and there were all these things you could do for a small amount of money, and he could get major movie stars to use them. At that point, I just stopped taking him seriously. I was like, Oh, he’s a complete fucking moron, and from then on it was like everything he said was blah blah blah.”
To almost everyone, it was immediately apparent that making the movie was “going to be just another shit job,” as Tim Dax says. Another actor says he told himself, “O.K., let’s just do it and get it over with. Rip it off like a Band-Aid.” To cope with the demoralizing circumstances, some of the cast simply checked out, making a game of mocking the production on set. Neither Nakoula nor Roberts showed any interest in character motivation or line readings, so some of the actors began to play their roles with funny accents and goof around on-camera as if they were rehearsing a high-school play. One actor says, “We were talking kind of like, ‘aaaarrr!’” letting loose with a pirate’s growl. “We would openly ridicule it because the dialogue was so atrocious, and we weren’t getting direction from anyone.”
The group of actors who played “George” and his band of desert warriors, began to joke among themselves that they were making a pirate musical “because of the amount of times that we were going ‘aaaarrr!’ when we came back from a battle. We would cheer and yell and raise our swords up high at the beginning of every take.” Another actor says, “And then one day we all had to be gay in one scene. And then it was a gay pirate musical. And we all did it. O.K., we’re all gay! What the fuck?”
Like most actors on most low-budget movies, the cast rationalized their involvement as dues-paying—the price of admission—and soothed themselves by imagining the otherwise discouraging situation as one step on the road to success. One young actor who had just arrived in L.A. had been elated to be cast: Desert Warrior was to be his first feature-film role. “I was like, My career is on the right path! I’ve only been in L.A. a couple of months!” Along with almost everyone on set, he quickly came to believe the movie would never see the light of day. Also like almost everyone else, he stuck around anyway, because he needed the money. One actor explains, “If you’re in L.A., you take a job when you get it. You don’t do porn, but you take a job when you get it. You never think, Is this going to cause unrest in the Middle East?”
Cast members were paid $75 to $100 a day—a pittance, but better than nothing. One cast member tells me he has made only “a couple thousand” dollars this year so far. How does he survive? His wife has a job, he says, “and she poses on Webcams for men who pay to watch her in a bikini.” Several actors gratefully mention that Nakoula, as one poignantly puts it, “fed us every day—always a home-cooked meal—and there were even vegetarian options for the people who needed that.”
When the two-week shoot was over, most of the actors forgot about it—until learning last September what Nakoula had done with the movie they’d made. He dubbed over the dialogue they had recorded and edited down the hours of footage they shot, to transform an almost incoherent, swashbuckling feature into a short, crude Web video that essentially subjected the prophet Mohammed to character assassination.
A production coordinator for Desert Warrior says that between the August 2011 wrap and the September 2012 surprise only one cast member—Cindy Lee Garcia, who spent two days playing a bit part in the film—contacted him regularly, about every other month, to check on the film’s status.
Garcia lives in Bakersfield, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from L.A. across a vast landscape of barren mountains that looks like Galilee on steroids. She has asked me to meet her on the outskirts of town, in front of a defunct Peet’s Coffee shop, in a wide-open area with long views in almost every direction. As I arrive, her first words are “I’m in a pissy mood.” When I ask why, she says, “You would be too if your life got turned upside down! I got used. I got made to look like a bigot, which—I’ve been preaching against bigotry all my life.”
Sharp-featured, dressed head to toe in black, her red-streaked black hair drawn back in a heavy ponytail, Garcia immediately offers that she is “a preacher of the Gospel” who has “been supporting the widows and orphans of Botswana for many years.” In 2009, after her husband “had his face ripped off” in a 20-foot fall at the power plant where he worked, she went back to work to support him by acting in low-budget movies, “especially action/adventure, because I have a gift for that.” Desert Warrior was her second film.
