Avery grew up in the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountains, in Oneonta, New York, with his mother, Annie. His father left before he was born, and the two didn’t meet until Avery turned 27. “I didn’t feel any kind of connection with him,” Avery recalls.
Avery in lower Manhattan. In a matter of months, his film
Loose Change had been viewed on the Internet more than 10 million times, by 20,000 people per day.
Annie managed a health-food store, and without child support, she had to work often. But she and her son were close, and she instilled in him a progressive sensibility and a healthy dose of skepticism. “I raised Dylan to be a free-thinker,” she says. “If somebody said one thing, I’d make him think about what they were really saying.”
As Avery grew older, he became withdrawn. “I didn’t want to go to school,” he says. “I got picked on all the time because I was vulnerable and lonely.”
Korey Rowe, Avery's production partner, signed on to make
Loose Change after serving U.S. Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He passed time drawing cartoons, spending nights watching movies with his mother and laughing at television shows like
South Park and
The Simpsons. “My mom did a damn good job,” he says. “But I was angry and confused. I was mostly raised without someone telling me, ‘Here’s how you talk to girls. Here’s how you shave.’ There was a certain presence that was missing. I didn’t have to bow down to anyone.”
When Avery turned 14 he met Korey Rowe, who picked up a paper route next to his. Rowe ran with a different crowd. “Dylan was into video games,” he says. “I was into sports and p*ssy.” Though they had little in common, they quickly became close friends, with Rowe taking on a kind of paternal role. “I tried to help him, using some of the things my father taught me. I brought him to parties and he blossomed.”
“If it weren’t for Korey,” Avery says, “I’d still be that timid little kid.”
When the boys were 17, Rowe dropped out of high school and eventually enlisted in the Army, while Avery applied to film school, at SUNY Oneonta, but didn’t get in. After he graduated, in 2002, he took a job doing local construction and began to sketch out a screenplay. It was a fantastical caper about a couple of boys who, sensing something nefarious, decide to investigate 9/11, unearthing a vast conspiracy and becoming heroes in the process. “It was fun,” Avery explains. “About kids fukking shyt up. The original script ended with a rally on the White House lawn, and then I think we all fake our own deaths.”
The plan was to splice the fictional story with real-life news footage, but then it turned into a documentary. “It was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he admits. “The feature script definitely paved the way for what was about to come.”
***
Avery sent bits of the feature film script to Rowe, then in Afghanistan, who was supportive. “I was telling him it was great,” he says.
When Rowe made occasional trips back to Oneonta on combat leave, the boys would shoot scenes together—freewheeling rap sessions with a Richard Linklater vibe, incongruously mixing witty banter with speculation about 9/11. The sequences took place in Avery’s living room, in the car or over dinner. “We’d smoke weed and just pull out the camera, no thought to lighting or continuity or anything like that,” Rowe recalls.
At the same, Avery researched his screenplay, digging further and further into the Sept. 11 attacks. “I wanted to try and find out what happened,” he says. “I didn’t go in with an opinion, per se, but for me, it was like slowly tumbling down a rabbit hole.” Before long, he became obsessive, staying up late at night, researching put-options on United Airlines’ stock and NORAD timelines.
Avery says the original
Loose Change was a fictional film about "kids fukking shyt up."
In February 2003, Rowe was sent to Sinjar, on the western border of Iraq. “That’s when I knew something wasn’t right,” he recalls. “For the next year, I had to go around looking for weapons of mass destruction, and I saw we destroyed their country.”
While he was there, Rowe acquired an old PlayStation and a television. Avery mailed him the first cut of
Loose Change, which ran to 20 minutes and was now basically a documentary. “I gathered a few friends around my little screen to watch,” Rowe says. “One yelled, ‘This is bullshyt!’ and another said, ‘This is good information.’ They started throwing things at each other, and then we had to go on a mission.”
Rowe left the Army in August 2005, four months after the official first edition was released. “I was on board to say something,” he says. “I was on board with Dylan.” The two boys, now both 21, worked on the second edition together in Oneonta. It hit the Internet that winter, and soon blew up worldwide.
The next two years were a whirlwind. The boys toured the country, screening their film and attending Truth conferences, where they were the stars. They were courted by Alex Jones, the rabid conservative conspiracy theorist and radio host who, among other things, believes the MSG found in juice boxes and kettle chips is part of a “chemical warfare operation” to spread homosexuality. He was at the forefront of the Truth Movement and rubbed shoulders with celebrities like Charlie Sheen, who was a Truther himself and a big fan of Loose Change. In early fall 2006, Jones facilitated an introduction between Sheen and the boys, suggesting the actor might narrate the next version of the movie, which would, with his cache, lead to a theatrical release.
Sheen met with 2929, Mark Cuban’s entertainment company, which had produced politically minded films like George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck and the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, saying he wanted to make a new edition of Loose Change. The idea was to rework the previous movie, turning it into a high-end production that would appeal to mass audiences.
At one point, Sheen had the boys over to his home in Los Angeles. “There were extravagant fruit and cheese platters,” Rowe recalls. “His backyard was perfectly manicured. He had a Picasso in his downstairs bathroom, had flat-screens, 60-plus inches, everywhere. There was a private movie theater, where we screened Loose Change for him and his people.”
The boys moved out to L.A. in March 2007, but the project talks fell apart six weeks later—their controversial movie presented a professional conflict for Sheen, who at the time was the star of Two and a Half Men, one of the most popular shows on television. There was a general concern that associating with Loose Change could make the actor less appealing to mainstream viewers. 
Meanwhile, based on the expectation of returns on the future film, Rowe, the businessman of the operation, had gone into severe debt. In advance of what the boys thought would be their big production, they hired employees and a script consultant, bought fresh footage and new cameras to reshoot interviews, and subcontracted graphics to a company in Germany. Avery and Rowe needed an additional $100,000 to finish the film. So they tapped Alex Jones, who stepped in and lent them the cash.
When the third edition, known as Final Cut, came out in November 2007, it hit with a ping, not a bang. Though it was produced for $250,000—the other two cost about $12,000 combined—there was no theatrical release, just DVDs for sale on a few websites. It was overproduced, with the rough edges that made the second edition so attractive smoothed over and polished. In other words, they had tried to make a Hollywood film.
“The movie was shyt,” Rowe says. “The people involved destroyed it. There were too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Avery was tired and beginning to grow wary of both the Truth Movement and his place in it. “There were anti-Semites saying the Israeli intelligence agency pulled off 9/11,” he says. “They wanted me to put that stuff in my films.” In a bizarre twist, some in the movement accused him of working for the government, conducting a disinformation campaign to discredit Truthers. Others, who disagreed with his ideas, berated him on a popular blog called Screw Loose Change, where commenters regularly said things like, “Jeez, fukking Hitler must be proud of Dylan.” And in different forums, strangers fantasized about his demise. “There were YouTube videos dedicated to killing me,” he recalls. “One said, ‘Dylan Avery dies in a plane crash,’ and it was just stock footage of a plane crashing. You see enough of that, and it really starts to wear on you.”
