They left Sioux Falls for Los Angeles — and are carving out impressive creative success

By John Hult, for Pigeon605

There were no guarantees when friends Tony Fleecs and Nick Simon left Sioux Falls in 2006 to pursue creative careers in Los Angeles.

Fleecs, a graphic artist, and Simon, a filmmaker, only knew they had to try.

Both had worked in television in South Dakota; Simon also had filmed commercials for a variety of companies. But each of them dreamed of bigger things — things that would be harder to find in the city at that time.

When Fleecs walked away from television, for example, he was “at the point where I’d done it long enough that I was either going to move on or work there forever.”

After a few rocky early years dodging bill collectors between meals of discount store noodles, the former South Dakotans managed to carve out creative success in California.

We caught up with them recently at SiouxperCon, where they appeared to meet fans, talk about their careers and reflect on what has changed since their departure.

Tony Fleecs: From ponies to Hollywood

For eight years, Fleecs worked the artist’s equivalent of a 9-to-5 job. 

He’d spent his first few years after college designing graphics for KELO-TV but eventually landed a job illustrating the “My Little Pony” comic book series after moving to Los Angeles, thanks in part to his tireless work ethic. 

The work paid the bills, of course, but it also made him a minor celebrity amongst the franchise’s fans, inclusive of young girls and the storied, parodied male fan base known as “bronies” — Fleecs jokingly refers to himself as a “pronie,” or “professional bronie.”

Ironically, his labor on the cartoonish critters for all those years set him up for what has become a remarkably successful creative endeavor of his own, a breakout hit called “Stray Dogs.” The five-volume tale puts its winsome canine protagonists at the center of a brooding horror plotline to build a narrative once described as “Silence of the Lambs” meets “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”

Last year, Paramount Pictures optioned the rights to story, reserving the chance to produce a theatrical feature film that would represent the studio’s first foray into animated horror for adults. It has been a good year for the 42-year-old, who sold the option before the series’ release and subsequent commercial success.

“Normally, you’ll have the stuff you do to pay the bills and the stuff you do for yourself,” Fleecs said at SiouxperCon, where he was on hand for book signing and a career retrospective talk. “Now, I’m in this place where my creator-owned stuff is doing better than the other stuff.”

Such a soft landing is the last thing assured to an artist who wraps their future around a move to Los Angeles. He’d pick up independent projects here and there at the start and shop his own work around, but he struggled to land anything steady or well-paid.

“I’d have bill collectors call, and they’d say ‘When’s your next check coming?’” Fleece recalls. “I’d have to be like, ‘I don’t know.’”

Eventually, the Colorado native joined a studio, working alongside other freelancers who put their heads down and worked hard every day. Fleecs took his cues from them, turning into “a bit of a workaholic,” and eventually met a friend who connected him with a publishing rep on the lookout for an illustrator for a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” comic in 2012. Fleecs took a script and turned around the art in two days. The style wasn’t quite right, he was told, but the speedy return made a good impression. When the same rep needed an illustrator for “My Little Pony,” Fleecs took the call that would move him from piecemeal to steady paychecks.

The artist’s appearance at SiouxperCon offered a chance to reflect on what he learned in the city and the lasting friendships he made but also provided an opportunity to reflect on what has changed in the industry. He met other creatives in the city, including Simon. 

At the time, the two of them both felt that moving away was a necessity for their careers. Today, given the city’s growth and the modes of connection now available to creatives through social media or self-funding platforms such as Patreon or Kickstarter, that need is far less acute.

Creatives tend to find one another, after all. That’s part of what makes an event like SiouxperCon so appealing. Connecting with other artists, selling your work in person and marketing yourself online can break down the barriers once posed by a remote location.

“You could make a great movie from Sioux Falls,” Fleecs said. “You could definitely make a great comic book from Sioux Falls.”

Simon: Film fellowship leads to filming with heroes

Nick Simon saw films in his future as far back as his memories go.

The 48-year-old Washington High School graduate was making them with a Super 8 camera in his early teens, shooting them between punk band gigs through high school, and worked on them as he held down video-related jobs as a young adult.

