by Chuck Salter
This is the topic of the night when a few others in the Geek Elite gather at the hillside Beverly Hills home of Naren Shankar, executive producer of CBS’s bulletproof forensic franchise CSI (full disclosure: Shankar is developing a movie based on a book by the author of this article). The long-haired bearded guy pouring straight bourbon is Ron Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel’s acclaimed reimagining of the classic series. The guy eating pizza on the couch is Javier Grillo-Marxauch, a veteran producer of Lost and NBC’s paranormal series Medium, who’s now having his own fantasy graphic novel, Middleman, turned into a series on ABC Family.
Long before running some of the hottest shows on television, these guys and their peers were just wee-geeks growing up obsessed with archetypal battles of good versus evil and mind-bending special effects. Star Wars epitomized how mainstream such fantasy could be. Star Trek, considerably more low-budget and hammy, with its campy Klingon villains and furry Tribbles, was for the die-hard sci-fi crowd. But both franchises deeply vested legions of powerless kids in their mythological worlds.
The problem was, as Moore and his cohorts tell it, in the pre-web days of the 1970s and 1980s, fans didn’t have an accessible way to reach out to one another. And so they cheered mostly in solitude. “I was obsessed and thought Star Trek was just my show,” Moore says. Only when he wandered into a drugstore in his hometown of Chowchilla, California, and happened on a fanzine called “Starlog” did he learn that he wasn’t alone. “It was a revelatory moment when I realized there were other people who watched this show,” he says. “It was like a secret club.”
Around the country, members of this club poured their passions—and piggy banks—into their fandom. They road-tripped to conventions. And they loaded up on memorabilia—lots of it. “I bought all this crap,” confesses Shankar.
Grillo-Marxauch is nodding. “There were bumper stickers that said I Grok Spock,” he says.
“Spock ears,” says Shankar.
“Blueprints for the ship,” says Moore.
Fans didn’t just build collections; they wanted to participate in a virtual world and expand it. “It was a universe you wanted to play in,” Moore says, “so people bought anything they could get their hands on.”
As these guys know well, fandom saves shows. Fans wrote letter campaigns to save recent faves such as Jericho and Firefly. (Jericho was saved; Firefly wasn’t but went on to sell more than 200,000 DVDs in six months.) When Star Trek was almost canceled after its second season in 1968, a massive letter-writing campaign resurrected it for one more round. And after the show went off the air, fans kept the characters alive by creating stories of their own, which they would publish in zines and swap at conventions. “They had nowhere to go, and they wanted the show to go on,” Moore says.
After becoming friends at Cornell University, where Moore received a library award for having the biggest collection of Star Trek books, Moore and Shankar came full circle as writers on the early 1990s Star Trek series The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, ushering the former fanboys into the new class of Hollywood writers and producers. Moore, Shankar, and this emerging crop of writers began communicating with fans online, figuring that was exactly the kind of dialogue they had wanted with the Star Trek and Star Wars creators back in the day. Not only was it cool, it was a way to essentially build the value of their intellectual property. “If you can actually find people who like your stuff,” Moore says, “there are probably enough people who can make it a going concern for you—if you can find them, if you can monetize them.”
And there is one member of the Geek Elite—their Jedi master—whom they all point to as their inspiration. “That’s the genius of Joss Whedon,” Grillo-Marxauch says.
IT’S A SMURF-BLUE morning as Joss Whedon, a gawky 43-year-old with short, wavy brown hair and a gray T-shirt, jogs up to his office in Santa Monica. Whedon works in a residential neighborhood, in a Spanish-style bungalow neatly decorated with gothic figurines and framed anime art. “I’m a huge fan of the Final Fantasy film,” he says as he heats up a pot of breakfast tea after his run. As his peers attest, Whedon defined a new generation of nerd worship with his iconic late-1990s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cheeky pop-culture powerhouse about a blond teenage demon killer. Then he continued his reign with a Buffy spin-off, Angel, and later Firefly. Today, he’s working on his next series, Dollhouse, which follows a young woman who can be imprinted with different identities to accomplish a variety of missions.
