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Dylan Avery, Loose Change

Dylan Avery

• Born November 1st, 1983 (age 30) in Leesburg, VA.
• Moved to Silver Spring, MD, before settling in Oneonta, NY.
• Applied to and rejected by SUNY Purchase’s film program twice in two years.
• Began work on the project that would become Loose Change in 2001.
• Filmed and directed Buzzkill (2010), a feature-length documentary released in eleven parts on Youtube, which follows the director’s friend Wes Davis as he attempts to go without caffeine for twenty-one days.
• Filmed and directed numerous music videos and short films (2010-2014)
• Worked as an animation assistant on the Discovery Channel’s Dinosaur Revolution program (2011).
• Credited online for having conducted uncredited research on Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss (2011).
• Edited A Field Full of Secrets, a documentary film directed by Charles Maxwell, which follows a small group of men and women attempting to build a “machine” using crop circles as blueprints.  
• Black and Blue, “a documentary about injustice and police brutality,” is forthcoming.

Release History

• Loose Change: 1st Edition (2005);
• Loose Change: 2nd Edition Recut (2006); TV premier in France and the Netherlands
• Loose Change: Final Cut (2007); TV premier in Finland
• Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup (2009); screened at Milano Film Festival (2010)
• Versions of the film were broadcast on state media outlets in Belgium, Ireland, and Portugal, and translated (or subtitled) into Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Reception History

• 1st Edition (2005) - IMDB: 6.0/10 (28 users)
• 2nd Edition Recut (2006) - IMDB: 7.2/10 (4300 users); RT: 3.8/5 (5587 users)
• Final Cut (2007) - IMDB: 7.1/10 (1826 users); RT: 3.9/5 (1444 users)
• An American Coup (2009) - IMDB: 7.2/10 (2389 users); RT: 3.9/5 (737 users); Amazon: 3.7/5 (109 customers); Netflix: 3.8/5 (686,827 viewers).
• N.B. IMDB demographic data indicates that the majority of ratings were made by individuals that identify as non-U.S. citizens.
• N.B. IMDB data also indicates that “10” and “1” were by a large margin the most popular ratings for the Loose Change films.

Early Stages of Loose Change

• From Ed Pilkington’s 2007 article in The Guardian: ”The Loose Change story begins in May 2002 on the opening night of a Mediterranean restaurant in Oneonta where Avery, then aged 19, is working as a dishwasher. A friend of the owner, James Gandolfini (aka Tony Soprano), is a guest at the party and Avery gets chatting with him. "We started talking about movies and shit," Avery recalls. "Gandolfini told me, if you want to do something that matters, you have to talk to the entire world. You have to have something to say."
• From an undated interview with Gary James, on the impetus for a project about 9/11: “There was a site called the 9/11 Timeline and a version of it later popped up in the form of a site, well, it was first called The Complete 9/11 Timeline and it evolved into what’s known as History Common.”
• From Alec Baldwin’s 2013 interview of Avery on WNYC’s “Here’s the Thing”: “The original Loose Change feature film script was ambitious...it had car chases, it had people assembling at the White House…”  
• From Nancy Jo Sales’s 2006 article in Vanity Fair: “I was supposed to be making a fictional story about me and my friends discovering that 9/11 was an inside job, and doing something about it,” he said, “and basically that happened in real life.”
• Again, from Vanity Fair: “I started researching 9/11 and I found an article on the World Trade Center—someone had posted a picture of a controlled demolition and then a picture of the World Trade Center collapsing. And I was like, Wow, O.K. And then you find one article and that article links to 10 others, and before you know it you’re up until six in the morning. It’s crazy, the information takes over.” “It wasn’t supposed to be true,” Avery said. “And then I started realizing that, you know, we were lied to. And then it was: Well, do I keep making this a fictional film, or do I focus on the real thing and write about what really happened? And that’s where I went with it.”
• Avery begins work on a documentary film, drafts of which he sends to his friend Korey Rowe, who is in Iraq fighting in the early stages of the Iraq War. Rowe will act as a producer on the Loose Change films.
• Another friend from Oneonta, NY, Jason Bermas, joins Avery and Rowe as a producer on later editions.

Critical Reception:

• Although articles about the film did appear in publications such as Vanity Fair and The Guardian, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and metacritic list no reviews of the film by professional film critics.

Academic Critique and Analysis

• “From Alerting the World to Stabilizing Its Own Community: The Shifting Cultural Work of the Loose Change Films,” co-written by Michael Butter and Lisa Retterath (a Junior Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Germany and a graduate student at the University of Bonn respectively), published in the Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 40, Number 1, 2010, pp. 25-44.
• Academic database searches using advanced search features yield only a handful of mentions or citations of Loose Change.

Official Response

• The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) responded directly to the film in a 1000 word document titled “Loose Change Debunked,” the lead of which reads, “amateurish video on 9/11 full of errors, faulty reasoning.”
• According to the State Department’s website, the IIP “engages international audiences on issues of foreign policy, society and values to help create an environment receptive to U.S. national interests. IIP communicates with foreign opinion makers and other publics through a wide range of print and electronic outreach materials published in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. IIP also provides information outreach support to U.S. embassies and consulates in more than 140 countries worldwide.”
• “WTC Disaster Study,” a forty-three volume report conducted and published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Unofficial Response

• Screw Loose Change - a blog, active to this day, devoted entirely to explaining and debunking claims made in the Loose Change films.
• Sifting Through Loose Change - a digital document created by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement as a “9-11 Research Companion to Loose Change 2nd Edition” that presents a “detailed point-by-point critique of the film using an illustrated transcript.”
• Numerous other responses, usually quite critical of the film and its research methods, have been published, predominantly online, by journalists, scientists, and engineers.