Remediating Comics for Cinema: An Interview with Drew Morton (Part Three)

You use Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation but have less to say about their distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy, terms they use to describe both the rhetorical choices and spectator response of different media practices. Might this terms be useful to describe what happens when fans and for that matter, nonfans encounter one of these texts which have become highly stylized as they seek to remediate their sources in comics?  

That’s a great question and something I wish I had thought more about when I was writing the book. In many ways, I think the relationship between immediacy and hypermediacy in Bolter and Grusin is perhaps the most difficult concept to grasp (at least that seems to be the case whenever I teach it). The idea that new media layers on additional remediations of old media (hypermediacy) in order to “disappear” before the viewer’s eyes (immediacy) is, as the authors say, paradoxical. The film that ended up helping me grasp the concept was Wall-E. Specifically, there’s a section in that film where he’s in a grocery store and is outrunning some runaway shopping carts. There’s a moment where the camera bobbles, zooms into the distance, goes out of focus, and then rack focuses back into view. Think about that for a moment - this is all computer animation. It is a medium based on being formally precise. Yet, we’ve seen in films like The Last Starfighter that the lack of photography’s imperfections - motion blur for instance - alienate the viewer. So in order to appear “there” for the viewer, computer generated imagery has to remediate the artifacts of the photographic apparatus.

So how does this relate to my topic? I’d hypothesize that a viewer well-versed in comic book visual vocabulary would be less aware of stylistic remediation and the experience of watching a film like Hulk or American Splendor or Dick Tracy would veer towards the immediate end of the spectrum. That viewer knows what a comic book looks like and might assume that a comic book movie can or should look similarly. The uninitiated viewer of 300 - on the other hand - might register the remediations as being self-conscious or foreign. Not necessarily in a negative way, just that they’re more aware of it because they may not have that expectation or visual primer going in. Of course, a lot of this depends on what media these folks are consuming in general and I’d hesitate to make any definitive claims about it without doing further research.

What might we learn about stylistic remediation by discussing, in parallel, the careers of Alan Moore, who has long argued that his comics should not be adapted for the screen, and Frank Miller, who has repeatedly sought to shape cinematic adaptations of his works?

Very broadly, I think the disjunction between Moore and Miller has to do with how we view the relationship between formal vocabularies of two visual media. A lot of filmmakers, executives, journalists - hell, a lot of people in general - view film and comics as being one in the same. “Well, aren’t comic books just storyboards?” Sure, both film and comics are visual media that have certain stylistic norms that - in some ways - overlap and were born from one the same family trees - the graphic arts. But cinema owes a lot to theater (staging in depth, the cinema of attractions) and comics owe a lot to literature. Moore, I think, was always troubled by the equation between the two and the role comics play in “feeding” the more culturally valued medium of cinema. Moore values the comic’s ties to literature and tends to equate cinema to Hollywood and commercialism, which he views as limiting the types of stories he can tell. Miller, on the other hand, often strives to make his comics cinematic and expects his films to reflect that intermingling. From embracing noir visual tropes to a “widescreen” aspect ratio in 300, he does not hesitate in trying to test the limits of those aesthetic points of contact.

But, and I’ll get at this later, that does not mean that the comic panel functions in the same way the filmic frame does. As Scott McCloud says, films are narratives told through time and comics are narratives told through space. One medium is based on subjectivity and caricature, while the other is based upon the photographic apparatus that Andre Bazin saw as being separated from human intervention. So I think if the philosophical difference between Miller and Moore tells us anything, it’s that the formal connective tissue between the two media is relatively superficial and there are some pretty heavy compromises one has to make in order to make a film look like a comic book or a comic book look like a film. Fittingly, as Rorschach once said, “Never compromise. Not even in the face of armageddon.” That seems to be his creator’s artistic credo as well.

You write, “To produce a comic book film without dealing with its unique formal devices is like adapting a musical and neglecting to include the music; it may work but it also fails to realize what is fully unique about the original form.” Can you elaborate on this, especially given your claim elsewhere that comic book adaptations have tended to be more successful when they abandon comic book style for a more cinematic approach?

This gets back to the question of what audience we’re talking about. I think comic book readers - myself included - appreciate the visual imagination of a film adaptation that remediates the style of the comics. Comic art can be beautiful and thrilling - Jack Kirby’s work should be in the collections of most modern art museums (look at those Fantastic Four photocollages!) - and the style of most contemporary action films, especially the house-style of the first couple phases of the Marvel films, is so generic and forgettable. So for fans and readers, I think there is something unique about seeing those remediations on screen.

Yet, as I noted earlier, readers are dwarfed in number by non-readers, so Hollywood is faced with a bit of a quagmire. How do they keep the fans on board without going over budget on comic book transitions and/or alienating a wide audience? There is no doubt that the Marvel films and the Nolan Batman films, adaptations that do not remediate comics, have been extremely successful both financially and with critics. But stylistic remediation is not necessarily an albatross to bear if the costs are kept in perspective - Sin City, 300, and Deadpool - have all shown that it isn’t a kiss of death. Hell, Ang Lee’s baroque Hulk film cost and made almost the same amount as its rather generic followup The Incredible Hulk.

You discuss throughout the ways that transmedia style is shaped by “the perpetual motion machine of synergistic properties.” So, can you be more precise about the marketability of stylistic remediation?

When we look at examples like Scott Pilgrim and The Matrix, we can see how prevalent their respective styles played in the “high concept” marketing of the films and how they took on their own meaning. In the case of The Matrix, bullet time became a cultural commodity of its own. Movies like Scary Movie and Shrek parodied it. Video game franchises like Max Payne - unaffiliated with The Matrix - attempted to co-opt it as a core game mechanic. Commercial directors cribbed from it. Players of Enter the Matrix wanted to experience bullet time for themselves.

In the case of Scott Pilgrim, Universal attempted to use Bryan Lee O’Malley’s aesthetic gumbo of video games, manga, and music to make its tie-in content seem more organic. The best example of this is how Edgar Wright utilized the 8-bit rendering of the main character that Scott Pilgrim game designer Paul Robertson produced in the film (8-bit Scott appears as the one-up icon during the climax and makes a second appearance in a post-credits tag). This design work was the basis for the tie-in game, which notably does not take its aesthetic cues from the film but the comic and the games the inspired it. Then, it came back around when Oni Press repackaged the comics as a box set - complete with a beautiful 8-bit sleeve designed by Robertson. Essentially, that style spread across the different platforms as a visual hook that solidified their branding. I make a similar case for how Warner Bros. used the unique design of Heath Ledger’s Joker - specifically his “Glasgow grin” - as featured iconography in DC Comics leading up and following the success of The Dark Knight.

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana and the co-editor of [in]Transition, the first peer-reviewed journal focused on videographic criticism.  He is also the author of the  book Panel to the Frame: Style, American Comics, and Blockbuster Film.

Remediating Comics for Cinema: An Interview with Drew Morton (Part Two)

As I read through your various examples across the book, it is clear that the concept of making a film look like a comic book means something different to different filmmakers, as comic-bookness gets conveyed through a range of different aspects of cinematic style. No one seems to try to capture every aspects of comics -- hard to know what that would even look like -- so what factors shape the choices of techniques to be foregrounded in any given adaptation?  

That’s a great question and one that I could easily answer it by going the other way. What if a comic book artist wanted to make a “filmic” comic book? Would she produce a panel breakdown akin to the quick cutting and intellectual montage of Sergei Eisenstein or try to find a way to use splash pages like Jean Renoir or Jacques Tati might? I think of Chris Ware’s tribute to Yashiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story or even the fantastic graphic novelization of Alien by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. The Ware piece pays tribute to Ozu’s knee-high framing, his use of reoccurring images, and the graphic simplicity of his images. In three images, we experience the profound loss of Tokyo Story - a husband loses his wife to the forward march of time and technological development in post-war Japan. Alien, on the other hand, uses an alternation between splash pages and complex multiframes with a fury of smaller panels to capture the varied temporal rhythms of Ridley Scott’s film - between the deliberate contemplation of the early scenes of the Nostromo to the more traditional “haunted house” sequences that come towards the end.

In short, I think the methods vary because the strengths, weaknesses, and preoccupations of the comics writers and artists vary. Most of the filmmakers seem to be asking themselves “What are the key characteristics of this comic?” Sometimes, the filmmakers in question are profoundly wrong in interpreting the source material. I think Frank Miller’s adaptation of The Spirit is a prime example. He has almost no interest in capturing Eisner’s style (the film looks more like Sin City than the graphically and tonally varied strips Eisner produced). While I think it’s naive to expect “faithfulness” from an adaptation in the way that term has come to be used (every narrative nook and cranny from the books must appear in the film), I think a general faithfulness to - in this case - the spirit of the work is what most filmmakers strive for and what most audience members expect (which brings us back to Nolan - it’s not as if his films were lambasted for not being “faithful”).

Often, remediation involves borrowing prestige from an older media form, such as the use of the leather bound book in the opening credits of film versions of literary adaptations. But in the case of comic book films, most of us would agree that the cinema has established a much higher cultural status than “graphic novels” have to date, and there’s often a hint of disdain in many of the quotes you provide here of the film’s producers when they discuss the story’s comic book origins or fan base. In this context, does stylistic remediation constitute a form of slumming it?

You’re exactly right - there is a cultural aspect to remediation as well. I think in the 1970s and 1980s, remediating style was viewed in relation to the 1960s Batman television show. The garish colors, the onomatopoeia, the canted angles all came from the comics. Will Brooker does a fantastic job in Batman Unmasked on tracing these aspects back to the 1960s comics, dispelling the scapegoating of the television program for introducing camp and baroque stylization to the “gritty” and “serious” world of Batman. But the legend became fact and the cultural legacy of that television show cast a long shadow over comic book movies. When you read about the production of Donner’s Superman, you can absolutely see that cultural prejudice against the comic book. The Salkinds and Richard Donner wanted to distance that project as far as possible from its “cartoon” origins, so they hired Oscar winners like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman to star in it and trendy screenwriters like Mario Puzo and the team behind Bonnie and Clyde to write it.

But as graphic novels helped comics come to cultural prominence in the 1980s, I think that tide began to shift. It also helped that many of the directors brought on to do these projects are fans of the original texts and relish the opportunity to strike up collaborative relationships with the writers and artists while adapting the properties - folks like Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez, and Zack Snyder.

That being said, I think there’s a certain paradox now and Snyder’s evolution - if we want to call it that - is indicative of it. Films that remediate comics rely on a certain amount of familiarity with comic books and their form. If the readership isn’t there - as I mentioned in an earlier answer - what stylistic primer does the audience have to appreciate a film like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World? So these filmmakers are torn between making a film that represents their interests in the property and their affection for the artwork while balancing it with a budget overruns for such stylistic embellishments and walking that line between a niche and a wide audience. Notice that Snyder’s last two films - Man of Steel and Batman v Superman - look nothing like 300 or Watchmen. They’re pretty strongly in the “realistic,” “gritty,” and “serious” Nolan/Marvel camp. And there’s an aesthetic loss in serving the master of manageable budgets and appeasing a large audience - which is one of the main reasons I think so many contemporary comic book adaptations are visually boring. As fun as Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers are, I cannot remember one action sequence from those films with the vividness of the finale of 300 or the race sequences in Speed Racer. Although Ant-Man and Doctor Strange were certainly a step in the right direction!

Throughout, you distinguish transmedia style from transmedia storytelling, noting that the first constitutes “intertextual references” but not necessarily “narrative embellishment.” Can you say more about this distinction here? What do you see as the advantages of transmedia style? How might it be related to the concept of High Concept, as explored by Justin Wyatt?

Transmedia storytelling requires a certain experiential buy in from the audience. As you’ve noted, in order to fully grasp the Enter the Matrix video game, you have to have seen the first film. In order to understand some of the pivots and characters in the second film, you have to have played the game and watched The Animatrix. Stylistic remediation, on the other hand, can benefit from previous knowledge but does not require it to be comprehended or appreciated. This conflicts slightly with the answer I just gave when I said that Scott Pilgrim cannot be fully appreciated without previous knowledge of the comic book, but hear me out.

300 is a perfect example - Frank Miller’s comic was a bit of a niche title that lacked the visibility of his work with DC or Marvel. Yet, it outgrossed more than Batman Begins. In fact, aside from the first Men in Black film, it’s the only non-DC or Marvel adaptation in the top thirty grossing comic book adaptations (and remember, 300 was rated R - not PG-13). If you go back and look at reactions to 300, a lot of the energy and excitement around the film had to do with its visual style. Like The Matrix, Snyder found a aesthetically unique way to remediate Miller’s style and that provided the Warner Bros. marketing team with a striking visual hook - the sepia toned watercolored skies and the “flat” ink splatter blood effect. This is where you can see some overlap with Justin Wyatt - the idea that there’s a strong linkage between visual style and marketing in films made after the 1970s. The advantages of transmedia style are that it provides ammunition for the marketing departments to help rope in new viewers while appeasing fans of the books. It doesn’t alienate consumers the same way transmedia storytelling can, which makes folks feel like they have to do homework before coming into the room.

Yet, what makes 300 and Scott Pilgrim differ is the cost of their remediations. 300 cost $65 million, Scott Pilgrim was somewhere between $85 and $90 million (both without marketing costs accounted for). Essentially, 300 was a relatively niche comic book and the film and was budgeted accordingly (at the time, $65 million was about the average for a Hollywood film and $200-250 million is the average for a superhero film). The visual hook aided it in breaking through to a popular audience. Scott Pilgrim, on the other hand, was a niche comic book that ballooned well beyond the average for such a film. It also didn’t help that Universal showed the film for free, numerous times, throughout San Diego Comic-Con. Needless to say, the disadvantages to transmedia style are that it can be a costly investment (Universal spent $1.5 million just on comic book transitions for Ang Lee’s Hulk) that take budgets for smaller properties well beyond their ceiling faster than a speeding bullet.

You use Batman 66 as an early example of stylistic remediation that has since been repudiated by many fans and critics as “camp,” a term which had a different cultural status in the 1960s than it does now. What do you make of the resurgence of interest in Batman ‘66 both through the comic series and the direct-to-video feature film recently released? One of many things that seems to be going on here is a re-engagement with the particular stylistic choices associated with the original, now being remediated back into comics.

Allow me to get a little autobiographical for just a moment. I was drawn to the Batman 66 series and film when I was a kid because of Tim Burton’s 1989 film. Yet, at the time, the series was relatively difficult for me to see. I think it ran on syndication on some local network. If memory serves, Will Brooker does a great job of tracing how DC distanced themselves from the property and suppressed it for decades because of its negative cultural stigmas. Now, they’ve recently changed direction. Needless to say, once the Burton films and the fantastic Animated Series took off, I spent a good period of my life planting my flag in the “Batman is grim and gritty! He’s serious - not campy!” trench.

Then we got “serious” Batman. We got him in the comics for at least 30 years. We’ve had him in the movies for the better part of 25 years. And you know what? I’m getting really bored with “serious” Batman. I awaited Batman v Superman with dread and the end result felt like I had been forced to drink the sourest of lemonades. I respect it to a certain extent for being so profoundly unpleasant, for linking Bruce Wayne to Trump (although that rings a whole lot differently now than it did last spring), and for focusing on the physical consequences of superhero action (the opening and the Scoot McNairy character), but it is not a film I look forward to re-visiting anytime soon. I never thought that after getting a Batman tattoo that I would be apathetic about an upcoming Batman film, but the DCU has gotten me there.

But you know what? I rewatched Batman 66 when the Blu-Ray release came out and bought the first couple issues of the comic. It’s not a flavor of Batman I want all the time, but it is a lot of fun because of its self-consciousness. The art of the comic, as you note, owns the dutch angles, onomatopoeia, cheesy puns, garish colors, and even the ben-day dot printing process that inspired the Pop Art movement that was evoked by the show. The variant cover galleries at the back of the trades are some of my favorite pieces of contemporary Batman art. They’re refreshing and I appreciate the multiplicity of Batman interpretations now. I think that’s why there has been a bit of a resurgence - something that was formerly forbidden or disavowed has made its way back into the cultural ecosystem at a time when every flavor of Batman has the same level of peatyness. Now if only we can get Warner Bros. to do a proper Blu-Ray release of Mask of the Phantasm and The Animated Series!

Remediating Comics for Cinema: An Interview with Drew Morton (Part One)

Shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, I was asked to serve on her dissertation committee at UCLA for promising graduate student named Drew Morton. Morton was putting together a committee that included that only myself but also Janet Bergstrom,  John Caldwell and Denise Mann. This committee tells you something about this range of methodologies and perspectives Morton was trying to bridge through his work. Morton's project was trying to understand the kinds of stylistic and narrative remediation taking place as more and more comic books and graphic novels were being adopted for the cinema.

Mortin's work was bold, original and rock solid, adding real insight to our understanding of the significant intertwining of the film and comics industries in recent years. He approached this topic with consideration of industry trends and developments but also with the formalist eye towards its impact on cinematic language, genre evolution, and authorship questions. He moved forward through a series of compelling case studies, exploring particular formal practices as they were deployed in specific films and comics. In the process, he developed a much larger framework for thinking about the remediation process more generally. In some cases he dealt with adaptations  such as Watchmen or Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World but  he also dealt with more implicit influences such as the way to the comic book version of The Dark Tower may been informed by the wide-screen practices of Sergio Leone. His closing discussion of motion comics represented perhaps the most thoughtful discussion I've read of this new set of digital production practices which remain highly controversial among comic book enthusiast because of the way that they overwrite core aspects of the sequential art.

Morton represents a new breed of comparative media scholars who are as comfortable describing the panel breakdown or comics page as they are discussing  camera work and editing in contemporary blockbusters.  His work is deeply grounded in contemporary film and media theory and it has also been shaped by his success at reaching out key practitioners and decision-makers within the two industries. His interests are at once historical spanning back to early cinema in contemporary dealing with films of the past few seasons. He seems equally at home on the floor of the San Diego comic con as he is at the podium at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. As such he's been able to build a solid network around his work and his emerges a major advocate for the video essay as an emerging form of scholarly discourse.

