This is the third time Cumming has starred in the musical. He talks about the new production — everything from his costume (which he calls a “Wonder Bra” for men) to the darker themes of the show.
Alex Blumberg in real life sounds just like Alex Blumberg on the radio.
If you’ve ever listened to This American Life, the massively popular weekly radio show, or Planet Money, NPR’s excellent economy-explaining podcast, you know Alex Blumberg’s voice. I certainly did. Today, as he stands in front of the laptop he’s perched on a wooden chair atop a long table (a brilliant hack of a standing desk), it’s hard not to close my eyes and just listen.
That is, of course, exactly what Blumberg is hoping for. Here in the brand-new offices of Gimlet Media, on the fifth floor of a downtown Brooklyn co-working building, amid piles of old furniture and terrifying art, Blumberg and his colleagues are attempting to build a big business out of podcasts. They’ve been chronicling their adventures in — what else? — a podcast, called StartUp. It offers an intimate, funny, and occasionally deeply awkward look at what it takes to start a company. The podcast quickly became popular, and so did Gimlet: Blumberg and his co-founder Matt Lieber raised $1.5 million in venture capital, hired a team, and honed their pitch. That pitch, in a nutshell: we’re entering a golden age of audio, the first since we all sat around radio cabinets and listened to The War of the Worlds. The future of radio is here.
Podcasts aren’t new, of course. Even the term has been around for a decade or so, and now feels hilariously dated. (What is a pod anymore? Or, for that matter, a cast?) They have traditionally been thought of as two people sitting at a table with microphones, chatting aimlessly about… whatever. ESPN, for one, has built a huge podcast network on the shoulders of Bill Simmons chatting with his friends on The BS Report and its many other shows focused deeply on a single topic or a single host. Yet Gimlet Media and others are betting that there’s room for more. More production, more storytelling, more narrative. So far, it seems like they’re right.
Podcasts are a decade old, but they’re just starting to make noise
Hi my name is David and I am addicted to podcasts
Serial, the remarkable murder mystery told by Sarah Koenig (another This American Life alum), is the fastest-growing podcast in history. It’s spawned discussion boards, truthers, deniers, other podcasts, and a level of fanaticism rarely seen this side of Lost.Radiotopia, a new network of shows anchored by the popular 99% Invisible, raised more than $600,000 on Kickstarter in an effort to create essentially an indie label for podcasters. The audience is growing larger and more dedicated, spending hours per day listening to shows about everything from fantasy football to terraforming.
As the shows and audience expand, the technology and infrastructure for podcasts is picking up as well. iTunes remains the behemoth of the podcasting industry, the place where most people find things to listen to. Apple now bakes a podcast app — and a decent one at that — into the iPhone, which has gone a long way toward making people aware of the fact that podcasts even exist in the first place. There are other great apps, too, like Overcast and Pocket Casts.
Jake Shapiro, CEO of PRX and Radiotopia
TuneIn and Deezer have both made commitments to podcasts, placing them among their more traditional radio offerings. Spotify, Pandora, and others are rumored to be doing the same. SoundCloud has done wonders for the podcast industry; more than one person told me that uploading and sharing audio online was an awful experience before SoundCloud made something universally embeddable. Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto are poised to finally teach us how to connect our phones to our cars, meaning the hours a day we spend driving can be spent listening to what we want, not aimlessly scanning through FM frequencies.
Listening to podcasts is finally as easy as it should be
The opportunity for audio, at least according to Alex Blumberg, is huge. There’s far more room for audio in our lives than even video; we can listen to podcasts while we do dishes, mow the lawn, ride the subway, even while we work. The tech is there, in our pockets. All we need now is something to listen to.
So Blumberg clears his throat and starts talking. He reads his part of the script he’s written, then hits space on his computer and plays audio. Sometimes it’s Blumberg’s wife who begins to talk, other times it’s Matt Lieber, who sits in the room taking notes while his voice comes from Blumberg’s laptop. Blumberg soon stops the audio and speaks again, occasionally stopping and typing, editing his script on the fly. He apologizes every time he stumbles in his reading, which isn’t often. He says things like “establishing sound here that I haven’t pulled yet,” and sneaks bites of his lunch while others’ sound bites play.
After 20 minutes or so, he’s gone through a rough cut of episode seven of StartUp, which the whole of Gimlet Media is nervous about. In it, Blumberg asks listeners for money. Money to make up the last $200,000 of the $1.5 million. He’s offering a few lucky listeners a stake in the company, while warning them of the risks and the many, many regulatory hurdles to investing. (After the episode aired, Gimlet raised the money in less than an hour.) He finishes reading, makes a face at his team, and says, “Well, there you go.” Everyone else furiously shares their Google docs with each other, and edits begin.
