
F A Q s
Where can I watch The Sudbury Devil?
You can currently stream it on Tubi, Prime Video and Apple TV+ . If you can afford to, please buy it directly from us here on my website – the cast and crew makes more money from royalties that way, and the bonus content is pretty cool.​ We also have a limited edition 4K UHD Blu-Ray for sale if you're a physical media kind of person.
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What is your next film going to be?
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There are a few balls in the air ;) At the moment, we're not sure if we want to try raising money for another traditional feature for the streaming market, or go all in on the New Media thing and make a kind of high production quality video essay/narrative film hybrid (think Peter Watkins' Culloden with an Atun-Shei twist) that would have multiple distribution points but eventually land on YouTube. Either way, we're actively looking for investors, so if you're interested then by all means send me an email!
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What does "Atun-Shei" mean?
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Nothing – it's nonsense. I came up with the name for a schlocky film I made in my 20s called Alien, Baby! Atun-Shei was a mythological character in the world of the story, an ancient Sumerian hoemaker-turned-hero who went to battle against the film's antagonist, a shapeshifting ancient alien invader. Atun-Shei Films started as nothing more than a placeholder name for my production company, but then the YouTube channel got famous and now I'm stuck with it. I've since been made aware that Atun-Shei is phonetically nearly identical to atın ÅŸeyi, which means "horse cock" in Turkish. I find that absolutely hilarious, especially as a Serb.
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What are those random short films available for sale under the "Movies" tab of your website?
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A little while ago I started taking submissions for independent films to host them alongside The Sudbury Devil here on the website. Finding an audience for indie cinema (much less making a little money off it) can be a bitch, and I'd like to use my platform to showcase cool and underappreciated movies. I hope you'll check them out! 100% of the profits go to the filmmakers.
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Will there be a Checkmate Lincolnites spin-off series tackling other historical myths?
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Nah, I'm not really interested in the Checkmate format anymore. While undeniably entertaining, I find the whole Socratic dialogue YouTuber-talking-to-themselves thing to be pretty limiting in terms of the ways it can impart complex information. Debunking videos also put you in the confrontational position of having to say "No, you're wrong," and when people feel like they're being preached at or condescended to in that way, they tend to be harder to reach. In terms of my work in historical education, I'd like to delve deeper into topics than that format allows, and as a filmmaker I'd like to create more artful and ambitious stuff than just shot-reverse-shot and a split-screen two-shot, which is just not that creatively exciting.
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Will there be more episodes of Frozen '50s Man?
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Definitely! But making them takes a lot of time, coordination, effort, and money, so new episodes will probably be few and far between.​
Can I interview you for my livestream or podcast?
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Possibly. Contact me.
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Do you still do walking tours of New Orleans?
No, I retired in 2019.
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Will you ever do in-person historical tours for your YouTube audience?
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I would love to!
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Whatever happened to your King Philip's War board game? Is it still available anywhere?
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It's for sale on the vanity board game publishing site Gamecrafter, where it drifts in and out of stock based on the availability of the game's components. I've actually been meaning for a while to make a second edition – as well as publish a sequel game set in King William's War – but my work keeps me incredibly busy, and to be honest, my board game hobby is pretty low on my list of priorities.
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How do you learn historical accents?
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I've always had a felicity for accents and mostly learn by imitation. The Confederate accent I did in Checkmate Lincolnites and other Civil War videos is basically Bill Compton, Stephen Lang's Stonewall Jackson, and Scarlet O'Hara all chopped up and put into a blender. For Original Pronunciation, the accent of the Witchfinder General and The Sudbury Devil, I sort of just taught myself by listening to Ben Crystal lectures and reading a ton of Early Modern English texts. Since OP is mostly used in Shakespearean theater, there are lots of resources out there for actors to learn the accent, and any dialect coach worth their salt will probably be at least passingly familiar with it. The late 18th century New England accent I use in my Revolutionary War content I learned from a dialect coach who specializes in the period – it's mostly based on Noah Webster's grammar books and pronunciation guides.
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What is your religion?
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I guess you could say I'm agnostic. I derive a lot of meaning from the connection I feel to the natural world in a very shroomy, hippie-dippie kind of way. I also identify quite a bit with the quasi-pantheistic theology of the Diggers, Ranters, and Quakers, which probably doesn't come as a surprise. I was baptized and halfheartedly raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church but never gleaned any spiritual gnosis from it. Despite what some very nasty people on the internet say, I am not religiously or ethnically Jewish (Jews aren't the only white people with sizable proboscises, y'all). As JRR Tolkien once wrote to a Nazi, "I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."
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What are your political views?
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Depends on the day of the week, to be honest. I have anarchist days, I have communist days, I have (gasp!) liberal days. The modern issues I'm most concerned about are climate change and income inequality, and I think we need radical and uplifting new systems of power to be able to adequately tackle these problems. I don't view Atun-Shei Films as a proselytization tool, but my politics do inform how I present history. The question I ask myself doing historical research is not "how can I inject my worldview into this?" but rather "What can I draw on from my unique perspective to come at this topic from an illuminating new angle?" I think historians asking themselves that second question is what drives the discipline forward.
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Are you involved in activism?
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Yes, I'm quite active in the animal rights movement, and to a lesser extent climate justice causes. I think factory farming and industrial fishing is an epoch-defining atrocity that our descendants will look back on with horror and shame. I have been involved in anti-fur and anti-foie gras campaigns as well as ballot initiatives to ban slaughterhouses and factory farms. I've been vegan since 2021 and, taking a cue from Benjamin Lay, do my imperfect best to minimize my contribution to human exploitation and ecological degradation in every aspect of my life. I think personal lifestyle changes like that are important because a) they're the right thing to do and b) they create a ripple effect that influences the people and culture around you. That said, if we want to end factory farming and stop the worst impacts of the climate crisis, personal change is not enough – we need nothing less than a complete and irrevocable transformation of our economic system and way of life. It's a tall order, but to paraphrase Le Guin, the divine right of kings didn't last forever... neither will this.