April 26, 2013

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part Two)

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Influences – East and West

HJ: Kabuki includes several pastiches of children’s books, at least one of which has been published independently and can function as a type of children’s book. You seem to be suggesting that we are strongly shaped by the books we read as children. Can you share some of your thoughts on the nature of children’s literature? What books influenced you as a child?

DM: Our childhood reading does probably have more of an influence certainly than you’re conscious of at the time, and I will often look back at things and realize that there’s certain things in those formative years that you can’t ever escape¬–those first stories you hear about. My introduction to literature was the Bible. My mother would read me Bible stories all the time, and I was very familiar with all the Bible stories. That was a very big part of the way I grew up. There’s a certain kind of storytelling structure and a certain kind of hero’s journey in Biblical stories that, without even realizing, I probably encrypted into a lot of the stories I’m doing.

Then also, there was Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and Doctor Seuss. I read those books when I was very young, and I like that mythical, haunting, fairy-tale quality. And I did very consciously use those impressions in a lot of the Kabuki tales. Every one of the Kabuki tales– even the ones that don’t have actual children’s book stories in them–have quite a bit of children’s book literature and fairytale allegory inside them.

When I wrote the first installments of Kabuki, I was taking Western literature, but I was also very influenced by Eastern literature. There’s a lot of Japanese children’s books that we would probably consider gruesome and really far out that were fascinating to me also. There was this book of hells that children read, and each hell represents a different punishment.

While incorporating some Eastern things in it, such as the structure of the Japanese ghost story, the first volume of Kabuki also in its structure incorporates Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I was very much thinking of Alice in Wonderland as this allegory of a story from childhood to adult consciousness: think about the chessboard where Alice starts as a pawn, but, if you make it all the way across the board, then that pawn, the least powerful piece on the board, can then become the most powerful piece, a grownup. You can become Queen, and you can move all the way across the board. That was a visual metaphor I was using in the first Kabuki volume.

Kabuki starts as a pawn, and then, eventually, she’s working for the system that she serves in the beginning. She crosses over and comes into direct conflict with the system she serves based on new values that she develops, and she starts using her power to go in the other direction. There’s a visual correspondence between each of the characters in the early Kabuki stories and characters from Alice in Wonderland. There’s a set of twins called Siamese which are Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Scarab, a character in Kabuki, is the beetle in Wonderland. Tiger Lily and Snap Dragon are named after characters in the Garden of Talking Flowers. The General character is the Humpty Dumpty character. These kinds of borrowings from childhood stories hold a lot of feeling and power. They help me to capture the mystery we feel toward the world when we are still children. I want that sense of childhood wonderment to haunt the reader as they read my stories.

HJ: Clearly, Japanese culture has exerted a strong influence on your work – both classical cultural influences such as Noh and Kabuki as well as more contemporary media practices such as the media mix associated with anime and manga. How did you become so invested in Japanese art and culture? How has it influenced both the form and content of your work?

DM: When I was in college, in my painting and drawing class, there was a fellow from Japan that I became friends with. We had to take a foreign language. Since I had taken Spanish in high school, I thought I’d take Japanese because of my friend and his family and the culture of international students that he introduced me to. I had a lot of Japanese friends, and I’d have access to practice it with my friends. And then I became more fascinated with Japan and ended up taking courses in Japanese history and mythology, and my friend was always there to answer my questions firsthand.

I did the first Kabuki volume when I was in college. I wanted to develop a book where I felt like I could tell personal stories about things that I was interested in. I was a big fan of autobiographical comics, but, at the time, I didn’t feel un-self-conscious enough to do a fully autobiographical book. I was a big fan of American Splendor, and I liked Joe Matt’s Peep Show, and I got Ivan Brunnetti’s Schizo. I loved these fantastic autobiographical stories where you take what might seem like the mundane, but you show the fascinating in it. It’s more fascinating because it’s so from the soul and it’s so un-self conscious.

But I was 19, 20 years old and I didn’t feel un-self-conscious enough, and I didn’t even feel fully enough formed as a human to feel like I had that much of a voice to be able to do it that way. So I felt like that quote from Shakespeare: “Give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” I didn’t want to do a fully autobiographical story but rather something that would give me a license to feel comfortable enough to talk about personal things. I didn’t want to make the main character an idealized version of myself. That could be a danger if it was a male protagonist. So I made it a female protagonist. I set it in a different part of the world.

I was immersed in learning about Japan, traveling, and learning the language, so I used these metaphors and this mythology from Japan that’s so fascinating to me as the structure to tell this story through. Doing this gave me the liberty to be able to do a story that people didn’t have to look at and see me in it, but maybe it was universal enough for them to see themselves in it if it was done right.

Alchemy, Improvization, and Process

HJ: The word “alchemy” crops up often, both in your work and in reference to your work. What does this word mean to you, and to what degree do you see your aesthetics as part of an alchemical process?

DM: I like alchemy as a metaphor for making comics. You turn base metals into gold. When you’re creating something, you start with a piece of paper or pen or whatever it is that you start with. By the time you’re finished, hopefully something of value has been produced from it. But, in terms of content, I like the idea that, even if you’re writing about something that’s troubling to you or that you’re coming to terms with, through the creative process you can often turn that into something that’s an asset to you or even helpful to other people or at least entertaining and fun for them. I like that kind of metaphor – transforming pain into something of value through the creative process So Alchemy is a metaphor for that interesting place that you get into when you’re making something. You can think about it, and you can plan it as much as you want, but, when you’re actually in the act of doing it, new stuff happens that you could not have anticipated. For me, I can have an analytical mind where I can plan as much as I want to. But in actually doing it, the act of creation is also a collaboration with another part of myself that I don’t always have constant access to, but it shows up when you’re doing it. I like that space.

HJ: You’ve written that images and incidents often get shuffled as you dig deeper into each new work in the Kabuki series. This is certainly an approach enabled by your more stream-of-consciousness style narratives, but it also suggests to me a kind of improvisational approach to artistic expression. What role does chance and intuition play in your creative process?

DM: That’s a good question. Some people often say, “Do you work through a stream-of-consciousness, or were you just making stuff as you go?” At the stage where you’re doing notes, that’s completely true. Any time an idea occurs to me, I write it down. Even if an idea occurs to me for a story I know I won’t even have time to do for a few years from now, I have a filing system. So I just write this idea down, and I put it in the file. In the case of when I was doing Alchemy, for instance, I knew I wanted to do this next story. Every time I had an idea for what this next story was, I wrote it on a napkin or wherever, put it in my file, and said, “This is the next Kabuki story.”

Years later, when it comes time to do it, I pull it out, and I have 200 pieces of little papers that have ideas on them–most of which I don’t remember writing. Then, it’s a great opportunity, because this previous version of myself has really helped out the present version of myself. Now, I have all these pieces of paper and can decide which of these belong in the story and which of these don’t belong in here at all. With the ones that are left, what order should they go in? I’m faced with the task of connecting the dots and filling in the spaces in between. That’s a really fun stage for me. I really like that conceptual stage.

Once I get that together, I write a pretty detailed script for myself. I do several drafts of it. In fact, in the script, there might be visual solutions that occur to me. I will make notes that might say, “This scene is about this, so use this mobius strip thing,” or “This scene is about unfolding into something else, so use these panels that become a two-dimensional cube and three-dimensional panels.” So, there’s quite a lot of academic and analytical build-up to it. With that said, there’s always room for spontaneity. When I actually am doing it, I do think of new ideas, and I do start to move things around.

The first Kabuki book was in black-and-white, but the next volume I did was the first where I was doing all the color. When I did all the layouts, they all made sense in a certain order, but, when I put them together in color, one scene was done with a certain set of colors and the next scene a different way, and I felt like “this page” next to “that page” doesn’t look nearly as good as I thought they would just based on the geometric layout that I had thought worked really well. I might not have known why this didn’t look quite as good, so I laid out all the pages around my wall or around my desk where I was working, and I’d start taking one page and putting it next to another In the process, I’d go, “Oh, it looks actually better next to this page,” and then I’d find another page where I’d go, “Oh, it looks so much better.” Then, I started rearranging all the pages and said, “They look twice as good this way as they did that way. I have to do it this way.” I would then ask, “Well, can that actually work?”

So I found a way to accommodate the script and the story to fit the change in page order, and I found that it made the script more interesting to me, anyway. I had to do a certain amount of work to finesse it to make it work. Since that time, any time I do a book in color, there are at least one or two pages that I end up changing the order of once the pages are finished. Usually, it adds something to the storytelling. I usually think it’s a more interesting way to tell the story when it happens, but I’m probably making it sound easier and simpler than it really is. There’s a lot of detail in making it work, too.

MORE TO COME

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture, interviews
April 24, 2013

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part One)

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The following interview with the comic book artist David Mack appeared in a special issue of the journal, Amerikastudien American Studies, focused on “American Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” This special issue was edited by Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. Other contributions to the issue include discussions of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum (James F. Wurtz), Arab and Muslim Superheroes in American Comics after 9/11 (Fredrik Stromberg), David Small’s Stitches (Astrid Boger), Howard Cruise’s Stuck Rubber Baby (Simon Dickel), focalization in comics narrative (Kai Mikkonen), and teaching graphic novels in the ESL classroom (Carola Hecke). This interview is being reprinted here with the special permission of the editors.

Most comics are written in prose – more often than not purple prose. They are telling us larger-than-life stories that draw us into close identifications with their characters and immerse us in their world. David Mack (best known for his creator-owned comic series, Kabuki) creates comics that are much closer to poetry. As he suggests later in this interview, the difference has to do with the process of compression on the production side, trying to pack as much meaning into his images as possible, and decryption on the reception side, inviting us to scrutinize the complexly layered images in search of hidden meanings which may emerge only upon the second or third readings.
As an artist, Mack is surprisingly self-conscious about the reading process and about what his fans bring to their experience of his work. In some cases, he draws materials directly from his fans, which he integrated into his collage-like designs. In every case, he argues that the alchemical process of creating meaning through the juxtaposition of words and images is not complete until the page has been processed through the eye and mind of the beholder. For him, the comics page is both raw material out of which the reader produces meaning and a byproduct which can be appreciated on its own terms only after the story has been consumed.

Mack began publishing Kabuki in 1994 while he was still completing a BFA in Graphic Arts at Northern Kentucky University. His close association with Brian Michael Bendis, the award-winning author famous for his work on the Ultimate Spider-Man series, opened up opportunities for Mack at the industry heavyweight Marvel Comics, where he drew covers for Bendis’s Alias and contributed as both a writer and artist to the popular Daredevil series.