Making a podcast, even one about making a podcast, is hard work. But more than ever before, this is the right time to try. Podcasts won’t kill AM and FM as we know it, at least not anytime soon, but they’re on the precipice of becoming totally and utterly mainstream. They offer what we want, when we want, wherever we want. They’re our own personalized radio, with every topic, every show, and every host you love on exactly your own schedule.
Everything podcasts were named for might now be dead, but podcasts are just starting to come alive. The future of radio is here, and it’s awesome.
Photographer Jeremy Kost has become known for his moody, sexually-charged photos that document chiseled models and habitués of the downtown New York club scene, images which were compiled into the books We Were All Innocent Once and It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn. His latest outing, Fractured, builds upon a career that has focused on the male form, but, thanks to a happy accident, suffuses it with a meditative, dreamlike energy.
Kost, who is known for working almost exclusively via the anachronistic Polaroid, took advantage of a camera malfunction which caused one image to be exposed multiple times for Fractured. In it, you’ll find bucolic images of men, many in various stages of undress, shot with other ghostly images layered over them. The results are voyeuristic and dreamy, and have a softer, more romantic edge than some of Kost’s previous work.
According to the Kost, the book celebrates male beauty and identity, while acknowledging unrequited desires and tangible memories layered in mystery.The artist provided us with exclusive images from the book, which you can buy here (there’s a special artists edition available too), which you can see below.
David Brock speaks at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tuesday, March 25, 2014.
David Brock, the conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder, is sitting in a conference room in the Park Avenue South offices of the MWW Group, a public-relations firm owned by Democratic mega-donor Michael Kempner. Fifty-two years old with a silver pompadour, and wearing round glasses with wire frames, he’s barely recognizable as the skinny, dark-haired operative who, during the Clinton administration, had an answering-machine message that said, “I’m out trying to bring down the president.”
That, of course, was before he publicly repented, first in a 1997 Esquire article, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” and then in 2002’s self-flagellating book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. It was before he founded Media Matters for America, which monitors the right-wing media, in 2004, and American Bridge, an unprecedented Democratic opposition-research organization, in 2010. It was before he became a favorite of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very couple he’d spent his years as an enfant terrible trying to destroy.
Yet Brock’s years in the conservative movement still mark him, particularly in how he conceives of his current mission to expose and defeat his former allies. First among the lessons he learned on the other side, he says, “is the idea of permanence. Ideological campaigns for our values have to be waged on a permanent basis and not only in election years.” Further, he says, “you have to have the resources commensurate with your goals if you’re going to hope to achieve them. Money isn’t by a long shot enough, but it’s a prerequisite. Something else I saw on the right, and that I’ve tried to apply in a different context, is recruiting top talent and trying to pay them close to what they’re worth. And the last thing—and this might be the most important—is patience. Goals this big, you’re not going to achieve them overnight.”
These days, Brock has moved well beyond the repentance phase of his political turnaround. He’s no longer trying to ingratiate himself with the Democratic establishment—he’s now a part of it, employing hundreds of people at organizations with budgets in the tens of millions. Recently, his network has been experiencing a spurt of growth—one that’s likely to continue as the Democrats ramp up their efforts on the 2016 race after the disastrous midterm elections.
An avid Hillary Clinton supporter, Brock is already deeply engaged in the presidential contest. His group American Bridge captures almost every public utterance by prominent Republican politicians, using both DC-based researchers and a national network of professional trackers; it currently has people following all of the even remotely plausible contenders for the Republican nomination. Complementing that operation is Correct the Record, a subsidiary of American Bridge that Brock launched last year to push back against misinformation about Democratic presidential candidates, which so far has meant defending Clinton constantly and consistently.
Meanwhile, in the last year, Brock has expanded into law, ethics and journalism organizations, giving him multiple new fronts for political combat. In August, he took over the corruption watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, prompting fears that the progressive but nonpartisan group—which in the past has gone after members of both parties—will start ignoring the ethical lapses of Democrats. (Brock disputes this. He could, he says, imagine CREW pursuing Democrats under his watch, but he emphasizes that CREW’s history shows there’s simply more corruption to be found on the right.)