While not always runaway hits on the air, Whedon’s shows are renowned by his peers for spawning some of the most thriving aftermarket around. Whedon sheepishly admits his shows “do crazy” on DVD, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Whedon’s achievement, say his fellow geeks, is not just creating an isolated TV show but also building a universe that has earned its own nickname, the Whedonverse. As Lindelof puts it, “The Whedonverse was, like, if you have a core fandom, how do you get that core fandom to buy a lot of shit?” And perhaps more important, how do you sell them all that stuff with integrity, so you don’t end up burning your biggest fans?
For Whedon, it all comes back to his own years growing up as a fanboy in Manhattan. “I don’t understand creators who aren’t fans,” he says. “My experience as a fan was, things that I loved, I loved very hard—Marvel Comics, science fiction, Dickens, Shakespeare, Sondheim. The things I was a geek about, I was a serious geek about.”
When Buffy started to take off, in 1997, Whedon went to where the nerds were: the Internet. Trekkies and other hard-core sci-fi and fantasy fans were among the earliest settlers on the Net, in newsgroup discussions, early bulletin-board systems, and online games. Whedon’s tales of mythological empowerment tapped a new wave of webby misfits. “They were starting to build clubs, and I was able to get feedback,” says Whedon, who maintains an active presence on fan sites devoted to him, such as Whedonesque.com. “I could do a show and go online and see what people thought of it right away,” he says. “That’s a crazy feeling.”
“Joss would email fans of the show, have a website where they’d gather, have parties where he’d meet with them,” says Alexander. And the more involved the fans got, the more they fed the aftermarket. “I’ve always believed that the only thing that’s important is back end,” Whedon says. “I don’t care what they pay me as long as there’s back-end money, because back-end money is success. Back-end money means people liked it. If someone pays you a huge amount up front, all you get is pressure.” But he is quick to add a caveat: “If I don’t have a purpose for repurposing—if there’s not a reason to tell a story that way—then I avoid it.”
Whedon is now experimenting with properties that originate online as short video series or web serials. Part of the incentive is the creative freedom and low production costs. At the moment, he is creating a three-part, 30-minute serial about a hapless villain, called “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” which he plans to make available for free online. If that show gets picked up in another medium, Whedon will own a greater stake than if the show originated on network television.
THE WIDEST-RANGING current example of transmedia success is Heroes. Gaps in story lines on the TV show get filled by products in ancillary markets. So in season one, the character Hiro goes back in time and falls in love with a waitress named Charlie; while viewers don’t see much of that affair on TV, the creators of the show decided to release an entire novel that revolves around it.
There’s more. Every week, Heroes puts up a five-to-seven-page online comic—complete with sponsorship by Nissan—that continues threads from that week’s episode. Each comic averages about 1 million readers. DC Comics ended up buying the series and then publishing it in print form. It was a best-selling graphic novel upon its release in November 2007 and is already in its second printing. A different example: When Cisco Systems was looking to market a new line of surveillance cameras, they teamed up with Heroes to create a website for the fictional company Pri
matech Paper; users could explore the firm’s headquarters using a Cisco-branded interface that mimicked the new camera technology. Sprint sponsored a “Create Your Hero” contest designed for cell phones; players could choose the attributes of their new character, then submit it for possible inclusion in a future episode on the web. There are weekly online and mobile trivia games (also sponsored by Sprint), blogs written by the characters, wikis about concepts explained in books referenced on the show. The list goes on.