What strikes one about David Mack’s career is his ability to move between mainstream and independent comics, often creating surprising hybrid forms where avant-garde practices are applied to the superhero characters who are Marvel’s cash cow. His own Kabuki comics are dazzling in their innovative use of techniques , including the incorporation of everything from tea stains to toy train tracks, into his visual collages, and in his exploration of complex ideas, including those about subjectivity and the experience of mediation. Over the course of the story, his protagonist, a Japanese woman, is a paid assassin in a criminal network, the fictionalized character in a mass media franchise, a prisoner trying to survive, a children’s book author, and a leader in a resistance movement. Each volume introduced new genre and narrative elements, while encouraging us to reread what came before through new conceptual lens.

However, Mack seems equally at home working for Marvel, collaborating as consummate a mainstream craftsman as Joe Quesada (who is now Editor-in-Chief at Marvel) or as commercial a comics author as Bendis. Sometimes, Mack’s interventions into the comics mainstream strike controversy because he is asking readers to embrace a style that takes them out of their comfort zone. Behind these interventions, however, there is a deep respect for the pulp traditions out of which these characters and stories have emerged. Many experimental comics creators seek to escape from the superhero tradition, while Mack hopes to bring something back to it from his own independent practices, adding new layers to our understanding of its iconic characters and expanding its visual vocabulary to create new kinds of emotional experiences for the reader.

I was lucky enough to snag some time with Mack in the aftermath of 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. Sitting in my hotel room in San Diego, Mack shared with me his reflections on everything from his first experiences with comics (and the childhood stories which have shaped his imagination) to his creative process and aesthetic practices. What emerges is a complex picture of a comics artist and storyteller of the highest caliber, someone who is constantly pushing beyond the conventions and limitations of American comic’s dominant genres, experimenting and innovating inside the commercial mainstream and on the fringe, trying to expand the expressive vocabulary of his medium and, in the process, to use the corporate machine to deliver his own distinctive perspective on American culture.

Comics, the Subversive Art

HJ: In Kabuki: The Alchemy, the writer Kabuki meets on the airplane notes that “most widely distributed media tend to be decision by committee. They are beholden to the various interests of a conglomerate umbrella company…Comics are a subversive medium capable of great communication and cultural influence. The format affords an individual to voice a singular vision on an international scale under the radar of big business interests and federal regulation.” Does this reflect your own thoughts about how comics function as a medium?

DM: I’m able to put into the book characters that have strong points of view. You can put one character with a strong view next to another, and you get to have them brush up against each other. Some people think this character is my definite point of view, but it allows me a playground to let these points of view go against each other. When I say it’s a subversive medium, I mean it in two different ways. One has to do with the comics industry as a distribution system, and the other has to do with the way comics work as a medium and how people read them.

As a distribution system, comics are unlike radio or TV where you have a license and regulations and people overseeing you or film distribution where there is a certain amount of money and system involved before you can do anything. One person in their basement can have an idea and immediately make a complete story and reach a pretty fair amount of people through comics – whether the kind you print off and staple together at Kinko’s or the kind you make and distribute through the web. Comics are one of the last pirate media. One person can go and immediately just have an idea in his attic and make a book, and it can be out there. This is why some of the other media, like film and television, use comics as a research and development platform to a degree. I just started making mini-comics and showing that to publishers. I don’t even know if a lot of times what I’m doing can even be classified as comics. I let other people decide what the category is, but I have been able to infiltrate the delivery system that’s there.

And the other way I think comics are subversive has to do with the nature of the medium of comics. Comics start with two images, each slightly different from what came before, but, when you put these two images together, it’s just human nature to construct a dialogue between them. We construct a continuity: whatever happens in this image was before in time, and this happens after it. Nothing’s moving at all; nothing’s said in between. Even if things are completely different from this panel to that panel, our natural instinct is to construct order out of that juxtaposition and to create a narrative in between those images. So what I love about comics is that the readers themselves are really making what’s happening in comics in their own mind. When comics are done right, when they meet the reader halfway, when they don’t give too much… I think if they give the reader too much information, the readers don’t have to use their minds as much. But, if you finesse it and give them just the right amount, the readers then really start actively completing everything inside their minds. This makes the reader an active participant in what’s happening.

HJ: There is an ongoing concern in Kabuki about corporate-controlled media, with entertainment as a form of propaganda, yet you have also chosen to work often for Marvel – one of the two biggest publishers in comics, a company now owned by the Disney corporation. How do you reconcile these two positions?

DM: Kabuki itself is published through Marvel. I started Kabuki as a series of mini-comics, and then I started doing it at a small publisher called Caliber Comics in the early 90s that had published The Crow, and I moved to a larger company (Image) in 1997. And then Brian Bendis, Mike Oeming, and I formed an imprint at Marvel Comics called Icon in 2004 to bring our creator-owned comics to Marvel. Marvel Comics has now been bought by Disney. We were able to carve out a niche at Marvel–a little compartment for creator-owned comic books. We’re given complete autonomy in terms of what we do.

People ask me, “Are you concerned with giving up your rights?” You don’t have to give up any rights–you only give up rights that you agree to give up. And, so we made a contract where we weren’t giving up any rights, and Marvel worked with that. Marvel provides us with distribution and access to their readership and their delivery system, and I guess Marvel felt like us being there was some advantage to them as well. But people ask me that a lot: “Is there some editorial control because it’s a bigger company?” In fact, I don’t think they care. I do a complete Kabuki story. I turn in a finished book. They don’t look at it ahead of time, and they don’t look at it afterwards. Some editors look at the finished story itself, but they don’t give any suggestions at all for creator-owned comics.

I like the idea that you’re living inside a system whether you like it or not. So you have to cohabitate with that system, and hopefully you can meet halfway at certain times, and, hopefully…maybe…you can even influence it to a degree or at least influence the people that are part of its delivery system.

HJ: As The Alchemy continues, it is clear that you also see popular culture as a site of potential resistance to corporate and governmental control. Can you speak to the ways you see popular culture as a potential resource for the people who consume it? Where do your theories of media and cultural change come from?

DM: One of the major themes of the story is that we don’t just have to consume the culture that we are offered, we can create our own culture.
I’m not as interested in consuming a culture that is offered to me and made by someone else for me to buy. I’m much more interested in works and literature, and culture that inspires me to create my own offerings that will be useful to others, and to be an active and meaningful participant in cultural creation.

The Alchemy story deals with two issues of resistance. The external resistance
from an outside power as you mentioned, but also an internal resistance that we face whenever we try to create something. There is a kind of self-censorship people sometimes have built into them. And an “object at rest, tends to remain at rest” force that offers a lot of rational reasons of why not to create what you think of creating, why not to fulfill all of your best and wildest dreams.

Before you ever get the external part, you need to overcome all of these internal walls to actually begin, complete, make real, or share all of your best ideas.
The Alchemy chronicles characters dealing with both of these internal and external battles of control and influence.

As for your question about external media influence… I don’t self-analyze that a lot, but, if I were to…I should say, first of all, I grew up without any television. When I grew up, there was no television in my home. I didn’t get my first television until I got my first comic book paycheck. I was in college the first time I started seeing television a lot. Even when I was in first grade, I felt like I was missing out on some culture that all the other children were talking about. “Oh, did you see that show last night? This happened.” I never knew what they were talking about all the time. So, I did feel a certain distance from other people when they were constantly referencing things and I had no idea what they were talking about. On the other hand, I didn’t have that built-in acceptance of what television and TV commercials are when I started seeing more of television when I was in college.

When I was in college, the first Gulf War was starting, and it was on CNN all the time. There was a TV in the lounge in my building in college, and I would see all these television shows I was fascinated with. I remember I was fascinated with this TV show called Cops that was big at the time. Here’s a television show that we considered entertainment, but we’re also seeing first-person points-of-view of the legal system in action. I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with the legal system being a form of entertainment and being strictly from one point of view. It made me feel very strange. Then, it cuts to a commercial and sells you something. Other people seemed to be a little more used to the commercials, but the commercials were really strange. Watching this many commercials on TV was a little weirder to me than other people seemed to think.
As the Gulf War was launching, there was this big build-up through CNN. The next thing you would see was a very similar show to Cops, but now it was first-person point-of-view of the world police. You see all these first-person point-of-view bombings and, at times, the war even felt like a video games. I was fascinated, but I was also outside my comfort zone.

I don’t know if I was conscious at the time of the connection, but certainly a degree of that experience went into the early books of Kabuki. Where the Kabuki books began, there’s an inter-dependence between a criminal element and a government element, and there’s an agency that polices that independence, but they are also part of the television and media conglomerate which shares a first-person point-of-view television show on their criminal activities. Kabuki was very consciously inspired by George Orwell and 1984, but I probably could not escape the effect that CNN and the Cops TV show and my introduction to more television and commercials were having on the way I saw the world. Comics were my playground to sort through all of that stuff.

MORE TO COME

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture, interviews
April 15, 2013

Thinking Critically About Brand Cultures: An Interview with Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part Three)

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Your chapter on YouTube has been the focus of some very productive debates between the two of us, often having to do with the relationship between collective engagement and “self-branding.” In the published chapter, you acknowledge that various forms of collective action are possible through social media (citing, for example, the Arab Spring movement), but for you, “narcissism is part of the very structure of online technologies,” (p.88). I could argue the opposite is also true — that networked communication is by its very definition networked, which involves some kind of set of social relations between individual participants. So, how do we as theorists reconcile the individualistic and collectivistic dimensions of digital culture?



It’s a very good question, and at the risk of being repetitive, I think our responsibility as theorists is to engage how these dimensions of digital culture—the individualistic and the collectivist—operate simultaneously and often in contradiction with each other. In terms of narcissism, I am responding to Jean Twenge, who has argued in her book on youth and media that narcissism is a problem for the younger generation. My critique of this argument is that rather than understand youth and media as discrete, separate realms, we need to think about the deep interrelations between and within youth culture and media spaces. That is, I said here that online technologies enable a kind of narcissism, and this (at least to me) is surely true, in the context of self-branding, personal profiles, the genre of “selfies” for young people, the isolation that can happen in digital spaces. The fact that this context exists doesn’t mean that networked communication is not enabled by digital culture, but it does mean that we have to think about what the categories of “individual” and “networked” are in relation to each other, rather than as each other’s opposite. To say that digital spaces are often individualistic, and that we should be more critical of this as these spaces are often touted as democratic, doesn’t mean that no other politics exist online.

I also think that we need to think of this digital dichotomy as something that also finds purchase in off-line spaces. So, there is some similarity between the notion that, say young women in digital spaces often self-present according to familiar gendered scripts, and the fact that these same scripts are reinforced in celebrity culture, everyday practices, policy and legislation. And, networked communication online might energize and organize a kind of democratic participation that then takes place off-line. What I hope to do in my work is not give the impression that I don’t think democratic participation is possible, but rather that in order for us to understand what something like democracy looks like in the current moment means that we need to engage cultural spaces in their relation to each other, rather than as discrete realms.

