'This Is My Destiny': Tim Misny Mockumentary in the Works for Summer 2025 Release

Tim Misny sitting in a room at his hunting lodge in Waite Hill, Ohio. He said he immediately jumped on a chance to have a documentary made about his life. “This is my destiny.” Credit: Mark Oprea

When considering Tim Misny’s brand recognition across Northeast Ohio, there’s no doubt that it’s prodigious.

Ask your best friend, your coworker or your neighbor, and they’ll know. They drive daily by one of Misny’s 299 billboards across the state. They’ve seen his 15-second commercials, or the music video or Mike Polk Jr.’s comedy skit that parodies them. They know about Misny’s “people’s” eyebrow and, of course, his trademark phrase: “I’ll make them pay.” (A phrase Misny has actually legally trademarked since 2009.)

And come next summer, they will have a new piece of media to further bolster Ohio’s most-advertised megalawyer: a mockumentary on Misny’s seven decades of life, set to begin airing at international film festivals and freemium streaming services by August 2025.

Currently in the pre-production stages, the hour-long feature on Misny and his 43-year-long climb to legal stardom and to beatification as a Cleveland meme is being produced by Moe Taylor, the head of BrainDagger Films.

Used to making psychedelic films on subjects such as hallucinogens and pandemic-era Costa Rican life, Taylor and his assistant producer, Matthew Klesel, decided to pursue a project on Misny after a late November brainstorm in Ohio City. Taylor had just started a film festival based in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, and seemed to be hunting locally for a subject worthy of an hour of mockumentary.

Almost instantly, at a table at Sacred Vortex, Misny’s name popped up. As did the format they would tell it in.

“Our vision is somewhat like, ‘millennial meme culture meets 60 Minutes meets ‘Billy On The Street’,” Klesel, 35, told Scene. “And we’re gonna kind of weave it into a Documentary Now type of vibe.”

“There’s total potential and appeal,” Taylor, 46, added nearby. Because “everyone thinks they’re buddies with Misny because they see him every day, but they don’t really know anything about him.”

Misny, who gave Taylor the go ahead “almost immediately” on November 21, said he saw BrainDagger’s pitch to cover his life story in a mock format as a natural extension of his own reach in the public sphere. A kind of bookend to his first ever TV appearance in 1993. (“When I had hair,” Misny joked.)

Also, Misny is set to turn 70 in April. A film, following four decades of fighting wrongful death and injury mixed with a kind of folk hero recognition, felt like the right way to start his legacy era.

Matthew Klesel and Moe Taylor, producers for BrainDagger Films, said Misny was a perfect subject for a mockumentary. “He is a funny dude,” Taylor said. “He is not a big mean guy that is just pointing at you.” Credit: Mark Oprea

“I feel that my life has kind of evolved to the point where I feel for the first time in my life—I feel very calm, very purposeful,” Misny said recently, sitting on a leather sofa in his hunting lodge in Misnyland, his 80-acre estate in Waite Hill, Ohio. “I feel that I found my identity of who I am and why I’m here.”

As he likes to tell it, Misny’s sense of identity—that i’ll-fight-for-you personal injury lawyer feared by all—started when he was eight years old. The grandchild of Slovak and Croatian immigrants, Misny was taken to Tower City often by his grandmother, Veronica, that was sort of a post-traumatic experience: his grandfather, Joseph Vulich, had fallen to his death years earlier during a bricklaying job.

It was, Misny said, the wrongful death case to begin a career of wrongful death cases.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Misny seemed to always find a way to weave the personal with the professional. As a reporter for the Sun News, he was once punished for penning a fictional obituary. In his late twenties, as an assistant prosecutor for the City of Euclid, Misny made a routine of starting trial with a turn of phrase, a kind of hook to capture the jury.

Chasing authenticity was a dictum Misny said came straight from his legal mentor, attorney David Lombardi. “He always said, ‘Never tell a lie’” in court, Misny recalled. “Think of a five-gallon, clear jug of water. Take one black drop of ink, and 20 minutes later, the whole thing is gray.”

Amateurish TV spots showed a balding Misny attracting potential clients with a sharp pointer finger aired come the 1990s. Ads that would, along with garnering cases against healthcare insurers or the RTA, turn Misny into a kind of local celebrity. One in the class of the hoarse furniture guru Mark Norton and comedy duo Big Chuck and Lil’ John.

But it wasn’t until the late aughts when Misny seemed to find his real footing in branching out into the public sphere. A client’s grandmother had been riled by a doctor who had put her eight-year-old grandson on life support. An artery had been cut. The doctor was, Misny proved, poorly trained.

“The grandma poked her skinny little index finger in my chest and she said, ‘Now, you go make them pay,’” Misny recalled, using a brow and finger for emphasis. “And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I promise I will.”

Misny’s success, both as an over-branded folk hero and as a Robin Hood fighting hospitals, has led to an irony for a man with hundreds of employees, 20 offices statewide, which get, he said, 13,000 inquiries per week. (Of which Misny takes “less than five percent.”)

And millions from lawsuit cuts. Which Misny is well aware of, sitting comfortably, despite a recently-torn meniscus, by a three-foot tall fireplace, sipping kombucha in his two-story hunting lodge on an 80-acre plot of land named after him. An estate with all the trappings of wealth — an enclosed pool, a baseball diamond down the drive.

“You know, if someone said I’m anti-capitalist, it’s kind of hypocritical—I live at Misnyland,” Misny said. He looked at the 10-foot-tall fake giraffe across the room. At a glass casing full of deer antlers. At dozens of photos of his wife, Stephanie, and three kids. “There are times I think, is this all real?”

On two tall chairs nearby, Taylor and Klesel grin with an infectious awe: Misny is here oh my god.

“The number one thing I want people to know in this film: He is a goofball. He is a nice guy. He is a funny dude,” Taylor said. “He is not a big mean guy that is just pointing at you.”

Klesel smiled at Misny. “I mean, I’ve never met a lawyer that I wanted to be friends with.”

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