The same month he acquired CREW, Brock announced the formation of the American Democracy Legal Fund, which is intended to battle the GOP in the courts and has already filed fifteen complaints against Republicans and Republican-aligned groups. Also, his new journalistic grant-making organization, the American Independent Institute, will give out $320,000 this year to reporters investigating right-wing misdeeds.
When I met with Brock, he suggested that I talk with Howard Dean about the work he’s been doing. Shortly thereafter, Dean e-mailed me to set up the interview. Dean had become chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2005, a year after Brock launched Media Matters, and says he quickly realized that Brock had “the best communications shop on the left. He had an ability to crystallize issues, mobilize people and call out the Republicans—and the Democrats to this day are still floundering over that.”
“It never occurred to me that David Brock needed to be redeemed,” Dean adds. “He redeemed himself.”
* * *
Journalists writing about Brock’s growing web of organizations sometimes say he aims to be the Democratic Karl Rove. A better analogy, though, might be that he’s becoming a liberal version of Paul Weyrich, an architect of the modern conservative movement who founded or co-founded the Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, among other organizations.
“Beginning in the early 1970s…Weyrich set out to create an infrastructure on the right—political and legal interest groups, coalitions, think tanks, magazines, and political action committees—to rival that of the left,” Brock wrote in Blinded by the Right. Within a decade, “Weyrich’s operation dwarfed anything like it on the left, making it possible for people like me to flock to Washington in droves and find jobs.”
Brock’s early career is a testament to the power of the right’s ideological apparatus to recruit and nurture new talent. Arriving at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, he was a liberal Democrat, his politics formed, in many ways, by his alienation as a closeted gay teenager growing up in a crushingly conservative Dallas suburb. At Berkeley, though, he found himself repelled by the culture of doctrinaire leftism and swung the other way. Once he did, he was embraced by a well-organized right-wing network ready to groom smart young foot soldiers.
As an undergraduate, Brock started a neoconservative weekly, the Berkeley Journal, financed by conservative alumni, and published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Combating Those Campus Marxists.” John Podhoretz, then the editor of Insight, the magazine of The Washington Times, noticed it, flew him to DC for an interview and gave him a job as a writer. Next, Brock moved to a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation underwritten by the John M. Olin Foundation, and then a job at the money-losing American Spectator magazine, which was primarily supported by the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. There, a right-wing heiress offered to fund a “special investigation” into Anita Hill, who had accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; it eventually became Brock’s scurrilous bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill.
Next, he became a key player in the campaign to bring down Bill Clinton. It was Brock who gave us the trumped-up “Troopergate” story, introducing the world to a woman named Paula, who later came forward as Paula Jones. Her sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton—waged, in part, by the Rutherford Institute, a conservative Christian legal group—would ultimately lead to the exposure of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and to his impeachment.
* * *
It took years for Democratic funders to awaken to the need to build an intellectual infrastructure to compete with the one that almost destroyed Clinton’s presidency, and that later helped to put George W. Bush in the White House. In 2003 and 2004, Rob Stein, a prominent figure in Democratic politics, began showing select groups of progressive donors, politicians and activists a PowerPoint presentation that he’d created, “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix,” which laid out the internal workings of the modern right. One slide broke down how much right-wing donors were spending, as of 2002, to maintain their ideological apparatus, including $200 million on think tanks, $46 million on legal advocacy and $11 million on media monitors.
Former New York Times Magazine political reporter Matt Bai devoted a chapter of his 2007 book, The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, to Stein and his “Killer Slide Show.” Bai wrote: “Wealthy contributors on both coasts told me that Rob’s slides had awakened them, at last, to the truth of what was happening in American politics. They stumbled back onto Wall Street or Wilshire Boulevard or the Embarcadero blinking into the sunlight, as if having witnessed a revelation.”
In 2005, Stein organized about 100 of these donors, including George Soros and Peter Lewis, into the Democracy Alliance, a group that agreed to direct money toward building progressive institutions. In its first year, the Democracy Alliance brought $1.75 million in new funding to Media Matters, making up more than a fifth of its budget. (Other recipients included CREW, the Center for American Progress, America Votes and the powerful progressive-voter database Catalist.)
Donors loved Brock’s conversion story, particularly since he’d been inside the machine they hoped to replicate. And Brock, in partnership with fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner—often described as his secret weapon—has turned out to be unparalleled at maintaining rich liberals’ loyalty and support. “The two of them together are probably the most effective major-individual-donor fundraising team ever assembled in the independent-expenditure progressive world,” Stein says.