You end the book with a really provocative section which at once critiques the possibilities of a politics grounded in critical utopianism (you talk about “utopic normativity”) and yet also holds open what you describe as “the generative potential of ambivalence.” What would you see as some real world examples where groups or individuals have built in meaningful ways on the “generative potential of ambivalence” and how might we distinguish them from the kind of utopian thinking which simply reinscribes existing norms and values?


Well, I think perhaps the most obvious recent example is the various Occupy movements around the globe. Surely, brand culture is part of the context for Occupy—even as it is also part of the movement’s critique. So while Occupy might be called a “branded” movement—through design, logos, the use of social media, the Guy Fawkes mask you mentioned, etc—it is also about challenging existing norms and values.

Another example of how ambivalence is generative can be found in the branding of Wikileaks. A marketing company was hired to brand Wikileaks, as a way to raise funds for Assange’s legal fees. Did branding Wikileaks mean that the politics behind it are rendered obsolete, or does it make Assange a “sell-out”? The WikiLeaks website challenges the history of “official” information and the public’s right to access this information; the leaked documents have already disrupted routines of national security around the globe. Regardless of its ultimate impact, WikiLeaks is subversive. Because WikiLeaks is an affective sentiment in the sense that it inspires affect and emotion from individuals, the branding of it invokes ambivalence. The traversing of boundaries involved in branding WikiLeaks is not about whether Assange is “selling out,” but is an articulation of a politics of ambivalence.

The branding of feminism (as opposed to the branding of post-feminism) might be yet another example. For instance, last year’s “Binders of Women” could be understood as embodying part of brand culture in the way it was circulated, distributed, and engaged by consumers. Yet it also brought critical attention to the patriarchal discourse of politics, and worked to remind women of the importance of voting, etc.

Importantly, to traverse boundaries of different economies, market and non-market, profit-oriented or reciprocal, means not to jump from one “side” of a neoliberal divide to the other, one a space of authenticity, the other one of complicity as the discourse of “selling out” implies. And this is the ambivalence that I think is generative, that challenges a utopic normativity.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She had two books published in 2012, most recently Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press), which examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. Also published in 2012 was Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, interviews, University of Southern California
April 10, 2013

Thinking Critically About Brand Cultures: An Interview with Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part One)

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Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change is coming up on Friday of this week, and in anticipation of that event, which is scheduled to have some substantive discussion about the intersection between brand cultures and political activism, I wanted to share this interview with my USC Annenberg School colleague Sarah Banet-Weiser. Banet-Weiser will be speaking at the event, drawing on her two recent books, the single-authored Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture and her anthology, co-edited with Roopali Mukherjee, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neo-Liberal Times. I anticipate Banet-Weiser bringing a very needed critical perspective to our discussions, one which is skeptical of the claims of some of our corporate participants, but one which is also open-minded and curious about their visions of political change.

I have come to develop enormous respect for Banet-Weiser during my time at USC. She is beloved here as a teacher and mentor who is incredibly dedicated to her students. We often find ourselves closely aligned on departmental policy concerns and she has in some ways been a mentor for me as I have adjusted to a new institutional setting. Our work seems to have paralleled each other — starting with her early work on children’s culture and media, which emerged at about the same time I was publishing The Children’s Culture Reader. More recently, her Authentic (TM) book was released just a few months before Spreadable Media. Both represent attempts to come to grips with the contradictions and challenges of our current moment of media change. And I have found her collection on Commodity Activism very important as we are thinking through my current research on youth, new media, and participatory politics.

I think it is safe to say that most of the world, reading our work in isolation from our institutional context, would see us as representing very different theoretical and ideological perspectives on some of these same issues. It is difficult in the current climate to describe these differences in language that is not already over-determined by culture wars and conflicts, rifts in our field that go back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier. Banet-Weiser’s work is grounded in a very strong critique of neoliberalism and a strong emphasis on structural constraints on our capacities for individual and collective action; my work has been strongly grounded in an advocacy for participatory culture as a central tool for bringing about greater diversity and democracy and has tended to place a strong importance on the concept of collective agency within a networked culture. Often, our respective intellectual allies do not play nicely with each other, and we’ve both been concerned by the sharp language through which these issues have often been contested in recent years.

Yet, I have enormous respect and affection for Banet-Weiser and have always learned a tremendous deal from her work, and as friends and colleagues, we have become important thinking partners for each other. We read and responded extensively to each other’s book manuscripts. Such exchanges were especially valuable at moments where we were in the sharpest disagreement, where our world views clashed in ways that prove generative for both of us. Some of these core disagreements surface in the following interview. My hope is that these disagreements prove generative for my readers also.

As I have written often of late, there’s an urgent need for these perspectives to be speaking with each other. I see more and more scholars talking about the need for a frank critique of what’s happened with digital culture and especially with Web 2.0. Many are calling for us to move beyond utopian or dystopian perspectives and deal realistically with what has and has not been achieved in terms of a vision for meaningful social and political change. One side has perhaps articulated most fully the promises and potentials of that change,the other has developed the strongest critique of the structural constraints on reforming or transforming the current system and the mechanisms by which participation has been manipulated and exploited by corporate interests towards its own ends. One side has pushed an agenda of media reform focused around corporate concentration, while the other has stressed the importance of insuring the broadest possible access to the skills and tools required for meaningful participation. These two sides too often speak past each other, distrust each other. We lose sight of our shared goals. I am determined to seek common ground between these perspectives, and I hope that this exchange will represent one step forward in that process.

Banet-Weiser writes with enormous clarity in her new book about a theoretical and political stance grounded in “ambivalence,” a term I also think might describe what I am seeking right now in my own work. Too often, we’ve ended up with a divide between those of us who see the world as a glass half full and those who see the world as a glass half empty, without noticing that both of us agree that it’s only half a glass. Our points of disagreement may make us stronger if they force us to examine our core assumptions and sharpen our analysis, but they should not come at the expense of our recognition of our shared commitments and our collective stakes in insuring a more just society.

You write, “Terranova’s idea of compromise, between creativity and capitalism, between affect and profit, requires that we understand what exactly is being compromised, and what consumers gain as well as lose through such transactions.” On this point, we totally agree though there’s much more work to be done before we can fully address this question. My own sense is that critical theory has been better, by far, at describing what consumers “lose” and less effective at describing what consumers “gain.” So, from your point of view, what do consumers “gain” under the neo-liberal terms you are describing in your book? And what do they “lose”?




Well, as you say, it is somewhat easier to describe what consumers “lose” within brand culture, so I’ll address that first. I describe in the book how, in the current moment, brands, and branding strategies, have expanded beyond selling actual products or companies, and are an integral part of culture. We are witnessing the expansion of brand language and logic to our personal selves, where individuals often feel obliged to not only construct, but to understand themselves as brands. This is a problem, I think, because branding is, at the end of the day, about selling and marketing things. So, for instance, when we create a self-brand, we embark on a process that packages, designs, and markets us—human beings—just like other products and commodities. To think of ourselves as things or commodities devalues the self.

Another thing I think consumers “lose” when we are not critical of, or do not challenge the normalization of self-branding, and brand culture more generally, relates to the economies of visibility that support and validate branding. Branding, and self-branding in particular, is about making the self visible (through a variety of media platforms), and I think we need to be critical of not only cultural imperatives to be visible, but also the structural inequalities that organize visibility in the first place: who can be visible? Who is seen as “worthy” of visibility? How does visibility work in different ways depending on gender, race, class? Within this context, brand culture, as both an economic and cultural formation and dynamic of power authorizes some things as “brandable,” while others are unbrandable, or are in excess of the brand, or remain in search of “brandability” if they want to be visible.

Now, what do consumers potentially “gain” within the neoliberal context? While I’m critical of many brand cultures in the book, the cultures and practices I examine are only a small element of broader brand culture. There are historical ways in which, for example, making the self visible through consumer and brand culture has been linked to a politics of freedom and emanicipation, and I think we need to pay attention to those histories. This is a contradictory formation: brand culture provides the context for struggles over visibility and recognition. Yet it simultaneously provides the context for the commodification of people as visual objects. The contradictory spaces of brand culture provide opportunities for acting on these contradictions, and thus potentially locating political possibility and critique within brand culture.

But brand culture, or any kind of culture for that matter, is not an either/or context, where it is either liberatory or oppressive, because the production of meaning is always collective and contingent. Certainly the kinds of access and disruptions of power we witness in, say, social media contexts, can lead to a more democratic idea of resistance and identity, and dynamics of power can be re-contextualized in ways that offer space for shifting norms.

What I trace in the book, and this is particularly true when we are talking about gender norms and practices, is that these media platforms may be disrupting conventions of power in some ways while also relying on familiar scripts and narratives that have proven successful in capitalism.


These questions are intended to get to the heart of what your book is describing as “ambivalence.” It is a word which does a great deal of work in your argument. In what sense do you think our relations to contemporary consumer culture are “ambivalent”? What is the role of the critic in dealing with this kind of ambivalence?



I think that a great deal of scholarship approaches consumer and popular culture within the framework of a familiar binary: it is either authentic or commercial, it is about real politics or corporate appropriation. For me, brand culture is neither a historical inevitability, nor is it uncontested. Rather, brand cultures emerge from the deeply interrelated discourses and practices of capitalism, history, culture, technology, and individual identity formation. Because brands form culture, they are—like culture itself—often unstable and precarious. The argument I’m making in the book is that consumer capitalism is a nuanced, multi-layered context for identity formation—as such, it is an explicitly cultural space. And, because I’m writing about culture, I think we need to carefully attend to the ways in which the production and consumption of culture within the logic of branding involves not only those practices that are easily branded, but also those who are left out of brand culture because they are not easily branded. So, we need to think about why certain politics or lifestyles are incorporated into brand culture, as well as why others not immediately amenable to branding are left out.

This is where ambivalence comes in, in those spaces of culture that are not easily determined by either commercial culture or individual resistance. But, connecting ambivalence to actual praxis is a difficult thing, and has no guarantees. For one thing, most elements of culture are not seen as ambivalent. Ambivalence, its lack of certainty, its inconsistency, the way it both harbors and is defined by doubt, is generally understood as a problem, something to avoid. Yet, I’m arguing that it is important to take seriously the cultural value of emotion and affect and the potential of ambivalence, its generative power, for it is within these spaces that hope and anxiety, pleasure and desire, fear and insecurity are nurtured and maintained. Brand marketers realize the potential of ambivalence, and capitalize on it. But their strategies do not in turn mean that affect, or ambivalence, are simply, or only, spaces of corporate manipulation. Rather, affect and ambivalence can be utilized in different ways.

