Welcome Bizzlers!

Welcome Bizzlers –

Here’s a shameless confession.  The real reason I started blogging back in October ‘08 was not to give my readers a sense of what it was like to run Beverly Hills, 90210 when we were  the most popular show in the world, or even to share my thoughts about the current (woeful) state of prime time, but to do whatever I could to draw attention to showbizzle.  Not that every week, but, trust me, everyone ended with a plug for the bizzle.

Anyway, to celebrate the launch of our first newsletter, and to say thanks for giving us a chance to become whatever you’d like us to be — a diversion/an obsession/a launching pad — I’d like to re-published some of my favorite posts   – with an update, of course.

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“Putting The Show Back in The Bizzle” was my mission statement, my Jerry Maquire moment.  An affirmation of why we made all these videos in the first place…

Putting the Show back in the Bizzle

December 18, 2008

What I like about producing original content for the digital world is that if it doesn’t work out you get to throw up your hands and insist that your website/start-up/show was in Beta mode the whole time — and then, with one click of a mouse, poof, all is forgiven, and you get to start over again. Not cancelled, demeaned, and quickly forgotten which mostly happens when the network/studio/money guys pull the plug on a prime time endeavor. No. Showbizzle gets to have a second chance - a Beta-induced relaunch in the spring of ‘09. Early March. Our videos have been remixed, revoiced, repurposed, and broken down into 23 weekly 10-15 minutes segments. That’s a lot of ff****ing segments. That’s a full season. That a show. No wonder we have been asked to be featured as part of the Beta launch for Zillion TV this February. There’s that Beta word again. What a concept!

For months I have been describing showbizzle to anyone who would listen as “scripted entertainment that could pass as a reality show, in the form of a fictitious daily video blog - for the purposes of creating a social network.” We swapped out social network for community back in October once we figured out that providing services and opportunities for members were of more value than introducing them to their next bff.

To this end showbizzle ‘09 will have cool contests where members get paid to perform as well as an outreach to university theater and drama programs where cash prizes will be given to students performing our monologues in addition to performing their own material. But at the end of the day showbizzle is a show - not scripted entertainment — and I think we lost sight of that as we grappled with malfunctioning technology, unprofessional behavior from our techies from texas, and our own feeble marketing and publicity efforts.

Hopefully, in ‘09 showbizzle can hook up with a brand, and that we generate more traffic and that members start reading Janey’s blog and respond all her new voice-overs — but no matter what happens it’ll still be about the show.

showbizzle…not quite showbusiness…and a lot more fun…

Have a happy, merry, happy - and we will be back in January.

Memo to Showrunners: When the Going Gets Tough, Blame it On The Sets

Summer has to be the least favorite season for showrunners — especially those hired to shepherd the transition from recently ordered pilot to weekly TV show.For unlike the rest of America, a meaningful summer vacation with the kiddles is totally out of the question. Showrunners don’t have time for lazy days by the pool or the beach, baseball games, family reunions,  etc. — especially during this era of squeezed budgets and creative torpor.

Not that it was any easier when I was running Beverly Hills, 90210. I distinctly remember a particularly truculent 90 minute phone call the night of July 3rd before a single frame of footage for the series was shot, in which two network execs criticized every single story beat contained in our first six outlines.  These guys even hated our typeface!  Fortunately, because of a misunderstanding on my part, the next day I called every writer (on July 4th!!!) and authorized them to begin writing their teleplays — which saved us for being shut down two weeks later for “script problems” like Fox’s other two (long forgotten) new dramas “DEA” and “Against The Law”.

Of course, the chances of a new show of any era surviving its summer gauntlet on the way to syndication has always been an iffy proposition…but my heart goes out to the folks behind “Beautiful”, a new CW show about fashion models produced by Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst productions, who is clearly dealing with stuff that ruins summers (not to mention fall, winter, and spring) as reported on hollywoodreporter.com:

The production start on CW’s new drama “The Beautiful Life” has been pushed back by a week, from July 22 to July 31. And despite the widely publicized recent meltdown and hospitalization of co-star Mischa Barton, sources close to the show say the reason for the delay is far more mundane: Some of the sets for the show were not completed on time. Still, given her medical issues, Barton’s situation on the show remains unclear.

What a relief to learn that it was not Mischa Barton’s illness that caused the delay — or script troubles, or clashing egos, or money woes, or any of the usual perils of production. It was those pesky sets! They get you every time! Oddly enough, the interior high school hallway for Beverly Hills, 90210 was not finished the week we went into production either, but we adjusted our shooting schedule and changed the locale of certain scenes to make it work. Hmmmmmmmm? Why didn’t these showrunners do that? What’s really going on here?

Well, what’s going on folks is a favorite bloodsport of the Hollywood entertainment press in which they try to predict which new show will be shut down or cancelled first by chronically whatever setbacks/misery a production company/showrunner is facing.  It’s gotcha journalism with lots of Schadenfreude thrown in to satisfy a very cynical and beaten down creative community waiting for time slots to open up.

Look, I’m a fan of Katalyst Productions so I hope they have a nice long run.  I also have a soft spot for Mischa Barton, whose fictional shopping spree makes for a wonderful three-part vignette by James Robinson, who plays Carver, a beleaguered salesman on showbizzle.com, our digital showcase and destination website.  But mostly, I’m a fan of catching waves in the morning when the surf is glassy and the dolphins check in on their daily up to Malibu to bask in the warm water of summer.

 

Wanted: Lunatics to Run The Asylum

I first knew Beverly Hills 90210 was going to be a mega hit when I got a call from someone I hadn’t spoken to since high school (or maybe since junior high school) asking me if I could get Ian Ziering to make an appearance at her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.  I remember telling her that I couldn’t ask Ian to do something like that on his day off, and confessed that the only reason I could get him and all the other cast members to show up on the set during was because they were under contract to Mr. Spelling.