That wouldn’t matter, however, if Brock couldn’t show his backers that he’s effective. Over the years, Media Matters has won or assisted in a number of tangible victories, from getting Glenn Beck off cable news to holding 60 Minutes accountable for its faulty Benghazi reporting. It obviously hasn’t shut down Fox News, which remains the highest-rated cable network, but Brock is persuasive when he argues that his group has been key in convincing the mainstream media to take Fox News less seriously.
“When we started, the right-wing media were operating with total impunity, and with no consequences or repercussions for anything they said or did,” Brock asserts. “And that’s changed. Not to the extent that we’d like—we’re still working on it—but they don’t get away with what they used to get away with. I think we’ve had success in marginalizing and discrediting a lot of those characters.”
* * *
American Bridge was the natural next step. By means of this group, Brock took the Media Matters method—which involves monitoring virtually every word uttered by the right-wing media—and transferred it to the realm of Republican politicians. “There’s no organization that does the level of tracking and research that we do,” says American Bridge president Brad Woodhouse, who previously served as communications director for the DNC. “The parties don’t do it; the campaigns don’t invest in it. There’s no one that has the ability to pull this type of stuff—video, news archives, our own video archives—as quickly and as cleanly to use in a rapid-response fashion as we do.”
As its archive grows, Woodhouse expects the organization to only become more powerful. “The true testament to this is going to be what our archive looks like five years from now,” he says. Woodhouse is sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the DC Chinatown building that houses American Bridge as well as Media Matters—a floor that, with its high ceilings, exposed pipes and Ping-Pong table, looks more like a tech start-up than a wonky political shop. Gesturing around, he notes: “This whole floor will be nothing but servers at some point, full of all of our tracking footage, all of what we’ve captured from radio interviews, television interviews, both nationally and locally. There won’t be anybody who has that.” As of this year, American Bridge staffers can search the archives by audio, meaning that they needn’t sit through hours of footage to find a particular incriminating name or phrase.
Initially, American Bridge was greeted with skepticism by Democratic insiders and journalists alike. As a devoted Clintonite, Brock had little connection with Obama’s people, who were wary of independent-expenditure groups, as were some of his own donors. “[W]hen Brock went to his donor base and asked, it did not step up,” wrote Jason Zengerle in a 2011 New York magazine profile. “For the first time in his fund-raising career, Brock didn’t have the magic touch. Peter Lewis, for instance, hasn’t given any money…. In the end, Brock was forced to dramatically scale back his plans.”
Reports of American Bridge’s failure, however, turned out to be premature. Shortly after the profile ran, Brock met with Lewis in his New York apartment, and the billionaire agreed to become an American Bridge seed funder. More important, American Bridge would have an enormous impact on the 2012 elections, where it deployed trackers in thirty-three states. One of them was watching the local Missouri television station KTVI when Senate candidate Todd Akin opined about “legitimate rape” being unlikely to result in pregnancy.
Akin’s remark in many ways defined the 2012 election cycle, powering the idea that the GOP was fighting a war on women. As Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, points out, without American Bridge, the remark might not have made any impact at all. Akin’s “bizarre rant,” he says, “would have been a tree falling in the forest—but some nerd from American Bridge saw that. Todd Akin would be a United States senator if it wasn’t for David Brock and his team.”
Begala, like Dean, is an unabashed Brock fan. He’s quick to emphasize that American Bridge’s value isn’t limited to capturing gotcha moments. As an adviser to Priorities USA Action, a major Democratic Super PAC, Begala says of American Bridge: “They produced for us a 950-page book of every business deal of Mitt Romney’s career. We spent something like $65 million [in the 2012 election], and I believe every single ad was in some ways informed by Brock’s research.”
Unfortunately for Democrats, there wasn’t an Akin moment in the 2014 cycle. American Bridge may have been a victim of its own success, as Republicans went to great lengths not to provide Brock and his allies with new fodder. “Little was left to chance: Republican operatives sent fake campaign trackers—interns and staff members brandishing video cameras to record every utterance and move—to trail their own candidates,” The New York Times reported the day after the election. “In media training sessions, candidates were forced to sit through a reel of the most self-destructive moments of 2012, when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock’s comments on rape and pregnancy helped sink the party.”
Ultimately, relentless tracking operations—which Republicans, taking a page from Brock, are now deploying against Democrats—may portend a future in which candidates are even less candid than they are now, and the only viable politicians are those who learn to spout vapid talking points the moment they win their first State Senate race or City Council seat. Yet Brock insists that tracking will remain important. The very structure of American politics, in which Republicans must win over far-right voters in primaries before tacking to the center in general elections, ensures a degree of flip-flopping and dissimulation that Democrats can exploit. “It’s a bit overstated that tracking is only looking for the ‘macaca’ moment,” says Brock, referring to the slur caught on camera that derailed Senator George Allen’s re-election bid in 2006. “Tracking is very, very valuable for when candidates change their positions. It’s a versatile thing.”