The ambivalence of brand cultures, then, is about incongruity—all brand cultures do not mean the same thing, either culturally or individually. If consumer capitalism demands that we live our lives within brand spaces and subjectivities, we need to think carefully about what this kind of life looks like, and conversely, what potential spaces and actions threaten to disrupt the expected flow of consumption.

To theorize ambivalence as a structuring element of brand cultures means that not all cultural practices are spaces of possibility, but rather that some carry more potential than others, that some cultural practices are easier to brand than others. Those practices that can be integrated within brand relationships, such as girls’ self-esteem, or environmental politics, or street art, are not empty of political possibility, but that possibility itself takes shape within a branded space and under branding rubrics. When a brand, a genre, or a product circulates in culture, its meaning is ambivalent. In other words, the fact that a brand circulates in culture is not a guarantee of its meaning; rather, the circulating brand is constantly under the threat of breakdown and destabilization. Within brand culture, this threat forms a crucial contradiction: brands are designed for stability, and their logic is based on regularity and singularity. Yet they are ultimately precarious, and are subject to cultural misunderstanding. For me, to theorize brand cultures as subject to misunderstanding and misrecognition is to deliberately hold on to the generative potential of brand cultures.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She had two books published in 2012, most recently Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press), which examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. Also published in 2012 was Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007).
She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, interviews, University of Southern California
April 8, 2013

As the World Stops Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo about Soap Operas (Part Three)

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Much of your writing has focused on parallels between daytime serialized drama and the rise of “quality” shows, primetime dramas which marry serialized storytelling with higher budgets, deeper production values, and much shorter, season-based dramas which pack intense meaning into typically between 10 and 20 episodes in a season, as opposed to 260 episodes per year. What do you feel is the nature of the connection between today’s critically acclaimed dramas on FX, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and elsewhere and the daytime serial drama?

 

The success of early primetime serials like Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) redefined the public perception of soap opera. Larger-than-life, over-the-top characters like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington, who more resembled stock characters from the commedia dell’arte, than ATWT’s Hughes family, were enormously entertaining to watch, but not because viewers found “meaning and resonance through a deeper connection.”  And while Larry Hagman’s (J.R) called Dallas as a cartoon rather than a soap opera, to the media and public these guilty pleasures were soaps simply by virtue of their seriality. The popularity of these primetime soaps coincided with Gloria Monty’s transformation of General Hospital,, and had at least as profound an impact on daytime soaps. The spirit of Dallas and Dynasty continues in current primetime soaps Revenge and Scandal, and for the teenage demo, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.

The Best of J.R. Ewing from Dallas

The true heirs of ATWT comprise a long list of often critically-acclaimed, always ratings challenged, and ultimately short-lived serial dramas.  While thirtysomething may not have looked anything like ATWT, the the day-to-day lives of two baby boomer families, the Stedmans and Westons, mirrored those of the Hughes and Lowells 30 years earlier. Thirtysomething ran from 1987-91 and never rose above 40th in the ratings. Its very ordinariness (tensions between career and family, visiting parents, finding a babysitter) made it, and similar shows that followed (My So-Called Life, Joan of Arcadia, Jack and Bobby, Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, to name but a few), a challenge to promote effectively.

How networks schedule these quiet, slow-paced shows creates another obstacle. Broadcast network programmers, under pressure to win time slots, often shuffle their lineup, making it difficult for viewers to find these shows, which, unlike episodic television, need to be watched in order. Sometimes networks cancel them after a handful of episodes, creating a self-fulling prophecy when fans hear about a promising new serial drama, but fearing yet another heartbreak (not being hyperbolic here:), decide not to watch.

Since cable networks rarely pull a serial drama before the first order of episodes has aired, and are able to place the show in a fixed time slot followed by multiple repeats (sometimes even daylong marathons), viewers have ample opportunity to connect with these quiet, slow-paced shows. But there are still issues beyond the obvious disadvantages shorter seasons create for serial dramas: less time to fully develop characters and their relationships means less time to fully engage viewers. When networks pick up serials dramas, the creators face uncertainty about the number of episodes that can undermine the pace of the storytelling. After a 13-episode first season, Parenthood was picked up for 22 episodes, then renewed for a 18-episode third season and 15 for the fourth. Since the season often ends before the network has announced that the show has been renewed (or not), the season finale could well be the series finale.

Sometimes, scheduling uncertainty can cause a show’s demise. When the first season of TNT’s Men of a Certain Age ended in February 2010, the show was averaging 2.6 million viewers per episode, enough for the network to order an additional 12 episodes. After the episodes were completed, TNT decided to air them in two batches.  The first set of six episodes ended in January 2011, and the show was holding its own, averaging 2.4 million viewers. But TNT held the second set until June, when average viewership dropped to 1.5 million and the show was cancelled, a fate that might well have been avoided had all 12 episodes aired as the writers intended when they laid out the second season.

The real challenge is how to describe these quiet, slow-paced shows, which, by their very nature, defy brevity, and struggle even on premium cable, where In Treatment lasted three seasons on HBO and Enlightened is currently fighting to be heard over the noisier Girls and Showtime’s Homeland. When Ray Romano pitched Men of a Certain Age to FX, he was told it “wasn’t loud enough.” The show wound up on TNT, where it never really fit in with the network’ s other original programming, procedurals like The Closer, and the light-hearted Franklin and Bash. When Men… was cancelled, critic Alan Sepinwall admitted , “I don’t always do the best job of articulating the greatness of this series, but it’s there in those moments I described above, and so many more. It is a series about small details, and those details add up into big things: big laughs and big emotion; big pain and big joy.”

Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) has said that she always saw The Sopranos as a family drama. She’s right; but take away the mob and what are the odds that The Sopranos would have been picked up, much less become a cultural phenomenon? Peter Horton (thirtysomethings’s Gary) perfectly articulated the situation, describing how networks, cable and otherwise, are driven to create shows where something stands out: “‘I’m a mother who sells pot,’ (Weeds); ‘I’m father, but I’m a meth dealer,’ (Breaking Bad); ‘I’m a gangster, but I have therapy,’ (The Sopranos). There’s always a but, whereas thirtysomething is about people,” which is exactly how Irna Phillips described As the World Turns.

“Quiet” shows with no “buts” are the 21st-century manifestation of  the “your mother’s soap opera” dilemma that ultimately doomed ATWT. The challenge facing today’s vertical storytellers and programmers is to develop a brand evoking the appeal of “quiet” and the missing “but,” that will stand out in an ever more crowded media landscape without compromising the integrity of the vertical storytelling axis. Developing that brand demands a more precise description and definition of vertical storytelling. That means first breaking down the characteristics of these shows at the elemental, even molecular level, a task hampered by the ambiguity of language that so flummoxed Alan Sepinwall. Virginia Heffernan’s insightfull 2008 observation that Friday Night Lights “ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity,” which limits “platforms for supplemental advertising” also applies to these shows, and adds to the challenge, and urgency, of developing a brand for them.

 

What are the most interesting experiments with soap opera storytelling that you feel are capturing the unique nature and potential of the “U.S. soap opera format” of storytelling?

 

And therein lies the fundamental (and vexing) question: what exactly is the unique nature of the “U. S. soap opera format?”  There’s a vast difference between the public perception of soap opera as a melodramatic guilty pleasure populated with campy, over-the-top, plot-driven characters motivated by agendas rather than emotions, and mine. I would argue that soaps’ unique nature lies in a narrative structure that emphasizes storytelling’s vertical axis, revealing characters’ interiority, their emotional and psychological back stories, and providing time for viewers to fully absorb that information. All of which creates the opportunity for viewers find meaning and resonance through a deeper connection to characters.

A conversation to be continued. But first, the economic realities and the toll they’ve taken on soap opera’s unique nature.

From the time soaps moved from radio to television, the genre expanded: first adding the visual element, then growing from 15 minutes to a half hour, and in the late 1970s, to an hour . At the time, soaps were still a profit center for networks, and their budgets, while paltry compared to primetime shows, were sufficient to hire large casts with which writers wove rich, densely interconnected stories. After O.J., ratings took a hit from which they never recovered. Networks reduced the licensing fees they paid to the production companies, who cut the shows’ budgets. There are a number of ways for producers to reduce the cost of on-screen talent (shifting highly-paid veterans to recurring status and reducing the guarantees for contract players), so smaller budgets didn’t necessarily translate into fewer characters. What did happen was that there with fewer actors populating each episode, characters interacted less frequently, which limited opportunities for viewers to experience the full pleasure of the vertical axis. So, what had been a rich storytelling tapestry frayed and eventually shredded into the fragmented storytelling discussed above.

In July 2011, Prospect Park announced that they had acquired the online rights to two cancelled ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, and planned to launch the shows in early 2012. Grateful fans cheered and the mainstream media took note. But, PP’s announcement was premature: they had not yet negotiated contracts with the unions, and their business plan, which retained the shows’ hour format, failed to attract sufficient financing. When PP said they were suspending their efforts a few months later, most observers believed the deal was dead.

Fast-forward to last December: PP announced that they had negotiated collective bargain agreements with the guilds and secured sufficient financing to begin production in February. PP had lost a credibility with many fans when they suspended their initial effort, and not surprisingly, the reboot’s reboot was met with skepticism (and barely a mention in the mainstream media). Initially, PP took a lot of heat on the boards, but as their plans solidified, veteran actors signed on and distribution deals were struck with Hulu and iTunes, fans began to believe (the mainstream media silence continues). Production began on February 25th.

What PP’s done over the the past 18 months is what the networks and Procter & Gamble Productions ought to have been doing before soaps’ economic model, so successful for so long, was no longer viable. It took PP to recognize that for soaps to survive into the 21st-century, the Web would have to be more than just an additional platform for showing and promoting shows, then come back from an initial failure to make it happen. Perhaps the most important aspect of this resurrection is that the online reboot streamlines the format: 30, rather than 60 minutes; four episodes a week, rather than five. No doubt scaling back helped to convince investors, but will PP recognize the opportunity it has to exploit the shorter format and recapture the unique nature of soaps that has been lost over the years? I’m encouraged by the relatively small, multi-generational (of the 14 contract players, eight are over 40; of the eight, two are over 50, four past 60) cast that’s been assembled for One Life to Live. All of the characters are deeply-connected, with long histories between and among them, so the elements are in place for PP to turn economic necessity into the mother of reinvention. The rebooted AMC and OLTL are slated to premiere some time in April.

