On paper it sounds like a project that might be better suited to a video blog, but the critical response to ROOM 237 at Sundance has been borderline obsessive. As New York‘s Bilge Ebiri wrote in his personal blog They Live By Night, “it’s not a film about conspiracy theories; it’s a film about movie love.”

via SUNfiltered | The Sundance Review Revue: ROOM 237.

via Wilco & Popeye – “Dawned On Me” – YouTube.

One person will not be attending — the designated survivor, the guy who will run the country if something catastrophic happens in that room during the speech.

Past Designated Survivors include attorneys general John Ashcroft, Eric Holder and Alberto Gonzales.

Also, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Richardson and Steven Chu.

Imagine the historical possibilities.

FOOLS!!! DAMN FOOLS!!!

Room 236

I love Rodney Ascher’s work. The first thing I ever saw from him was an amazing piece of video animation built around those awesome Jack Chick Comics.

A few years ago, he and I collaborated on a pilot for VH1 called “First Person,” the idea of which was that we’d link the audiobook versions of rock stars’ lives to Rodney’s amazing animation style. Our pilot was built around Gene Simmons – you can see it here.

This week, Rodney’s film “Room 237” is premiering at Sundance, in the “New Frontiers” category.

“Room 237” chronicles the obsessions and obsessives around Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Turns out, there’s a LOT of people who think that the film is laced with secret messages and hidden meanings. And, given that Kubrick was an obsessive director who was known to do 100 takes of a shot, they’ve got their reasons.

The doc is very much in the style of Rodney’s “The S From Hell,” which details (in Rodney’s words) “The scariest corporate symbol in history – The 1964 Screen Gems logo, aka ‘The S From Hell.’ Built around interviews with survivors still traumatized from their childhood exposure to the logo after shows like Bewitched or The Monkees, the film brings their stories to life with animation, found footage, and dramatic reenactments.”

Among the amazing details in “Room 237” – the crash of a red Volkswagen, witnessed on the side of the road on the way to the Overlook, is Kubrick’s message to the audience that “this is not the novel.” (The Grady family in the book drove a Red Volkswagen.) Tins and labels in the hotel’s pantry refer to the American “slaughter” of the Native American population – and the tale itself (as detailed by film critic Bill Blakemore   http://bit.ly/AukqcO   ) might be an allegory about America’s “genocide” of Native Americans. As you’d expect, there’s a lot of numerology and symbolic meanings, and enough loose ends to keep you talking and thinking for days.

Somehow, Rodney’s able to work on amazingly cool stuff constantly. He’s directed videos for Funny or Die, his music video for Matt and Kim features Soulja Boy and Andrew W.K., and… well, he’s just the coolest.

Good luck at Sundance, Rodney!

Understanding SOPA: A Simple Q&A for Understanding the Online Piracy Debate – WSJ.com.

- Remember how everyone was scratching their heads when Google bought Motorola? Turns out, Motorola controls about 40% of the set-top boxes in America. OHHHHH… NOW I GET IT! ANDROID CABLE BOXES.

- The use of social media in our political debates is lame lame lame… it places the social media world as some kind of weird “freak / other” that we patronizingly feature from time to time. I compared it to the moment in the delivery room when the doctor turns to the Dad and asks him if he’d like to cut the cord.  Twitter’s experiment with the hashtag “#dodgedthequestion” in the last debate had one good effect — two of the candidates (Newt and Mitt) came back to the Twitter people after the debate to look at how they fared.

- I asked “When am I going to be able to watch a movie on Netflix and see who else is watching, and tweet with them… or better yet, see tweets left by my friends when THEY watched it.” It’s coming – and it’ll probably be a two-screen experience.

- The American TV Viewer is SOOOOO Over this election. They know who the candidates are, they’ve probably made up their minds, and now it’s all up to who gets out the vote on election day. What’s the old wisdom about rain / sun and republicans / democrats? Crank up the weather machine, Dr. Evil!

- I’ve often blogged about how the EPG on your cable box is the real evil… here’s something that’s even more soul-deadening: IF you counted EPGs on cable boxes as web pages, the EPGs of some of our bigger cable companies would easily occupy the top ten web sites in the country. That’s power.

- I got on my high horse again about “WHY NIELSEN?!?” Two things seem to keep this antiquated, antedated system afloat: It’s pretty well baked into the purchasing decisions of all the major advertisers, and is the “lingua franca” of the discussion about whether or not to buy time on tv. Nothing is out there that replaces it as a metric. AND… the cable companies (who have the most accurate data) like to keep that data to themselves as leverage when they re-negotiate carriage fees with the big content companies.

Like I said, a GREAT dinner.

MMMMMMM.... Dinner!

Photo by Betsy Graver

It’s Here!

The Graver Family Best of 2011 Music 

Have a great New Year!!!

The Playlist

1. Good Feeling, Flo Rida
2. Don’t Stop (Color on the Walls), Foster the People
3. Do You Want It All, Two Door Cinema Club
4. Easy, Real Estate
5. It’s All Around You, Release the Sunbird
6. Stop the Clocks, Noel Gallagher
7. Lonely Boy, The Black Keys
8. Chicago, Tom Waits
9. Hard Livin’, Justin Townes Earle
10.  All the Way Under, John Hiatt
11.  Knotts, Lisa Hannigan
12.  Cheerleader, St. Vincent
13.  Call Your Girlfriend, Robyn
14.  Hell On Heels, Pistol Annies
15.  Invisible Riverside, Ryan Adams
16.  Surf’s Up (Demo), Brian Wilson
17.  Born Alone, Wilco
18.  I Gotta Go, Robert Earle Keene
19.   Dance Me To The End of Love, The Civil Wars

SHAZAM TAGS GLEE: Cynopsis Digital reports: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is tapping the Shazam for TV offering to provide Glee fans extra content, reports Mobile Marketer. In conjunction with the Blu-ray and DVD release of Glee: The Concert Movie, viewers can tag the Shazam logo that will periodically appear on the screen. After making the tag, users will be taken to a page on their mobile devices where they can view additional content, such as lyrics to the song that is currently being played in the movie, exclusive merchandise, behind-the-scenes videos, photos and trivia questions from the cast. The tag will even remain archived in the app for later access.