Late last year, Morton published Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era, a book which built on an extended his dissertation research. I was asked to write a blurb for the book which sums up my assessment of its contributions to the field:

“At a time when superhero blockbusters dominate the box office, we need to know much more than we do about the formal and institutional factors shaping these films. In Panel to the Screen, Drew Morton provides a nuanced account of why these films look the ways they do as producers adopt a range of strategies for the cinematic remediation and translation of comics, and in turn, he considers how comic artists absorb devices from Hollywood which make their books seem that much more screen-ready when read by studio executives. This groundbreaking book moves from one rich and compelling case study to the next and will be essential reading for anyone interested in comics, films, and the relationship between them.”

Today, I am proud to share the first installment of an interview with Drew Morton about comics and film, one that is far-reaching in its scope, touching on many of the case studies from the book but also updating the argument to describe more recent developments such as the Deadpool movie and the revitalization of Batman 66. Enjoy!

You begin the book with a basic distinction between adaptation and remediation, noting that many more superhero movies, say, are adaptations and extensions of comic book sources than seek to perform the kinds of stylistic remediation that is central to your book. Explain this distinction more.

First off Henry, thanks for asking me to do this. I really appreciate the mentorship you’ve provided me with while I was working on this project.

This is a great question - given its centrality to the book and its ambiguity. Whenever I teach remediation and adaptation in my courses, I find that it takes my students quite a while to work through the difference. If I remember correctly? It was a hard concept for me to grasp the first time I read through it. Needless to say, examples tend to help.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy is a loose adaptation that lacks remediation. If we look at the narrative borrowings of his films, we can easily find correspondences between Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One in Batman Begins. The film focuses on Bruce’s training, why he wants to protect Gotham City, and his relationship with the officer who will become Commissioner Gordon. The Dark Knight borrows from The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween while Rises takes its central conflict from Knightfall. As I said, these are loose adaptations that broadly take plot points, characters, and themes from the original books. Most comic book adaptations do this - the “faithful” adaptation seems to be incredibly rare.

Yet, Nolan’s films owe more stylistically to film noir than they do to comic books. He does not remediate - re-represent - the comic in the film. Unlike say Ang Lee’s Hulk, Nolan doesn’t fracture the frame into a bunch of panels. He does not use speed ramping like Zack Snyder does to capture the subjective temporality of reading. His film, unlike Dick Tracy or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, does not highlight the representational artifice of cartooning. Nolan borrows the iconography and some narrative pieces, but his films owe relatively little to their original medium.

As we think about the emergence of the comic book movie as a major factor in film production, one could argue that comics and film needed to be ready for each other. Comics had to gain a certain stylistic self-consciousness, thematic maturity, and cultural status and films had to acquire the technical capacity to make us believe a man could fly. Would you agree with this broad strokes analysis of the factors which led to the rise of the comic book movie?

I would agree with this to a certain extent. If we look back at how Hollywood treated comic book properties in the 1970s and 1980s, on the cusp of the cultural renaissance that came with the graphic novel, we can see a certain amount of dismissal. In today’s climate, it seems insane that DC Comics and Warner Brothers would sell off the rights to Superman for an independent film and yet, in the 1970s, it seemed perfectly reasonable for a number of reasons. First, as you mention, the special effects technology wasn’t there yet. The Christopher Reeves Superman films went horribly over budget. Secondly, Hollywood wasn’t sure if there was a large enough audience to cover the budgets of such costly films. The Comics Code of the 1950s had recast the American comic as a medium almost exclusively made for children.

The irony, of course, is that comic book sales peaked in America in the 1940s and - because of competition from television, video games, and other media - have never come close to recouping. So while comic book films are incredibly financially successful, those dollars do not necessarily migrate back to the comics. Whenever I talk about comic book movies in my classes, it astounds me to find how few of my students have actually read the comics. For most consumers, the films seem to be enough for them to call themselves DC or Marvel fans.

Your chapter on Scott Pilgrim begin life as a video essay, a form you have been deeply invested in cultivating and promoting. So, what did you learn through this process of, in effect, adapting this essay between two different delivery platforms? What could you convey through the video essay that was hard to achieve in print and vice-versa?

The Scott Pilgrim chapter was a bit of an odd beast. When I planned on including Scott Pilgrim, I was in the midst of the first draft of the book and I thought it was just strictly going to be another formal analysis case study. Then I was asked to cover the film for a entertainment outlet that summer and I was given behind the scenes access. Thanks to that, it evolved from what I initially thought was going to be a forgettable chapter to one of the centerpieces.

Thanks to the interviews I was able to conduct with the creators, the chapter was really exciting to write but it was not, as I found when I initially tried to turn it into an article, terribly exciting to read. Sure, the insights from Edgar Wright and the behind the scenes anecdotes gave the chapter some life, but formal and stylistic analysis can be really hard to write well due to the confines of prose and academic publishing in general. A picture can do a lot, but we deal in moving images and texts that are - to borrow from Raymond Bellour - “unattainable.” We cannot quote a film in an academic monograph the same way a English lit scholar can quote Shakespeare or an Art Historian can duplicate a Pollock painting. So I thought I would roll the dice and take an important section of my book and turn it into a video essay, which allowed me to provide a commentary over moving images. The end result allowed me to compare and contrast the book with the comic in a way that was much more dynamic (a little music can go a long way) and I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions of the large audience that was drawn to the piece (thanks to the social media savvy of Edgar Wright, Matt Zoller Seitz, and yourself!).

That being said, the process of adaptation was much more complicated now that I have the benefit of hindsight. The Scott Pilgrim video essay was the third or fourth video piece I had made and came after a long sabbatical from video editing, so I look back at it now and wish I had made certain adjustments. Primarily, the voice over is too dense and I talk way too fast for some of the more complicated ideas (like the adaptation vs. remediation distinction) to take root in non-academic viewers.

Yet, the process of making the video essay also taught me how to hone my voice in prose in ways I had not expected. I think a lot of young academics think that scholarship needs to read intelligently - there is a certain vocabulary and toolbox of jargon that comes with academia - and I found I was hiding fairly uncomplicated concepts behind complicated prose in order to sound Professorial. That type of voice doesn’t tend to fly when it comes to video essays; it’s too stilted and dominates the argument. The ideal video essay should let both the audio and the video deliver the argument (which is why I’ve experimented with text only videos in the past); it’s not a conference paper.

I tell colleagues and students that a good video essay owes more to a journalistic or broadcasting style. Sentences should be concise, clear, and should roll off the tongue easily (the video essay voice over is a form of performance, after all!). I also tell them that the best “first step” to take is to take the blueprint for your video (which might be an article or a conference paper), throw it away, and ask yourself how you might explain your subject to your mom or dad - someone uninitiated in the language and concepts of Media Studies. That does not mean the ideas articulated are simple or lacking in scholarly rigor - they’re accessible. Fittingly, I have always thought of your voice as being a prime example of this model. I believe, if I remember correctly, that you once practiced journalism and I think that tends to be a really productive background for academics to have because it helps us produce work that can be approached by folks outside the Ivory Tower. So the video essay ended up helping me re-write the prose version into something much more dynamic.

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana and the co-editor of [in]Transition, the first peer-reviewed journal focused on videographic criticism.  He is also the author of the  book Panel to the Frame: Style, American Comics, and Blockbuster Film.

Announcing Transforming Hollywood 8: “The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Culture,” UCLA May 5, 2017.

The following is a hold the date announcement for the next Transforming Hollywood conference. Some speakers are still being confirmed as we post this. I will add their details as they get resolved.

 Transforming Hollywood 8: “The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Culture,” UCLA May 5, 2017.

Co-directors, Denise Mann, UCLA and Henry Jenkins, USC 

Overview: Transforming Hollywood 8: “The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Culture,” reframes Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted essay about technology’s double-edged sword: mechanical reproduction fundamentally alters the original artwork’s unique auratic properties but makes it accessible to the masses. According to Ted Striphas, “…the growing prevalence of recommendation features such as those you find on Amazon.com [signals the] displacement of human judgment into algorithmic form [which] raises all sorts of questions about taste aggregation — questions with which scholars in the humanities …have only begun to grapple.” Streaming on-demand services grant consumers greater choice and democratic access to media content (letting us choose what to watch and when to watch it); however, the terms of this exchange is unfettered access to our consumer impulses via sophisticated surveillance tactics that track our online activities 24-7.

Ted Hope, the newly appointed head of Amazon Studios’ film division, lays out the implicit pact we’ve forged with the major tech platforms: “Amazon Studios’ flood of investment in the movie business is designed to revive a market for independent films….” However, at the same time, he observes wryly: “At Amazon, to quote Jeff Bezos, we make movies to sell shoes. The movies are essentially advertising for the (e-commerce) platform.” Welcome to the future of art (as advertising) in the age of algorithmic culture.

While Netflix has received the lions’ share of press and notoriety for disrupting traditional Hollywood given its $6 billion investment in original content and its global expansion to 190 territories, the “big four” tech platforms—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA)—have infinitely more capital (and data) to spare when it comes to the risky business of growing a media and entertainment industry. Each has its own core business to fall back on: Google has search and advertising; Apple has its hardware-software business; Facebook has social and advertising; and Amazon has its ecommerce business. Media, it turns out, is the ideal lure to keep users inside of their powerful digital ecosystems as long as consumers accept datavaillance as the price of admission.

As Hollywood and Silicon Valley battle for supremacy, the current crisis in media stems from an unmanageable sea of online content made available by competing subscription-based (SVOD) and advertising-supported (AVOD) streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube Red, Vimeo, Seeso, Crackle, CBS Everywhere, HBO Go, CW Seed, Verizon Go90, and so forth. The streaming music services, such as Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Tidal, have also joined the original content derby, with Apple’s repurposing of James Cordon’s Carpool Karaoke and Tidal’s exclusive streaming of Beyonce’s Lemonade being prime examples. Compounding the surplus of data-driven content churn are the millennial-facing online news formats, such as Vice, Buzzfeed, and Mic; each is disrupting legacy news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, once revered for their veteran editors who curate the news and seasoned reporters who research all sides of complex issues. The backlash that followed the recent election cycle prompted Wired to report: “There’s a very dark mood in Silicon Valley right now…. Google and Facebook also seem to be feeling a need to grapple with the role they have played. Both have undertaken highly visible initiatives to curb fake news….” While the platforms were able to scale rapidly by giving unfettered access to all forms of third-party-generated content, in their new role as original content producers, the tech founders are starting to reflect on their social responsibility to curate culture.

This year’s conference examines the legacy of Netflix and YouTube as influencers, creator-entrepreneurs, and engineers all contribute to the seemingly endless flood of scripted series and short-form, snackable content that vies for our attention. One question looms large—will flesh and blood experts or data-driven algorithms ultimately control the production, delivery, and reception of our shared cultural knowledge going forward? Welcome to the age of algorithmic culture.

THE PANELS:

9:00-9:15AM: Introduction: The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Culture.

Welcome by Transforming Hollywood by co-directors Denise Mann (UCLA) and Henry Jenkins (USC).

9:15-10:20 AM: Keynote Presentation by Ted Striphas, “Algorithmic Culture.”

10:20-10:30: Break

10:30-12:00: Panel One: Playing with Snackable Content in Virtual Marketplaces

moderated by Denise Mann, Professor, School of Theater, Film, Television, UCLA.

Description: Peak TV’s premium quality TV series may be grabbing headlines, but new, addictive forms of “snackable” content have become one of the preferred ways for brands to access millennials and Gen-Z’ers—digital natives whose facility with multitasking across mobile screens means they prefer images, short videos, and emojis over lengthy (con)textual exchanges. Charles Eckert’s essay, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” reminds us that Hollywood was always inextricably linked to consumer culture since the first cameraman pointed his camera at actors standing in front of a shop-window in the 1910s; however, it is important to recognize the massive shift underway as the new “social media logic” associated with the 21st century effaces the "mass media logic" that dominated in the 20th century.

The corporate gatekeepers of the tech economy are engineering innovative user experiences (UX) and user interface (UI) features, such as touch, liveness, and VR/AR, to keep us happily engaged on their platforms for extended periods of time. Hence, we are encouraged to click, like, share, and comment on an arsenal of new, addictive, forms of online entertainment, which include: Pokemon Go, Snapchat filters, Amazon Twitch, Facebook Live, Instagram Shop Now Buttons, and Pinterest Pins. Today’s panelists represent key stakeholders whose in-depth understanding of UX/UI design elements is facilitating new forms of algorithmic culture designed to enhance our sense of play inside 24-7 digital ecosystems.

PANELISTS:

• Rob Kramer, Founder/CEO, Purpose Labs
• Ted Striphas, Professor, Colorado University

12:00-12:15PM Break

12:15-1:45 PM Panel Two:  “Fake News and Struggles Over Circulation”

Moderated by Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism; School of Cinematic Arts, USC.

Description: Sensationalism is scarcely new in the history of American journalism, and the circulation wars of the early 20th century contributed to the rise of “yellow journalism,” as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitizer and the other media tycoons of the era fought for the eyeballs of an expanding American readership. Today’s “fake news” also has its roots in new struggles over circulation, though in this case, the circulation of news through social networking sites. The role of “fake news” in the past presidential campaign has been hotly contested, with the current administration accusing CNN and the New York Times as publishers of “fake news,” while others point to the role which Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms played in blurring the line between reliable and questionable media sources.

Fake news thrives because it is often more emotionally targeted than traditional journalism: because it is designed to shock and outrage its readers, because it often conveys what people living in filter bubbles already believe to be true about the world. Fake news is news which has been manufactured to spread like wildfire without regard to its accuracy or its consequences.

What do we know about fake news and the people who produce and consume it? What does it tell us about the place of journalism in the era of algorithmic culture and social media? What efforts are being made by the social media companies to take responsibility over their role in the spread of misinformation? What alternative models for journalism are emerging within the same environment to insure more trusted curatorship over news and information? How are the struggles over what constitutes “fake news” shaping our current political realities?

PANELISTS:

• Mark Andrejevic, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College
• Brooke Borel, a science writer and journalist; contributing editor to Popular Science.
• Hannah Cranston, guest host & producer, The Young Turks; host of FoxTV’s Top30TV; host and EP of ThinktankFeed.
• Jon Passantino, deputy news director for BuzzFeed News, Los Angeles.
• Laura Sydell, Correspondent, Arts Desk, NPR.
• Ramesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor, Department of Information Studies and Design/Media Arts.

1:45-2:45 Lunch

2:45-4:15 PM: Panel Three: "Music Streaming & The Splinternets: The New, Competing, Cultural Curators”

moderated by Gigi Johnson, Founding Director, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Description: Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and Google Play Music are the current leaders in the subscription-based and advertising supported music streaming derby—having locked down the majority of artists through massive licensing deals with the major music labels. The current crisis facing the streaming tech giants is the glut of choice available to consumers, who are drowning in an endless supply of things to watch, read, or listen to online. As a result, the streaming giants have enlisted “an elite class of veteran music nerds — fewer than 100 working full-time at either Apple, Google, or Spotify — who are responsible for assembling, naming, and updating nearly every commute, dinner party, or TGIF playlist on your phone,” according to Buzzfeed's "Inside the Playlist Factory."

Apple Music started the trend in 2014 when it acquired Beats’ along with co-heads Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Trent Reznor, as their ultimate marketing weapon to challenge Spotify’s lead. Iovine insists that the tech corporations use the human music experts to guide tech engineers, and not vice versa, stating:“fans can smell the difference between a service where much of the product is dictated by algorithms or charts and one that is guided by more knowledgeable but equally passionate versions of themselves.”

This panel focuses on the growing industry of cultural curators who organize playlists “by reading endless music blogs, tracking artists before they have been discovered, and by maintaining contact with artists’ managers, producers, and label representatives.” Needless to say, the economic driver of this on-demand streaming culture is consumer data analytics targeting advertising brands. Feeling lonely after a particularly bad break up? Try listening to Adele while stuffing your emotions with a quart of Ben & Jerry’s and a diet Pepsi.

PANELISTS:

• Rocío Guerrero Colomo, Head of Content Programming/Curation & Editorial, Latin Global, Head of Latin Culture, Shows & Editorial-Content Programming, Spotify
• Alex White, Head of Next Big Sound at Pandora

4:15-4:30 Break

4:30-6:00: Panel Four: Creating Binge-worthy “Streaming Web TV.”

moderated by Neil Landau, author of TV Outside the Box and The Showrunner’s Roadmap.

 Description: Most credit Netflix with launching the 21^st century “web TV” revolution and with it “peak TV” by introducing the phrase “binge-watching” into the lexicon and by fundamentally altering the way we watch and access television online. Everything changed, according to Thomas Schatz, when Netflix “…barged into the high-stakes original series programming derby in 2013 with House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.” Never have so many buyers prompted so many creators to step up and pitch original concepts. FX conducted a study and determined that in the years 2009 to 2015, the number of scripted series went from 200 to 400+.

In 2016, Netflix produced 600 hours of scripted TV and in 2017 it said it would spend $6 billion on both scripted and acquired series. The good news is the excitement associated with this ramp up of creative opportunity; the bad news is that in the current world of overabundant online content, consumers are swimming in series they’ll never see once, let alone watch in their entirety. As in previous eras, writers, actors, and showrunners with credits under their belt are in high demand and earning large salaries to attach their names to lesser known creators. At the same time, untried writers, actors, and comedians are staking their futures on self-financed webseries productions using personal funding from part-time jobs, crowdsourcing, and by promoting themselves on social media—all in the hopes of catching the lightning in a bottle success associated with Broad City, Insecure, and High Maintenance. Streaming TV is grabbing lots of attention (and subscribers), but the question remains: “Will the current boom cycle continue indefinitely or has ‘peak TV’ peaked?

PANELISTS:

• Jessie Kahnweiler, creator, The Skinny (Hulu)

• Zander Lehmann, creator, Casual (Hulu)
• Dawn Prestwich, co-executive producer, Z: The Beginning of Everything (Amazon)
• Nicole Yorkin, co-executive producer, Z: The Beginning of Everything (Amazon)

6-8PM Reception

You can register here for the event.

How Did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part Three)

You and your interview subjects have a lot to say about genre across the book. Is genre still important as a means of marketing specific programs and targeting specific audiences? Are new genre categories emerging in this era of experimentation and differentiation? What genres do you see as most characteristic of the current television environment?

Marketing executives like to classify and categorize shows in order to package and sell them.  It's often an easy "pass" (rejection) when a series doesn't fit into one genre.  The network execs usually say: It's too all over the place.

