Zachary Quinto and Shane Dawson butted heads over the YouTuber's critically panned 2014 movie

• A viral TikTok resurfaced a connection between actor Zachary Quinto and YouTuber Shane Dawson.
• Quinto produced filmmaking reality show "The Chair," through which Dawson made his film "Not Cool."
• Quinto did not like Dawson's film.

A viral TikTok video from creator @dandydemon resurfaced the connection between actor Zachary Quinto and YouTuber Shane Dawson, which traces back to a filmmaking reality TV series called "The Chair" that aired on Starz in 2014. Quinto, as reported in multiple outlets including Variety and Observer at the time, was not the biggest fan of the film Dawson directed as part of the series.

"The Chair" was a reality series in which Dawson and another filmmaker, Anna Martemucci, were given the same original script and each made separate films. Following the films' release, Starz used SurveyMonkey to calculate an audience vote, Variety reported: Dawson's film "Not Cool" received an average rating of 63 out of 100, while Martemucci's Hollidaysburg" received a 58 out of 100. Dawson's winning prize was $250,000.

His film, however, was critically panned: The Los Angeles Times called it "a stab - no, a frantic machete swipe - at comedy that only date-rapists, racists, and sociopaths could love," and The New York Times said that it was "so poorly executed and so unfunny that no one involved with it should ever be allowed to work in the movies again." Dawson responded to some of his harshest critics at the time by saying that they "treated my movie differently than they would have treated any other teen comedy," Observer reported.

They weren't the only ones who thought "Not Cool" lived up to its title. @dandydemon's TikTok video, which currently has over 160,000 likes, brought up some of Quinto's reported comments on Dawson's film and they were scathing.

@dandydemon

Reply to @yourmumschesspears blue-light glasses were gifted to me by @theseglasses ! ##shanedawson ##zacharyquinto

♬ original sound - DAX

While footage of Quinto commenting on Dawson's film on "The Chair" that linked in some coverage from 2014 no longer appears to be available on the Starz website, many of his comments live on in interviews. Variety reported that prior to Dawson's victory, Quinto called his film "a vapid waste of time."

"The reality is, [Not Cool] is not a good movie," Quinto told Yahoo Entertainment. "And on top of it not being good, it was offensive. I'm all for off-colored humor. I'm all for original voices that are designed to provoke, but there's nothing original or revelatory about the story or the way he shot it, and that was the thing that I took most umbrage with. If you're going to be distasteful, then at least be smart about it."

In an interview with Observer Quinto attributed Dawson's win to his existing fanbase, and said that Dawson's "inflexibility" and "arrogance" bothered him while acknowledging that "there were a lot of people that responded to his film."

In the same Observer article, Dawson rebuked Quinto's criticism and said that his team was "so incredibly collaborative," saying that "to say I didn't collaborate just showed how out of touch he was with the making of my movie.

Following his participation in "The Chair," Dawson continued making content for YouTube, reigning as one of its biggest stars before a deep reckoning over past racist and otherwise offensive and controversial content in 2020. As Insider's Lindsay Dodgson wrote, he had one of the biggest falls from grace in YouTube history and has only made small appearances back into the public eye after going dark in mid-2020.