With a budget of more than $17 million and some eighty-plus staffers, American Bridge has grown even bigger than Media Matters, which has a staff of just under eighty and a budget of $10 million. In addition to tracking every Republican Senate candidate and plausible presidential contender in 2016, it also has people following twenty-one gubernatorial campaigns and a number of House races. Further, through its “Rising Stars” program, American Bridge is tracking Republicans who aren’t running for major office now, but who might one day go on to national prominence—people like George P. Bush, Jeb Bush’s son and a candidate for Texas land commissioner.
“When somebody who ran for Congress in 2012 runs for president in 2028, we’re going to have an archive full of material,” says American Bridge chief operating officer Jessica Mackler.
* * *
No matter how big his operations get, however, there are still some fundamental ways Brock can never achieve a true analogue of the right-wing network that launched his career. One reason for this—and the reason that most on the left can applaud—is simply that Brock has more integrity than his previous employers. For all the comprehensiveness of his opposition research, Brock no longer traffics in sexual innuendo or character assassination; Begala says he’s never received a single morsel of personal dirt from American Bridge. The ugliness of Brock’s early career, Begala adds, left him with a “marrow-deep aversion to the politics of personal destruction. It’s definitional with David. I’ve been around him a fair amount ever since then, and I’ve never heard him say, ‘Let’s go after John Doe—he beats his dog!’ Nothing like that.”
But if Brock isn’t as ethically unconstrained as his old friends, he’s also not as passionately ideological. In the end, his political journey has taken him roughly back to where he started: he’s a center-left Democrat, uninterested in any sort of radicalism. His final exit from conservatism, after all, happened after he set out to write a book trashing Hillary Clinton and came, instead, to sympathize with her. Since then, he’s been transformed into a fervid Clintonite, and he doesn’t hide the fact that he wants to see her elected president. Brock is interested in fighting the right, not in pushing his own party to the left.
In Blinded by the Right, he recalls how one of Weyrich’s first scalps was the Republican Texas senator John Tower, George H.W. Bush’s nominee for defense secretary, who was distrusted by conservatives as a pro-choice moderate. Testifying before the Senate at Tower’s confirmation hearing, Weyrich said, “I have encountered the nominee in a condition—a lack of sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married.” These rumors ultimately helped sink the nomination, even though Tower wasn’t married to anyone at the time.
It’s nearly impossible to conceive of Brock mounting a similar attack on a Democratic president’s nominee, even in a less slimy way. He has, however, gone after left-wing critics of the Clintons. When Harper’s published the October cover story “Stop Hillary!” by Doug Henwood, a Nation contributing editor, Correct the Record responded with a point-by-point rebuttal of over 9,000 words. Some of it was convincing, some of it—particularly an earnest defense of Clinton’s record on welfare reform—less so. Whatever you make of it, though, it demonstrated that Brock is willing to fight challenges to the Democratic establishment that come from progressives as well as conservatives.
In fact, should there be a contested Democratic primary, Brock won’t swear off using Correct the Record to defend Hillary Clinton from a left-wing challenger. “We don’t know if Hillary Clinton is running; if she does run, we don’t know whether there will be a contested primary; and if there is, we don’t know what that will look like,” he says. “So I’d just say I’m not going to comment on anything that’s hypothetical.”
It was probably inevitable that an intellectual infrastructure funded by rich progressives wouldn’t be radical in the way of one funded by rich reactionaries. Guy Saperstein, a retired Oakland trial lawyer and major liberal donor, quit the Democracy Alliance in 2008 out of frustration with its failure to invest in new, boundary-pushing left-wing ideas. (The same year, he stopped donating to Brock, whom he admires tremendously, because Brock was “so heavily tilted towards Hillary.”) Much of his frustration came from the fact that his fellow funders seemed more committed to electing Democrats than to deep, systemic ideological change.
“You’ve got to give it to the conservatives,” Saperstein says. “They’ve really run circles around our side. They staked out ground very early on, on subjects where the political consensus would have called them crazy. Of course we need a welfare program—it’s crazy that they would go out and attack the welfare system. But, you know, twenty years later, they have Bill Clinton saluting them! They just moved the whole debate, and they’ve done that in so many areas.”
