Everyone Said the Show Was Greenlit. Then a VICE Executive Walked Into the Edit Room the Night Before the Screening.

Adam: Take me to the beginning. Where did the project originate? What were you doing at the time?

Sam: This was 2016. I had just moved to Los Angeles, and I had done some branded content, short docs with Mountain Dew. They had a production company called Green Label, and everything was run through Complex Magazine. Complex was doing all the content for Green Label.

My friend Erica Jarvis was running part of the documentary department, and she was a fan of some of the work that I had done on a music series called Live from the Streets for Vice and Noisey. She was a big underground hip-hop fan, so she liked Jedi Mind Tricks and other artists I had worked with.

She reached out and said, “Hey, can you do a series on this skate crew called Illegal Civilization, l…