Since September, she has put her acting career, along with the rest of her life, on hold. She has moved her church (a non-denominational evangelical congregation), moved to a different house, and stopped babysitting for her grandchildren, for fear they’ll be murdered, along with her, now that “a fatwa has been put out against me.” One Egyptian cleric has in fact issued an online call for the deaths of everyone involved with the movie, cast included. It’s unclear how much power this imam wields—he had never previously been mentioned in the Western press. Garcia is not taking any chances. She says that a private security firm is now providing 24-hour protection for her, pro bono.
I ask, “Are they watching us now?”
“Ohhh, yes,” she answers. In addition to what she calls “my fatwa,” Garcia says, she has received “many death threats.”
“What kind of death threats?”
“Death threats!”
“By e-mail, phone, letter, or—?”
“Death threats!”
She says she called Nakoula the day the movie hit the fan, to ask him, “Why did you do this to me?”
As she recalls, he answered, “Cindy, tell the world that you are innocent!” She has thrown herself into the task. In one month, working with a writer and two editors, she says she nearly finished writing a book about her experience, to be called The Innocence of Cindy Garcia. Though her motion to have the video removed from YouTube was denied by a federal judge, Garcia’s lawyer says she hopes to file an appeal, and the actress intends to keep fighting. She says that she has called the F.B.I. “more than once,” and that “they ignored me. And that is wrong. I want to know why my government is not defending Cindy Garcia.” A few minutes later, she climbs into her vehicle—the vanity license plate proclaims her faith in God—and drives away.
Garcia’s fundamental complaint against Nakoula (“I got used”) forms the basis for what legal experts see as the most striking aspect of her case: the unprecedented claim that a performer’s appearance on film or video is his or her intellectual property. Garcia is asserting copyright interest in The Innocence of Muslims, since she says she did not sign a release granting Nakoula the right to use her image. (Garcia’s suit includes expert testimony from a forensic analyst who worked on the case of the Zodiac Killer, asserting that Garcia’s handwriting and signatures on the releases provided by Nakoula are forged.) She wants to use that claim of ownership to force YouTube to take down the video. If her argument gains traction in court, it could render questionable the use of anyone’s image in online video without that person’s explicit permission. Garcia’s suit also alleges that Nakoula engaged in fraud, unfair business practices, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. And for good measure Garcia has also filed suit against all of the individuals who have reposted the video to YouTube.
One other cast member says he will be a plaintiff in two other lawsuits concerning The Innocence of Muslims. The actor Dan Sutter intends to sue Nakoula and others for offenses including slander, libel, and invasion of privacy; and he plans to sue media outlets that published a picture of Sutter, identified as Nakoula, for publication of a false likeness and negligent publication, among other charges. (One Web site, 411board.com, published Sutter’s picture with the headline, “We’ve Got The Picture of The Film Maker Who Directed The Movie That Lead To The Death Of The U.S. Ambassador to Libya.”) With lawyerly hyperbole, Sutter’s attorney, Jeffrey W. Steinberger, says, “Everybody thinks this guy is a killer, but he’s only an actor.”
Issues of statutory merit aside, the Innocence of Muslims lawsuits highlight an important aspect of the trailer’s cultural significance. Though aspiring actors in L.A. have always been vulnerable to predators of various kinds, The Innocence of Muslims shows them to be in a whole new kind of danger. On the casting couch, a performer can at least try to push a lecherous producer away. Yet as digital technology democratizes filmmaking and the Web becomes the ultimate weapon of mass distribution, performers can, and increasingly will, lose control of what happens to their images, putting reputations at risk of severe damage or outright ruin. The federal judge who rejected Garcia’s request for an injunction ruled that the actress had not shown that she suffered irreparable harm. The same could not be said of the actor who had the misfortune of playing “George,” only to find that he had been rendered as Mohammed in postproduction. People who know that actor say he’s been in hiding since September. Given radical Islamic strictures against visual depictions of the prophet, it is difficult to imagine how he could return to acting without putting his personal safety—and the safety of those he might work with—at significant risk.