But now we have some phenomenal half hour dramedies that defy classification -- and that happens to excite me: Atlanta, Baskets, Better Things, Louie, Insecure, Orange Is the New Black, Casual, Derek, Master of None, Transparent, Fleabag, Better Call Saul.  Even M*A*S*H blurred the line between comedy and tragedy, but was always known as a comedy series (with accompanying laugh track).

Are they comedies or dramas?  I say: who cares.  Just watch and have your mind blown. They don't always go for the joke. They push their characters to the edge. They make us cringe and/or recoil. But I, for one, can't look away.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt broke the traditional sitcom mold, in my humble opinion; it's created a new genre unto itself.  Ditto: Baskets.  Ditto: Atlanta which features, in random measure, dark and light, funny and serious, and magical realism. It's winning accolades and praise and deserves them all.

I don't watch TV to see the same old, same old.  I want to be surprised!  I don't want to fall asleep to my TV.  I want it to wake me up.

We're also seeing more historical series (from long ago to the more recent past) and science-fiction series that defy our expectations: The Crown, The People vs. OJ, Stranger Things, Westworld.  Game of Thrones is such a game changer because it demands viewer engagement in a multi verse, and viewers of all ages are addicted to its story lines and cast of thousands.

There's an interactive component to these out of the box genre-bending or genre-transcending series; we don;t just watch them, we discuss them. They're in the zeitgeist.  They're part of the national and global conversation.  It used to be that I'd ride the subway and everyone was reading a book or newspaper; now everyone is watching TV content on their smart phones, headphones on, fragmented attention spans processing.

Multitasking has become like breathing. We can consume content faster than ever and store that data for our social interactions; maybe it's because we've freed up our memory by not needing to memorize so many facts and figures anymore; it's all stored on our iPhones and available in a matter of seconds via google.  We're distracted, addicted, restless, and need constant stimulation or else we're bored.

Familiar genres tend to increase boredom, but familiar genres with a fresh spin can engage us in new and exciting ways.  True Detective (season one) was a tried and true detective series (the most prevalent genre), but it was an existential detective series.  Bloodline (on Netflix) isn't just a family ensemble drama/soap opera; it's a new genre: family noir. Mr. Robot provides us with an unreliable narrator and revels in destabilizing its viewers; the show dares us to guess what's going to happen next.  The Leftovers (on HBO) is also it's own genre: the rapture drama, inviting us into a world that defies explanation.  The season two opener offers a teaser that's astonishing and rapturous.  Damon Lindelof knows what he's doing, even though it's not a show for everyone.

Alongside genre there is the question of format. At places, you and your subjects suggest that the procedural will die out with the generation which grew up on the broadcast networks. Why has serial television become so central to the new media economy and ecology you are documenting here? And what do we make of the return of anthology series, such as Black Mirror, or of series with short story arcs, such as American Crime Story and American Horror Story?

I covered this one above, too.  I should have read all the questions in advance, but I enjoy the spontaneity.  Sorry!  Suffice it to say, that audience engagement is stoked by the audience's relationship with the characters.  If it's a limited series, that relationship needs to grip us right out of the gate (such as with the exceptionally engaging The Night of on HBO).

Longer serialized shows translate to long term relationships, involving shifting allegiances, and often a love-hate dynamic.  Sometimes we root for Frank Underwood, sometimes we root for Claire.

The same applies to unscripted documentary series.  Making a Murderer was a limited series but I kept changing my mind as to Steven Avery's guilt.  Ditto: The Jinx.  And this also applies to scripted series like The Night Of.  Give me a complicated mystery that's smart and airtight and I'll follow you anywhere.

The Affair on Showtime destabilizes us with multiple perspectives of the same event, Rashomon style. Sure, it's a narrative trick, a device, but it works beautifully and pulls you in.  UnREAL also provokes and destabilizes.  It's pitch black comedy and satire and soap opera and reality TV all rolled into one.  Black Mirror (which I refer to in my book as "The Twilight Zone on digital crack") is just so damn disturbing because it's not wholly science-fiction; it's already happening, or will possibly happen soon.  It's both prescient and portentous.  I can't get enough.

Yes, it's problematic that we have to wait so long for new episodes of some of our favorite series.  Between seasons of ambitious, expensive shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld, and House of Cards can take more than a year.  Due to Donald Glover's busy acting schedule (hello: Star Wars), we won't be getting new episodes of Atlanta until 2018; it's a disruptive show that's being disrupted.

One of the bigger surprises in recent years has been a resurgence of radio formats and genres through podcasts. Can we see the success of Serial and its successors as a byproduct of the same sea changes in production, distribution, and consumption you discuss here primarily in terms of television?

I can certainly foresee a TV version of Serial and other podcasts.  These radio programs are now valuable IP with built in audiences, and they're also based on the irresistible allure of a great central mystery with twists and turns.  They're both interactive (whodunit?) and voyeuristic, like the best of so-called "unscripted" TV.  It takes us inside the world of the crime and behind the scenes of the painstaking investigation. BUT ALL WITH A SLOW BURN.

Broadcast network procedurals tend to offer crime and punishment in one closed-ended episode, fast resolution, easy justice.  These serialized podcasts engage us and keep us on the edge of our seats but don't offer black and white resolution.  The investigation usually just leads to more questions.  Justice is elusive.  These podcasts and true crime stories are grounded in realism, and hook us in based upon the vicarious thrill of both being there and re-experiencing the crime, or even by putting us in the position as viewers/listeners and thinking: What if this happened to me?

Critics describe these breakthrough programs as possessing distinctive voices or perspectives, a shift that we can see as closely associated with the rise of the Showrunner as a kind of television auteur. Many of the folks you interview are showrunners, so what insights might we get from reading the book about the emergence of author-based television production?

Great showrunners have all the power in the TV business -- whether they originally created the show or have been brought in to run the operation.  Their sensibilities, leadership skills, and vision have brought them hard-earned reputations that they can and will deliver a high quality TV show on time and within a prescribed budget.  A fresh, original idea is good.  Being able to execute that idea in an exciting, authentic, visionary, accessible way is invaluable.

And several of our more famous show runners choose to run several shows at the same time: Chuck Lorre, Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Greg Berlanti. I don't know what drives them, but running one show is arduous and requires incredible stamina.  Delegation is key.

But these show runners have stories to tell and characters to birth. They are their own brands.  We trust them to deliver on the promise of the premise.  I asked Norman Lear how he'd managed to run multiple shows.  How did he handle all the stress?  He wisely replied: "Yes, it was incredibly stressful.  But there's such a thing as good stress."  Those were the days....

Several of the new players you discuss in this book are moving away from the pilot process that shaped old television production. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Why?

 

I've covered the wisdom behind this above.  Ted Sarandos has condemned what he calls the idiotic, fiscally irresponsible, wasteful, inefficient pilot process.  I tend to agree with Ted (hey, you can't argue with success).  One hour drama pilots can cost upwards of $5 million -- and never air.  That's unsustainable and nutty.

But there is value in looking before you leap.  But in today's on-demand, binge-viewing TV landscape, the demand for fresh new content exceeds the supply.  If you're a TV network or platform, better to be first with a new series than a day late and a dollar short.  In other words, everything is moving much too fast to calculate catching lightning in a bottle.

There is no magic formula to a hit series, no matter how much a network retools an ostensibly "broken pilot."  Mr. Robot got on the air because the assistants at USA Network and NBCU rallied for it; at first, their bosses just didn't get it.  But the inner-office fandom was overwhelming.  Most groundbreaking shows had and have a rough road making it on the air.  But shows from All in the Family and Breaking Bad to Black Mirror and Atlanta beat the odds and entered the zeitgeist.  The rest is history.

Neil Landau ('85), teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT.

His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle.

Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release.

In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy).

From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.)

Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

How Did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part Two)

Your opening section pays attention to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, and others who have produced television style content for the web. In what ways have these networks become game-changers in terms of what we think television is? In what ways are broadcast and cable networks responding to the alternative models they represent?

Serialized content used to scare the broadcast networks because if you missed an episode or two, they were afraid you'd never come back.  But in an on-demand landscape, no one misses anything; the modern scourge is the spoiler.

I love the paradox of today's TV landscape in which people try to watch everything but it's impossible due to the number of shows. So when you start to tell someone about a great new show that they haven't seen, they usually stop you with: "I can't wait to see it. Don't tell me anything!"

Sony Crackle is advertiser supported, but they circumvent the pilot process and go straight to series (and then offering all episodes all at once for the binge viewing experience.  Hulu started as a second window platform, but soon realized they could only compete if they offered original series of their own.  Netflix and Amazon both complete for exclusivity and originality, but there's a big difference between their business models; while Netflix is a media company, Amazon in a retail company.  They're each making their own programs now and aiming to cut out the middle man studio.

But Amazon Studios exists as a magnet to their online shopping mall experience (with free shipping for Amazon Prime members).  Netflix needs to keep its subscriber base happy so they keep paying their monthly dues.  Streaming and premium cable depend on subscriptions and are considered utilities versus broadcasters, giving the subscription networks much more freedom from censorship.

The broadcast networks and basic cable networks still need to please advertisers, necessitating Standards and Practices (a form of censorship) to avoid any content that's too edgy or morally objectionable and could taint an advertiser's brand. The subscription networks are only beholden to their subscribers.  And so edgier, more provocative content on streaming and premium cable has pushed the broadcast networks to improve the quality of their shows; we now see riskier shows, niche shows, and bolder choices being made across all platforms.

Mr. Robot has helped redefine USA network.  It might not appeal to your typical zombie-loving fan base of The Walking Dead, but it's certainly darker, edgier, and smarter than most basic cable shows.  Consequently, all networks are raising the bar: This Is Us (on NBC), Animal Kingdom (on TNT), UnREAL (on Lifetime?!), American Crime (on ABC) to name a few.

And with niche content attracting viewers on streaming and premium cable, we're also seeing greater diversity and authenticity in casts, plot lines, and in writers' rooms.  

Many of the storytellers you interviewed spoke of the differences in producing series which are meant to be binged watched. What are some of the core insights to emerge about this new form of media consumption?

When you circumvent the pilot process, you're removing some of the fine tuning and audience testing checks and balances in the system. And when all or most of the episodes are written in advance of even starting production, the show runners have less opportunity to course correct.  Re-shoots are costly and time consuming.  To create a show that's intended for the full episode drop for binge viewing requires a more visionary show runner than ever before.  They have to see the whole season in advance, as opposed to finding the show throughout the season and adjusting according to audience response, chemistry among actors, and latent discoveries made.

You map a complex media ecology throughout the book. How much movement is there between the different levels of media production? For example, many of us are watching Issa Rae, who you interviewed, bring Insecure onto HBO after years of being a web television producer. Are there things we can observe there which may help us anticipate further movements of this kind in the future?

The audience is in control in the on-demand world.  But the content creators are also much more in control of their destinies if they can think like creative entrepreneurs.  Issa Rae made Awkward Black Girl at her own expense; it's funny, authentic, and she writes, directs, and stars in it.  Issa knew she had something to say and an audience who wanted to tune in. She spent her own money to make her web series, which served as proof of concept.  It wasn't a huge leap of faith for HBO to green light Issa's hilarious and superb series, Insecure; she already had a substantial fan base and three seasons of Awkward Black Girl under her belt.

Yes, it's always a risk to produce and distribute a new show, but the smart money was on Issa: her authentic voice,  grace, style, and talent.

High Maintenance followed a similar trajectory (from self-financed web series on Vimeo and i.am.other to HBO series.  In the old days, you had to start off at the bottom of the food chain as a freelancer or staff writer and work your way up the ladder.  Now, first-time creators are rapidly becoming show runners.  Look at Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) and Zander Lehmann (Casual).  Unprecedented.

Throughout, you have much to say about struggles over diversity, inclusion, and representation in the contemporary television landscape. This is clearly a core issue at the moment -- thus our recent Diversifying Entertainment conference. What did you hear from the industry insiders that might shed light on how they are thinking about this issue? In some ways, the question has to do with rapid expansion of minority-cast programming and its audience share over the past few seasons, but as you also note, some of the issue has to do with how under-represented minorities and women are both in front of and behind the camera. What factors are determining the speed with which these changes are taking place?

Before the recent Presidential election, I was getting optimistic on this subject.  Now... it's anybody's guess.

We could be entering a new era of ALT RIGHT, white-washed, unobjectionable and/or purely escapist shows.  I hope not.  I think we need a national catharsis, so I'm rooting for edgy, provocative shows that stir folks up -- both audiences and content creators (aka writer/producers).  We're not going to have a cultural revolution if everyone is sitting home watching Dancing with the Stars and Big Bang Theory.

Actually, the current political climate (it's only Trump's second week in office) could usher in a new creative Renaissance.  Only time will tell.  But I'm an optimist.  Shows like Atlanta and Mr. Robot give me hope.  It's not that I believe all shows needs to address the ills of our society (racism, greed, climate change), but I want to be challenged to think about my place in the world when I watch a great TV series.

I don't want to just be a complacent couch potato.  We don't want our country to turn into WALL-E.  We must engage, question, and resist formulaic story tropes and stereotypes.  The first question I asked Norman Lear was "Does TV reflect our lives or do our lives reflect TV?"  His response was a little bit of both, but now more than ever there are shows that reflect myriad perspectives and lives.

And TV is a global business.  Netflix is now in every country except China and North Korea.  More and more shows are being distributed in their original language with subtitles.  This also gives me hope because when we are able to get a window on people in other parts of the world, it can engender compassion and empathy.  I like to believe that storytelling can not only inspire, entertain, and delight -- but also it can change the world.

One of your section headings proclaims “niche is the new mainstream.” Is that true? How would you characterize the relationship today between niche and mainstream program? As the media market fragments, is there anything that can be characterized as mainstream programming?

I addressed this above, but Orange Is the New Black is a great example of a niche series (about women in prison) that has multiple entry points to attract a wider audience.  There's Piper, the Caucasian blond protagonist, but then there are people of color, male guards, social worker, and wardens, and many ways to connect.  Theme is also a way for showrunners and creators to broader their niche appeal.

House of Cards is not a show about politics; it's a show about power.  Transparent is not a show solely about a transgender woman, it's a show about identity.  Theme is universal and can take what might seem like a niche show and make it go mainstream.

Neil Landau ('85), teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT.

His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle.

Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release.

In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy).

From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.)

Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

How did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part One)

When was the last time anyone you know spoke of television as "a vast wasteland"? Certainly, television today is as vast as ever was, actually probably 100 times more so, but there more outstanding television series available to us each week can we possibly could watch.

Some are describing the current moment is the era of peak television or the age of too much great TV. A complex set of factors have contributed to wave after wave of creative experimentation, often involving idiosyncratic personalities, genre bending narrative strategies, and appeals to niche audiences. First premium cable and then streaming platforms challenged the dominance of broadcast and basic cable, pushing innovation outward even to the most conservative players. The challenge has become directing attention and ensuring access to all of the innovative new content. 

Neil Landau's TV Outside the Box offers an essential guide to the opportunities and risks facing  the creative industry at the current moment. Longtime industry insider as well as a professor at the UCLA Cinema School, Landau seemingly had access to anyone and everyone he wanted to talk to. The book includes cogent, concise, lively and thoughtful interviews with network executives and show runners alike. Right now, the book provides the back story we need to understand what's happening with this expansive medium and in the future, the book will be time capsule that preserves a transitional moment in television history. What I would give to have an equally vivid snapshot of television's innovators in the 1950s or 1980s.

I was lucky enough to have lunch with Landau in the fall and was immediately taken by the depth of his knowledge and passion for television as a medium. We spent the entire meal tossing off one new title after another as if playing Stump the Band. This guy knows everyone, watches everything. He understands the contours of this changing landscape like no one else I have ever met. The interview that follows will give you some simple taste of his insights into contemporary television culture.

Landau is working with UCLA's Denise man and I plan for the next Transforming Hollywood event, coming up in early May. Watch here for further details coming soon.

You seem to have been able to interview all of the key players reshaping television at the current moment. Can you provide us some sense of the scope of different players represented in the book? What can you share of the process of getting all of these folks to speak with you?

I began my research more than 3 years ago (in 2014).  I could see how the TV business was changing the way the music industry changed, first with Napster and then, of course, iTunes.  I also saw parallel "on demand" tracks in transportation (Uber) and accommodations (AirBNB) and a little voice in me said: jump on this and track where this is going to transform the TV landscape.  Honestly, I began my research with the naive idea that I was simply covering the new platinum age of great TV series.  I started out with "beginner's mind" and decided not to draw any conclusions until I went out into the field to gather data and multiple perspectives.  I knew I wanted to interview not only trailblazing showrunners (Jenji Kohan, Beau Willimon, Jill Soloway), but also network/studio executives (Ted Sarandos, Roy Price, Andy Kaplan) and a few icons (Norman Lear, Tom Fontana, Elliot Webb) to give the whole thing a historical perspective.

What I quickly came to realize was that this project was going to be much bigger than what I'd originally pitched to my publisher.  I could foresee a Digitial Television Revolution.  Being that TV Outside the Box (TVOTB) was my 4th book, along with my pedigree as co-director of the UCLA MFA Screenwriting Program and the book's sponsorship by NATPE (National Association of Television Programming Executives), these interviews were relatively easy for me to secure (despite the scheduling and resheduling of several incredibly busy people).

I'd first met one of my idols, Norman Lear, at the NATPE conference in Miami in 2014, and he immediately agreed to participate.  Beau Willimon was a friend of a friend, and we became fast friends. Beau strongly encouraged me to include the legacy perspective and introduced me to Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide Life on the Streets, Borgia); Oz was HBO's very first scripted one-hour drama series. Tom Fontana's influence over TV content cannot be overstated. He's the original trailblazer (along with Steven Bochco and Norman Lear).

The toughest interview for me to secure was Jenji Kohan whose a total workhorse and would rather write than talk about her process; but after a cold start (and fighting exhaustion), she warmed up to me.  Dan Harmon (Community, Rick & Morty) was the most entertaining interview that took place in a seedy bar in Eaglerock and involved several cocktails.  Ricky Gervais (The Office, Derek) was the most surprising because he was so gracious and kind (and hilarious).  Charlie Brooker & Annabel Jones (Black Mirror) was the most fascinating and scary for me due to their prescient stories.

