Toronto, Canada-born, Liverpool, England-raised Andrew Cole has been making an anti-bullying documentary since 2012–or before anti-bullying was cool.
Today, writer/director Manfred Becker’s #NoJoke is available to the masses through On Demand and Indiecan Entertainment.
#NoJoke follows singer-songwriter Cole as he tries to convince his musical idols to help him make a song for victims of bullying. Think “We Are the World,” only starving kids have been replaced by picked-on youths.
Cole does not ultimately get Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder to accompany him on his journey, but Jeff Goldblum, Slash, Patrick Stewart, Lemmy (R.I.P.), Jane Lynch, Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf, Charlie Sheen, Michael Biehn, Diego Boneta, Julian Lennon, Steve Vai and Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith are enlisted to share their talents and, in some instances, painful experiences.
Along the way, Cole is also exposed to experts who help him understand bullying and his own painful past.
Here is the trailer:
This is, to our knowledge, the only project ever to combine the talents of Lemmy and Jeff Goldblum, but we’ll just have to download #NoJoke to find out if it is, as billed, unlike any other anti-bullying campaign out there.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.