Hulu’s Doc ‘Jawline’ Has a Major Connection to the TanaCon Disaster

Jawline, Hulu’s new documentary about the wild world of teenagers on social media, is a fascinating analysis of how Generation Z engages with the internet. And if you’re older than Generation Z, then watching Jawline is a new way to make you feel older than dirt (what the hell is YouNow?!). No matter your age, you’ll definitely feel for Jawline’s lead teen Austyn Tester, a kid from middle-of-nowhere Tennessee (I’m from Tennessee, born and raised, so I can say that with authority!) trying to bust out of a bad situation by finding fame online. But Austyn isn’t the only big personality in Jawline. We gotta talk about Michael Weist.

While pulling the curtain back on streaming teens and the teens who stream them, Jawline also reveals the inner workings of the industry that supports this Jenga tower of thirst traps and temporary fame. Weist is a mover and shaker in the streaming teens industry, a combination manager/den mother who talks like the hard-ass lead of a Shonda Rhimes drama– except trade a hospital or the White House for a sparsely furnished McMansion where he micromanages frivolous videos made by pretty teens. It’s a gig, and Weist at least knows there’s an expiration date on all of these aspiring internet stars. He’s blunt about that! Also Weist is from Tennessee, and I find it weird that a doc about an aspiring streaming star from rural Tennessee never mentions this. I’m here for the hometown connection!

But who is Michael Weist? And what has Michael Weist been up to since Jawline’s filming concluded a few years ago? Oh, he’s been up to some stuff. Let’s talk about TanaCon.

If you’re already engaged with the pop culture that Jawline’s embedded in, then you most likely recognized Weist right away as one of the masterminds behind what’s come to be known as the Fyre Festival of the YouTube generation. But before we get into TanaCon, let’s talk about Tana Mongeau. Mongeau is a YouTube personality with 4.8 million subscribers, is the same age as Disney’s Mulan, and recently had a fake wedding to YouTuber Jake Paul.

So, TanaCon. It all started when Mongeau was denied a “feature creator” badge at VidCon (a convention for online video personalities) in 2017. What initially started as a big joke about Mongeau holding a rival meet and greet across the street from VidCon grew into an actual convention, and, full circle, eventually became a punchline.

As Mongeau told Forbes in the buildup to the disaster, Michael Weist and his company Good Times Entertainment played a big part in getting TanaCon off the ground. “People just started tweeting #TanaCon and kept telling me to have a convention,” Mongeau said in the days before the disaster. “And I was laughing about it, but I didn’t think it was possible. But then a friend of mine, Michael from Good Times Live, reached out to me and said, ‘You’re crazy if you don’t do this. Let’s do this. Let’s make it happen.'” With just over a month of prep time to put together a full-blown convention, Weist and Mongeau set out to make it happen.

The free convention was to take place on the same weekend as VidCon at the Anaheim Marriott Suites, located just over a mile south of the con that so wronged Mongeau. TanaCon was supposed to have free concerts, lots of meet and greets, and a who’s who of YouTube-lebrities (Shane Dawson, Casey Neistat) and actors (Bella Thorne), but things started to seem fishy right away. Other YouTubers like Anna Campbell said they were added to the guest list without ever being booked, and those “free” tickets (which actually cost $1) sold out almost instantly. That led to the creation of the $65 VIP ticket, a ticket that the majority of attendees purchased even though “VIP” implies exclusivity.

On June 22, 2018, thousands of TanaCon attendees–most of which bought a $65 pass to a free convention–showed up at the Marriott, and then waited between four and five hours in the direct heat of the Anaheim sun to be let in. Sunburns were plentiful, so plentiful and painful that concerned parents called the cops en masse when they realized their children were burning up while trying to get indoors. It turns out that the Marriott ballroom rented for TanaCon could only hold 1,500 people. Mongeau claimed that 15,000 showed up, but it was actually closer to 4,000-5,000 as reported by the police to BuzzFeed News. Still, that’s significantly more than 1,500! Attendees protested as the cops showed up and shut down the convention around noon on its first day. There would be no day two of TanaCon.

This being a convention organized and attended by the social media savvy, there was a lot of TanaCon tea spilled on Twitter that weekend.

In the fallout of the event, YouTuber and TanaCon featured guest Shane Dawson posted a three-part “The Truth About TanaCon” doc, with plenty of Weist and Mongeau’s sides of the story.

Weist himself became a meme after the TanaCon debacle thanks to his constant presence during the crumbling convention, zipping around on a Segway while wearing a jaunty scarf.

Things were no longer cool between Mongeau and Weist, and they still aren’t. In an interview with Paper marking the one year anniversary of TanaCon, Mongeau regretted “trusting someone that everyone was telling me not to… I remember days, or weeks, before TanaCon, [YouTube personality] James Charles really sitting me down and being like, ‘What the f*ck are you doing trusting Michael Weist’… At that time I was spending everyday with Michael, and Michael was pouring his heart out to me about how misunderstood he was, how his intentions were amazing, how smart and business-minded he was, wining and dining me, you know what I mean?”

Weist, on the other hand, put the blame on Marriott, who he claims told him that the ballroom could hold 4,000 people. In October 2018, four months after TanaCon, Weist  filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and dissolved Good Times Entertainment. Weist says his company lost $700,000 over TanaCon. The last thing Good Times did was release their own documentary about TanaCon, possibly a response to the one Shane Dawson released. That doc has since been taken off of YouTube, but Mongeau described it to Paper as “just him secretly filming me for like an hour straight and it was really weird.”

Weist has moved on since TanaCon, especially with Jawline–filmed entirely before TanaCon–dropping on Hulu. He’s now the president of Juice Krate, a company that does…a lot, from developing and managing up-and-coming streaming stars to producing its own content, running its own streaming service ($7.99/month), and–brace yourselves–hosting a live convention in Nashville at a venue that, at least 15 years ago, was a Jesus-approved skate park/concert venue for high school kids. It was like if the Foot Clan headquarters from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie traded in Shredder for Jesus. Oh–it still is! Hopefully God is with Juice Krate in October and Nashville won’t have its own TanaCon.

Stream Jawline on Hulu