A couple years ago I was driving in LA and an intern who was working with our company was in the car with me.  He was fresh out of film school and was all excited about starting out in the film business.  He took the opportunity as we drove down Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood to ask me if I could give any advice to an aspiring filmmaker like himself.  

I liked the guy.  He had grown up gay in a very religious home, and he had done some short films that were interesting and challenging.  He seemed responsible and hard working.  I turned to him and gave him my simple answer, "turn back now".  

It wasn't what he wanted to hear.  And it wasn't what I wanted to tell him.  He was creative and had drive, so working in film and television should be a perfect way to make a decent living and get to express oneself at the same time.  This young guy looked at me as someone successful.  I have my own business with my brother, I've had many shows on TV, we've gotten some awards.  But from my perspective, I couldn't bullshit him and give him all sorts of happy stories.  

I told him, it's hard as hell to first find an agent and then to sell a show, period.  But to try to sell a show that you believe in and where they let you craft it in a meaningful way--that is extremely rare.  And then, even if you are lucky enough to get to that point, you still won't get any ownership of your project.  So your deal will be that you get a salary to work on your film or TV show, plus some mythical back end that you will never see a penny from.  And at the end of the day, you will have worked your ass off to make a very moderate amount of money, and they will own your project so there is no upside.  So you better get a huge thrill from just working in this industry.

While you're young and single, that thrill is probably all that matters to you.  All you care about is getting the chance to produce something, make something, prove yourself.  And the companies you pitch to will take advantage of that enthusiasm.  Eventually, your lack of upside, your lack of ownership in your work, will become frustrating.  If you have to create because it's in your blood, then you'll stay in the business.  Otherwise, you'll find a line of work that will reward you somewhat fairly for your time, energy and creativity.

I've spent thirty years making my art.  And please pardon me if I indulge myself by using that word... art.  The first eight years I was writing and photographing, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to live in Paris and to exhibit my photographs at the Georges Pompidou Center, the Vienna Museum of Modern Art and the Munich State Museum, and to publish a non-fiction book on the first generation of children growing up in openly gay homes in the United States, entitled Whose Child Cries.  

I loved living in Paris.  I loved the architecture on every corner, I loved the way people hung out and talked to each other, and I loved the way men and women flirted over there.  But after awhile I grew to dislike the side of the art world where you have to cultivate rich people to collect your work.  And I was not doing artwork that was traditionally beautiful or decorative, so it was a hard sell for the galleries that were representing me.  

I moved back to the US and I began making documentary films with my brother Harry.  We've been doing that for 20 years now.  Fuck, that is a looong time.  I've always hated that song, but I think that 'we did it our way' (if you cue that song in your head, please play the Sex Pistols version).  What I mean by that, is that Harry and I only pitched ideas that we believed in, and we would stick with an idea for years never giving up until we could somehow get it made.  

Most producers in this town are like pitch machines; they need to be since they get no ownership.  If they want to make a decent living they feel they have no choice but to go for volume.  We brought our overhead down by living and working in the Valley, owning our own equipment, and working with a small staff.  We've managed to make a living while we made films and TV shows that we really cared about.  We didn't get rich, which wasn't our objective, and we worked harder than almost anybody else I know, which hasn't always been fun, especially when you have a family.

The fact is, to sell a show that is innovative, meaningful or provocative is very difficult to do in this advertiser-dominated, corporate world we work in.  And to get some real ownership and financial upside in the process is next to impossible.  But that's why we started CrushedPlanet, to try to make that happen.  CrushedPlanet is about making the most amazing, out there, powerful, artistic, intimate or surprising shit imaginable.  And then it's about giving the artist or producer a fair piece of their own creative pie.  So they can afford to make their next project and to raise a family if they so choose.  And we plan to do that --or try anyway-- with a little support from viewers who want to see something that really moves them.  

So, as serious as I was when I told the intern to "turn back now", I was perhaps being a bit overly cynical.  Eventually there's a chance that there may be a way out of this tunnel of no ownership and the TV mentality of doing the same shit over and over again... and it will probably be due to the Internet.  We at CrushedPlanet plan to put our little spin on that dual concept-- the artist retaining ownership and the distribution of innovative content.  We are making a go of this!  And now I'm getting excited to see how it all unfolds...
 