When Irna Phillips blazed the trail for serial drama in the 1950s, the television landscape was minuscule, three networks, and relatively expensive to enter — the $10,000 cost of the ATWT pilot was twice the median household income at the time. Today, as the price of technology continues to drop, anyone can make and upload video to a media landscape incalculably larger than 60 years ago.  Since the mid-1990s, the Web has been flooded with mostly free content of varying quality, including an ever-increasing number of online serials designed to appeal to soap fans. Like their primetime counterparts, these Web-series are most often considered soap operas only by virtue of their seriality.  Despite barebones budgets and minimal monetization, many of these series, juggle large casts of characters squeezed into short (7-12 minute) episodes, limiting possibilities for deep viewers engagement. Only a handful have fully engaged my inner soap fan. My favorite, the critically acclaimed Anyone But Me, premiered in 2008 and ran for 26 episodes over three years before the series finale in January 2012.

Last May, while Prospect Park was off the grid getting its ducks in a row, there was a small news item on the We Love Soaps site announcing a new YouTube channel, WIGS: Where It Gets Interesting. The channel promised “high-end, original, scripted series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads.” WIGS co-creator, Rodrigo Garcia, had long plumbed the vertical storytelling axis in films like Things You Tell Just By Looking At Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Nine Lives, along with  HBO’s In Treatment. He brought the same sensibility to the work he created for WIGS.

Blue

Serena

 Celia

 

WIGS co-creator, filmmaker Jon Avnet, shares his partner’s storytelling sensibility, but even more important is how the two men went about creating the channel. With first-round seed money from Google, WIGS  became an official YouTube channel, making the project attractive to media partner, News Corp, and advertisers, AMEX and Unilever. As the pieces fell into place, including collective bargaining agreements with the entertainment unions, Avnet and Garcia invited more than a dozen writers and directors to create projects built around a female lead. Established actors, aware that their industry is in flux, were eager to participate even if it meant working for scale.

Before WIGS went live on May 14, Avnet and Garcia had produced enough content to run three episodes a week for almost seven months. Enough time to build an audience: more than 25 million views and 110,000 subscribers. The first season of WIGS included a few documentaries and short films, but the channel’s foundation was13 scripted serial dramas made up of 2-15 episodes running 7-10 minutes with small casts — sometimes as few as two characters.

Last month, FOX Broadcasting signed a multi-year deal with WIGS “to expand the breadth of offerings through the WIGS channel, and test and nurture dramatic concepts and talent in the digital realm..with an eye toward building content that can be programmed on FOX and/or other channels.” On March 15th, WIGS returns with a second season of Blue, followed later in the spring by the next installments of Lauren, and a new series Paloma.

Avnet and Garcia created WIGS specifically with women as the target audience. So, what to make of one commenter’s question, “what does it say that I, a 35-year old man, find myself addicted to WIGS?” What to make of the substantial number of women who were (and are) deeply engaged fans of Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, both shows ostensibly for and about men? The appeal of vertical storytelling clearly transcends gender; what about other demographic markers? What are the characteristics of viewers drawn to the vertical storytelling axis?

These questions, and others yet to be articulated, need to be explored before vertical storytellers can identify and maximize their potential audience. The data generated by the 110,000+ WIGS subscribers contain essential information for brand development, which, properly analyzed, can also inform the qualitative insights necessary to fully identify viewership.

 

Where has this project led you? Now that you’ve put together a personal reflection on your relationship to As the World Turns, what’s the next step in your ongoing research about the soap opera’s place in our cultural history and in our contemporary culture?

Probably the most frustrating part of writing about soap opera has been the lack of a framework within which to consider soap opera’s place in our contemporary culture. Identifying the underlying factors has been challenging because there’s no hierarchical relationship among them. Over the past several years, I’ve posted over 100 short articles on my blog. This piece represents my first effort to begin crafting those pieces into a larger context; I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I first began writing about soaps as a fan. And it’s as a fan, saddened and angered with the premature demise of show after show carrying on (consciously or not) the legacy that Irna Phillips began when she created As the World Turns, that I began exploring what it would take to carve out a place for this kind of storytelling in today’s rapidly-shifting media landscape. Personal as my efforts have been, this work can only continue with the collaboration of media scholars and professionals along with institutional support.

On related fronts, I’m currently completing the syllabus for a class, “The Influence and Evolution of the American Soap Opera, I’ll be pitching to Boston area schools, and considering the possibility of a book to follow.  Also in progress: a proposal for an Irna Phillips biography.

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
April 5, 2013

As the World Stopped Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo on Soap Operas (Part Two)

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You provide a very personal account of your own gradual disconnect from enjoying and having an emotional engagement with As the World Turns. How would you describe your relationship to the show, both as a fan and as a critic, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

It’s ironic, and no small testament to the power of its storytelling, that I became so deeply involved with ATWT: Since it aired on the East Coast at 1:30, while I was at school, I was far more familiar with, and have far more vivid memories of, Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light, which were on when my sister and I came home for lunch in grammar school, and Another World, which I could see if I came straight home from junior high school.

 

I only got to watch ATWT on holidays, vacations and sick days, a pattern that continued after I moved to Boston in 1973, found a full time job and worked on my undergraduate degree at night. In those pre-VCR days, what I remember more than specific stories is the familiarity of the characters, who were always there when I was able to watch. That was until I took a year off (1982-3) to complete my degree.  While I had been peripherally aware of the General Hospital phenomenon, I had  no idea that GH’s success was why the ATWT on my screen was so different from what I remembered.  But, I actually enjoyed what I saw and never considered abandoning the show. At the time, I was in advertisers’ target demo, so from that perspective, the change in direction was a success.

 

But, while I was enjoying the ATWT’s new direction, my mother was not. She missed the show she had loved for 25 years and eventually stopped watching. She wasn’t the only one; the show lost more viewers than it gained and a couple of years later (1984-5) the Calhoun-Marland team righted the ship and the show rose in the ratings. But, without my mother, although she continued to watch GL.

 

After college, the combination of a flexible job and a VCR allowed me to become a serious fan. I was writing about nursing (like soaps, strongly associated with women and thereby marginalized. Also, like soaps’ “not your mother’s soap opera,” nursing had internalized the belief that to be valued they had to become something else: “professional” nurses who didn’t want to be seen as “that kind of nurse,” dealing with bodily fluids at the bedside.”)  While writing an article for Soap Opera Weekly on how nurses were portrayed on soaps I interviewed Doug Marland. A few months later, what was supposed to be a short news piece about CBS ending its head writer training program morphed into a longer article about the paths of three head writers (including Marland), which got me thinking seriously about soaps.

 

In 1995, I began pitching a piece to coincide with ATWT’s 40th anniversary in 1996 to Smithsonian Magazine; it took over a year to convince the editor. By the time I arrived on the set in mid-March when the anniversary episode was taped, there was a new production team in place (see above) and the mantra of the executive producer, head writers and publicist was “we’re not 40 years old, we’re 40 years young.”  I could see that things were falling apart, and while I could identify bits and pieces of what was wrong, I couldn’t figure out how those pieces fit together (even if I could, I’m not sure Smithsonian would have been the right place), so I was forced to abandon the piece. I wrote one more article analyzing the demographics of soap opera audience, then turned my attention to writing a screenplay (isn’t everyone:) and short plays.

 

It wasn’t until Sam Ford asked me to be on his thesis committee in 2006 that I was able to begin identifying the “bits and pieces” that had undermined the Smithsonian piece. The task now is to integrate those elements into a cohesive framework within which to consider the full impact of soaps — a task made all the more challenging since there is no obvious hierarchical relationship among the elements.

 

The book begins with a deep look at Irna Phillips and how the details of her own life so intensely shaped many aspects of As the World Turns. You also recently published a piece about Irna for Harvard Magazine. What do you believe Phillips’ place is in the history of the soap opera in particular, and in the greater landscape of U.S. television?

 

Irna Phillips was a risk taker who, rather than fear failure, learned from it. In 1948, she wrote to P&G’s William Ramsey that she had doubts about televising soaps, suggesting that it would be some time before a televised serial could succeed. (She doesn’t explain why, but at the time there were roughly 100,00 television sets in the country, most concentrated in the New York area, up from 44,000 the previous year. As the post-war economy expanded, the number of sets increased exponentially; by 1953, over half of US household had a television.) Yet, just a few months later, in January 1949, Irna approached NBC about creating what many consider the first television soap, These are My Children. Accounts vary (some say the network pulled it after five weeks; Irna says she pulled it after 13 weeks when the network shifted its time slot), but by any measure, the television’s first soap opera was a failure. Whether the show failed because it was bad (according to Television World) or because the low viewership was a function of too few households with televisions is impossible to determine.

 

The success of two early television soaps on CBS (Search for Tomorrow and  Love of Life), convinced Irna that the time was right to move Guiding Light from radio, where it began in 1937, to television. But GL’s owner, P&G believed that only serials created specifically for television would succeed.  Undaunted, Irna revised two GL “highly dramatic” radio scripts (it’s not clear if she secured P&G’s permission), then spent more than $5000 of her own money (in 1952, the median household income was $3900) to tape the episodes and the show premiered on CBS in June, while remaining on radio until 1956 (when 71% of households had at least one television).

 

When Irna first floated the idea of a half-hour soap the suits were again skeptical. One executive told her, “we don’t believe in investing in a possible failure.” But, as with GL, Irna persevered, this time collaborating with longtime colleagues, Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, to write and finance ($10,000) a pilot for ATWT. According to Irna, the nine cast members were so impressed, “they agreed to hold themselves available for six months” until the pilot was picked up.

 

In the early 1960s, Irna became a consultant for what would become the first successful primetime soap opera, ABC’s Peyton Place (1964-1969). She then created a primetime ATWT spinoff, Our Private World, which ran for 19 weeks (38 episodes) from May 5 – September 10, 1965. CBS’s decision to air the show over the summer, rather than launching it as part of the new fall season, likely contributed to its short run, and may also have reflected a lack of confidence in Irna. Since her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, ends in late 1963 with her creation of Another World, if Irna had any thoughts about All My Worlds and the two shows she later created, Love is a Many Splendored Thing and A World Apart, they would be in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

 

Much of your book focuses on the ways in which management practices and corporate structure in the last 15 years of As the World Turns‘ 54-year run damaged both the quality of the story and the relationship the show maintained with its fans. In the course of your research and writing, in what ways were soap opera fans drawing these connections between industry news and what played out on their screens on an everyday basis? And what can media scholars and those who work in or study other media industries learn from studying the ongoing relationship between longterm viewers and a media property like ATWT?