TV Outside the Box traces the contours of what you describe as “the revolution.” What characterizes the dramatic shifts in the nature of television, its content, its platforms, and its audiences your book seeks to document? What were some of the first signs that a revolution in television was taking place?

The on-demand nature and scope is what's most revolutionary to me.  The audience is now in control and can dodge or completely avoid commercials.  The sheer volume of scripted TV content was and continues to exponentially rise.

When I was a kid, we had three TV networks and maybe 30-40 shows on the air, scheduled in time slots.  Now we have over 440 scripted series across too many platforms to mention here.  Are we currently in a "content bubble"?  Sure.  But I'm not sure that choice is ever a bad thing.  Is it sustainable for the studios and networks: probably not.  I see a natural form of attrition happening.

The bar keeps rising on high quality, engaging, fresh content, so the mediocre shows won't last.  In the book I refer to this phenomenon as "digital Darwinism."

Binge viewing is also a touchstone of the digital TV revolution.  Not only can we watch what we want, when we want, without commercial interruption, we can watch the whole season of series offered on Netflix and Amazon. I can foresee HBO, Showtime, and Hulu eventually following suit.

I also saw the decline of the TV industry's reliance on the overnight Nielsen rating system -- to the point where the overnight rating is virtually an irrelevant metric of a show's success.  Most younger viewers don't want TV content on televisions anymore, and they absolutely don't watch anything in its prescribed time slot -- unless it's live sporting events.  To me, the only reason linear TV still exists is for live events.

We're still in a TV ecosystem in which viewership is segmented by age and older viewers still tend to watch their favorite series in their time slot, for free, with commercials. But the younger generations are either agnostic (they find their favorite shows and don't care what network it's on) or they're only watching highlights from shows on YouTube.

A summer TV landscape dominated by reruns is also going away.  Networks and platforms always need fresh, buzz worthy, exclusive, original content -- or they're toast.

The other enormous shift in the TV landscape has been its focus from broadest and safest shows to series that might appeal to a small, but fiercely loyal and dedicated audience; a subscription, on-demand streaming network needs lots of choice, not just a series that appeals to the widest possible audience, but multiple shows that may appeal to different slices of the audience.  One of the main theses of the book is: Niche Is the New Mainstream.

You characterize appointment television as an anachronism. I’ve argued that appointment television is giving way to engagement television, which places more emphasis on the choices that audiences make about when, where, and how they chose to watch television. Engagement has been a buzz word of the industry and crops up often across your interviews. What insights can you share about the ways television producers and executives are thinking about engagement?

Audience engagement is one of the programmers biggest challenges. With so many choices, how do you break through all the noise (the glut) and actually attract an audience?  If a show is great, it will generate buzz.  But what generates the buzz is a fresh, authentic experience, something new -- and it's going to have to be provocative and controversial (aka noisy) in order to get attention from the media (critics and social media influencers).

It used to be that the major networks could program a new series in the time slot immediately following one of their biggest hits. Now the platforms need to find different ways to engage the audience via new marketing trends and via transmedia.  Some great TV series take time and patience for the audience to connect.

Breaking Bad, for example, was only a modest performer when it premiered on AMC, but it turned into a cultural phenomenon when it premiered on Netflix.  Shorter episode orders and limited/anthology series (The Night Of, Fargo, True Detective, American Horror Story) have also made it possible for big movie starts to commit to doing a TV series.

Working in TV used to be considered a form of "slumming," but that's also changed.  Once David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese jumped into TV, it leveled the playing field.  Now everyone wants to work in TV -- but the true icons mainly want to work on premium and high quality cable and streaming.  Showrunners now have a direct relationship with their show's fan base.  Like our new president, they use Twitter and Facebook.  They live tweet during the episode.  What was once the office water cooler conversation the night after a show aired has transformed into the global water cooler via social media.

Neil Landau  teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT. His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle. Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release. In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy). From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.) Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Six): Everyday Wonders

Everyday Wonders I decided to call this installment Everyday Wonders because each of the podcasts I'm discussing here take as their core subject matter the practices of everyday life. They managed to turn subject matter that we take for granted into stories that are fascinating and engaging. In part this has to do with the skills of their hosts as storytellers and investigators. These podcasts also popularize some of the core insights of cultural studies: the culture is ordinary, that humans do not involve themselves in activities that are meaningless, and that looking beneath the surface of everyday life may help us to understand hidden assumptions and values that shape who we are and how we see the world.

I'm a huge fan of the Kitchen Sisters who were early entrants into this podcast game and they have continued to explore new subject matter in imaginative ways. I would flag two series produced by the Kitchen Sisters. The first is called Hidden Kitchens and is a global exploration of the place of cooking, food, and the kitchen. Sometimes the series takes an historical approach as with an episode devoted to the impact of the internment camps on Japanese-American cooking or a study of the bake sales held to support the Montgomery bus boycott. Other times the series explores the history of familiar objects such as Tupperware, Rice-a-Roni, or the George Foreman grill. Other episodes may deal with specific groups of people and their relationship to food -- for example, the chili Queens of San Antonio.

The second Kitchen Sisters series, Fugitive Waves deals with the history of recorded sound and often brings to our attention long-lost treasures recorded on vinyl or audio tape. I first discovered the series via an episode called "Bone Music" which dealt with the underground circulation of western pop music in Cold War Soviet Union. Pirated music was recorded on on old x-rays, with the result that underground music became known as bone music. One of the first episodes in the series dealt with the ways Thomas Alva Edison promoted himself and his phonograph. Another shared some informal recordings that Tennessee Williams made goofing around one Midsummer afternoon. One of my very favorites explores the storytellers and musicians who were hired to amuse the workers at cigar factories in Havana and Miami. This series is consistently imaginative and self-aware about its own audio strategies.

I discovered the "Bone Music" episode thanks to a crossover with 99% Invisible, another long-running podcast series. 99% Invisible deals with the history of design, in particular the design of things that we take for granted in our immediate surroundings. Episodes deal with the architecture of McMansion, the history of the NBC chime, how food gets photographed for advertising, the evolution of the Monopoly game, and the conventions surrounding the design of superhero costumes. Some episodes may explore specific historical locations like the Stonewall bar, the site of some of the earliest gay-rights uprisings or the kind of fusion architecture that shapes Chinatowns in major American cities, understood here as reflecting the complex politics of racial assimilation and exoticism that has marked the history of Asian Americans.

Nate DiMeo, host of The Memory Palace, may be the best storyteller in the contemporary podcast medium. One can imagine a history of revolutions in radio storytelling that takes us from Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion to Ira Glass on This American Life to Nate DiMeo on The Memory Palace. In each case, a distinctive personality establishes a style of delivery, a rhythm, a narrative structure, and a particular voice that sets them apart from what was there before and provides a model for the next generation that will follow. The Memory Palace, as the title suggests, is fascinated with the nature of history and popular memory. Its stories are at once personal and shared. There is an overarching sense of nostalgia and yet a willingness to debunk the past at the same time. Often we are revisiting the past to discover outlaw figures who might belong in another time and place, such as the protagonist of "Mary Walker would wear what she wanted," the story of a cross-dressing woman in the 19 century. So much can be gleaned about the tenor of the Memory Palace by reading the titles of some of their best episodes. "Notes on an imaginary plaque to be added to the statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest upon hearing that the Memphis city Council has voted to move it and exhumed the remains of Gen. Forest and his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forest." "50 words written after learning that the Arctic bowhead whale can live up to 200 years." "Six scenes in the life of William J Saitus, wonderful boy." "A brief eulogy for consumer electronics projects." Don't these sound like stories you'd like to know more about?

Sleepover starts out like a reality television series brought to podcast, something like an audio version of Big Brother. Three people from radically different backgrounds, each struggling with some personal challenge, are invited to spend the night together at a sleepover in a hotel room, during which they are encouraged to provide each other with life advice and emotional support. The strength of the series lies in its casting – the characters are always three-dimensional and we are given a chance to get to know them over an episode dedicated to each. Although personal revelations occur throughout, the series never feels voyeuristic or exploitative, in part because of the host Sook-Yin Lee's remarkable ability to bridge across differences. I leave each episode with a sense of hopefulness about our ability to overcome some of the polarization in contemporary culture. I'm especially touched by the producers willingness to treat children's experiences alongside adult's, and the willingness of the adult participants to treat the young ones as their equals as they work through issues together and as children offer insights well beyond their years.

Mystery Show and Heavyweight suggest the emergence of yet another potential genre in the podcast world – mystery shows where detectives deal with everyday dilemmas. Heavyweight is interested in the emotional dynamics and the psychological consequences of digging up chapters of our lives that might've been closed years ago. The pilot episode bring together Buzz and Sheldon, two quarrelsome brothers in their 80s who haven't spoken to each other in decades; the host Jonathan Goldstein goes along for the ride, sometimes rattling their cages, sometimes throwing a lifeline but ultimately interested in seeing whether they can overcome a lifetime of differences. Another episode deals with Gregor who has loaned his old friend Moby a cd of American folk music and whose built up resentment over the years that the techno composer never returned his record. Sometimes Goldstein revisits his own past as in an episode where he reconnects with his first girlfriend. "Julia" explores the issue of childhood bullying and what both bullies and victims remember and forget through the ears.

Mystery Show is more interested in the detecting process as a young woman, Starlee Kine, tries to solve some very complex questions having to do with popular culture, such as figuring out what happened to a video store that seemingly disappeared overnight a decade before, tracking down the owner of a distinctive belt buckle found in the streets, or figuring out what's going on in a particular cryptic picture on the side of the Welcome Back Kotter lunchbox. Kine is dogged in her shoe leather work and imaginative in her use of social media to solve each challenging question. The episodes are as interested in the wrong turns and red herrings as they are with the final solution, though both are of interest because of the insights they shed on the world we live in. Kine reminds me of Veronica Mars if she was given a chance to host an NPR show. Both Heavyweight and Mystery Show are a lot of fun, not the least of all because of the vividness of the characters depicted, as compared to the suspects on a television procedural.

I've barely scratched the surface of contemporary podcasting -- having said nothing, for example, about the revival of radio drama there, a topic to which I hope to return before much longer.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Five): Minority Reports

My interest in the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture also led me to the Still Processing podcast. Each week Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, both African-American, offer their perspectives on current events and especially popular culture. The contents might range from an in-depth interview with RuPaul to a frank discussion of our culture's ongoing obsession with the black penis. But their strongest episode to date describes their first impressions of the new Smithsonian Museum and culminates with an extensive interview with one of the Museum's curators which helps us to understand the logic by which the Institute set out to build and display this remarkable collection. Having gotten to know the hosts over more mundane matters, it was all the more moving to hear them describe the impact this new Museum had on their sense of themselves and their appreciation of their own history. Given how often discussions of race in America center only on the black-white divide, I was excited to discover Code Switch, which has brought together a whole generation of young journalist of color currently working for National Public Radio. Code Switch brings a multiracial and often intersectional perspective to current events. For me, the highlight so far was an episode entitled "A letter from a Young Asian American to Her Parents about Black Lives Matter", which was surprisingly frank in exploring historic divides between African-Americans and Asian Americans. A special holiday episode had reporters of various ethnicities describe traditional foods that cause them particular discomfort. Following the Orlando shootings, Code Switch explored what the events meant to GLBT, Latino, and American Muslim residents of the city. More recently, they launched a series examining Obama's legacy. In the first episode they dug deep into the ways racialized rhetoric consistently shaped critiques of his public policies, including the ways that his critics crossed the lines traditionally protecting children from such public discourse. Yet they also talked about their own divided loyalties since many felt Obama had not gone far enough in addressing issues of civil rights and immigration reform.

In our recent book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, my co-author Sangita Shresthova provides an overview of the political lives of American Muslim youth. She tells us that these young Muslims were politicized in the wake of 9/11 whether they wanted to be or not: they are often forced to defend their cultural and religious identities. She describes a range of storytelling projects in the American Muslim community where these young activists find their voice and express their perspectives on changing times. Podcast are one of the many ways that we can begin to listen to what these young people have to say. #Good Muslim, Bad Muslim represents a particularly vivid example. Tanzila 'Taz' Ahmed is a LA-based activist and storyteller and her cohost Zahra Noorbakhsh is a San Francisco comedian actor and writer. These two young women share intimate aspects of their lives with their listeners as they describe their shared experience as Muslim women living in California. They explain the program's title:

"To the Muslim community, we are "bad" Muslims - we listen to music, we don't pray regularly, we date or get married to white men (Zahra), identify as punks and radicals (Taz), we perform and share our lives with comedy and writing. So we are bad. So so bad. To non-Muslims, we are "good" - we don't drink, we don't do drugs, we are not criminals, we are social justice activists and community leaders. We are successful, published, accomplished. But then of course, on the flipside, because we are brown Muslims living in a post 9/11 islamophobia funded world, we are also villanized by Western society, too. No matter how you look at it, we are bad Muslims. There's no winning!!!! As Muslim American women, we are walking this fine line between what it means to be good and bad. "

What they share is funny and alarming in equal measures and that's part of the point. Often they are turning the words of Islamiaphobes against themselves:they declare Fatawa against mundane aspects of the world around, showcase what they call Creeping Sharia -- examples of support from unexpected corners, or share awkward conversations with the non-Muslim world and debunk common microaggressions directed against them.

Another useful podcast for gaining some insights into the American Muslim experience is See Something, Say Something. I especially enjoyed a series of episodes dealing with what it is to be an American Muslim fan, including one devoted to the recent Star Wars films entitled "Wookies are Muslim." Other recent episodes of interest focused on memes as a means of challenging dominant representations or another centered on how Muslims decide whether or not to celebrate Christmas. All of these speak to the challenges of living as Muslims in a country that often wants to declare itself emphatically Christian – how to maintain your own identity while embracing aspects of the culture around you.

How to Be A Girl is perhaps the most intimate of the podcast identified today – – told from the perspective of a young mother with a transgender daughter. The podcast lacks the technical polish of the NPR podcasts but for that reason it often has an authenticity and sincerity that is refreshing as we engage in debates around gender and sexuality. We sometimes hear the young daughter's rambling stories told into a tape recorder alongside her mother's attempt to provide a fuller context of what it means to grow up transgender in the current public education system. A great episode has her grilling her friends with the questions she most often gets asked about how she knows her daughter's gender and what she will do if she changes her mind later. Along the way, the mother becomes more and more of a public educator and activist around transgender issues, but she never stops being a dedicated and proud mother who was there to support her daughter during her first steps into an unfamiliar territory. Thanks to Jonathan Gray for bringing this particular podcast to my attention.

Making Gay History is an extraordinary resource for any of us who want to understand the changing sexual politics of this country. Historian Eric Marcus shares recordings made decades ago with some of the leaders and founders of the GLBT movement as part of his research for the book, Making Gay History. Each episode to date has been a treasure -- a voice from the past -- which provides a immediate sense of the struggle which has had to be fought to reach the current moment and how much work still remains to be done.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Four): American Voices

In the wake of last year's divisive election, there's never been such an urgent need for Americans to be listening to each other. America is in the midst of a dynamic and dramatic demographic shift which is been building over the last several decades and extends into the horizon.  America is becoming a more diverse nation, one which will be minority – majority in a few more years. Some segments of the population have embraced these changes but others have been left out of this conversation, are less certain what the future holds for them, and were encouraged by this election cycle to react with fear and uncertainty. In this context, I feel an urgency to help build bridges between different communities. There is a classic story of Mark Twain hearing about the invention of the telegraph and being told that for the first time the people in Massachusetts would be able to speak to the people in California. His response was to ask what the people in Massachusetts had to say to the people in California. Today we might well ask what the people in Mississippi have to say to people in California. I'm very interested in the infrastructure and social capital that still holds the country together in the face of some of the sharpest ideological divides Americans have faced since the Civil War and Reconstruction. It seems a terrible burden to place all of this on the back of podcasts, but because podcasts are such an intimate medium and support such diverse perspectives, they offer a unique opportunity for us to read each other's mail. That is to say, podcasts allows us to listen into conversations that would otherwise be closed to us and as a consequence, hear perspectives we would not otherwise access. The podcasts I'm exploring today are ones that I use to bridge various cultural divides, to do my homework on race, gender and sexuality in America today, and otherwise broadened my access to minority perspectives.

Podcasts have been at the center of the movement over the last several decades to rediscover the dying art of storytelling. Alongside various forms of digital storytelling, they supported various communities interested in hearing stories of everyday life. Not since the mass observation movement in Britain during World War II has there been such a concerted effort to capture the details of how people live and make sense of the modern world. There is some tension here between podcast that emphasized the art and craft of storytelling and those which are trying for a more documentary style grittiness.

Those which emphasize highly professionalized and well-crafted stories – such as This American Life, The Moth and Snap Judgment – are often among the best-known examples of podcasting. Each has developed a distinctive voice and format but what they have in common is a fascination with the spoken word. On the other in the spectrum, I would play something like Story Corps, which sets up booths at various locations to collect more naturalistic accounts of everyday people's experiences. Story Corps is at its best when the stories are organized around larger social themes and categories, such as an extended series they did several years ago about veterans returning from recent wars or their efforts to deal with the experience of transgendered people or any number of other projects which tackle questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. We learn something about the value Story Corps places on voice and personal narrative by examining their standards mission statement: "StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. At the same time, we are creating an invaluable archive for future generations."

After the election results, many of us woke up the following morning with the strong sense that we didn't fully understand America as well as we thought we did. Red America and Blue America were talking past each other, might've been doing so for many years. One of the best resources I've used to work through some of those feelings is a podcast that originates in West Virginia called Us and Them. This podcast explores the faultlines in American cultural and political life. It's host Trey Kay models what I would describe as ethical yet critical listening. A progressive, he never the less is seeking out conservative voices with the goal not of knocking them down but of exploring why conservatives think what they do. He certainly doesn't let anyone off the hook for misinformation or faulty logic. But he remains open to alternative vantage points and tries to provide some historical context for how they emerged. I was drawn to the podcast by his extensive reporting on the debates around the Confederate flag and its continual role in southern civic life. Us and Them has also done outstanding reporting on the textbook struggles in Texas, the so-called "war on Christmas", addictions to opiates in rural America,gays living in small and rural towns, Islamaphobia and the experiences of recent refugees moving to middle America, and many other topics. I have been raving to anyone who will listen about Us and Them as a model for what other kinds of meaningful interventions might look like that bridge between different American realities. Often when people speak about the need to listen more fully to rural and working-class America – almost always read as white America – there is an anxiety that this will mean the displacement or marginalization once again of minority perspectives. This podcast continually shows shows us the importance of bringing multiple perspectives together as we try to unravel the complex history of the current culture wars. Along a similar vein, I might recommend Home of the Brave which comes from a westerner's perspective and has been doing a fantastic job covering debates around environmental preservation and especially around native American politics. Thanks to Elyse Eidman-Aadahl from the National Writing Project for calling this one to my attention.  Both have done some compelling episodes interviewing everyday Trump supporters.