Though the specific financials of the sponsorship deals and online traffic are not being made public, DVDs of the first season of Heroes sold more than 1.7 million copies (for roughly $70 million) and became NBC’s best-selling DVD of 2007—and the second-best TV-show DVD overall, behind Planet Earth. James L. McQuivey, principal analyst of television and media technologies for Forrester Research, puts the value of Heroes’ online-advertising revenue at $50 million. But the biggest sign of bottom-line success, Alexander says, is simple: “NBC wants us to do more.” In fact, Heroes now is in the unique position of having two full-time producers devoted to transmedia efforts. It’s a massive undertaking, relying on contributions from more than 30 writers. Heroes’ executive producers maintain quality control, poring over every new detail in search of inconsistencies, which serious fans would spot in an instant. “It’s critical, because if you play in this space, you’re opening yourself up to the risk of catastrophe from one small mistake,” Alexander says.
Lost’s backstory is also being filled in across platforms. An online alternate-reality game called “The Lost Experience,” for example, sent surfers on an online scavenger hunt that ultimately revealed the story behind the show’s enigmatic Dharma Initiative. But Lost also illuminates the risk of going overboard: The show’s TV ratings dipped an average of 21% in its third season, due partly, according to some critics, to the number of plotlines becoming so dizzying that only the most rabid transmedia fans could follow them all. Still, says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for Jupiter Research, TV shows are no longer once-a-week events. They’re “one big circle.”
DESSERT AND COFFEE arrive at the Sunset Boulevard restaurant, and the Geek Elite’s conversation turns to a suddenly urgent matter: how to score a copy of “The Star Wars Holiday Special” of 1978. “I tell you what,” Lindelof says, “I challenge everyone to go home tonight and try to find the Boba Fett cartoon.”
“When we go home?” says Alexander, and whips out his iPhone. “It’s 2008, man!” With a few pecks, he boots up the Boba Fett clip on YouTube as the guys gather around to watch.
“Don’t fight the Internet, man,” Wolf says. “It will beat you every time.”
“You cannot fight it,” Alexander says.
“Wow,” says Lindelof. “There’s Chewie!”
While many dismiss the 1978 holiday special as an insufferably cheesy variety show—featuring the movie’s cast along with special guests Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship—these guys say it also holds the key to the business model of tomorrow. “The special was, like, the worst thing ever,” says Lindelof, as he dips a doughnut into a dish of melted chocolate, “but there was this Boba Fett cartoon. He wasn’t a character in Star Wars. He was just an action figure, and it was like, ‘Send in a proof-of-purchase, and you get this Boba Fett.’ And we were like, ‘Who the fuck is Boba Fett?’ ”
For kids who obsessed over every bit of the Star Wars universe, this mysterious character was electrifying. They had to buy it. “It was the coolest toy to have,” Letterman recalls. Two years later, when Boba Fett walked onto the screen of The Empire Strikes Back, the action-figure buyers got the ultimate payoff: So this is who Boba Fett was all along.
Alexander cited the Boba Fett paradigm when he was invited to speak recently at the transmedia mother ship, George Lucas’s company LucasArts. “If you’re a producer now and you’re a savvy person who views your show as a product, you’re as much a brand manager as you are running the show,” says Grillo-Marxauch. “If you ask Tim Kring, he’ll say, ‘That’s how I run Heroes.’ How your brand is exploited is now a reflection of the creator’s relationship with technology.” The bigger the geek, in other words, the wider the reach. And the higher the potential revenues.
As network television migrates increasingly to the Internet, transmedia interaction is likely to grow only more important. “You’ll see more shows trying to capture this same viewing experience,” says Forrester’s McQuivey. “It’ll be interesting to see if every new season, there will be two new Lost and Heroes replacements.”
The Geek Elite are well aware that they’re creating a future that may ultimately pass them by. “There’s someone out there who will figure out how to relate the Internet and narrative beyond my old-fashioned notions,” Whedon says. “But I think whoever cracks that is not going to be someone who’s made it huge in television. It’s going to be some guy we just don’t know about yet.”
But odds are, he’ll be a fan of theirs.
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Fast Company, May 2008
HBO’S HIT MAN CHRIS ALBRECHT ON MAKING THE SOPRANOS, SEX AND THE CITY, AND SIX FEET UNDER
By Polly LaBarre
CHRIS ALBRECHT, the 49-year-old chairman and CEO of HBO original programming, is standing in the middle of his beige-toned corner office on the sun-drenched top floor of a Century City tower, surrounded by images of Sarah Jessica Parker.
