Deep Media

Why Lucas and Spielberg see Hollywood at the edge

Sometimes you really need to sit up and pay attention. That was clearly the case at USC last night as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg predicted the immiment demise of the movie business—or at least, the movie business as we know it. Because Lucas and Spielberg aren't just two super-successful directors who've made a bunch of blockbuster films. They are the two directors who essentially invented the blockbuster back in the '70s, and in the process saved Hollywood the last time it was headed for oblivion. When they say, as Spielberg put it, “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again,” it matters, because they're the ones who set in motion the paradigm we have now. 

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg at USC with Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, and Elizabeth M. Daley, dean of the School of Cinematic Arts.

The occasion for this pronouncement was significant as well: the opening of the School of Cinematic Arts' new Interactive Media Center, a $50 million high-tech playground that boasts such toys as Oculus Rift headsets, Microsoft Kinect motion sensors, a 3-D printer, and 55-inch interactive screens from MultiTouch. Whatever takes the place of movies will as likely as not be invented here. 

Spielberg and Lucas aren't the only ones who see an implosion ahead. Last month in the Times, James Stewart observed that "the studios seem to be headed over a blockbuster cliff"—and sooner rather than later. Between May and July, he noted, 17 would-be blockbusters are due to hit the theaters. And yet, as Cowen & Co. analyst Doug Creutz pointed out, “we’ve never had a summer where more than nine did well, and often it’s fewer." 

Way-Way-Off-Broadway: How the immersive theater of 'Then She Fell' resonates with the digital world

Okay, here's an admission: I've never been able to take Broadway musicals seriously. In fact, I've barely been able to take them at all. I did watch the Tonys last night with an actress friend who's in from LA, and I have to admit there were some transcendent moments—Cyndi Lauper performing her '80s hit "True Colors"; almost any time Neil Patrick Harris was onstage; Kinky Boots sweeping the awards and capping it off with best musical. (Drag queens, I've found, can salvage just about anything.) But the good news from my perspective is that conventional, proscenium-arch theater, musical and otherwise, has been getting serious competition recently from the immersive variety—from productions that break down the fourth wall, and with it the barrier between audience and performance. 

Photo: Dariel Sneed 

Rachel I. Berman as Alice in Third Rail Projects' "Then She Fell."

One of the standouts is Then She Fell, an intimately scaled, highly idiosyncratic look at the Lewis Carroll-Alice Liddell relationship. Staged (so to speak) in a grim, featureless structure in Williamsburg that was built a century ago as a parochial school, the performances are limited to an audience of 15—small enough that everyone gets an individualized experience. The three-story building, cramped and institutional, has been re-imagined as Kingsland Ward, a dubious facility that's home to all manner of feverish behavior involving a Mad Hatter, a White Queen, a Red Queen, two Alices, and Carroll himself. As strange and dreamlike as the Alice books themselves, Then She Fell invites you to explore the fantastical world that Carroll created—and with it, the mystery of the Oxford mathematician and the little girl he liked to take rowing, until for unexplained reasons her mother cut off the relationship one day in 1863. 

One of the many fascinating things about Then She Fell is the way it resonates with the digital world we live in. An entirely no-tech production, it nonetheless manages to feel utterly contemporary in a time of video games and online media. I wanted to know how this worked, so I emailed some questions to Tom Pearson, co-founder of Third Rail Projects, the New York theater company that produces it. Here's what he had to say: 

First off, why Alice? 

We decided to work with the two Alice stories and the life of Lewis Carroll for all its rich psychological terrain as well as its amazing structural components — but also because there is already a cultural cachet to these works which provides a really palpable entry point for audiences. Most folks are familiar with the stories to some extent, whether it's certain images or story lines that they remember from the books, film versions, or general cultural saturation. It gives us an opportunity to really take these images and themes into more abstract territory. This is a very good thing for immersive storytelling, where the narrative is inherently fragmented. Giving audiences something familiar allows them to enter the world with some sort of grounding, and then also allows us to quickly subvert those expectations . . . much like the Alice stories themselves. 

What makes an experience immersive? Clearly it doesn't have to depend on technology.  

It's immersive because when you enter it, the world engulfs you and you no longer see its edges. You are implicated as opposed to removed. There is no fourth wall at all in our experience, though sometimes you view scenes through carefully composed apertures, which gives you the feeling of being inside of a film. You are at times completely surrounded or directly engaged with the performers, and also in our case, engaged with the tastes, smells and textures that we provide. Immersive theater can exist anywhere on the spectrum in terms of the way it deals with audience participation,  audience agency, or how the fourth wall is dealt with. In Then She Fell, we chose to meticulously guide our audiences through the world, so each performance/audience experience is carefully crafted for each individual.

Forbes called this "theater for the video game generation." Is that something you set out to do? 

Is it time to change how we think about audiences?

Over at Medium, Matt Locke has a fascinating post on "emerging patterns of digital attention." Taken from a talk he gave last week at London's Digital Shoreditch festival, it explores the relationship between stories and audiences—a relationship that has shifted quite a bit over the years and is shifting again now. Speaking at a Victorian assembly hall in the East End, he challenged some of the assumptions that have grown up around audiences in the past few years. For people (including myself) who like to talk about "those formerly known as the audience," the post is enlightening in surprising ways.

The venue: Shoreditch Town Hall, built 1866, now a creative hub at the center of London's tech scene.

