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STATE OF THE INTERNET/FILM BIZ UNION Part Two Part One

So what other gems does the internet offer the film industry?

Well, the evolution of web writers interacting with studios has been, like any new medium, a bit choppy. The battle over who gets access - the real coin of the realm - has been fought long and hard. And those who have stuck around for the long haul have gotten, for the most part, the opportunity for media parity. As with print, radio and television, habit tends to overwhelm logic in many quarters. But after years of studio internet reps suffering a daily shredding by internet writers who were not being given access, many of those outlets created by the web boom that has now busted, are simply gone. And the list of indignities is a lot more like the list we are used to hearing about troubling reporters from other media.

Still, online is often treated as the bastard child of movie publicity. With due respect to the old dogs of the industry, new tricks are often hard to come by. The best and the brightest (you know who you are) have gone well out of their way to embrace and comprehend the nature of the web.

Here is the short version - the web is a series of niche press opportunities that lays out far more specifically than most other media. However, the speed of the form, has changed the game utterly. Studios must figure out how to create key placements, just as they always have with "major media," but now they have to figure out how to get ahead of the curve. If you still think that internet is short-lead, you are going to get beaten most of the time.

Now, all of this is very specifically about the web. But it is also not. The nature of the web has spread to all other media and we are just about at the point where the growth pattern is passing from puberty into adolescence. The New York Times still runs reviews in print on Friday, but has taken to releasing reviews a day or two early on the web. The LA Times has been using its Calendar Live internet section as subscription bait for over a year now. Hot entertainment stories in Time and Newsweek are often read first on the web before subscribers receive their print editions. Breaking news now crosses lines between TV and the web, with traditional media unable to keep up, given printing deadlines and once-a-day publishing… . not that late editions are coming back in the era of the web.

The open format of the web as also changed what content traditional media wants and needs from the studios. Only a handful of outlets "needed" truly unique materials for their coverage in the past. Now, with virtually every story from every outlet available on the web, differentiating has become almost impossible to do when reporting from a junket roundtable. And even 1-on-1s with talent sound too much alike, with demands for almost any silly old thing to make an interview seem unique. Well, anything but asking an original or thoughtful question.

At the same time, celebrity exposure appears to have grown exponentially as stories reverberate not only through old media, but through the caverns of the internet. As a result, personal publicists have tightened the reins on their clients (supposed to be the other way around, no?), so just as studios need more individual time in order to get a strong media message across, they have less time and less cooperation than ever.

But like so much of the web phenomenon, the echoing of stories is primarily a function of the bubble we all live in. It is true that you can read 200 different outlets' stories on Will Smith this week as I, Robot opens. But at the same time, 90% of the material is going to be virtually identical to the rest. Take it from someone who looks at about 10 stories to every one we link to at Movie City News… same shit, different font.

Of course, publicists want the media to be happy and writing happily about their films. But marketers… not so much. In the last decade, this has become an industry obsessed with opening weekends and opening weekends are driven, first and last, by marketing dollars and a strong commercial/trailer message. The media, lovely as we are in the eyes of studios when we write nice things, are mostly a distraction with far more downside than upside.

It is the convergence of these things where traditional print media has also failed terribly so far. You learn very quickly on the web… personality drives the machine. The internet is to media what those food simulators on Star Trek were to lunch. You can have anything you can think of… you can have all the nourishment there is… you can eat one perfect pea… you can put duck l'orange and American cheese on a grilled sandwich with hoisin sauce and a side of caviar and chiclets. Consumers, for the first time, are able to choose what they read. And while that has been a marginal part of the web for its first decade in existence, it is now expanding out to the average reader, both because of a generation of young people who are not techno-phobic and because of cheaper and cheaper forms of quality access.

The media bubble tells us that Tony "A.O." Scott is important to read because he writes reviews for the New York Times. But more people may take The Flick Filosopher more seriously in really deciding what they will see in the theaters, in great part because they make a choice to read Mary Anne Johansson, while checking out the New York Times is part of what one "must" do as a part of the educated elite. I don't really know how Manohla Dargis would be on a TV chat show, but all I know is that I want to talk to her and get slapped upside the head with her ideas and the litheness of her thought process more than I want to read 600 words on A Cinderella Story. The internet allows us a real relationship with Manohla and Tony and Roger and so many others. Perhaps it will never allow another Pauline Kael, whose inaccessibility was part of her power. But you have to wonder how Kael would play the current circumstances… or more to the point, the circumstances in a few years when old media can no longer look down its long nose at the web.