 

This is blog number two for CrushedPlanet and I think I have to start by admitting something... We are losing our minds and going broke trying to launch this damn Internet Network.  

After all the hurdles we've faced making documentaries for over twenty years, and dealing with every imaginable production problem along the way, nothing seems to have prepared us for building CrushedPlanet.

We've spent a year and a half putting together CrushedPlanet in the version 2 mode.   Version 1 of CrushedPlanet launched in 1999, in the Chinese year of the donkey.  In that go around my brother, Harry, and I invested a lot of time, money and energy to stream postage stamp size videos to the few folks around the world who were tuned into the Internet then.  It was a dial up world and a labor of love.  We did it for a couple years and then folded up shop, having learned that launching an Internet network with minimal resources was extremely fatiguing.

But here we are again.  Go figure.  They say that women forget how difficult childbirth is or they wouldn't do it over and over.  Giving birth to CrushedPlanet the first time was extremely painful.  Internet networks, like CrushedPlanet, have a big head and we still have scars from getting that sucker out the first time.  And now we're doing this again?  All together now -breath-- and one, two, three, PUSH!

We've had our share of headaches this go around.  Our first programmer disappeared the weekend we were originally scheduled to launch about ten months ago.  He just suddenly was gone and wouldn't return my calls or my emails.  We discovered that he had not created the all-important back end yet.  And we had already paid to do the PR around the launch.  

That was a weird feeling, him disappearing like that.  He was in Boston.  I am in LA.  I just kept calling.  The only experience I've had which was like that, was one time a girlfriend broke up with me by disappearing.  That was in France in 1986.  But I will say that the disappearing trick is a pretty effective technique to fuck with someone's brain.  The girlfriend eventually showed up.  We argued a lot, had sex a few more times, and had some sort of ending.  The programmer never resurfaced.  Never heard from him again.

You know how people go to a rebound lover who is totally wrong for them, but they have a broken heart and can only make the worst decisions for themselves?  That's what happened with the next programmer.  We got his name from someone that was helping us with CrushedPlanet at the time.  And here's how he sold him to us-- we were told that before doing programming, this guy was a rocket scientist.  I'm serious, that's the story that we fell in love with.  They say that TV is not rocket science, but CrushedPlanet was indeed going to be designed by an ex-rocket scientist.  We sure liked the sound of that, and we hired the guy.  Nothing he did worked and then he started yelling at people over the phone.  Rocket scientists, evidentially, can get pretty temperamental.

After we gave up on the rocket scientist we admitted that we were not able to judge programmers very well and we hired a guy who had worked at a company that made web sites.  He had been an account executive there, but he was about to move to Canada to marry a Canadian girl, and he said that he would work with us for eight weeks while he sold all his worldly possessions.  

He found us a programmer who had made mainly porn sites.  This piece of information made us strangely comfortable.  The reasoning was that porn was way ahead of the curve when it came to programming, so this guy would be using all the latest and greatest techniques that porn had pioneered.  Unfortunately, this programmer was actually a designer, sort of, who said that he worked with a programmer who lived in San Francisco.  In our first couple meetings I kept insisting that I wanted to talk to his/our programmer directly to ask a few questions, but the guy said he preferred to do all the communicating with his programmer without us "interfering".   And the crazy thing was that the moving-to-Canada fellow told me not to push to meet the programmer, because they, supposedly, worked together all the time.  The crazier thing was that I took his advice.

When that programmer suddenly vanished, the porn designer guy said that the missing programmer now lived in New Hampshire.  Plenty sounded fishy but we still let this porn designer guy find us a fourth programmer, who he was going to pay himself.  But then he didn't pay the guy, and by the time we figured that out the front end was looking okay and we were dreaming that the back end was all coming together.  Let me tell you a little piece of information that I have learned--the front end is easy, it's the back end that is hard.  So we paid the fourth programmer directly and that guy turned out to be the most incompetent of all.

Now we're on Programmer number five.  Right at this moment, thing's seem to be falling into place (knock on wood, please), but the pain still lingers...

All this being said, like any guy who is about to become a new father, I feel very lucky. I'm sure that over the years lots of TV executives would wait until Harry and I were out of the room to turn to their colleagues and say, "they've got to be kidding, that's the strangest pitch I've had in a long time".   We were doing the same thing we're doing now, way before there was such a thing as reality television, when no one had a context for some of our productions.