It was during these heady but turbulent  first years of dealing with the off camera antics of certain 90210 cast members that I developed the mantra that would mostly define my relationship to actors during my career as a showrunner.   All I really wanted from them (with very few exceptions — hello, Jay) was to know their lines, hit their marks, and go home. 

Not that I was anti-social by nature, but running an hour TV show is ridiculously time consuming, and virtually every free moment I had in those prime time days was spent with my wife and young kids.

Well , the kiddles are all grown up now, and I find myself working  in the over-crowded and under-capitalized  digital entertainment space with my eldest daughter Lindsey trying to find an audience and a sponsor for showbizzle.com, the digital showcase and destination website we created together and recently re-launched.

We worked with more than 35 very talented and very unknown young actors on the show. Many were recent college graduates, most had no professional credits, and some were still in college.  You think that most of them might be appreciative that they were given an opportunity to perform on our unique web series — especially since we made a point of paying everyone of them a fair wage immediately upon finishing their monologues.  No deferred payment here. No self-serving bull shit about working for free ’cause the exposure that will help them down the line.  No Hollywood hustle.  Our goal wasn’t just to make  a fun show, but to transform the way that business should be conducted on the internet.

All we asked from our cast in return was to help us promote showbizzle among their friends, especially their facebook friends, and let us know what they think of the new site.  We’ve been up for three weeks now (with 20 more weeks to go) and I can count the cast members who contacted us  or posted our link on their facebook page on one hand.  Nothing from the acting student from USC who has only one credit on IMDB because I wrote a part specifically for him. Nothing from the recent graduate from the UCLA drama school who worked as a paid PA during the production, but hasn’t found a moment to tell her zillion facebook friends to check us out.  Or the young man from– ah, you get the picture. Energy is put out and zippo tends to come back.

All right, so I know what you are thinking. It’s either: “Hey, CR, these people don’t really love the bizzle the way you do so they would rather avoid having a conversation then express their ambivalence”; or, maybe it’s an “Excuse me,  these young actors did what you paid them to do and moved on — which is what a real professional does, right?”; or finally, there’s the  “hey, dude, everybody’s overloaded  just trying to get through the day, so give them a break.”

Okay.  Fine. You are absolutely right. I’ll give them a break.  In fact, I’ll give any young actor with a modicum of talent the chance to get their break, or at least get some good footage for their reel.  All they have to do is become a member of showbizzle.com, and put a link on their profile page to a short performance piece they have posted on YouTube or blip.tv that they would like us to evaluate — preferably some original material  in the style of the show in which they tell Janey, our unseen blogger, what they are doing to jumpstart their careers in Hollywood, or wherever they may be.  We will post our faves on our Community Channel — and let our members votes on their favorites — and have the “winners” be paid to perform some original material on our Digital Showcase.

So if you know any young actor types just starting out, tell them about showbizzle — and I promise that if we ever get the chance to work with them,  all they will have to do is know their lines, hit their marks,  and stick around and have a beer or a cup of coffee on us.

 

Happy Independents Day, err, Independence Day

July 4th is this week — and between the fireworks, the 5K’s, and the grilled hot dogs (or, if you are in health conscious, LA, the grilled mushrooms and tofu) I would like to take a moment  of silence for a long forgotten patriot who fought for our right to be self-supporting and independent years before anyone even thought there could ever be such a thing as Twitter, or a Google or a Simon Cowell. 

No, not Ben Franklin! Come on, think. No, not Crispus Atticus.  I’m talking about Len Hill, a Lt. Col. in the War on Indpendents who put himself and his livelihood at risk when he went to Washington D.C. in the early 90’s to testify against the implementation of The Repeal of the Financial and Syndication Rule, which prohibited networks from owning the entertainment programming they air.

But unlike the unruly mob that gathered in front of Faneuil Hall to protest the inherent unfairness of the Stamp Act, Len braved the fight against the behemoths of programming all by his lonesome — think of Paul Revere riding in the dead of night to warn his compatriots that ‘The British are Coming, the British are Coming’ only to realize once he finally reaches Concord that all the other soldiers have made a side deal with King George, or in Len’s case, with Les Moonves, the then President of Warner Brother’s Television and one of President Bill Clinton’s favorite Hollywood golfing buddies .

Len warned us that the Repeal of The Fin Syn, as it was known  back then, would doom a generation of independent purveyors to a life of indentured servitude, serving at the whim of the corporate royalists while battling for creative freedom and a shrinking percentage of the pie.

That Len Hill had an outstanding career as a network executive (who gave me one of my first jobs) and a prolific independent producer of TV movies (including one on the Beach Boys which I wrote) is all but forgotten during this woeful , culturally impoverished, era of Jon and Kate and TMZ.

Please join me now for a moment of silence as we read the roll call of the fallen production companies who went to their final resting place as part of a larger conglomerate  thanks to the scourge of network hegemony: Carsey Werner, Stephen Cannel, Lorimar, MTM, Spelling- Goldberg, and Tandem Productions, which was the name of Norman Lear’s main production  company for all you who have no recollection of what life was like before there was Fox Television…

Ah, but I remember Len. He gave great script note, he smoked a pipe, and he screamed a lot, and as soon as it was clear that networks would no longer buy projects from him when they could do them for a bigger profit margin by themselves, he left show business to develop real estate and play golf.  And in his honor, I pledge to name a future character on showbizzle ( the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey) after  Len.  Happy holiday, everybody

Oh, one other thing — did you honestly think I could write a blog without a mention of the bizzle?

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