For me, as a native Southerner, part of this process has involved in thinking more deeply than I have in a long time about the American South, its culture, its politics, and its history. As I do so, two podcasts have emerged as essential listening. The first Gravy comes from the Southern Foodways Alliance, a group that "documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation." In many ways, food is what South gets right: southern cooking bridges between different racial, ethnic and economic groups each of whom call call the South their home. My all-time favorite episode, "Southern Fried Baked Alaska" asks some core questions about what makes southern cooking southern and how "fine dining" has emerged as the South negotiates a more cosmopolitan identity. Gravy often examines the historic emergence of so-called "white trash" cooking, examining the history of particular dishes or ingredients, specifying the distinctions between different states and regions, or dealing with the history of institutions such as Coca-Cola. But Gravy offers us a vision of a multiracial South, exploring not only what black Southerners brought to the table from Africa or their experiences of slavery, but also factoring in the various foods brought to the South by immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

The second is the Smithsonian's Folkways Sound Sessions, one of a number of podcasts that have emerged from the Smithsonian Institute in recent years. I know of no other cultural institution which has made such a deep commitment to the podcast. There are probably a dozen or more podcast representing the different museums and collections at the Smithsonian. I've sampled a number of them and they seem consistently strong and interesting – ranging from short videos for children about the animals found at the nation's zoo to short docent talks about specific works found in the National Portrait Gallery. The Folkways Sound Sessions draw from a rich archive of folk music collected going back to the 1930s. I grew up listening to some of the Folkways recordings on vinyl records which I checked out of the Atlanta Public Library so some of the materials presented here are very old friends indeed. Each episode's focuses on a specific artist, their work, and their contributions. I take great pleasure listening to their in-depth explorations of Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Leadbelly. But I've also discovered new artist such as Ella Jenkins, Doc Watson, and Jean Ritchie who would not been on my playlists otherwise. Only rarely does the podcast extend beyond American regional traditions and tap into the extensive holdings the Smithsonian has in world music. Here, we get podcast dedicated to Oud music or the music of the Silk Road. Just as Gravy allows us a deeper appreciation of what food says about the region, here we learn about the ways that music has expressed the struggles of the working class South.

While on the subject of the Smithsonian, I wanted to do a shout out to the podcast they created around the opening of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Historically Black. As part of the process of building up that museums collection, the Smithsonian reached out to everyday people in hopes that they might share family treasures that shed light on his the social history of black America. Beyond putting these objects on display, the museum also collected the stories behind them and share some of them through this podcast series. For me one of the most moving ones centered around a bill of sale as a former slave purchased his wife and children. Another must listen episode recounts the story of NASA's human computers and provides valuable background for the current film, Hidden Figures. The others range geographically and chronologically including accounts of fiddle music in Missouri, a photographer capturing the Harlem Renaissance, and the Million Man March in Washington DC. My only regret is that the series was a special event rather than ongoing outreach. I loved every episode here but I'm sad that there were so few.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Three): Television, Fandom and Popular Culture

Television and other popular culture Maureen Ryan is quite simply the smartest person writing about television today. Her tastes are refreshingly eclectic ranging from "quality dramas" like Rectify to genre series like Killjoys without any signs of High-Low bias. She fearlessly champions the interests of television fans, which is all the more remarkable given Variety's history as a spokesman for the television industry. She brings a feminist politics to such topics as the representation of sexual violence on HBO dramas like Game of Thrones or the female gaze into Outlander. She has been especially vocal in advocating for more diversity and inclusion both in front of and behind the camera. And no one can take down an overrated series like she can, as she demonstrated in a long rant  about the final episodes of Westworld. So when I want to get an engaging reading on new and old shows in the era of peak television, I search out the latest episode of Talking TV with Ryan and Ryan. Here Maureen Ryan is joined by Ryan McGee for a lively discussion of contemporary television landscape. As it happens, I've gotten to know Maureen Ryan through our mutual involvement with the Peabody Awards Committee and I've never met McGee but listening to this smart series brings all the pleasure of spending time with several friends who share my passions for the medium.

Rob Cesternino has parlayed an appearance on Survivor: the Amazon into a minor podcast empire. Rob Has A Podcast is essential listening for all fans of reality television. Originally, the podcast covered only Survivor with interviews with each contestant after they were voted off the island, detailed speculation and critical commentary on each episode, and ongoing exchanges with current and former contestants. Here we get a sense of what takes place behind-the-scene: being a reality's contestant becomes a point of entry into a larger social community. Given that I have never missed an episode of Survivor in its many years on the air, this is the place I go to really geek out about a series that is off the radar for most of the rest of the viewing public. Rob Has a Podcast has expanded its coverage to incorporate a range of other reality programs including Big Brother, Celebrity Apprentice, Amazing Race, Hunted and The Bachelor franchise, as well as a podcast that picks up on oddball current events and popular culture.

I would love to be able to recommend to you a really top-flight podcast about comics and graphic novels. There certainly is no shortage of podcasts out there featuring middle-aged fan boys talking about the guys in capes, which reproduces the experience of hanging out at your local comic shop. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any of them whose tastes come anywhere near what's on my current pull list. My tastes in graphic storytelling are eclectic but lean toward the margins. I certainly read some Marvel and DC material every month but I like the more offbeat titles there such as Hellcat or Squirrel Girl or Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk, even Silver Surfer. More often I like comics that combine genres storytelling with a more independent flavor (think Sex Criminals or Timberjanes), Saga or Papergirls). So if any reader out there knows of a good comics podcast, I'd love a recommendation. For the moment, the best match I found has been Word Balloons, an interview program which features long – and I do mean long – interviews with top comics writers and artists. Its host John Suintres wisely allows guests to dwell on their current obsessions and offers behind-the-scenes insights into why the comic business operates the way it does. I particularly enjoyed episodes where Brian Bendis discusses his experience at the Peabody awards for Jessica Jones or Kelly Sue DeConnick discusses the feminist politics behind her amazing Bitch Planet series.

I'm still making up my mind about The Comics Canon podcasts. Here, the hosts – again two middle-aged fan boys – explore one graphic novel per week, some old and some new, to explain their impact on the evolution of the superhero genre. If you want to understand why Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, or Frank Miller matter, this is the place for you. But, With the exception of Fun Home, they don't branch very deeply into the independent comic scene.

More recently still, I've stumbled onto Comics from Grownups -- their selection of materials skews much more towards the works being published by Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and other independent comics publishers. I've grabbed a bunch of recommendations from them already and it is doing the job of helping me find interesting titles, but oddly, I am finding what they have to say about these books less interesting than which books they select to talk about, so this has not yet found its way to the top of my list yet.

Imaginary Worlds is my favorite podcast dealing with science fiction film, television, and literature. As its title suggests, the focus here is on world building which means we may explore the construction of a Nazi 1960s America in The Man in the High Castle one week, political allegory of the Death Star the next, different theories of magic in contemporary fantasy fiction the following week. Most episodes involve interviews with writers, both academic and popular, as well as fans and creative artist. I don't know of any podcast that gets as deep into the underlying logic of fictional worlds as this one does. Imaginary worlds has dedicated long series of episodes dedicated to various aspects of Star Wars and Harry Potter, but is also done one offs on everything from Octavia Butler, The Golem and the Jenni and The Wizard of Oz. It helps that the host Eric Molinsky in this case came with a history of having worked at Pixar and brings an insider's take on the creative choices shaping our favorite franchises. And lately, he's been exploring issues of race and representation in popular media, stepping aside to allow guest hosts of color to describe their relationships to, for example, Last Airbender on their own terms.

Harry Potter and the Sacred Text features Casper ter Kulle and Vanessa Zoltan, two theologians in training from Harvard, working their way through JK Rowling's books chapter by chapter and finding a surprising array of spiritual allegories. The two hosts are knowledgeable about the fantasy genre and its fandom and they take the books seriously in terms of exploring why they have been meaningful to so many people. On the one hand, they use the discussions of the books to explore debates about theology and moral philosophy, applying a range of different interpretive strategies just to see what will work. On the other hand, they are moving through the books in a more systematic fashion than any book club would with the result that we come away with much deeper understanding and appreciation of what Rowling accomplished with the series.

Making Oprah is a three-part series which traces the emergence of Oprah Winfrey's media empire. It touches on all the high points of Winfrey's career for her debut on local television to her provocative dialogue with a room full of racist whites from Forsyth County, Georgia, through the debut of her highly influential book club, the mass giveaway of automobiles, and her turn toward more spiritual content. This limited series interviews many of the people who shaped Oprah's career including an unprecedented level of access to the star herself. I've never considered myself an Oprah fan but I found myself consistently fascinated by the documentary series' insights into the rise and fall talk television.

No podcast out there provides as rich and as varied a depiction of contemporary fan culture and politics as Fansplaining does. I may be biased since one of the two hosts, Flourish Klink, is my former student and my son's professional colleague. But this is where I go to keep abreast of new forms of fan culture and emerging figures in fandom studies. I will be featuring an interview with the two host on my blog later this spring. An underlying strength has been the podcast's ongoing coverage of the politics of racial diversity within the fan communities, with guests including a fair number of fans and acafans of color. I'm also impressed by the podcast's ongoing coverage of research dealing with historical roots of today's fan culture. And Fansplaning has done valiant efforts to expand the range of phantoms under consideration, dealing with fans of sports, games, and popular music alongside fans of genre fiction. Both of the hosts grew up to fandom and maintain strong identification with various corners of the fan communities. Flourish Klink now consults with the media industry as they think through new strategies for interacting with their fans. Elizabeth Minkel is a working journalist often covers fan-related topics during her day job. The result is less polished or rehearsed than some of the more professionally produced podcasts, but it comes from the heart and more importantly from the community.

I am just discovering Black Girl Nerds but so far I've been impressed by the scope of the topics it covers and by the originality of perspective it brings the bear on even the most familiar science fiction series. I first encountered it in a search for good discussions of Afrofuturism but my favorite episode so far have been interviews with creative artist such as Marjorie Chiu, the woman behind this years critically acclaimed Monstress series, and Riz Ahmed, the American Muslim actor gaining visibility for his appearances in The Night Of and Rogue One. In both cases, the use of critical race theory brought out aspects of these artists' work that I've not seen in other conversations. Politics of diversity remains a hot button issue both within fandom and fandom studies. Most of the news has been focused on white male backlash against "politically correct" casting decisions. This focus allows the industry to go slow in embracing inclusion for fear of alienating their core market. But one doesn't have to look far to find discussions like those on this podcast where fandom is way out of front of the creative industries in its call for greater diversity of representation within popular media.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Two): Cinema

This is part two in a six part series pimping my favorite podcasts. I am happy to hear further suggestions from readers.  

Popular Culture

It will not surprise anyone who knows me well that I listen to a large number podcasts focused around popular culture, media, and entertainment. The one ring to rule them all is NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, which feels like a bunch of really smart and witty friends who get together every week to talk about their most recent discoveries and passions. My personal favorite segment is when they each share "what's making them happy" that week. This can include anything from a small budget genre film, a pop song, a young adult novel, or an offbeat televisions series. The hosts are unapologetic about the pleasure and joy pop-culture brings them -- no "guilty pleasures" here. Don't get me wrong. These guys can pontificate with the best of them but they do not need to justify or explain away their passion for popular culture. These people know their stuff. My personal favorite is Glenn Weldon, NPR's resident comics and SF, enthusiast, was published book length studies of Batman and the rise of nerd culture, Superman, and Roger Corman. If you want to hear the program and best, check out their special episode long discussion of Hamilton. For a more typical example, see their discussions of Jane the Virgin and My Crazy Ex-girlfriend, two of my favorite television series. Every so often they do what they call smallbatch episodes which are more focused, often interviews with people like Amy Schumer, Stranger Things' Duffer Brothers, The Daily Show's Trevor Noah, or UnReal's Sarah Shapiro. But this also might include their field reports from San Diego comic con, their reactions of Pokémon Go, or something else that just can't wait. Cinema

In The Next Picture Show, Keith Phillips, Tasha Robertson, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Koski, the former editorial team behind The Dissolve, provide a biweekly series focused around contemporary movies and the older films that help to inspire. I hesitate to call the older films classics since they rarely go back before the 1970s. Perhaps we can use the Turner networks phrase -- "the New Classics." The core of the program is in these juxtapositions between old and new. Some are predictable, inevitable, but still fascinating such as the Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Lalaland, Suicide Squad and The Dirty Dozen, or the old and new versions of the Ghostbusters. Some take more reflection such as Memento and Finding Dory. Once they've been disdained tackle television as a trace the similarities between the film and television versions of Westworld. These critics go deep with hour-long discussions for each film covering history, technique, genre, characters and themes. The hosts are well-informed and thoughtful without being stuffy or overly technical. They won't talk over your head but I managed to leave each episode with new insight and often an urge to dig out my DVD versions of the New Classics.

The Cinephiliacs is willing to take things in a much more ponderous direction. Its center of gravity is the realm of academic film studies. The quality of the episodes has everything to do with the quality of the guests, many of whom are old friends and colleagues of mine, such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Scott Bukatman, Leah Jacobs, and J Hoberman, though they might also include media makers who have a deep knowledge and passion for their medium. The host Peter Labuza annoys me at least a few times every episode, sometimes coming across as a precocious undergraduate too eager to impress. Once you get to interviews, he does his homework and talks us through interactivity jump key insights and their lifelong love affairs with the cinema. Each interview culminates with an in-depth discussion of a classic film. Here he's not afraid to go to older and more obscure works. This is where you can enjoy serious conversations about The Tall T, Out of The Past, Daisy Kenyon, How Green Was My Valley, and Only Angels Have Wings.

Somewhere in between is The Canon. Each week the hosts Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson propose a new title for inclusion on their list of all-time favorite films, providing some justifications for their choices, and allowing their audience to determine the outcome. Sample titles might include The General, Blazing Saddles, or Stand By Me. In short, selections are old and new but nothing that won't be familiar to the average person with a Netflix account. The discussions are engaging but on the surface as in an extended debate about whether we could make a film like Blazing Saddles in today's politically correct times or another about the relative virtues of Ringo Starr or George Harrison.

If you want to learn more about film history and in particular Hollywood's dark and sordid past, let me recommend You Must Remember This which is ever so much better, more substantive, and better informed than we have any right to expect. Keep in mind that I loath the pompous old windbags in armchairs that introduce film classics on television. They generally repeat mythologies that could be disproven by anyone with an undergraduate film studies degree and access to Google. Once my eyes start rolling three or four times per minute, I put them on mute until the movie starts. So I was skeptical when my son shared his excitement about the host Karina Longworth and her hour-long episodes about Silver Screen legends. However, I've only caught her in a few howling mistakes – mostly when she tried to describe films she hasn't seen and no one else has either -- for example the sound films of Buster Keaton or the non-horror films of Val Lewton. For the series at its best, check out the season-long 16 part account of the Hollywood blacklist which offers juicy tidbits of gossip one moment and a deep dive into Cold War American politics the next.

I have to confess to being a lifelong obsession with the Oscars. I get much deeper into the weeds about industry buzz than most. I am often the ringer who wins your parties prediction pool year after year.  Little Gold Men is my favorite Oscar prediction podcasts. It is created by the entertainment reporters at Vanity Fair. They use the Oscar prediction frame to focus attention on a broad range of contemporary releases, dealing with everything from the sexual assault charges that largely destroy the chances for Birth of a Nation to the films that won the hearts critics and audiences at the Toronto film Festival. While they focus on the top five or six categories like everyone else, they're willing to spend time on documentary, animation, or technical categories and if you want to stay competitive, this is what separates the newbies from the pros. They also can provide back story on the negotiations around eligibility such as why Moonlight is competing for best adapted screenplay, why Viola Davis is up for best supporting actress for Fences, or why Arrival was disqualified for musical score.

The Talkhouse Film Podcast is in a league of its own. Each week it brings together two filmmakers, mostly from indie circuit, to engage in a serious but freeform conversation about anything they want. The host get out of the way and let the gas guests interact with each other. So you can geek out with Joe Dante and Max Landis, do some female bonding between Amber Tamblyn and and Aisha Tyler, go goofy with Paul Rubens and Kid Cudi, ponder the nature of the universe with Laurie Anderson and Darren Aronofsky, debate media violence with Abel Ferrara and Gasper Noe, or sound world-weary with Allison Anders and Wim Wenders. Here the quality of the episode rests with the guests and as my descriptions suggest, the tone varies dramatically week by week. Thanks to Jocelyn Kelvin for introducing me to this one.

Film Comment was one of my favorite magazines when I was an undergraduate: every issue yielded intense lunchtime conversations with my cineaste friends as we debated various claims made about the state of contemporary cinema or the value of particular films. I was so happy when Virginia Wright Wexman told me that they had a podcast. This one is full of love of movies, new and old, and there's an atmosphere of passionate friends getting together to replay old debates and score new points. I am just digging into it, but it is a last minute addition to this post.

I am also now digging into the Aca-Media podcast, produced by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Here, the focus is decisively academic, including information about archives and new research initiatives, but along the way, you get to hear smart people sharing their insights about film studies, broadcast history, sound studies, cultural studies, comic studies, game studies, transmedia studies...  I particularly enjoyed a recent oral history interview with Constance Penley, an old friend and an important voice in feminist media studies.

A Few Of My Favorite Podcasts (Part One): Intro and Politics

This is the first of a Six Part Series. Like many of my friends, I became fascinated several years ago with the pleasures of longform audio storytelling as represented by the successful Serial. When that series ended, I found myself searching for other examples of podcasting as an emerging media form, a search that is only intensified as I've ended up reviewing a range of podcast and my roles as the jury member for the Peabody Awards. This fall the series of health setbacks left me with more time on my hands, I have fallen even more deeply down that particular rabbit hole. Since I want to share with my loyal readers some of my personal favorites -- some of the best examples of contemporary podcast across a range of different genres.