Poster-sized photographs are propped up on every available piece of furniture, on window sills, even on the floor. There’s a shot of Sex and the City’s iconic heroine, Carrie Bradshaw, sitting primly on a park bench, tilting her pert chin to the sky with her best gamine smile (and pushing the sartorial edge with a tiara and white gloves). There’s a flirty Carrie, kicking up a spiky Choo at a street-corner hot-dog stand; a pensive Carrie, gazing out from a telephone kiosk in a picture within a picture; and a glamorous Carrie, sparkling in a beaded dress, all burning eyes and glossy lips.
“We have to present these to SJ tomorrow,” says Carolyn Strauss, Albrecht’s deputy. Albrecht snaps to attention: “Then let’s pick the four we like best, and let her choose from those. We don’t want to draw this out.” They both scan the photos in a slow circle and, almost in unison, point to the same four. “That one, that one, and those two,” says Albrecht. “Definitely,” says Strauss, adding, “I’m amazed SJ approved a photo of herself smiling.” (Ultimately, when the photos are shown to the actress, pensive Carrie prevails.)
A few hours later, Albrecht is at the wheel of his gleaming white urban-safari vehicle. He’s weaving his way through Beverly Hills traffic, riffing on the connection between Tony Soprano, Carl Jung, and horseback riding. Albrecht is passionate about all three. A compact man with alert eyes who favors sleek, open-collared suits, he exudes the casual intensity of a practiced deal maker. But despite the Mercedes G series SUV tricked out with a dashboard computer for rolling calls on the commute from his ranch in Malibu, he is hardly what you’d get if you called central casting for a network executive.
Albrecht is both slickly confident and openly curious. A fast-talking former stand-up comedian from Long Island, he is reflective in conversation. He takes an almost scholarly approach to the Jungian analysis that he has pursued for the past 10 years. “The idea that we’re all connected in the collective unconscious is an extremely important part of what makes entertainment successful,” he says. “You can’t translate that literally, but you can be aware of the ideas behind it: that the psyche has a structure, that the unconscious is a very powerful force, that we’re all on a journey, striving for individuation and wholeness. If you understand that, you have a better grip on what’s relevant, resonant, and rich about human experience.”
You also have what turns out to be an unparalleled formula for producing genuinely original and genuinely good television. Albrecht’s instincts guide him to what is both robustly entertaining and rigorously human, from promotional photos to character development. But he isn’t just a philosopher of television
. Under his leadership, HBO’s original-programming division has unleashed a creative juggernaut on the television landscape. By any measure, when it comes to original programming, Albrecht is the most original mind in television.
Sex and the City, which debuted in 1998, The Sopranos (1999), and Six Feet Under (2001)—the “3Ses,” in HBO shorthand—are three of the biggest hits on TV. The shows draw prime-time-sized audiences (an average of around 12 million, 14 million, and 12 million viewers per episode, respectively) to a network that still reaches only one-quarter of all TV households. HBO regularly garners more Emmy nominations than the big-three broadcast networks and wins Golden Globes, Oscars, and Peabody Awards for its original series and movies in competition with the biggest players in Hollywood. At the 2001 Emmys, HBO got 94 nominations and won 16. No fewer than 20 winners thanked Albrecht personally from the stage. This year, HBO leads again with 93 nominations, 23 of them for Six Feet Under alone.
The Sopranos, veteran TV writer-producer David Chase’s unstintingly original, unflinchingly real series about an angst-ridden New Jersey mob boss (played by James Gandolfini to be both repugnant and riveting) with two dysfunctional families, surged into the popular consciousness two years ago. Even if you haven’t watched an episode, chances are that you know all about the show. The series has earned both highbrow acclaim and street-level props. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden declared the series “the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century,” while a couple of lieutenants from the New Jersey DeCavalcante crime family were recorded on surveillance tapes raving about the show.