Most of the Desert Warrior cast and crew members I spoke with take a dim view of Cindy Lee Garcia’s lawsuit, which they regard as grandstanding. “If you don’t want to be a target, maybe don’t go on TV and shoot your mouth off,” one of them says. No one questions her claim of innocence, but three actors and one crew member do admit that they had somewhat greater awareness of the movie’s subject matter even during filming, though they had no idea of the project’s potential reach or stakes.
One actor remembers being struck by lines such as “There is no God but George’s God.” And “George is the Messenger.” He says, “I was able to piece together that there were a lot of similarities to the rise of Islam as far as what we were saying.” When this actor asked if the movie was about Mohammed and Islam, he was told, no, absolutely not—this is about two warring tribes in ancient Arabia. He accepted the answer because “there was no mention of Islam or Muslims” in the script or on set.
The same actor recalls, “There’s a line that was not in the 14-minute cut: ‘We’re going to put a holocaust on the Jews and the Christians.’ That is actually a line. We said that line, and we were like, ‘Is this something we’re actually saying? . . . What do you do with something as bad as that?’ We chose to make it a little bit lighter by joking around. I know that sounds so bad, but that’s the way it kind of was. We knew that the things we were saying were terrible and terribly written, but, I don’t know, we just did them anyway.”
Referring to that same line, another actor says, “At the time, we were saying ridiculous things. That was said, but there was no context to it. I didn’t know what to think of it except that it was poorly written. And then Sam would be dancing around saying how wonderful we all were. And I would be like, O.K., O.K., guy. See you later.”
He goes on: “At one point we did get together, and we were like, ‘What the hell is this about?’ We did wonder, Is it about Islamic people? Is it supposed to be about the Muslim religion? And it didn’t make any sense that it could specifically be about it, because we weren’t talking about it. There were no references to the Koran, to Allah, no specific references. And [Nakoula and Roberts] didn’t seem like malicious people. They just didn’t seem to know what they were doing.”
Tim Dax, for his part, remembers just one mention of religion on set, and he dismissed it as a strange non sequitur. He says Nakoula asked him, “Do you know what Muslims, where I come from, would do to a person like you?”
Dax said no, and Nakoula told him they would murder him—because of his tattoos. Nakoula said, “I’m against that.”
Dax rolls his eyes and raises the skin above them (he has shaved his eyebrows since he had the tops of his eye sockets tattooed): “I said, ‘Uh, yeah . . . I am, too.’ And I went to lunch.”
When “Sam Bacile” claimed credit for directing The Innocence of Muslims, he said, “this is a political film,” and he declared that “Islam is a cancer, period.” Since then, his only public comments, to The New York Times, indicated that he made The Innocence of Muslims for the express purpose of denouncing Islam. “I thought, before I wrote this script, that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in,” he said.
For the movie’s cast and crew, all evidence indicates that the screenplay was genuinely beside the point. It may not quite be true to say that they were innocent of awareness of the project’s themes, but they genuinely had no idea of its intentions. They were just slogging through another chapter in the stories of their lives and careers. For them, Desert Warrior was nothing but a vehicle—a vehicle that got hijacked in a way no vehicle had been hijacked before.
Tim Dax says he went on four or five auditions in the month following September 11 and got no callbacks. The one person in the industry who reached out to him was the producer of Operation Repo, a low-budget cable show about the repossession of vehicles, on which Dax once had a small part. Still, though he regrets the damage and confusion The Innocence of Muslims caused around the world, Dax hopes it may turn out to be his big break. The whole experience will have been worthwhile, he says, “if I can catch the eye of someone important who says, ‘This guy has heart. We need heart.’” When I try to ask another question about the movie, he interrupts: “Look how pretty the haze is,” he says, gazing east toward the San Gabriel Mountains, naming sunset colors in the smog—“the blue, the purple, periwinkle. Every night it’s like this.”