As I reflect on my favorites, I'm still trying to decide what makes a podcast good. People in public radio talk about the driveway moment – times when you have gotten so caught up in a particular story that you do not want to turn off the car engine and come inside. This analogy emerged because of the ways that so many of us listen to radio while driving. We tune into a particular network in search of compelling content as we move around the city and we listen until we reach our destination in most cases. We may form a relationship over time with a particular network or host but for most of us, radio is not an appointment based medium.

The podcast, on the other hand, is an engagement based media. We actively seek out specific series, often searching for them by name at the iTunes Store – which makes it imperative that the podcast offers us something fresh and distinctive, something we will not find anywhere else, something that we will want to return to on a regular basis. In some cases, we are pulled towards niche content, shows that address underserved audiences, shows of narrower but more intense interest than can be supported on broadcast radio. This focus on specialized interest reflects the relatively open market of podcasting today. There are growing number of companies such as Panoply that focus on podcasts. Podcasts are emerging from public institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution which has made a major commitment to public outreach. NPR and PRI are developing podcasts as extensions of their existing programs and as a farm league for emerging personalities. But there also a wealth of grassroots and independent producers working in the space. I'm especially interested, for example, in various fan communities as early adapters and active users of this platform to share content that thrives here but would never reach the airwaves. And we're seeing rich examples of podcast producers that serve the needs of racial ethnic and sexual minorities including for example American Muslims.

Not only must the podcast provide me distinctive content that I will actively seek out on a recurring basis but the host has to be someone with whom I want to establish a more intimate relationship. The radio host comes to the speaker in my car. I tend to listen to podcasts through my ear buds as I ride the bus, as I walk around downtown Los Angeles, as I'm laying in bed next to my sleeping wife during my frequent bouts of insomnia. For me to want to engage them in this way, the host has to adopt a different tone of voice and a different kind of address than a broadcaster might. I don't want deep booming voices -- I want something that is more casual and conversational. I will listen to a single person tell me a story via podcast in a way that I expect multiple voices and perspectives on a typical radio broadcast.

Each of the examples I am sharing here the six cell by these two criteria – distinctive content and a compelling host that I enjoy spending time with.

How do you identify good podcasts? Well, apart from personal rec list like this one, you can sample from the featured podcast from top charts at the iTunes Store. I certainly try to be aware of the shows generating the most buzz at iTunes but many of my favorites are lower ranking shows that I would never find by that means. A fair number of the shows referenced here were brought to my attention by The Big Listen, an NPR podcast which showcases other podcasts. Each week its host Lauren Ober showcases 5-10 different programs, each organized by shared interests. Sometimes she interviews the host of top-rated programs and ask them to recommend other interesting shows in their space. She also offers her own reviews of programs she finds engaging. Her tastes are eclectic but also refined. I've ended up sampling two or three programs from most of her episodes and I found many of my favorite off the beaten path examples in this way. So The Big Listen is an ideal starting point if you want to explore the variety the contemporary podcasting offers.

Politics

Through the fall, a good portion of my podcast listening was bound up with the election. I sought regular updates from NPR's Politics podcast, which during the closing weeks of the campaign was posting new episodes every night, offering contexts for today's top stories but also going beyond the headlines. A strength of the series is its responsiveness to listener questions, which often encourages the reporters to provide a fuller explanation of how the political system operates than what we found on the evening news. A common complaint is that American journalism offers few points of entry for first-time voters. I can't say that this podcast fully addresses that problem but it goes a long way towards offering a more transparent version of the US political system while also digging deeply enough to provide new insight for us more hard-core politicos. The podcast output has slowed down twice a week through the transition and the early days of the Trump regime. But they offer more intense updates when breaking stories demand them.

Some of the best podcast this past year provide in-depth interviews with key political figures, not only the candidates but also their campaign managers and advisors and score journalists and commentators. My favorite was Politico's Off Message. Veteran reporter Glenn Thrush (who recently left the series) digs deep through interviews with key players from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I stress this ideological diversity because so many podcasts like blogs or online news sites start with partisan bias. But here, my favorites are often conservative figures such as Donald Trump's current Atty. Gen. nominee Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor Roger Stone, House Speaker Paul Ryan, right-wing talk show host Hugh Hewett, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. His interviews help me to understand who these people are and what motivates the positions they advocate, even where we fundamentally disagree. Thrush's questioning is rigorous but also cordial and open-minded. The picture that emerges could not be more different from the shouting matches many of these figures engage with on cable news networks. Thrush also explores emerging figures on the left – from current Democratic National Committee chair candidate Keith Ellison to the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, from rapper Chuck D to New York Sen. Kristin Gillibrand. He also takes us behind-the-scenes to get to know other journalists such as Nate Silver better.

There are other great interview podcast in the political space – for example check out The Axe Files with Obama adviser David Axelrod. Axelrod has great conversations with cultural figures such as Hamilton's Lin – Manuel Miranda or Van Jones. But Axe tends to focus on left of center guest and thus I find fewer surprises here then on Off Message. The number of conservative and Republican guests has picked up a bit since the election season.

Another interview series I would recommend would be Candidate Confessional which features in-depth briefings with former presidential and Senate candidates about what went wrong for them on the campaign trail. Among my favorites here are exchanges with Martin O'Malley, Howard Dean, Anthony Weiner and Michele Bachmann, each of whom are much more frank on this podcast that I've seen them in other venues.

For those of you who are interested in the history of American politics I have two recommendations – Presidential and Whistle Stop. Across the past year Presidential's Lillian Cunningham from the Washington Post has produced a profile of each of the countries presidents down through Donald Trump. For each episode, she interviews key archivist especially the Library of Congress and draws insights from the deep bench of political reporters and history buffs at the Post. Cunningham is at her best when digging into some of the characters than most often are overlooked in our history classes. So check out her account of the disputed election that brought Rutherford B Hayes to the White House, of the complex and secretive emotional life of James Buchanan -- our only bachelor president, of the tragedy that surrounded the administration of Franklin Pierce and so forth. She often ask historians what it would've been like to go on a blind date with these guys which can seem awkward and inane but often yields rich insights into their personalities.

Slate's Whistlestop shares an in-depth account of a key moment from the history of presidential campaigns. Host John Dickerson often selected his stories to draw parallels to the contemporary campaign. So for example he uses Ross Perot, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace to explain the rise of Donald Trump. He prepares us for the debates by discussing Gerald Ford's biggest gaffe in debate history. He dipped into 19th century campaign history with for example accounts of the disintegration of the Whig party or of the charges that Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. But he's at his best when he can fold in a few soundbites as he does effectively in his account of Mario Cuomo's status as the front runner who refused to jump into the race, of John F. Kennedy's attempts to address concerns about his Catholicism during the West Virginia primary, or the prolonged struggle at the Republican national convention between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Dickinson is such a compelling storyteller that you listen with baited breath to accounts of events you already know well. He offers insights into cultural context also -- for example, how Betty Ford emerges a feminist First Lady. As the campaign concluded, the pace has slowed but he's beginning to share stories of presidential administrations, again using history to provide background for current events.

Next Time: Cinema

Superheroes and the Civic Imagination

 

In early December, I delivered -- via Skype -- some opening remarks for the Superhero Identities Symposium at Melbourne's Australian Center for the Moving Image. Angela Ndlianis, one of the event organizers, has let me know that an audio podcast version of my remarks and those of some of the other sessions are now available online. You can access my remarks here.

My remarks built upon Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Liana Gamber-Thompson, “Super-Powers to the People!: How Young Activists are Tapping the Civic Imagination,” in Eric Gordon and Paul Mihalias (eds.) Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 295-320.

Here's the abstract for the talk:

“What Else Can You Do With Them?”: Superheroes and the Civic Imagination

By Henry Jenkins

“If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them?” -- Kurt Busiek, AstroCity

In his 2015 book, On the Origin of the Superheroes, Chris Cavalier traces one origin story of the superhero back to the figure of popular rebels, such as Robin Hood and Guy Fawkes, suggesting the ongoing struggles to contain these larger-than-life protagonists operating outside the system into the constraints of corporate ideologies and political institutions.  From the start, the superhero had a politics and from time to time -- when Superman was “Champion of the Oppressed” rather than the defender of “Truth, Justice, and the American way,” when Green Lantern and Green Arrow set out to discover a troubled 1960s America, when Captain America questions the military-industrial complex, and when Wonder Woman inspires the birth of Second Wave Feminism -- that politics threatens to get out of hand. It is one thing to kick Hitler’s butt and another to stand up for GLBT rights, challenge Islamiphobia, or support African self-determination.

My interest here, though, is not first and foremost in the way politics is depicted in superhero comics, but rather the ways superheroes are stepping off the page and the screen and becoming resources for the Civic Imagination. Around the world, activists are struggling for immigrant rights, battling rape culture, questioning the police state, asking for homes for Syrian refuges,  or condemning wealth inequality while deploying iconography and mythology borrowed from the American superhero tradition.  Before we can change the world, we need to be able to imagine what a better world might look like, we need to believe that change is possible, we need to see ourselves as agents of change, and we need to develop empathy for the plight of others whose experiences are different from our own. The Civic Imagination refers to the often shared mental constructs and rhetorical devices through which we inspire these potentials for social and political change.

Recent research on participatory politics in the United States suggests that more and more the Civic Imagination is being fueled by popular culture, especially among youth, and we have begun to see such patterns elsewhere around the world.  There is a blurring of the lines between fans and activists as characters from popular culture are being reimagined, redrawn, and re-performed to speak for non-dominant peoples who often want contemporary heroic narratives they can pass along to their own children and help them imagine a different role for themselves as political and civic agents.

And this process has gone global as the success of the Marvel franchises has introduced the superhero genre to countries, especially in the global south, which have had limited exposure to it before. As countries seek to create mythologies that place them on the map of an increasingly transnational culture, as they seek narratives of personal and collective empowerment, they are seeking to insert their concerns into the framework the superhero genre provides us.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of this phenomenon, situating it within the larger contexts of participatory politics and the Civic Imagination. I will consider what about the superhero has made this popular culture trope such a flexible and generative tool for sparking the Civic Imagination. And I will close with some reflections on the strengths and limits of conceptualizing struggles for social justice within the terms the superhero genre offers.

You can go here for information about the conference and links to other presentations, including featured interviews with Hope Larsen, Paul Dini, Nicola Scott, and Tom Taylor,  among others.

Angela also shared with me some great videos produced for the event interviewing Australian fans and artists from local comics conventions. Enjoy!

Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Melanie Bourdaa and Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Part Three)

An important contribution of this book is expanding the range of exemplars of transmedia practice to consider the role that transtexts play in relation to the contemporary sitcom and professional wrestling, among others. What are sitcom producers doing differently from those working with speculative fictions and how might expanding what we look at further sharpen our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about transmedia?  

Derhy Kurtz: Thank you. Sam Ford’s chapter on wrestling and the chapter on sitcoms do offer perspectives which are... under-represented, we could say, in academic literature on transmedia; as does yours, on a totally different level, with regards to geographically and conceptually different types of transmedia. This was precisely the point of this book: not only to develop the analysis of key and often-discussed topics through new case studies, as Matt Hills and Paul Booth skilfully have, but also to bring new elements and perspectives to the table.

And some sitcom producers using transmedia strategies, indeed, do things differently, on a number of levels. In our chapter, Simone Knox and I explain that in this TV III era, TV channels, and US networks in particular, are struggling for audience share, and sitcoms are thus turning to smaller but more engaged audiences; with the producers encouraging invested viewership by using transtexts. This is where we came up with two new notions (albeit not specific/limited to comedy). Transtexts give their audiences the opportunity to willingly (continue to) suspend their disbelief, play along and ‘believe’ that the transtexts are ‘real’ (for example, that books and or tweets were in fact written by the characters); this is what we have called Accepted Imaginative Realism. It is, therefore, an imaginative game between the producers, who invest in creative labour to provide a more compelling and life-like storyworld, and the audience, who becomes further engaged and chooses to ‘believe’ in the transtexts (in a manner reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s ‘we-know-they-know’ double-codedness of the postmodern). But of course, one can also express the situation from the production perspective, rather than the reception one, through the concept of the Reality Envelope, where the producers have a specific agenda: attempting to push this (reality) envelope so as to penetrate beyond the TV set’s screen and thus bring this sense of reality to the audience. We chose that expression because, in addition to the ‘pushing the envelope’ idiom, an envelope is a spatial object, alike transtexts ‘hovering’ around their storyworlds, and also because envelopes are fragile, a notion which we must be kept in mind in relation to these concepts of ‘realism’. But I wish we had more time / space, because there are many more elements to talk about, which are used within transtexts by sitcoms producers, such as issues relating to texture, performance and the actors’ input. To sum up, individually and collectively, such concepts can enrich debates on transtexts, and in our conclusion, we invite others to engage with them and test them out through other case studies, whether from or beyond the sitcom genre.

While most accounts acknowledge that many transmedia texts function as both storytelling and branding, the emphasis has largely been on identifying their contributions to the story. Yet there are several places in the book where this emphasis is reversed. What might readers learn about branding by looking more closely at transmedia franchises?

Derhy Kurtz: Yes, I think this is another important element as well, and it is interesting to finish on that note. Besides studying what transtexts and branding can bring to a story, one could and should also look at what transmedia stories can bring to branding, and marketing, and communication. As it happens, the answer is: a lot! I have long been interested in that aspect, in fact, and aside from guest-editing a special issue entitled ‘Branding TV: Transmedia to the Rescue’ a few years ago, I actually teach transmedia as a communication and a branding strategy to communication postgraduate students (it was only natural, therefore, that this emphasis would be reversed at times in the book, as you note).

Regarding transtexts and branding, and the text-brand, Hélène Laurichesse, by applying concepts such as the galaxy system and the brand universe to transtexts, and by clarifying the place of fans in this brand-centred analysis, brings a rare insight into how the two can work with one another. But aside from branding, transmedia franchises (for which a whole new legal framework must be considered, as explained by Jennifer Henderson, due to the presence of extensions under many forms) can be used as an example to create an engaging marketing or communication strategy around a product, which will be more immersive and more compelling than a traditional advertising campaign could ever be; as was done, for instance, by Chipotle and its scarecrow campaign a few years back. But it can also be used in order to create a new storyworld, the transtexts of which would be the ones to be sold to the public, like LEGO (through the help of various right-leasing devices, in order to use a number of comic books or other fictional characters), which have created a universe where people are... ‘legos’, and directed the audience to the transtexts themselves: videogames, films, etc., which are sold to the consumers, rather than to the original product itself: the toys (as opposed to using transtexts as a decoy to hide the advertising purpose, while bringing people back to the original product; in the case of Chipotle: sandwiches).

Transtexts are, therefore, not ‘simply’ a persistent – and rising – narrative form for a variety of cultural products anymore; they are also part of the future of communication, marketing, branding and advertising.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Do Fans Generate Transtexts: An Interview with Melanie Bourdaa and Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Part Two)

  There has been an international conversation amongst fans, producers, and academics about the nature of transmedia entertainment over more than a decade now. What do we know now that we did not know a decade ago? Why is now the right time to publish a new book on this topic?

Bourdaa: We are in a more mature time to analyze transmedia productions and strategies. A decade ago, production teams were experimenting, trying to find the good balance between expanding stories, the use of the right platform to tell their stories and engaging the audience. When projects blossomed a decade ago, there was this sense that transmedia was all about marketing and digital production. I am thinking of the interactive platform NBC launched, called NBC 360, to enhance the stories of their TV shows. Now producers realize that transmedia content could be deployed on different media platforms and non-digital ones, such as comic books, novels, billboards, radio podcasts for example. Moroever, Jeff Gomez introduced the term Transmedia Producer in the Producer Guild of America, creating a job with rules to develop extended universes.

This book is published at a perfect time for scholars to look back and take a step back on transmedia projects. They have the background to know what worked, what didn’t work, they had time to delve into the strategies, play with them, engage in the stories, go from one platform to the other to unravel new contents. They played the role of the fans, and that gives them the legitimacy to analyze the strategies from within, giving new insights on practices both from a production point-of-view and an audience one.

Early definitions of transmedia placed a strong emphasis on the “coordinated” and “systematic” unfolding of content across media platforms and thus on the central role of the author, not necessarily an individual but a creative team or design network, in insuring consistency and continuity across the story world. Reading fan works as transtexts, alongside the commercially produced paratexts and intertexts, requires us to adopt a different model of transmedia authorship. What do you see as the implications of this shift towards a more participatory account of how transmedia takes shape around a fictional property?

Bourdaa: When you coined your definition Henry, it was around a Hollywood IP, The Matrix Trilogy, and the case study has some specificities, besides an obvious marketing one: the use of multiple platforms to tell chunk of an overall story, bridges between those platforms to form a coherent whole and the creation of a coordinated narrative universe. The goals were to extend the stories and to engage and immerse hard-core fans in the storyworld, hunting for clues and moving from one platform to the next. This is what Brian Clark called the West Coast model, based on a franchise property, where ancillary contents are created around a mothership. Your definition was a bit restrictive in terms of effectiveness and feasibility for production teams and you developed 7 principles to soften it.

With the integration of fans’ works, of paratexts and intertexts, we are in a more flexible definition of transmedia strategies. The term Transtexts as we explained earlier and in the book considers both production strategies and fans’ tactics in the creation of a common, bigger, more shifting narrative universe. Of course, this requires from the production to include spaces to welcome fans’ creativity and opportunities to participate and collaborate in the narration. Transmedia strategies are very effective around entertainment strategies with a solid fanbase, as fans will create and produce their own content and own meaning, and they will engage in the collaborative spaces required by the production design. I am thinking of ARG (alternate Reality Games), which are participatory storytelling, asking for a huge collaboration between players to advance in the storyworld and discover clues and Easter eggs, on media platforms and in the real world.

One of the basic principles of Transmedia Storytelling or Transtexts is the creation of a narrative universe, a process called world-building. The stronger the world-building, with reliable characters and imaginative places, the more audiences and fans will play with it, will create around it, will discuss it. This is the key to a successful transmedia strategy.