 

When fan magazines covering soaps first appeared in the late-1960s, soaps had been on television for almost 20 years. Those early publications consisted mainly of interviews with actors and features that took fans behind-the-scenes of the shows. It wasn’t until Soap Opera Weekly came on the scene in November 1989 that fans had timely access to industry news and serious criticism. In addition to episode recaps, Weekly published spoilers that let fans know what would happen when. According to founding editor, Mimi Torchin, fans welcomed information that allowed them to prioritize. Of course, in a extreme example of unintended consequences, spoilers have become a vexing challenge for all serialized storytelling in the digital age.

Both Weekly and its sister publication, Soap Opera Digest, included “Comings and Goings” and “The Revolving Door,” features that alerted fans when actors left roles, or were cast as new characters. This information became a form of spoiler that allowed fans to speculate outside of what they saw on the screen. Producers and writers exacerbated this phenomenon by sharing information about who the new (or recast) character would be paired with, and the direction the story would take.  With the final years of ATWT  characterized by a seemingly endless array of new characters, few of whom were connected to the core Hughes family, when fans heard the news online, many were not inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how stories played out before passing (usually negative) judgment.

Another factor to consider: the unintended consequences of rebranding, which requires a willingness to to alienate, and even lose, existing customers to attract desired customers. This worked brilliantly for AMC when the network shifted its focus from showing old movies to become the HBO of basic cable. But movie buffs had plenty of options; not so with soaps. Whether it was articulated or not, when ATWT shifted the show’s focus in the early-1980s to capture younger viewers, the show seemed willing to lose its existing viewers, like my mother, who left and never returned, even when the show corrected course a few years later. But, with all soaps trying to recreate General Hospital’s success, there was no place for disaffected fans to turn. So many stayed, and with the remote controls that came with their new VCRs in hand,  fast forwarded through many of the new characters that populated the ATWT canvas, contributing to the show’s increasingly fragmented storytelling. One consequence  of fragmented storytelling is a fragmented audience, with each segment expressing its own spin on the genre’s aesthetic. The result: divergent and often conflicting comments that made it difficult to interpret and apply fan feedback.

In 1996 P&G set up a toll-free number to provide viewers with inside information about the ATWT. At the end callers were asked who they wanted to see the troubled Emily Stewart paired with: “press 1 for Diego, 2 for Jeff.” Since “other,” “none of the above” or,”in the case of this particular character, “a good therapist,” were not among the choices, the results were  meaningless. And the way in which the question was posed (the only option to bypass the question was hanging up) made clear that this was not a serious effort on the part of PGP to engage viewers, but rather a ham-handed token.

Another example of the show’s tin ear was someone’s (probably not the executive producer or head writer, both of whom had worked in soaps long enough to understand the subtle intricacies of how time unfolds on soaps; depending on the circumstances, sometimes compressed, sometimes extended.) literal interpretation of a frequent complaint about soaps: “the stories move too slowly.” In 2008, ATWT abandoned soap opera’s traditional narrative structure and began a series of short-term story arcs, some of which wrapped up in a single episode. The combination of self-contained episodes and spoilers made at least one fan happy: “Not sure how or why TPTB have come up with this new concept, but is sure is working well. I think I’ve watched a total of one or two episodes in the last two weeks.” An unintended consequence that inflicted considerable damage in ATWT’s final years.

Without an understanding of not just what’s being said, but what it means, soliciting feedback is at best, futile, at worst, damaging. When it came to soap opera, however, there was no guarantee that those who were conducting the research had ever watched soaps. According to one former network executive I talked with, it was the rare researcher who even took the time to familiarized themselves with the show for which they were collecting feedback. So, while their empirical observations may have been accurate, without a shared experiential frame of reference with their subjects, researchers often lacked to tools to infer, then accurately interpret and apply how fans experience soaps.

When it comes to suspending disbelief, the very nature of daytime soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media. But as the genre’s scope expanded over the years, traditional elements — intimate relationships between family, friends and lovers — began to share space with time travel, the supernatural, omnipotent villains and characters whose repeated returns from the dead often defied both logic and the laws of physics. When ATWT’s James Stenbeck first reappeared in 1986 after being presume dead, he provided a simple explanation: “I had a parachute.”  But as explanations for his subsequent resurrections became more and more preposterous, some fans were angry, feeling that the writers were taking advantage of their willingness to suspend disbelief — even insulting their intelligence. Others chalked it up to a “it’s a soap opera. No one gives a shit if it makes sense” mentality on the part of writers and producers. By 2009, when Stenbeck returned from the dead for the fourth and final time, the writers didn’t bother to even go through the motions. And rather than get angry, those fans still watching responded with detached bemusement.

The number of serialized dramas has exploded in the past 15 years, so dominating television programming that a recent piece in TVGuide suggests that serial dramas may be reaching the saturation point. The challenges facing these shows — maintaining the integrity of the storytelling in the face of network interference and the shuffling of show runners, spoilers, time-shifting, and more recent additions to the lexicon, binge watching and, perhaps most important, hate-watching — all have their antecedents in soaps. Current and future storytellers facing the challenge of attracting viewers in a media landscape drowning in serial drama have much to learn by understanding how soaps and their fans have dealt with these issues.

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 Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, c3, fan culture, interviews, television
April 3, 2013

As The World Stopped Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One)

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I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate relationship with a favorite series or franchise often motivates them to research it more deeply, read it more closely, and interpret it more richly than an academic would be able to do. Not all fans know how to articulate their findings in ways that move beyond the particular details and speak to the larger context and implications of their objects of study, but those who do have much to teach us about their particular corners of the popular culture universe.

Lynn Liccardo is an extraordinary soap opera fan, who over the course of her life has moved from a passion for As the World Turns and its creator Irma Phillips, towards more and more active engagement with the soap opera industry (such as it has become) and who has written professionally about soaps for a number of years. I was lucky to meet Liccardo when she served on the thesis committee for one of my MIT graduate students Sam Ford, now co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture; she has been coming to our Futures of Entertainment conferences ever since; she contributed to Sam’s book on the future of soap operas; and now, she has an e-book of her own, As the World Stopped Turning, which shares some of what she knows about the history, aesthetics, production, and reception of soap operas.

I am the first to admit that soaps are a blind spot for me as a fan and as an academic, though I also would acknowledge that those of us who care about transmedia storytelling and contemporary primetime drama have much to learn from the soap opera tradition about expansive storyworlds and long-form serials in particular. So, I asked Sam Ford if he would interview her for the blog. Below aresome of Liccardo’s thoughts connecting As the World Turns to some of the industry trends and developments over the past six decades that have impacted serialized television storytelling.

As the World Stopped Turning is a full ebook of your essays dedicated to the soap opera As the World Turns. Why is this particular daytime serial drama so important to study, in your opinion? What is As the World Turns‘ particular place in our cultural history?

 

As The World Turns was the first 30-minute serial, doubling the standard 15-minute episode. But  it was more than its length that contributed to the show’s impact on the genre and cultural history. When creator, Irna Phillips, conceived the show, she wanted the additional time not to tell more story, but to develop “better story and characterization.” Before ATWT debuted in 1956, serials concentrated on a single family; in her new creation, Irna contrasted the stories of two families, one united and solidly middle-class, the Hughes, the other, wealthy and divided, the Lowells, “because by the 1950s divorce and separation were becoming a more pronounced element in our social structure.” Irna also believed (more than 30 years before GH’s Luke and Laura), that including teenagers as a major part of the story, “added the valuable asset of longevity to the serial.”

But what set ATWT apart from earlier soaps was Irna’s skillful juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal storytelling axes, with her emphasis on the former (character), which slowed the latter (plot), sometimes to a seeming standstill.  In fact, the first year of the show there was virtually no plot, just these rather ordinary characters going about everyday lives that resembled those of many viewers. The intimacy of the connection between viewer and character was reinforced as the camera moved slowly over actors’ faces, laying the groundwork for future audiences to recognize what a character in Ron Howard’s film, Frost/Nixon, called “the reductive power of the close-up.”

Irna gave voice to her deeply-held belief that “nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these elements, often at the same time,” through stories that gave equal weight to the conflicting emotions within each character,  forcing viewers, in the words of critic Robert LaGuardia, “to grieve over the heartbreak of the human condition rather than to hang on to a fixed value judgement.”  In her outline, Irna was emphatic that ATWT “not a melodrama,” but rather “a show about people.” That ambiguity deeply permeated the cultural ground water and became the foundation of what’s now called quality television and complex storytelling, although, as I discuss below, for viewers who only know daytime soaps after Luke and Laura, the connection is not at all clear.

The episode below aired about a year into the show’s 54-year run. While it contains none of ATWT’s trademark closeups, it is an elegant example (one of the few still available) of how soap opera historically used character to move plot: a narrative structure that ties current stories to back stories and uses history and memory to contextualize current plot and character development. The power of this episode lies in its four deceptively simple scenes, each a conversation between two of the episode’s four characters. While almost nothing happens in the episode, when it’s over viewers understand the relationships, not just among the characters in the episode, Chris, his father, Pa, and sister,, Edie, who was involved with his law partner, Jim, but between every character on the show: Chris’s wife Nancy, his daughter, Penny, who became estranged from her aunt Edie when Penny’s best friend, Ellen, revealed that her father, Jim, was involved with another woman, Edie. Even a character who never appeared on the show, Chris and Edie’s brother, John, was fully contextualized.

As the World Turns #268 Part 1 

 As the World Turns #268 Part 2

 

What do you believe were the biggest factors in the demise of As the World Turns?

The demise of ATWT actually began in 1978, when Gloria Monty’s was hired to fix a show on the verge of cancellation, ABC’s General Hospital. At the time, most soap operas followed the model Irna Phillips had created on ATWT: intergenerational families made up of rather ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives that resembled those of most viewers.

 

Monty altered that model by speeding up the pace of the storytelling by shifting the focus from the day-to-day lives of the doctors and nurses of General Hospital to the young, Laura, and the hip, Luke, who, in the process of saving the world from being frozen by the Ice Princess, also saved General Hospital, thereby forever altering the public’s perception of soaps. As college lounges  filled with students following the adventures of Luke and Laura, for the first time it was cool for kids to watch soaps.

 Luke & Laura – Lover’s on the Run Volume 1

But GH wasn’t their mother’s soap opera; ATWT was. How CBS and Procter & Gamble responded to the end of ATWT’s 20-year reign at the top of the ratings is a lesson in what not to do. Rather than take a deep breath and think about ways to exploit the perception of ATWT as “their mothers’ soap opera” to the show’s advantage, the new executive producer, Mary-Ellis Bumin, approached her task from what, in light of GH’s explosive success, seemed like a logical assumption, but ultimately proved deeply flawed: the only way to attract the younger viewers advertisers coveted was by excluding older characters. So, what had been the ATWT’s  greatest assets — its 20+-year history and the multi-generational Hughes family — was seen as its greatest weaknesses. Soon after Bunim took over familiar characters were pushed to the sidelines and viewers found themselves watching Tom and Margo (Oakdale’s Luke and Laura) chase a dwarf named Mr. Big — ATWT’s version of the Ice Princess.