Matt is an expert at detecting and decoding new patterns of audience behavior. Formerly head of multi-platform commissioning at the UK's Channel 4, he now leads a consultancy called Storythings that focuses on developing new types of stories. (Among its projects is Pepys Road, a Web companion to John Lanchester's Capital that I blogged about last year.) Having worked both in broadcasting and in digital, he's been struck by the differing ways the two groups regarded the people they were trying to reach. To broadcasters, they were passive consumers; to the digital crowd, they were fans, users, participants, and—ultimately—data points. In fact, he came to realize, 

Audiences are not passive — they make choices about what stories they want to listen to, turn up to listen (which is not a passive act), and fold the emotional impact of good stories back into their lives. Many years ago, audiences were as noisy as Twitter is now, and the call and response between the stage and the crowd was an integral part of the show. It’s only been in the last few 50 years or so that audiences have been quiet. So quiet, that they became almost invisible to the people telling the stories.

How to find an audience for your indie film

It's never been easy to market an indie film—but in a blockbuster universe, getting people to care about a low-budget production devoid of stars and lacking the enormous, built-in fan base of The Dark Knight or The Hunger Games can seem all but impossible. One of the few experts at this stuff is Marc Schiller of BOND Strategy and Influence, a New York firm that's helped launch such films as the Napster doc Downloaded, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, and the forthcoming teen killer pic Violet & Daisy.

Last month, Marc—whom I've known for some time and work with on occasion—an­nounced BOND360, a marketing, strategy, and PR consultancy designed to help indie filmmakers connect directly with their fans. He calls it the "artisanal distribution" route—"partnering with a film team to craft a distribution plan that's best for them." In a recent post on the IFP blog, he laid out some groundrules that govern how this stuff works. The short answer: 

Community + Data + Content Bundling + Dynamic Pricing = $$$ 

Let's take them one at a time. 

Community 

No, it's not about how many Twitter followers or Facebook "likes" you can claim. A Facebook campaign to collect more fans is as pointless and empty as it sounds. It's quality, not quantity, that matters:

For me, your community are those people who want your film to succeed as much as you do, and are willing to do anything and everything they can do to help it get there. They are the people who are willing to spend their Saturday afternoon putting up posters for you in their local towns. They are the ones who can’t wait to meet others who share a similar passion for your project. The real value of community is that these are the people who will tell ten others to go see your movie. And there’s nothing more powerful (and inexpensive) than lever­aging the passion of your community.

 Which is why a list of email addresses is the most powerful tool you can have. 

Now at Medium: 'The Disappearing Book'

A few weeks ago, when I was blogging about Neil Gaiman's speech at the London Book Fair, I came across his reference to These Pages Fall Like Ash, a highly unconventional experiment in storytelling by Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman of Bristol. The project Gaiman described seemed fascinating, so I got in touch with Abba, whom I'd met when I was in Bristol two years earlier to speak as part of the city's ongoing Festival of Ideas, and asked him about it. The upshot was this piece, which ran yesterday in the online publication Medium: 

“Book? What’s a book?” I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately, and I keep getting different answers — but none so quirky or inventive as the one Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman have come up with in Bristol. Abba, who heads an interactive media program at the University of the West of England, and Speakman, of the Bristol art collective Circumstance, have conspired with the novelists Neil Gaiman and Nick Harkaway to construct a story that starts out as a book but then unfolds as a digital text that people read on their smartphones or tablets. It’s called These Pages Fall Like Ash, and it’s a tale of two cities — cities that exist in the same time and place without, somehow, ever bumping into each other.

The book, encased in a wooden box and sold . . . [To continue reading, please visit Medium]

I particularly liked the idea of publishing this in Medium because it too is an experiment in digital publishing. Started last fall by Ev Williams and his partners at Obvious Corp., Medium is "a collaborative publishing platform" (in Williams's words) that aims to rethink many of the conventions of online media—conventions that in many cases began with Blogger, which Williams co-founded in 1999.

Blogging back then was a rarefied activity almost unheard-of outside tech circles; by creating the first easy-to-use platform (one he later sold to Google), Williams changed that forever. But that was a couple of eons ago in Internet years. So why not take what we've learned and start over again, with the idea of getting it right? As Williams has explained, that's the idea behind Medium. In some ways it seems as far-fetched and idealistic as Blogger did 14 years ago, or Twitter after that. But hey—these guys do have a track record, right? 

Tribeca transmedia: The power of "Sandy Storylines"

Images are powerful, stories even more so. But how do you collect them from hundreds if not thousands of people and present them in a coherent and compelling fashion—especially when you're trying to document an event that was itself so chaotic?

I was on the jury last week for the Tribeca Film Festival's "Storyscapes"—five transmedia presentations involving everything from Star Wars to insomnia to Hurricane Sandy. Curated by Ingrid Kopp, the Tribeca Film Institute's director of digital initiatives, and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire, this first-ever Tribeca transmedia competition showed several very different ways of bringing the audience into the story.

Each of the entries involved some kind of interaction, some of it archived, some of it live and on-the-spot. For Casey Pugh's Star Wars Uncut, this took the form of a grid you could navigate through to watch fan-made retakes of scenes from The Empire Strikes Back. For A Journal of Insomnia, commissioned by Hugues Sweeney for the National Film Board of Canada, it involved a black box you could climb into. There, sitting in the dark with a glowing screen at your face, you were asked to open up about your inability to sleep. For Robots in Residence, which started out as Alexander Reben's thesis project at the MIT Media Lab, it meant being given a cute little cardboard robot you could take out onto the street. The robots, equipped with videocams and mics, were designed to elicit secrets—things you'd probably never tell another person but just might be willing to share with a machine (especially one with a smiley face).