That is still the reality too. Old media is still playing the "it's only the web" game, while trying to emulate the speed and flexibility of the medium. That effort has been and will be a failure. The disaster known as Inside.com was classic. And make no mistake, it was not a noble failure, but an arrogant effort that flopped in spite of being rich in talent. There is a very distinct school of journalists who still measure the field by standards that no longer apply. Newspapers are just another media outlet with a million semi-committed readers. That is not to say that the value of that large a readership is not enormous… but the philosophy of quality readership versus mass readership is one that drives the new media. And while "the way things have always been done" is still a big part of the picture, it is, like network TV, become more a part of a bigger picture.

I have always been of the belief that media will become a smorgasbord, both in form and content. If you want to watch ABC TV shows, you will be able to subscribe, as you do to HBO, to the network and buy the entire schedule. Or parts of it without commercials for a price. Or you can get it for free with the ads in place. Or you can just buy Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for the season, perhaps with on demand access to the full catalog of old episodes.

The same is true of movie information. Just a few years ago, ShowbizData.com was the best site on the web for older box office information, then a part free/part subscription site. But Brandon Gray came along, aggregated the years of information for virtually no cost other than his time and the time of his co-workers on Box Office Mojo and built a business by giving away the free, but not easily available, information for free. He also created well-conceived ways of navigating the information and, in time, started selling parts of the free information that he acquired over the years. As a result, his site overtook Gitesh Pandaya, who was the master of that web domain for years prior with Box Office Guru. And one of these days, someone will acquire that same free information and built their own box office site and give away more for free or come up with another angle and take over the reins from Brandon Gray. It is inevitable.

Now, if you are a reader of The New York Times (for instance) and you are really interested in box office, you need to go elsewhere to gather more information than you can get in the NYT coverage. As that is one small part of their overall coverage, the NYT cannot ever hope to connect with all the various outlets of greater depth than them in each area of coverage. In this scenario, The New York Times and the other major newspapers become the "network television" of news. (Ironically, that is pretty much where USA Today started.) And the internet becomes the cable/satellite channels.

Like cable, the internet has taken about a decade to mature to its first young adult stage, to get past the part where anyone who was entering was automatically given some space to grow because there was such a demand for content. The 300 channel television universe is, in the web, more like a 3000 channel universe. Of course, more websites than that go up every day now. But the capacity for effective distribution… that is the challenge. No one, except for Mr. Google, can embrace a universe much bigger than, at the outside, 3000 sites, even with the best web tools. Once you get into that 3000 site group, you have to ask yourself, do you want to be The Food Network or USA or Nickolodeon or The Game Show Network. They are all viable businesses. But they do not have the same kind of upside as one another.

Now, my suggestion for such august bodies as The New York Times would be to slow down and to become, as they once were, the most impeccable sources of knowledge by way of perspective in the world. What has gone wrong there - if you agree that something has gone wrong - is that that they are adults in the media candy story. But in this new media world, where so much feels new (more often than not, an illusion), they seem to have the appetite of small children. So instead of picking a few pieces of the finest chocolate for their sophisticated palate, they seem to be grabbing for every piece of sugary substance they can reach. As the adults in the room, their appetite is greater and their pocketbook is bigger. Which means that they will be able to afford really good false teeth when theirs fall out. But I, for one, liked it better when they had their originals in place.

Getting back to selling movies, this spread-out universe is a challenge to studios. In part this is because the good old outlets are acting like a bunch of sugar-binging children and the studios, who are stuck as nannies and not as parents, have to try to discipline the kids without really disciplining them, lest the reporters tell mommy and daddy editor that the studio molested them and real trouble starts. Meanwhile, there is a huge crowd of actual orphaned website children who are as unpredictable as any kindergarten class and often think the smell of their own farts is the best thing ever. But the studios know that "kids" spend money and these "kids" speak to cash flow decision makers. So the urge to exploit these "kids" is real. But like any nanny, sometimes they just get fed up and throw up their arms out of sheer frustration.

So what to do? More on that in Part 3… which will be available tomorrow…

E ME: You can still start writing now….