Derhy Kurtz: Of course, industrial transtexts (or transmedia storytelling) need to be coordinated by someone, or an intellectual entity in relation to the copyright owner; this is why, for instance, the Marvel strategy is a coordinated one, with the various transtexts forming one storyworld, while one could not have a transmedia strategy with elements from BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary, even though both programmes revolve around the character of Sherlock Holmes; indeed, most of Conan Doyle’s stories being part of the public domain now, there is no way to coordinate or oversee one version, one universe of Sherlock Holmes (a strategy could be made around the Elementary version, specifically, however, as one could exist around the Sherlock one).

When it comes to fan-made extensions, such transtexts can – and, from the fans’ perspective, are meant to – be seen as paratexts, surrounding the main text(s), the source text(s) as I call it/them, and completing them in the way desired. Similarly, other fan-made transtexts can take the role of intertexts, shaping the meaning of industrial transtexts, often (with so many fanfictions, fanvids, etc.) to give a slightly different interpretation than originally intended by the producers (for example, imagining a romance between two characters, or saving a character implied (or shown) dead, etc.).

In that sense, the model of media authorship that we can adopt should be a collaborative model, where industry and fans collaborate together, although not one along the other, and thus create a number of transtexts around one central piece, the canonicity of some being often up for discussion (or not, as most fantexts are often considered as non-canonical by fans, which gives the latter no less pleasure in producing and ‘consuming’ them). As a result, this model is quite complicated and paradoxical, as the relationship is not reciprocal in the majority of cases: while fans make transtexts around the institutional ones, the industry typically does not make transtexts revolving or acknowledging fan-made ones (although some exceptions exist). While this overall, mutually-constructed universe (by industry practitioners and engaged audiences alike) should be considered and acknowledged, and while fan-produced extensions developed across different media must be recognised as transtexts as such, this non-reciprocity in terms of interaction between the two types of transtexts incites one to make that very distinction: consider them as two types of transtexts, revolving around, and within, one common (initially industry-built) universe.

Part of what had initially interested me about transmedia storytelling was that we were seeing the kinds of textual expansion, backstory elaboration, and development of secondary characters that I had long associated with fan fiction but being incorporated officially into the franchise and thus becoming part of the canon. Although I appreciate the intellectual rationale for doing so, I also worry that our ability to make meaningful distinctions about the status of different textual extensions may get lost in your more expansive concept. What do you see as the continued value of canon and fanon in this transtexts paradigm?

Bourdaa: This book offers a new perspective in Transmedia, as it was so often analyzed from a production point of view, i.e. studying the canon and authentic texts produced by the industrial and executive team at work.

Canon productions and fanon ones have to be both distinct and yet, if we think in terms of transtexts, they have also to be linked together in a shared storyworld. When I quoted Geoffrey Long earlier on negative spaces, I think we have here the core aspect of transtexts: those space left by the production teams are inevitable going to be filled by the creativity of fans. A dialogue, a co-creative process have to be envisioned by both parties. The extended universes have to be built by both the production teams and the fans.

Of course, that can create monsters and controversies like for example Star Wars, the paragon of extended universe. The Star Wars stories are augmented by hundreds of novels and comic books, video games and TV series (animated or not). And fans complete this huge narrative universe with their own productions, sometimes creating alternate universes within the canon. When Disney bought the franchise, before launching Star Wars 7, they created a clean slate for the canon, keeping only a few ancillary content such as The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels for example. But the fans’ texts are still out there, still part of the storyworld. To control fans’ productivity and play with the canon, J.K. Rowling created the interactive website Pottermore, which contains original content from the Harry Potter universe, thus extending the stories. But the author, wishing to regain control on the fanon productions and especially on the proliferation of slash fictions, created a creative space where fans could write their own stories but would have to follow some rules if they wanted to be published on the website.

Examples here from Hunger Games and Doctor Who suggest ways that fans and other audiences actively accept and reject bids for authenticity and canonicity rather than taking all commercially produced texts at face value and we’ve seen with Star Wars that the producers, themselves, may actively retract the canonical status of particular transtexts if they block potential future developments in the franchise. On what basis do fans arbitrate and resolve these conflicting bids on what constitutes the canon? Why does it matter if we have an agreed-upon sense of what constitutes the canon?

Derhy Kurtz: To go back to the origin of the term, canon, of course, initially refers to what is considered as ‘officially part of the “story”’ by a legitimate figure of authority, with the Rabbis deciding on which texts to include in (and reject from) the Old Testament (Tanakh), twenty four books / texts in total, and later on the Church, making slight adjustments to the list of texts from the Old Testament and making a new selection for the New one (with, interestingly, a number of variations: the Samaritan canon only retaining the Pentateuch and the various Christian denominations having certain dissensions on the final version of the canonical Bible). From this, we see that decision on what is considered canonical or not comes from the authoritative figure, rather than from the ‘audience’.

As developed in the chapter that I wrote about canonicity and transtexts, institutional figures still have a major role in whether a text is recognised as canonical or not when it comes to, as you say, the commercially produced texts. In many cases, once they weigh in, fans would not typically challenge the ‘official version’ (I’m still talking about transtexts from the same ‘universe’ here; not, say, adaptations). When things are left unsaid, however, without the show-runner, the channel, the writer or whichever authoritative person, everything is left to discussion, and fans can engage in heated debate over the status of a given transtext. In such cases, issues of credibility and consistency with the rest of the canonical texts arise, and, when such elements are debatable, long debates are sure to ensue.

As for why it matters to have an agreed upon sense of what constitutes the canon, I guess this comes back to the historical original sense of the term and purpose thereof: for the community to have a collective understanding of the ‘story’ in question so as to bring consistency and togetherness to its members with regards to a shared culture and ‘myth’, to know what did ‘happen’ and what did not; what is, what was, and what could be.

Bourdaa: When it comes to fans’ creations and works, there is often, if not always, a tension between what is considered by the authoritative production as canon and what is considered by fans as fanon. Fans play with the universe in the sense that when they produce their videos, write their fanfictions, draw their artworks, they poach what they think is interesting and re-work it into something new. They produce a new meaning, new contexts, new relationships.

In the Hunger Games case study, fans went against the authoritative canon of the movies because they thought it was not faithful enough to the books. The marketing campaign and the movies were glamorizing the stories and characters, thus weakening the purpose the books. So, they “took back the narrative” and organized themselves to build a transmedia activism, on multiple media platforms and social networks, and make something positive out of a negative narrative. This form of “resistance” from engaged audiences and this activism can be cultural, social or even political. A more recent example: the science-fiction show The 100 (broadcast on the CW) killed off Lexa, a lesbian character in episode 3x07 and a fans’ favourite, by a stray bullet, continuing the Bury Your Gay trope, that is infamous among LGBTQ fans. This trope shows how gay characters can be killed off to make a straight character’s arc move forward (see Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries for example). In this case, LGBTQ fans felt betrayed and enraged but they chose to re-direct their energy towards a good cause: raising money for the Trevor Project and bringing awareness on lesbian and more largely on LGBTQ representation on TV and media. Moreover, fans created their own alternate universe with fanfictions and tumblrs in which Lexa is still alive and still in her relationship with Clarke, her lover. These fanon productions and creations do not match with the canon since Lexa is dead but give fans an opportunity to make Lexa live again and build their own imaginative storyworld, emphasising on a positive representation that is lacking now in the canon.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Imagine Us, 2040

Recently, my research group, Civic Paths, released a special project, "Imagine Us, 2040," which we developed using the Medium Platform. We've been spending more and more time as a group theorizing what we describe as the "civic imagination" and running world-building workshops with various groups as a means to inspire more progressive visions of political change. This process has seemed especially urgent to us in the aftermath of the November election and at the start of the Trump administration, given how many people have lost hope in the direction our country is going. We decided to apply this process to our own community and "Imagine Us, 2040" is what emerged. In an introduction below, Gabriel Peters Lazaro describes the process which generated the project. You can visit the issue here. There you will find short essays on, for example, the future of technology and labor, alternative models of journalism, native rights, social justice, and my own reflections on what an ideal health care system might look like, to cite just a few examples.

The goal is to describe the kind of world we want to live in -- an act of advocacy rather than simply critique. We'd love to see others experiment with this mode of analysis and critical writing.

If you'd like to know more about our workshops, check out this documentation of what we did last summer at the Salzberg Academy for Global and Media Change. I am just back from running a similar workshop with the good folks at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Introduction to Imagine Us, 2040 written with Gabriel Peters Lazaro

“Imagine it’s 2040 and everything turned out OK; in fact, things have have turned out fantastically. What does the world around us look like?” This was the opening question of the worldbuilding and civic imagination workshop that we, the members of the Civic Paths research group based at the University of Southern California, asked ourselves on November 28th, 2016, only three weeks after the presidential election. After brainstorming our collective answers to that question we each wrote a personal projection or story envisioning that future world and we share those stories here.

Imagining the United States as we would like it to be in 2040 may seem like an unusual way to respond to what may well be one of the most divisive moments in America’s history. It might seem that it is a reaction that rests on escapism and distraction from vital issues. But for us at Civic Paths it seemed like the best way to respond to a difficult moment. It felt like exactly what we needed to do to begin to collect our thoughts, mobilize as a community, and figure out how to guide our own responses to issues of politics and justice as they continue to evolve and arise. Giving ourselves a little space to take a deep breath and reflect on what we really care about and channel just a little bit of energy into visualizing a future world that we really want to live in seemed like a good way to face that moment and all the moments ahead. Now, having seen what the transition and inauguration have brought, we feel all the more affirmed in the necessity of this approach and invite you to read the stories we came up with about the world in 2040 and maybe even share your own.

Our decision to run this internal workshop was not simply an intuitive reaction to the election but in fact an application of insights gleaned from our previous research. Founded in 2009 by Henry Jenkins, Civic Paths uses public conversations, workshops, research, and the popular arts to bridge between participatory culture and civic engagement. Civic Paths’s previous efforts resulted in the NYU Press book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and the byanymedia.org online resource for educators. For that project, the team interviewed several hundred young artists and activists to identify tactics and strategies by which networks of youth are able to expand civic participation via the practices and infrastructure of participatory culture. As Civic Paths learned, these networks also place an emphasis on personal and collective storytelling to effectively harness what we call the civic imagination.

We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Beyond that, the civic imagination also requires the capacity to see one’s self as a civic agent capable of making change, as part of a larger collective which has shared interests, as an equal participant within a democratic culture, and as empathetic to the plight of others different than one’s self. Working with community partners, Civic Paths developed several workshops around the civic imagination with the hope that they would help communities tap into and expand their inspirational and organizational potentials. The workshop we ran internally with our group in November is a variation on our “Think Critically, Act Creatively” workshop, which is a future-focused experience highlighting the power of stories as tools for fostering civic imagination and inspiring real world change.

Although our interests and perspectives are generally transnational in scope, we felt that the current moment called for a focus on the United States. Our brainstorm on November 28th was divided into two parts. The first part was a free-wheeling, anything goes brainstorm where we defined some key characteristics of the world we envision for 2040. The second part invited Civic Paths members to contribute their own autobiographical or fictional response to the world. It gave each of us an opportunity to really delve into that positive future vision that we had generated collectively, but in very personal terms.

The outcome is a collection of short stories and reflections that we share with you in this publication. We feel they capture our thoughts and visions at this particular moment, a moment that we feel will one day be historically significant. We also feel that by taking this time both collectively and individually to articulate some of our values and hopes for the future, we will be better equipped to make tough choices and take action in the world today. Each story includes links to other writings or organizations that are working in the areas addressed in each of the pieces and include topics such as healthcare, immigration, education, social justice and financial security. We also want to extend an invitation to others who may want to respond with their own aspirational vision for the world of 2040 and have included the full prompt here. Anyone can author their own piece and submit it to us for inclusion in this publication.

Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Benjamin Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa (Part One)

Over the last few installments, I've been sharing an interview with Matthew Freeman, the author of a new book which takes us into the history/prehistory of Transmedia entertainment. Today I will introduce a second interview also focused on current research which revises our understanding of the concept of Transmedia entertainment – Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, editors of The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities, which was published late last year. This is a rich collection which includes new essays by some of my favorite thinkers about all things transmedia, including Louisa Ellen Stein, Geoffrey Long, Matt Hills,Aaron Delwiche,  Paul Booth, Sam Ford, and yours truly. My contribution explores what it means to locate transmedia production within particular media ecologies and economies, asking for example whether transmedia looks different in a public service based media economy as opposed to a commercial economy. The book's primary contribution and provocation is to broaden the category of transmedia storytelling to include works produced by the audience and in particular by fans. For me, this is been a somewhat vexing question. Early on, what drew me to transmedia entertainment was the degree to which producers were replicating forms of extensions that I previously only seen in fan fiction and other fan works. Fans had long demonstrated a fascination with back story for example or with fleshing out secondary characters or exploring uncharted corners of a fictional world. Heck, in Textual Poachers, I noted that fans were pushing for a more serialized form of storytelling at a time when network television was still highly episodic. So initially, what seemed important about transmedia storytellingg was that these fan reading practices are being recognized and replicated within the official Canon. So in that sense, transmedia and fan works operate in parallel with the difference that one is authorized and the other is not.

That said, if we think of transmedia stories less in terms of continuity and more in terms of multiplicity, then it is hard to argue for a sharp distinction between fan works and other kinds of transmedia extensions. More and more, transmedia entertainment has become a sprawling inter-textual system which includes text that are not easily located within a master plan for the unfolding franchise. When readers encounter the franchise online, their experience of say Star Trek includes both authorized and unauthorized works.

Building on our observation, The Rise of Transtexts ask us to consider this new category – transtext – which can be used to discuss the relationship between the two. Many of the contributors here are making a strong case for factoring audience produced text into our consideration of the transmedia system as a whole. I'm going to be very curious to see how people respond to this argument. My hunch is that the new concept is more likely to be embraced by academics and active fans rather than industry insiders and creative practitioners.

Regardless of how you fall down on that particular question, The Rise of Transtexts represents an important next contribution to the growing literature around transmedia entertainment. One could not reduce its contributions to the question of fan works, since it has much to say about the history of transmedia practices, the genre categories in which transmedia production operates, the industrial context that yields transmedia entertainment, and much much more.

This interview with the books editors opens up a wide range of such topics and offers some preview of the challenges and opportunities the books title describes. I will be running it over the next three installments of my blog.

Let’s start with some core concepts from the book’s title. What do you mean by Transtexts? What does this concept include that might normally be excluded from our understanding of transmedia storytelling?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: Ok, let’s go. First, thank you for inviting us to do this interview, it is a pleasure to be featured here. The questions were challenging (as they should) and enjoyable to answer, and so very relevant in this day and age when talking about transmedia and transtexts.

The term Transtexts first appeared in 2012, for a study proposal I had made (with the same title / subtitle of the book, and of which this book would be a spin-off, if you pardon me the TV-pun), as I felt it a necessary step to build on, or rethink the existing concept of Transmedia by reinserting the agency of power of engaged audiences within the concept (which, incidentally, is very much the purpose of this collection. The term ‘transtexts’, in fact, could be seen as an ‘acronym’ / abbreviation for ‘transmedia storytelling and fan-produced texts’. Because, of course, two types of transmedia texts can be identified (and were thus addressed in the book).

Firstly, industrial transmedia texts, produced by supposedly authoritative authors or entities (we go back to canon and what is seen as ‘authority’ in this interview and in the book), and directed at active audiences, in order (hopefully) to foster engagement. Secondly, there are fan-made transmedia texts, which are made by the very engaged audiences which are targeted by transmedia strategies. Fans are, therefore, making and spreading original texts across various media (and social media platforms) which, in turn, expand the content and presence of this narrative universe. As such, as explained by several of the book’s contributors (especially Louisa Stein), such fan-made texts could / should be considered as transmedia narratives, on the same level as industrial transtexts.

This new concept was introduced to provide a category where they can both fit, and giving equal attention to the audience’s texts. Since the concept of transmedia storytelling, as generally understood, mostly positions itself on the side of institutional transmedia practices and thus leaves little place for fan-produced transmedia narratives, using the same expression while widening its scope would not be enough (due to this inherent industrial connotation). It thus seemed that a term encompassing both notions at once could be of use.

Finally, Hélène Laurichesse argued in this collection that it was this twofold nature of transtexts (industrial and fan-produced), rather than transmedia storytelling alone, that constituted the foundation of a text-brand’ identity, while Aaron Delwiche provided a fourfold typology of transtexts. Nothing is ‘lost’, therefore, by this new terminology, which simultaneously allows the study of wider-ranging phenomena than were usually studied, and encourages the search for more precision through in-depth analyses or case studies.

There’s a productive tension running through the book. On the one hand, you discuss transmedia or transtexts as something that urgently must be addressed because it is exerting such a strong influence on the contemporary entertainment industry. On the other hand, many of your authors seek to situate today’s transmedia in relation to a much broader history of telling stories across media. Given this tension, how much weight should we place on the idea of “the rise of transtexts” as opposed to the persistence of transtexts? What factors contribute to the increased visibility of such practices at the current moment?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: I think this point is a key one. As explained in the introduction, the term rise does not refers to a supposedly new start of the phenomenon, as transtexts must be understood through a complex framework involving a history and development of this form and use, a recent one, and a much older one (as demonstrated by Denzell Richards, for instance), since we can find examples throughout history dating back even to Biblical times and state propaganda in Ancient History; this rise of transtexts refers to its incredible expansion over the past few years.

As stated in the introduction, and further in Melanie’s chapter, it is the combination of these three revolutions, I believe, which has fostered, and continued to encourage, this increased visibility – but also development in use (which is undeniably becoming increasingly widespread) – of transtexts.

M. Bourdaa: Of course, the art of extending narrative universes existed before what we are witnessing today with such pieces as Star Wars and even before that with the Disney Universe, the Wizard of Oz or the Marvel and DC stories, with ancillary contents spread across radio shows, novels, cartoons, comic books and comic strips. A history and archaeology of Transmedia strategies is needed to understand why and how they have been evolving, as Matthew Freeman proposes in his more recent book or as Denzell Richards publishes here in this collection.