In many ways, my brother and I have been making Internet programming since we made our first documentary, Couples Arguing, in 1985.   We just got lucky that the Internet came along.  In the beginning just getting any of our projects on TV was a huge uphill battle, back when we were making little productions by the seat of our pants.  And now we're shooting again on a tiny budget, without anybody telling us how to make it more commercial.  We've even started an apprentice program at CrushedPlanet, which is like a school situation, to get people in to help us create this behemoth.  Granted, we still don't know if there is a market for content driven, edgy, authentic, intimate programming.  But we're giving it another go.  And suddenly I can breathe again.

 

BLOG #1

 

I've never done a blog.  I'm a blog virgin.  That being said, the idea that I can share my thoughts without censorship or getting some kind of stamp of approval from the Corporations of Public Broadcasting, well, that's right in line with CrushedPlanet's vision.  It's in the moment, personal, emotional --it's kind of exhilarating actually.  I think I will give this a try, so here goes...

 

We are launching CrushedPlanet today, after ten months of faux launches and promised launches--each of which ended up being a heartbreaking crash and burn.  It's been frustrating getting to this point.  But here we are at the finish line of our design and programming phase, which is really just the starting line for getting CrushedPlanet out there.  

 

We started this dream of creating an Internet network almost ten years ago when we launched CrushedPlanet the first time in 1999.  That was when people could only stream itty-bitty postage stamp sized media.  On this go around CrushedPlanet rivals the image quality of any TV.  But we're not obsessed with the tech stuff.  We're all about content. 

 

CrushedPlanet will show the most innovative, provocative and intimate programming on the Internet.  TV was started by Corporations to sell advertising, and they don't want anything too edgy or mentally taxing.  The Corporations would put you to sleep for the programming and then wake you up for the advertising if they could.  And sometimes I think they try to do that.

 

I honestly think that the spectrum of entertainment possibilities offered right now is a sliver of what it can and will be.  We haven't exploited a tenth of what can be done when it comes to content.  CrushedPlanet is going to be about Powerful, Innovative content and --as The Unrestricted Voice-- we are going to help reinvent programming possibilities in this country and hopefully around the world.  (Sorry about using so many capital letters but I feel passionate about this.)

 

The second concept behind CrushedPlanet is to treat producers and artists and filmmakers the way we wish we had had been treated when we were coming up in this business.  Over the last fifteen years artists and producers in Hollywood, in the vast majority of cases, did not get ownership of their ideas.  Instead we had to sign over the ownership of our ideas, and we were offered this mythical back end, always calculated using net receipts rather than gross receipts.

 

At CrushedPlanet, everyone who allows us to distribute their work keeps all the rights to their content and we give them 51% of gross, if their work is exclusive to CrushedPlanet, and 33% of gross if it is given to us on a non-exclusive basis. 

 

And these two concepts --innovative and provocative content, and retaining ownership of all one's rights and getting a very fair percentage of gross receipts-- have already allowed us to sign up some of the most amazing artists from around the world who do absolutely phenomenal work.  I am in awe of the artists that we have signed up for CrushedPlanet, and we are only getting started finding these amazingly creative folks.

 

CrushedPlanet has short and long form films and videos that are honest and intimate, that are surprising and powerful, we have films that break the mold and come at filmmaking from a completely different direction, and we have films and videos and blogs that are such a simple, strong statement that they can astonish you and blow you away.   (Sorry about the run on sentence, I'm getting myself excited here.)

 

The goal with CrushedPlanet, and with this blog, is to reach out to the people who look around and say to themselves:  That's it?  That's all there is?  It seems like Art continues to get squeezed into tiny boxes by a few huge corporations that, as keepers of the gate, are picking out all the content they feel we need to see, or that we supposedly can handle.  We're in a democracy that has freedom of expression but the range of expression is incredibly stifled.  Well, CrushedPlanet is about passion, innovation, creativity, a strong point of view, and a refusal to relent to the pressure of conforming to the mainstream.  We want to showcase art, media and personal expression that is off the charts.  That shouldn't be too hard, right?   I think we have some great examples of that on CrushedPlanet already, and I'll be curious to know what you think.

 

Okay, so that felt pretty good for a first time.  And whoever reads this first blog will always have a special place in my heart.  Hey, I may just like this blogging thing.  Now it's time to towel off and get back to work.  Thanks for checking us out and stay tuned...