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.
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.
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