When Your Dog Pays the Mortgage | The Free Press

Six years ago, Bryan Reisberg was a struggling New York University film school grad whose first feature had been described by Variety as “an 84-minute shoulder shrug.” He was working in advertising and barely making the rent when he and his fiancée Alex Garyn gave themselves a wedding present in November 2015 that changed their lives.

It was a corgi puppy, who they named Maxine. Reisberg started posting videos as @madmax_fluffyroad because, he said, “I just wanted the world to see how damn cute my puppy was.” Maxine built up a respectable number of followers—about fifty thousand—and within a year, Reisberg’s filmmaker instincts returned. “I shot a video with a cinematographer friend in Brooklyn,” said Reisberg. “Then I wrote a script, and hired the voice-over actor Jon St. John (he was the voice of Duke Nukem in the video game); he responded to a casting notice I put on Voices.com.” 

Reisberg posted “Maxine the Fluffy Corgi” to Vimeo on November 1, 2016. It became a Vimeo “staff pick”—and @madmax_fluffyroad went viral. Maxine now has over five million followers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Last year, Reisberg signed five-figure deals with MGM Rewards, Amazon, and Grubhub; Dell computer paid him $75K for two @madmax_fluffyroad posts. And if you live in New York, you recently saw Maxine’s furry face on digital billboards showing New Yorkers how to travel responsibly with their pets on subways, buses, and commuter trains.

“I’m getting paid to hang out with my dog,” said Reisberg, who is 34 and quit his advertising job in 2021. “It’s incredible. I’d do all this stuff for free. I probably shouldn’t say that, should I?”

via www.thefp.com

We could try this with Mitzi but it would probably just make her crazier. That would be wrong. But Maxine just seems to be eating all this attention up. Typical.