I agree with Benjamin on the evolutions of the media landscape. As I have stated in my article on The Hunger Games in this book, I think that three mutations paved the way for a more systematic use of Transmedia strategies in the entertainment industry, bringing awareness on a rise of Transmedia and transtexts.

First, we have witnessed the implementation of technologies in production strategies, mixing traditional media with new ones, leading to what Jennifer Gillian calls “must-click TV”, and to stories spread across multiple media platforms.

Then, narrations have evolved into a complex system and more seriality, developing cliffhangers and negative spaces, where fans could fill the gaps with their own productions and creations.

Finally, fans and audiences are more and more engaged in narrative universes, leaning on a convergence and participatory culture. They work together, share, discuss, create, organize in their communities and often productions rely on these fans’ works to promote their shows, as it is the case with Game of Thrones, Orange in the New Black or Hannibal when they ask fans to create artworks that would later be used to advertise seasons of the show.

So of course, transmedia and transtexts are not new strategies in the entertainment industries, but there are definitively factors and mutations that are leading to a more visibility and acceptance of these practices and tactics.

 In his Foreword, Toby Miller raises some ethical considerations about transtexts: “In moving rapidly between platforms, genres, and sites in order to tell stories, how good and how well-informed are those stories and those involved in telling and reading them?” Up until now, the focus has been on identifying models and practices associated with transmedia. Transmedia has been read as something like a talking dog -- who cares what it says. But at some point, we need to be asking the kinds of evaluative questions Miller is pointing us toward. What criteria might we use to evaluate whether a given transtext is good or more importantly whether the shift towards transtexts is good for the society?

M. Bourdaa: The question of evaluating transmedia strategies, especially around audiovisual contents such as TV series or blockbusters, has been a problem since the beginning because it implies economical and marketing issues. How many people follow the strategy? What are the rates of engagement?

The only way to measure that is to look at the number of likes on a Facebook page or the number of people following a Twitter account and that is not very reliable, because people can like a page and never come back on it or have no interaction with the content.

Transtexts are focused on creating storyworlds both by the production teams, thus deploying stories that are canon, and by the fans themselves, expanding the universe in a fannish approach. One criterion to evaluate transmedia projects could be the degree of engagement by fans, and by that I mean what fans do with the media text, how do they re-work it, what meaning do they produce with it. Fans are the target audience of transmedia projects, because they are the expert audience and because they will share the canon content within their communities and via social networks. But they will also create new content, using fan fictions, viding, fan arts, discussion boards, games.

Louisa Stein gives a good example, when she analyzes the way Jane Austen’s fans re-worked the stories in a more contemporary setting and produced the webseries The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, focused on the iconic character of Pride and Prejudice. Fans can also resist the marketing aspect of the transmedia strategies and organize themselves to produce transmedia activism, as it was the case with fans of Hunger Games.

Geoffrey Long in this collection offers a framework to analyze such successes by evaluating the negative spaces left in the storyworlds, spaces that will later be filled by fans’ productions. He sums it up here: “the key lesson is that successful vast transmedia storyworlds find a balance between saying what they say in a unique fashion, such as in the unique franchise characteristics at both the storyworld and character levels, and in strategically not saying everything there is to say, both inviting audiences in to imagine who they themselves would be in these storyworlds and filling in the negative spaces in the storyworld with their own imaginations”.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Three)

Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power introduced the concept of “transmedia” in relation to characters and not stories, characters that travel between texts without necessarily carrying large amount of backstory with them. Her examples were Mario Brothers, Ninja Turtles, and Muppet Babies. Is the same true for the earlier examples you discuss? Does a more character-centered notion of transmedia allow for a looser set of relations between texts and less dependence on audiences “catching them all,” seeing every installment in order to make sense of the connections between them? Might this suggest that what was distinctive about more contemporary forms of transmedia is precisely the tighter integration of story enabled by new networked forms of production, distribution, and reception?  

I don’t think so. I would argue that there has been a tendency in some of the earlier work on transmedia storytelling to perhaps over-emphasise the ‘complexity’ of contemporary transmedia, suggesting – directly or indirectly – that the new era of digital convergence is somehow more effective at producing tight integrations of networked plots across platforms.

For me, such an assumption is to greatly undermine and to underestimate the storytelling prowess of the past. It’s true that characters are an important part of a story that transcends multiple media – if nothing else, they help to ‘link’ different texts together in the eyes of audiences. But that’s not to assume that the tight integration of interconnected storytelling across platforms wasn’t going on in the past, albeit in ways informed by largely different strategies and practices.

Here’s a nice example to show just how integrated and ‘complex’ the transmedia storytelling was in the past. Even in the face of industry experts that warned authors of the 1930s not to produce media stories across multiple platforms on account of the perceived risks that one version might compete against another versions, Edgar Rice Burroughs was especially detailed in his weaving of plot details across multiple media for his Tarzan adventures.

In one case, the words ‘red star’ were used to link a pulp magazine with a later novel, pointing readers across both texts. The novel then gave readers some added insight into how and why the pulp story’s plot occurred as it did. So the novel incorporated a new kidnap sequence, which explained how a particular map was attained by characters in the pulp story, whose own narrative began after the map had been stolen. New characters were added into the novel – one that was revealed to have kidnapped Magra, a character rescued by Tarzan in the pulp story. This story then continued over into the newspaper comic strip and the radio serial, which, crucially, were published and broadcast almost concurrently to one another. Thus in the first edition of the comic strip, readers were told that Tarzan had travelled to hold a meeting on the outskirts of Bobolo, a town on the Congo River hundreds of miles inland. But readers were not told where Tarzan had actually travelled from – until, that is, the broadcast date of the radio serial, when exactly four weeks later listeners were informed that Tarzan had in fact travelled from the village of Loango, a town which lies one hundred miles downstream the Congo River from Bobolo, thus interconnecting the tales of comic strip Tarzan and the radio Tarzan simultaneously.

All of which is my way of highlighting just how complex and ‘involved’ transmedia storytelling could be in the past. In this case, after all, Burroughs had crafted a quest narrative comprising of a large number of supporting characters, each in rival expeditions with hidden agendas, and with the audience’s careful following of small details of plot across pulps, novels, comics and radio all being crucial to the story.

You argue that of all the media, cinema proved most resistant to transmedia practices. Why? How might today’s “mothership” model of transmedia reflect the desire of contemporary transmedia producers to work around or work with the resistances of the film industry to a transmedia model?

Ah yes, the ‘trouble with the cinema’. Whereas some media forms – namely, comics – greatly afforded transmedia storytelling in the past, the cinema almost consistently militated against the telling of stories across multiple media. The problem with the cinema was not inherent to the medium itself and its mode of telling stories, but was instead related either to its cultural distinction from other media around the turn of the twentieth century or to the mode of vertical integration that had come to typify Hollywood by the 1930s.

With regards to my first comment, what’s important is that directing certain audiences to the cinema in the 1900s and 1910s was often difficult, since the audience composition that built up novels and Broadway was so different to that which made up the cinema’s audience: Whereas novels and Broadway belonged to the rising middle class, the cinema was still mostly associated with its lower class nickelodeon origins. And this lower-class perception was reflected in the price of buying a novel or attending a Broadway play compared to the cost of seeing a film: A nickelodeon entry admission was around five cents, whereas a novel cost around $1.50 and the average admission price to see a Broadway show was $1 to $2.

And in later decades, secondly, the system of vertical integration that came to characterise the major Hollywood studios meant that these studios occupied a producer-distributor-exhibitor model and had therefore grown accustomed to working internally. Without a regulatory influence forcing different media industries to work together, it was much more difficult for creative personnel to author storyworlds that crossed in and out of the cinema. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, but it’s certainly interesting to see that Burroughs’ Tarzan films were arguably the least transmedial of all of his Tarzan ventures in the sense that many of these films failed to connect with the plots occurring in other media, while DC Comics later resorted to producing many of their Superman films with relatively minor-status companies so that they could manage screenplays whose plots weaved closely into the plots of their comics.

Your conclusion makes some provocative suggestions about planned obsolescence in today’s transmedia as compared to the long-standing franchises from the early 20th century. Oz, Tarzan and Superman are still present in our culture in a way that The Matrix is not. How might you account for this shift in the life span of intellectual properties?

Interestingly, there’s a case to be made that the transmedia storytelling of the past century centered on a more individualistic notion of authorship compared to the more corporate ideas of authorship now associated with the franchised transmedia worlds of the contemporary era – and for me this difference is key to answering this question.

Today’s convergent media culture has certainly allowed transmedia storytelling to gain urgency as producers now make use of a host of internal corporate connections so to craft stories across media. But there’s a sense that the corporate scale of today’s industrial convergences breeds a form of ‘departmental’ authorship as transmedia storyworlds now pass through the hands of so many creative personnel, working across many sub-divisions and subsidiaries (and often farmed out to many different transmedia consultancy companies such as Starlight Runner Entertainment). As such, many of today’s transmedia franchises tend to be short-lived projects that come with a high turnover rate. We are perhaps more accustomed to the idea of the ‘reboot’ in today’s Hollywood cinema and popular culture than we’ve ever been before.

By way of comparison, my own exemplars of historical transmedia storytelling (Oz, Tarzan and Superman, all of which are still part of today’s culture of course) continued to be built for a substantially longer period of time – for twenty years in some cases. These historical cases, and unlike the conglomerate-produced cases of today, were typically produced by one author, or at least by a smaller number of creative personnel working together across media. For example, it’s quite remarkable to note that, with the exception of one instance, the basic story told in each and every Land of Oz text produced across novels, comics, theatre and films between 1900 and 1918 came from the imagination and the pen of L. Frank Baum. Though the same cannot be said of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the many Tarzan stories that emerged between 1918 and 1938, there is the sense that the most effective transmedia storytelling strategies to emerge during that period came when Burroughs carefully managed his various licensing contracts himself. And this was also true of DC Comics and their Superman stories between 1938 and 1958. Here, only a very small handful of creative personnel worked on Superman across multiple media forms.

Importantly, across my three cases of Oz, Tarzan and indeed Superman, almost all of the authors and creative personnel that brought these storyworlds to life often relied on the continued transmedial growth of their storyworld to make a living, with the need to find new revenue streams driving the desire to expand the story. What’s more, the fact that these authors depended so heavily on their respective storyworlds growing partly explains why many of the strategies used to tell stories across media in the past were so varied – revolving around everything from colour-coding to spectacle, from comic-strip characters to printed maps, from posters and reviews to licensing and franchising, from merchandising and sponsorship to propaganda.

The main reason for this more ad-hoc formation of transmedia storytelling in the past – in turn spanning such a diverse range of industrial and technological strategies – is quite simply because many of the strategies that underpinned how stories were told across media in the past were themselves emergent in nature, with the likes of Baum, Burroughs and DC Comics reacting to new developments as and when they arose.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds was published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Two)

To continue with questions you pose yourself, “what does it actually mean to understand the industrial contingencies and practices of historical transmedia practices”? To break this down further, what does it mean to focus on shifting industrial conditions as opposed to say the technological affordances of media, the constitution of audiences and the conditions of reception, or the thematic and narrative conventions of the period, each of which might also help to explain transmedia practices?  

For me, only by understanding longer histories of production and consumption can we begin to make sense of the contingencies and the affordances of our contemporary transmedia landscape. In that sense, the model of transmedia storytelling today is not the only one; past builders of fictional storyworlds employed many different strategies that showcase just how many possibilities there really are for telling tales across multiple media. In other words, understanding the workings of transmedia storytelling in the past means exploring the shifting industrial conditions and the technological affordances of media and the constitution of audiences and reception and the thematic and narrative conventions of the period. All of these factors had important and often overlapping influences on the ways by which a story expanded across media.

Allow me to point to an example to explain what I mean. Elaborating on the ideas of advertising I mentioned previously, we can trace the links between advertising at the dawn of the twentieth century and the strategies of transmedia storytelling that it afforded via the case study of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz.

Here, we can detect the importance of colour, spectacle, comic-strip characters and also posters and reviews as key promotional mechanisms for building storyworlds across media at that time. While colour and spectacle allowed audiences to see that some stories in one medium belonged, as it were, to stories in another medium, comic-strip characters and posters worked to point audiences directly to other media where new pieces of that story were told, meaning that the adventures of Oz and its characters existed not solely within the actual texts (novels, stage plays, films, etc.), but also folded across multiple sites of media paratext (printed maps, posters, reviews, competitions, faux newspapers, etc.).

All of these outputs were based on industrial conditions and technological affordances. But on the other hand, the concept of the media-migrating audience was very different to its status today, and much of this cross-platform activity stemmed from the rather middle-class culture of consumerism and shopping that came to define the early twentieth century. Audiences were by now absorbed in the so-called ‘society of the spectacle’, with images that pointed them to other images and across to other sites of (media) consumption a characteristic of the period. In other words, gauging the manoeuvrability of audiences across multiple platforms at that time means understanding the wider historical culture, just as exploring the associated patterns of narrativity of each of that period’s media forms can shed new light into why particular media of the era tended to specialise in particular parts of a given transmedia tale.

If we broaden transmedia to incorporate earlier media and industrial practices, how does this shift our definition of the concept? Some fear that transmedia has already become so elastic that it describes anything and everything. Does this historical expansion of the concept make the problem worse or does it help us to identify something particular that links these various practices together?

This is a very important question. I, for one, agree with some of the criticisms of that say that transmedia, as a term, is becoming too elastic. Since I argue throughout the book that both the industry strategies and wider cultural contingencies informing transmedia storytelling have varied substantially over time, I believe that it is even more important to theorise a different conceptual model for examining transmedia storytelling as part of the industrial-cultural configurations of the past, rather than simply trying to apply its present model to the industrial-cultural configurations of the past.

However, as you imply in your question, this archaeological approach does raise one notable problem: If transmedia storytelling is indeed closely linked to twenty-first century media culture and its industrial or technological configurations, then how can one go about classifying earlier forms of media culture and divergent industrial configurations as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully really means understanding transmedia storytelling according to a few general characteristics that can be seen in both the media of the past and of the present, with only the industrial configurations informing those characteristics varying one from period to another.

So, in so far as it must ultimately work to expand established fictional storyworlds and extend the arcs of characters and plots across multiple media platforms, I would argue that transmedia storytelling can be understood in terms of the following three general characteristics: (1) Character-building; (2) World-building; and (3) Authorship. Most basically, if character-building is a smaller aspect of world-building, then authorship is crucial for achieving both of the former.

Thinking along these lines allowed me to explore historical cases of transmedia storytelling by focusing on how each of these three general characteristics were determined by particular industrial workings in the past. And I show that the strategies for holding the past’s transmedia storyworlds together and indeed for pointing audiences across those multiple media were informed largely by different determinants and configurations from case to another, from one era to another.

For instance, looking through the lens of world-building, we can understand the Land of Oz in the early 1900s as a playground of fantasy where systems of advertising across novels, magazines, newspapers, reviews, etc. afforded a host of characters to roam free and for different adventures to be told transmedially. Later on in the 1920s and 30s, analysing the empire surrounding Tarzan in terms of authorship lends itself to correlating the affordances of corporate practices such as merchandising and sponsorship to the interlinking of Tarzan’s stories across the likes of pulp magazines, radio serials, movies and toys. And, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, analysing the iconic red cape of Superman in terms of character-building across comics, radio, cinema, etc. really led to a very clear understanding of how practices of propaganda, war cinema and B-movie production throughout the 1940s and 1950s ultimately gave way to forms of transmedia storytelling as a response to the Second World War.

In other words, each of these cases serve as a demonstration of how very different industrial configurations in the past led to the same transmedial results. In revealing how differently structured media industries still had very strong impulses towards what is now called transmedia storytelling, I like to think that my work serves as an important example of how contemporary developments can actually re-focus the ways in which we think about the past, and indeed the ways in which bygone historical perspectives can in turn reframe current scholarly debates of, in this case, transmedia.

You note that your emphasis on American developments in transmedia are not intended to reflect “any kind of general explanation” of transmedia’s industrial history, but it seems to me that your account tends to assume that transmedia is an extension of commercial or market logics that dominate the American entertainment system but do not necessarily shape other media ecologies. Would transmedia have necessarily emerged in cases where there is a much stronger emphasis on public service broadcasting or state funding for the arts? Or would transmedia at least have taken a different shape if storytelling was kept separate from marketing and promotional practices?

Absolutely, I very much believe that, at least in the context of US history, transmedia storytelling emerged out of large-scale commercial and market logics driven by industrialisation and consumer culture, with modes of storytelling across media coming out of certain industrial and culture needs to reproduce and distribute media products for the mass-market.

Yet, be that as it may, I also don’t think that my conclusions are globally applicable. What I realised is that when you examine transmedia in its present context compared to its historical contexts, it is totally different – even if it’s in the same country. In my eyes it’s much more useful to think about context specificity – that is, that different things at different moments in different cultures for different reasons inform transmedia in different ways. It would be wrong to say that the commercial or market-based ideas that I propose of transmedia’s past in the US can be used to explain transmedia in other countries. Instead, it is much more accurate to start again, as it were, and to look at the specific country, its cultures, industries, society, etc. and ask: What role is (or was) transmedia playing here? And what are the specific mechanisms informing it?

A perfect example of this would be Colombia, which I’ve started researching lately. Colombians very passionately reject the idea that transmedia is commercial. Some Colombian researchers actively oppose the link between transmedia and Hollywood, say, or transmedia and branding or franchising. Instead, in Colombia transmedia is a long-standing social tool, a way to unite a dispersed Colombian nation – people who have gone through terrible social ordeals and violent conflicts in the past.

I’m also currently working with others who affirm similar ideas about the specificity of transmedia in different countries: Melanie Bourdaa, for example, argues that transmedia occupies a role of cultural heritage in France, while Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojamaa explore the dual role of transmedia in Estonia as both a mechanism for supporting cultural heterogeneity and for enforcing coherence and stability in culture via maintaining the relevance of historical media texts. Marie-Eve Carignan, too, is doing very interesting research that analyses the media coverage of terrorist attacks in Canada to show the key role of transmedia in the radicalisation of that country.

Not to simplify things, but in each of these cases it is documentary that seems to have shaped the form of transmedia. And because of this, in a country like Colombia transmedia is now fundamentally perceived not as a tool for brand-building but rather for community-building, with the spreading of content across multiple media serving to re-create lost cultural memories and to re-build broken societies.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds is published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690