The feeling that he was more doer than dreamer ran so deep that when the instructors at his highly selective American Film Institute fellowship told their two dozen aspiring storytellers that 99 percent of them would never make a movie, Simon looked around the room and thought, “well, I feel sorry for these other guys.”

It’s not so much that he had a big head, he explained earlier this month at SiouxperCon. It was more like the naivete of someone not used to being told “no,” perhaps earned because he and his friends never asked for permission to make art and noise.

“Everybody in that scene just did what they were going to do,” Simon said earlier this month, echoing sentiments he offered onscreen in “I Really Get Into It,” a movie about the Sioux Falls punk scene of the ’80s and ’90s.

Less than four years out from his first class with AFI in 2006, Simon released his first feature, “Removal.”

He hasn’t stopped working for long since. By 2013, “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston was chewing the furniture with a Russian accent in the Simon-penned thriller “Cold Comes the Night.” A year later, he earned a seat in the Writer’s Guild with a credit for “The Pyramid,” which eventually would connect him with the childhood hero who became his collaborator: “A Nightmare on Elm Street” director Wes Craven.

Simon’s group of six new Guild members was connected to Craven for a yearlong mentorship, during which they’d periodically dine and discuss the business of film with the Hollywood legend. The email telling Simon he’d been paired with Craven was so jarring that his wife had to remind him that it included an invitation to dinner at Craven’s home the following week.

“I read that email, and it just didn’t register,” Simon said. “I don’t really care about meeting an actor, but this was Wes Craven. His movies made me who I am.”

One of the rules of engagement was that the mentees were to avoid pitching projects to their mentors, and it was one Simon took seriously. At the end of the year, in a moment reminiscent of Charlie Bucket’s inheritance of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, Craven asked Simon what he was working on. Simon’s answer, “The Girl in the Photographs,” would become his first major directorial coup, with Craven as executive producer. 

It’s a film with South Dakota’s dusty fingerprints all over it. Its co-writer was Robert Morast, a former Argus Leader arts and entertainment reporter who now works for the San Francisco Chronicle. Morast went looking for local “Planet of the Apes” obsessives to write about and found Simon. They’ve been friends since.

Parts of the film are set in Spearfish and Rapid City. The opening shots are three facing south on Phillips Avenue: the “Welcome to Downtown” arch, Vishnu Bunny’s storefront, and flashing red traffic lights at Sixth Street. 

“That’s such a Midwestern thing,” Simon said of the timed-out traffic signals. “It’s something you recognize if you’re from here. It doesn’t really happen in other places.”

Simon used SiouxperCon to screen his 2021 horror-comedy “Untitled Horror Movie.” He’d always wanted to direct a comedy, and the chance came with the COVID-19 pandemic and a random idea about a pendulum from his “The Girl in the Photographs” collaborator Nick Baines. Within weeks, Simon and Baines had pounded out a script about actors on hiatus from a television show who decide to shoot their own horror movie via Zoom. The words “COVID” or “pandemic” don’t appear in the script, but the movie wouldn’t feel real if we hadn’t all just lived them.

If it looks like a series of curated video chats, that’s because it was. The actors called in to Zoom and acted through the scenes, all the while filming themselves with iPhone 11 Pros. Simon worked with the actors between takes. The footage would drop into a shared drive at the end of each workday, which all started and ended for them the way so many days for so many people did last year and still today: at home

The speed was a matter of timing — or at least what the filmmakers expected the timing ought to be to secure a post-pandemic theatrical release.

“At that time, we thought lockdown was going to be over by July (of 2020),” Simon said.

Ultimately, the entire project, from take one to official release, was completed in some state of pandemic precaution. Simon only just met cast member Emmy Raver-Lampman, who’s known for Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy.” He posted a photo to Instagram of the face-to-face gathering five days before arriving for the Oct. 1 opening day of SiouxperCon. 

It was a return trip and a first at once — Simon appeared for the virtual version in 2020. If you missed the screening, “Untitled Horror Film” is streaming for free on Tubi and available for purchase across several platforms.