 As the World Turns: Vintage Tom and Margo

But what had worked so brilliantly for GH never caught on with ATWT’s core audience. When Laurence Caso took over CBS’s New York daytime operation in 1983, he realized that ATWT would never succeed by continuing to copy what the ABC soaps were doing. He pushed Procter & Gamble to replace Mary-Ellis Bunim with Robert Calhoun, then hired head writer Douglas Marland, who rebuilt the show around Hughes. ATWT thrived until Marland suddenly died in 1993. A year later, the show was still in the process of rebuilding as the country obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

ATWT’s missteps of the early 1980s have to be understood in the context of GH’s unprecedented success, which threw all soaps into uncharted waters. But CBS and P&G had clearly failed learn from history when, in 1995, a new regime once again distanced the show from its history and the Hughes family. As the show floundered until its cancellation in 2010, no one even tried to right the ship by reestablishing the centrality of the Hughes. Even if they had, it might well have been too late. P&G’s other two shows, Guiding Light and Another World, were in even worse shape than ATWT. In 2005, P&G eliminated the position of executive in charge of production and subsequently transferred the shows’ day-to-day operations to a subsidiary, TeleNext Media. Then, in 2008, the TeleNext logo replaced P&G’s in the show credits, sending a clear message that P&G was content to let the clock run out on their soaps.  

 

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
March 29, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About The Future of Television (Final Installment)

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Suzanne Scott:

Thanks, AJ, for doing the heavy lifting by synthesizing the tensions emerging out of this conversation, and for tackling the industrial context. You’re absolutely right, fans and producers both know the score, and I think it’s vital to acknowledge fan agency in this discussion, despite my qualms about how the campaign frames fan participation and labor.  That said, I’d add a couple of corollaries to the core tensions you’ve identified above, drawing on the framing of fans across the past few exchanges.

First, I want to revisit Maurício’s point about the ultimate “winner” of the shifting power dynamics between media audiences, producers, and distributors being the story itself.  Both Maurício and Henry make a strong case for the how this emerging model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production.  But there’s a catch with fan-funded stories, and it’s already visible in the discourses around the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.  It’s baked into the FAQ’s nod to shipping and fan expectations (see image), and it’s directly addressed in this remark from Thomas after the success of the campaign:

“I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there’s the ‘give the people what they want’ version. And I think partly because it’s crowd-sourced, I’m going with the ‘give the people what they want’ version. It’s going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love. Certainly, I think I can make a fun, great movie out of that, and I’m excited about that, but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I’m happy with it, to go with, ‘Let’s not piss people off who all donated. Let’s give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie.’”

 

It’s the “give them the stuff that I think they want” that troubles the notion that story emerges the clear “winner” in this particular case.  Whether Thomas is justifiably hedging his bets in response to the intense scrutiny that has accompanied the campaign’s success (“If the movie ultimately sucks, don’t blame me, my vision was hindered by fan service…after all, they paid for it…”) is beside the point.  To return to the first tension AJ identified, fan “satisfaction” is clearly the central concern here, but it’s ultimately framed as a potential detriment to Thomas’ creative control.  There is something empowering about the fact that, in Maurício’s terms, we can now frame fans as studios.  But what I think might be getting lost here is the fact that fans are independent creators too, and it’s often their dissatisfaction with a story, or the industrial structures and strictures that limit it, that drives their textual production.  Henry’s right that fans will always be read, first and foremost, through an economic lens.  But, fans aren’t just storybuyers, they’re storytellers.  They make their own satisfaction.

 

On a second and related point, you all make a compelling case for how distribution on Netflix, or similar platforms, might help reshape industrial investments in media properties, encourage experimentation with transmedia or non-linear textualities, and cater to pre-existing fannish consumption patterns such as binge watching. Our conceptual understanding of what “television” is (who produces and distributes it, and where, when and how we consume it) continues to be radically reimagined in the post-network era.  Within the Netflix television model, the television temporalities of seriality and seasonality are effectively eradicated. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I do wonder how these new “telelvision” models might fundamentally alter our conception of television fandom.

 

If fans produce their richest work in the gaps and margins of a television text, they’ve also historically used the temporal gaps and margins between episodes and seasons to their advantage.  I return, time and again, to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures and his useful notion of “just-in-time” fandom to describe how fan practices have “become increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting” (178).  Moreover, Hills cautioned (back in 2002, no less), that eradicating time lags function “ever more insistently to discipline and regulate the opportunities for temporally-licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the fan experience” (179).  So, what happens when we begin to reconceptualize the afterlife for cult television series strictly as films, or in one large seasonal installment with no lag time between episodes?  The pleasures of television fandom are deeply tied to its form, and the impact of these shifts deserves further consideration.

 

My concern here isn’t just the horizons of the fan experience, but the horizons of the industrial and cultural framing of fans and fan participation. Whether we’re talking about fan-funded film extension of a cult television series, or an entire new season of a cult show dropping on Netflix, these temporal horizons are potentially less generative for fans, which in turn might make it increasingly difficult to discursively shift our understanding of them as producers of anything but capital.  If I’m being totally honest, as a Veronica Marsfan, what I really want is another season of Veronica Mars.  And as an Arrested Development fan, I will absolutely binge watch the new season (and, let’s be real, I’ll binge watch the prior three seasons as an amuse bouche the day before the launch).

 

Understandably, we all want to focus on what we’re gaining.  I’m admittedly more interested in what’s potentially being lost or overlooked, but I don’t want that emphasis to be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm about these developments.  I do think they have game-changing potential, particularly as the beginnings of a creators’ rights movement.  I just worry that fans’ legacy as creators in their own right will once again be obscured in favor of celebrating industrially sanctioned modes of fan engagement.

Mauricio Mota:

From all of our contributions so far, the ones that mostly intrigued me were the ones related to roles (fans, producers, distributors) and business models.

And both rely on a discussion that, if not well explored, can become a “chicken or the egg” equation.

Some questions to provoke that discussion:

Would Veronica Mars raise all that money on Kickstarter if it was an independent movie from a new director with an unknown actress about an unknown character?

Do we really need algorithms to figure out that BBC Format + David Fincher + Kevin Spacey + Washington politics is a success formula for House of Cards?

Is 60 thousand people as a Box Office number for a movie a sufficient number for a studio to green light to produce it?

When fans “invest” or donate for IP development and or production they are looking for some sort of creative control or ownership or just wanting the story to come to life?

We are entering – with or without the help from the Studios – an era of what we like to name as  ”Grassroots Blockbusting”: where IPs are nurtured to the ground up and more independent of the “normal” way of becoming a success. All Studios have what we name “Dormant IPs” – stories that have already a whole world built, good story arches and some sort of audience built through generations. But very few of these IPs (and even less Studios) are being developed in a way that allows them to become something profitable and successful.

Unfortunately it is still naive to come to a studio or any big show runner in town and tell them to “hand over IP”. This is not only a conversation about studios focusing on blockbusters and mainstream stories because of shareholders. They are also investing on their libraries and keeping as much control of that IP as possible. Their framework is built around owning as much % of the IPs as possible since the same framework is built around giving more power and control for the part that invests more to make a story happen. And although roles are blurring,  very few creators can say they can make their own shows without a major investment from a studio.

In Brazil, the Government is making an immense effort to grow our TV industries by creating a new law that makes every cable channel to invest massively on original content produced by Brazilian companies (like mine). It is a huge achievement but it has also been very tricky and challenging for the producers to convince studios and networks ( still the most important distribution channels) to give up on a big percentage of an IP they would air because of that new law. Simply because it forces them to not own majority of brazilian original content. So, better said than done.

However, there are independent funds – in the US, Latin America and Asia – that are starting to invest into new green IPs or buying turnaround scripts from studios/production companies to re-start them from the ground using transmedia and the digital tools to start them small and sustainable. Like I said before, lines are blurred, roles are confused and money and knowledge about what works is more democratized.

The existing cases we have been discussing are actually good starters for a possible different model where fans and creators are closer by sharing a common dream and making it happen. And by doing so more and more the Studio system will then have new competitors among the same people they see as consumers. Which is a good thing since humans and companies tend to pay more attention to things and people that threat them than to people that they take for granted. And to AJ’s points looks like creators and fans are paying more attention to what is happening around them.

 

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, fan culture, interviews, participation, television, transmedia entertainment
March 28, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About the Future of Television (Part Three)

By

Henry Jenkins:

Suzanne, I share some of your concerns about the ways that fan power is being evaluated here primarily in terms of economic capital. Interestingly, the Veronica Mars campaign was preceded by another effort — David Fincher’s effort to raise funds to produce an animated film based on Eric Powell’s cult comic book series, The Goon. This project had set a goal of raising $400,000 in order to fund a story reel as proof of concept for a proposed feature film, and instead, they raised 441,900 from 7,576 backers, which was, as of November, a record-breaker for the micro-funding company, now dramatically surpassed by the Veronica Mars juggernaut. At the time, there was considerable pushback from fans who felt that these funds should be raised by the studio through traditional means rather than tapping the fan network for investments that would be repaid through merchandise but not through either revenue or creative control.  As Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi wrote at the time:

“Should the film be made by a corporate film studio, that company just saved themselves half a million dollars on the backs of dedicated animation fans who believe they’re funding an indie project, when in reality they’re funding a mainstream Hollywood feature….while I’m sure Fincher and Blur Studios are well intentioned in their desire to make an animated feature, their approach of mixing their fans’ money with those of media corporations, the latter of whom will receive all the profit from a Goon feature, leads to an uncomfortable situation that is contrary to the entire spirit of Kickstarter. Artists should use the generosity of backers in crowdfunding campaigns to fulfill a creative vision, not to help corporations make money, as The Goon Kickstarter is currently set up to do.”

These are, to my eyes, legitimate concerns in both of these case but these projects also potentially represent a transitional point in the degree of creative control which cult producers may yield in this still emerging system. Neither The Goon or Veronica Mars were likely to be produced in the absence of a strong show of audience support; both fall into an awkward category of production that is neither fully mainstream nor fully independent. They are both genre series that gain strong support from a substantial niche that is too small to move the levers to greenlight a project under traditional industry logics. Yet, this is why the recent developments seem to me to be game-changers, both in terms of the ways they strengthen the hands of creative producers and of the ways they allow fans to exert a greater influence on production decisions.