Facebook explains sponsored stories. 

World’s Smallest TV Producer Has Show Cancelled by Apple

The Union of 3 Sets: Cake Boss, Social Media and Actual Information 

Grantland Dissects the Homeland Finale

Three things / people got into my head this week and I’ve been trying to shuffle them around and see what they mean.

1) Louis C.K.

2) An article on Wired.com about Maker Studios —  an incredibly smart and inventive place where they’re creating a new kind of production studio for YouTube.

3) A chance encounter with an old ad sales guy for a leading print publication.

I think I can triangulate these three things and get them to mean something… Stay with me here.

1) You couldn’t miss all of the chatter around Louis C.K.’s amazing success at distributing his own comedy special online. David Carr did a great write up in the Times on Monday. As of Carr’s deadline, Louis cleared $750K on 200,000 downloads of his special (total gross was a $Million). Good money (although he might have made just as much from HBO paying him to license it up front). But even better as a game changer for everyone in media.

This was not a sure thing. Louis took a real risk here. He could have put this up, and no one would have bought it. OR, he could have suffered from his decision not to heavily DRM the file and had some people buy it and tons of others watch it “illegally.” But he trusted his fans, set the price right, and it took off.

Now, Louis wouldn’t starve if this hadn’t had worked… but it would have been an embarrassment. And it DEFINITELY wouldn’t have put him in the catbird seat, where he sits now.

Everyone has commented on some of the obvious factors lurking here, but it’s worth noting them now:

• Louis has an established reputation. He’s a known commodity for comedy fans, and for the large mailing list he probably used to spark the initial demand for the special.
• He has an established career / pov. Again — this is a guy who’s been on stage practically every night of the last 20 years or so. He’s got chops. He knew he could deliver. It was NEVER a risk of failing creatively.
• Like many other things that become phenomena on the internet, no one’s sure what’s going to happen with this, but a door has certainly been blown open and it’s NOT ever going to close again.

Which is something to keep in mind if you’re one of the “kids” profiled in …

2)… Wired.com’s piece “The YouTube Laugh Factory.” The main focus of the piece is Maker Studios in Culver City in L.A. There’s 200 “partners” making hundreds of YouTube Channels, supported by 140+ people. A lot of them are making money. Along with Maker Studios, the centerpiece of the article is Tay Zonday, whom many of you will remember from his video “Chocolate Rain.”

Turns out Tay clears somewhere between 24-72K a year (he wouldn’t say, and Wired had to calculate based on $1-3 CPMs). Some of Maker’s channels clear 6 figures.

The big thing here is that, as Wired points out, these people are making waitress / p.a. money while they’re getting better at their craft. This is a viable way to break into the business. And no one is claiming that “this is it!” — only that this is a great launch pad – the way UCB or Second City has been a launch pad in decades past.

What I was MOST taken by was the collaborative support demonstrated at Maker Studios. The economy of scale — where unknowns appear and are promoted by the successful “established” channels, and crews / writers / artists / production people pollinate each other’s shows with intelligence, wisdom and ideas is what makes this really exciting!

But this is not Louis C.K. These people are not established, they’ve got a lot to learn about pleasing and holding an audience… they need (as they say in showbiz) “Seasoning.” But it’ll come, and in the meantime they’ve discovered a new place to get some chops.

As for the money — we’re seeing the “funnel” of old media / advertising money becoming a “colander.”  Same pool of money, you just now break it into hundreds of little streams. You’re going to need “co-ops” like Maker Studios to make that work.

Which brings me to…

3) The sad old advertising salesman I ran into the other night. I was with a friend, who recognized this guy as being the head of ad sales at what is STILL a leading print magazine. (And still profitable, so that narrows the list down PLENTY.) My friend asked after several people whom he believed still worked at the magazine — none work there anymore.

The poor guy was headed into his holiday party, and my friend had pulled a total “ghost of Christmas present” on him. He shrugged, headed for the check-in table, where two eager interns handed him his name tag.

Now — you might expect me to say “Run kids, Run!” but I’m not going to… because this magazine the old ad sales guy works for trades on MONSTER celebrity names and wonderful photos of them and “inside dirt” about their lives. And the people at Maker Studios would KILL to be in this magazine, and probably read this magazine, and probably make fun of it on their channels.

And while the old ad sales guy is sad because the money isn’t flowing to his magazine in the raging floodwater style to which he had become accustomed, that money is going to start flowing toward YouTube.

And that’s because YouTube put money down on Jay-Z and Madonna and Depak Chopra’s channels. Say what you will about those big-money bets — it sent a big flare in the sky that was noticed by the big ad sales guys, who aren’t going to think of YouTube only as the home of “Chocolate Rain.”

Good news all around…

4) WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO LOUIS C.K. because I’ve been thinking a lot about “What would YOU do if you were Louis?”

What I’d do if I were Louis is turn around to the 10 most successful comics I know and love, and say “Here’s the tools. Here’s how I did it. Go ahead, let’s all do it… and we can appear on each other’s videos, and we’ll promote them on each other’s sites, and maybe we’ll promote 1 or 2 of those kids from Maker Studios… because we can create our own network. And it’s not an either / or thing… it’s a ‘more for everyone’ thing.”

That’s what I’d do if I were Louis C.K.