I see this as especially true when coupled with the new systems for content production and distribution we are seeing emerging in recent months via the web. We have talked so far about Netflix funding both original programming (House of Cards) and rescuing orphaned cult series (Arrested Development).  Hulu has also announced similar plans and is already importing imaginative content from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom as exclusives for their subscribers. YouTube has recently developed a system for funding content production. And Amazon has announced that they will be presenting fans with a range of pilots later this year, both comedy and children’s series, and asking consumers to weigh in on which ones should be put into full production.

These alternative arrangements offer much to program producers, starting with the fact that with the exception of Amazon where they are introducing content to consumers at an earlier point in the negotiation process, they seem to be making upfront commitments for entire seasons of programs, allowing them to exert creative integrity over entire story arcs, rather than subjecting them to the uncertainties of the ratings, where they might well get cut off after the first few episodes, never resolving any of the enigmas they have set into play. One can be successful in these platforms with a much lower viewership than network television, creating a space for programs that can command a strong niche of intense support, as opposed to the diffused viewership that gets rewarded on the major networks. These programs can have a more unique perspective because they are never designed to appeal to everyone.  Some producers may be much better served in this context: this may no longer be right for Joss Whedon who is turning down Star Wars to keep working with Marvel, but it would certainly be true for someone like Bryan Fuller, who is already revisiting Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls in the wake of the Veronica Mars news.

The example of The Goon above is an interesting one in this context, since The Goon is a creator-owned comic book series, that has been successfully sustained since 2002. In comics, a creator’s rights movement in the 1990s helped pave the way for more sustainable models of content creation: creators now have multiple options for publishing their own work, with or without the challenges of self-distribution. We are seeing some top talents move project by project between the mainstream publishers to self-publishing models and now, through Kickstarter, crowdsourcing models. Kickstarter now ranks just below DC and Marvel as the number three source of comics funding in the United States. And even artists who work with the majors have somewhat greater creative control than before and have been able to cut better deals as a result of the option of going independent.

The space of indie comics, as opposed to underground and alternative comics, has long been smart and original genre content — pushing comics beyond the superhero genre that dominates DC and Marvel, but also having broader appeal than the more experimental space represented by alternative comics. This seems like the niche that is apt to be filled in this new world of crowd-funding and web distribution that is taking shape week by week before our eyes right now. In such a world, there might not be a need for Rob Thomas to depend upon Warner Brothers to distribute his content, or perhaps, there might be a chance for him to retain more of the IP rights going into his negotiations so that there are more options for series which gain a hardcore audience that is too small to sustain broadcast. Netflix’s decision to release all of the episodes at once, allowing for binge viewing, also seems to point towards this kind of program production — i.e., allowing for more intricately woven stories, which reward this kind of intense viewer commitment.

Such arrangements would help get us out of the paradoxes of these current cases, where producers are appealing for fan support, but ultimately have to work within a system which gives most of the rewards to the same studios who have always controlled production decisions. Clearly, what we need is a creator rights movement for television, which learns as much as it can from the creator rights movement in comics, which is still struggling to fully achieve its goals.

Of course, the costs of television production dwarf those of comics production, meaning that it is unlikely to see fan-support television be fully realized in the short term. Veronica Mars may work as an early example because it is going to be a lot less expensive to produce than some of the cult science fiction or fantasy series that have been mentioned alongside it this week. But, part of what’s interesting to me is that Veronica Mars has a fandom that I would describe as mid-level intensity: there are shows out there with much more dedicated and active fan bases. And so, if they can raise the funds, there is apt to be many other series which could, in theory, command this same level of support.

The reality is that in a capitalist-mode of production, fans are always going to be read first and foremost through an economic lens. The old model saw us primarily as a commodity — eyeballs — that could be sold to advertisers. More recently, Web 2.0 has treated us primary as a source of creative labor — for which we are never directly compensated. And now, this model treats us as investors, who may gain some greater creative control as a consequence of advancing gifted producers money they need to get their dream projects into production. For me, the key thing is that the relationship here needs to be transparent: fans need to understand what is being offered and what role they can or will play in the process. In most cases, fans are not seeking to take creative control away from the producers whose work they admire, but they do hope to prevent series from being “retooled” in order to broaden their support, often at the expense of cutting out elements that drew fans to the program in the first place.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian

Whew, this is enthralling!

It sounds like we’ve zeroed in on a couple key tensions. One pits creative control for producers and satisfaction for fans against the profit-focused motives of the conglomerates. Another pits their impulse to mainstream against the increasing popularity of indie and digital production, from television to comics.

We can’t resolve these tensions here, but I’ll give it a go! To start, some context. And the most important context is the financial health of the studios and distributors. As Mauricio said, it is hard to be a studio, and media executives have always worked in tense environments permeated with fear.

But the truth is the studios are richer now than they’ve been in a decade (after the heyday of the 1990s). Movies are still popular. People watch almost as television as they ever have, albeit across more devices and technologies. Media stocks have joined the broader market rally after lows in late 2008 and early 2009. From that low, Viacom, Comcastand Lions Gate stocks have quadrupled. News. Corp has quintupled. Time Warner and Disney’s have tripled. There are lot of reasons for this, but the underlying factor is there is much more power in distribution these days. Since there are so many niche markets, distributors with resources can grab our attention. Everyone knows when the next Star Wars is due.

Studios seek market share to keep stocks afloat, and that’s why they’ve been spending hundreds of millions marketing new film franchises. And now web networks are taking a cue, hence Netflix outspending legacy TV with House of Cards. These investments in franchises pay off. They are rich, even as they underfund niche markets (Viacom cable channels Logo and BET, for just one example, are criminally under-resourced, with some shows actually written by freelancers!).

Which brings us to our conundrum, and the tensions above: clearly fans and producers know what’s going on. They know, instinctually, studio money is being funneled to bigger and bigger “mainstream” products, as companies reach for market share amidst the tidal wave of digital production.

As Derek Johnson argues in his new book, we have to view bottom-up dynamics in the context of the growth of franchising, the studio’s (logical) way of responding to complex market dynamics. As Suzanne rightly noted, crowdsourced projects really are a message to distributors from fans and producers to studios that they’ve gone too far, channeling investments in IP higher and higher. Why, even with the lowered production costs of digital, have mid-range projects dried up? As Rob Thomas has noted, the $2-$20 million film is struggling, but there’s no reason it should be. Veronica Mars is an important reminder, if an ambivalent one, since Thomas also noted they need Warner Bros. to work out gifts.

In this environment, mainstream distributors are both essential and inadequate. Focusing on the breadth and depth of bottom-up efforts at value creation points the way to reform: producers and fans are already leading, but they can only go so far on their own. Their efforts, niche-driven, are largely unseen, because they are sporadic. Individual scholars and journalists are aware of the robust growth in indie production in gaming, comics, film, music, television (web series), radio (podcasting) and publishing (blogging to e-books). These are all markets dominated by conglomerates, in various ways, and yet we rarely talk about them in conversation (Henry’s work a significant exception).

Which is why it’s good we’re having this conversation! Can we imagine a different system than what we have now? I think we can. And it starts with independents.

Why, for instance, don’t studios have internal mechanisms for nurturing franchises from the ground up? Studying web series has shown me how we can think of TV development differently: certain niches can nurture small but passionate fan bases for budgets well under the cost of marketing Avatar or ambitious series that flop like Terra Nova or Smash. And it’s not just in low-fi comedy; special effects heavy series like Video Game High School indicate there’s a lot of value yet to be mined. The indie comics Henry mentioned are an excellent source.

All of this activity can be streamlined and aggregated. The studios could market one less blockbuster a year and incubate dozens upon dozens of projects, with enough to support union (read: trained, skilled) labor from the oversupply of art/film-school graduates. They don’t do this because they have to report quarterly to shareholders, so they think short-term. It takes years to grow such projects, but the pay-off could be huge. Projects that prove successful at a smaller scale could argue for more resources and broaden narratives with fans in conversation. “Bombing” rates could go down.

Conglomerates do support small-scale projects, but not consistently. Veronica Mars is only a higher-profile example;The Goon is another. Of the web series I’ve tracked that have been picked up for television – like super-grassroots YouTube series Fred and The Annoying Orange, which spent years cultivating millions of fans – most are successful enough to go beyond one season. Now cable networks are looking to artier showrunners like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, creators of the brilliant sketch series Broad City that Comedy Central just picked up to series (with a little help from Amy Poehler, no stranger to YouTube). I’m running a series of essays on “Indie TV Innovation” on my blog next month, with contributions from Jane Espenson (Husbands), Glazer and a dozen others, to show how there’s a lot of value being generated in these spaces at very low-cost.

The problem is these examples are scattered and dispersed. The effect of studio neglect is we get a small number of outrageous case studies like Veronica Mars that present ethical conundrums because there aren’t structures in place. Under-investment also means, even if projects can generate fans, they often do so at lesser quality, which perpetuates the myth that indie projects are artistically impoverished.

We are indeed in a capitalist mode of production that privileges conglomerates and publicly-traded companies, and the culture in Washington suggests that won’t change anytime soon, which is fine. But the takeaway from Veronica Mars et al. should be a call for distributors to: invest in the growing segment of smaller and mid-range projects, hand over intellectual property and creative control (something web series creators like Felicia Day have been fiercely advocating for years) and nurture more fan-driven projects before producers face the crowds. They have the money. It’s better for business, for workers and the culture at large.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, Comics Culture, interviews, participation, television
March 27, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation on the Future of Television (Part Two)

By

 

 

Suzanne Scott:

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation.  I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths.  Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived.  It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.”  Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.

 

My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered.  In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment.  I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).”  I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts.  Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime).  But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.

 

I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women.  I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects.  For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation.  But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform.  What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.

As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard.  The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important.  They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences.  Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists?  Hopefully.  Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers?  Absolutely. It’s the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.

Mauricio Mota:

Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)

I was born – literally – at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80′s, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx – because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.

That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.

Kickstarter didn’t invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about “exploring” fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I’m not talking about Wolverine, I’m talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people’s trust to do whatever they want (I’m talking about House of Cards).

The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives — with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.

The roles are also blurred, thanks G’d — both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I’m able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.

Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: “Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don’t need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?”. Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.

Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the “series marathon” culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)

By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also “outside” the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.

Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.

Yes, studios.

Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood’s lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I’m trying to make.

The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories – including Veronica Mars.

The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry’s recent book as a reference, the formula was “If doesn’t get picked by studio it is dead”. Now it probably would be “If doesn’t get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels” (not so charming as “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” but really fascinating).

Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.

Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.

So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don’t know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

 

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, fan culture, interviews, participation, television, transmedia entertainment
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