With few exceptions—gay marriage being a big one—deep-pocketed Democratic donors have rarely shown the zeal or the patience to nurture far-reaching ideological change; they tend, ironically, to be more conservative in the small-c sense. Gara LaMarche, who became president of the Democracy Alliance last year, may begin to change this pattern. He has been vocal about the need for donors to support a progressive vision that extends beyond the next election. “In general, progressives have not been audacious enough,” LaMarche says, speaking about his desire to make the Democracy Alliance “not a cheering section for the Democratic Party, but a place where progressives can actually talk about the long term.”
At this point, however, the Democracy Alliance is far from united in a desire to push Democrats leftward. Its membership, according to LaMarche, “includes everyone from people who are very associated with, let’s say, Elizabeth Warren’s view of economics, to people who have worked in the Clinton administration and have more of an identification with the Rubin wing of the party.” (He’s referring to Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs veteran and former director of Citigroup who served as Clinton’s treasury secretary.)
From Brock’s perspective, there is nothing to lament in the fact that liberal donors and institution builders tend to be more moderate than their right-wing counterparts. Members of the conservative establishment can empower right-wing radicals, he says, “because they don’t have any regard for the truth of anything. They have no standards, and they’re very brazen about it. It’s a very different culture on the Democratic/liberal/progressive side.” And it’s within that culture—sensible, nondogmatic and technocratic—that Brock has finally found his place. “I don’t think progressives can abandon their respect for evidence-based conversation and logic, because it’s one of their strengths,” he says. “I don’t think you should throw that away to have a noisier machine.”
Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass,the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.
In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.
This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.
That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand. “Books to go down!” is extinct. So is Book Row, the Fourth Avenue strip that fortified the readers and writers of Greenwich Village. Though there are signs of life in the independent-bookseller business — consider the success of McNally-Jackson — few secondhand-book stores are left in Manhattan. Only two survive in midtown, and the necrology is long. Skyline on West 18th Street, New York Bound Bookshop in Rockefeller Center, the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th — closed. Academy Books is now Academy Records & CDs.
So, then: Why is there still a Strand Book Store?
In large part because of Fred Bass. He’s pretty much the human analogue for the store’s gray column. His father, Ben, founded the Strand around the corner in 1927, and he was born in 1928. Ask him about his childhood, and he recalls going on buying trips on the subway with his father, hauling back bundles of books tied with rope that cut into his hands. (“Along the line, we got some handles.”) Ask him about the 1970s, and he’ll tell you about hiding cash in the store because it was too dangerous to go to the bank after dark. He’s 86, and he still makes buying trips, though mostly not by subway. “Part of my job is going out to look at estates — it’s a treasure hunt.” New York, to him, “is an incredible source — a highly educated group of people in a concentrated area, with universities and Wall Street wealth. The libraries are here.” Printed and bound ore, ready to be mined.
Four days a week, he’s on the main floor, working the book-buying desk in back. Stand there, and you’ll see the full gamut of New York readers. Critics and junior editors, selling recent releases. Academics. Weirdos. “Book scouts,” who pan for first-edition gold at yard sales and on Goodwill shelves. They walk in with heavy shopping bags and leave with a few $20s. Usually fewer than they’d hoped: The Strand rejects a lot, because unsalable books are deadweight. Whatever arrives has to go out quickly. “Our stock isn’t stale,” Bass says. “You come in, and there’ll be new stuff continually.” Slow sellers are culled, then marked down, then moved to the bargain racks outside, then finally sold in bulk for stage sets and the like.
Secondhand books have to be judged individually as they come in, a process that requires time and experience. (A couple of buyers have been on the job upwards of 40 years.) Though it takes less experience than it once did: Arriving books now have their UPCs scanned, and the database “gives us information where it used to be guesswork,” says Bass. “The guesswork was so great then, I filled up an 11,000-square-foot warehouse with unsold books.” He pauses, deadpan. “Using my expertise.”
All of this suggests that the Strand is a used-book store. It isn’t, not exactly. Over the past decade or so, new books have come to represent about 40 percent of sales. They constitute, Bass explains, a more predictable business: “New books, we can sell 50, 100, 200 copies of. I make less money, but it’s a little bit more scientific. The used-book business, we have a bigger market — of course, we have to carry a bigger inventory.”
Those new books are also profitable because of a source almost unique to the Strand: broke editorial assistants. When the Strand buys their review copies, it pays about a quarter of the cover price, sometimes less. They’re indistinguishable from new, and the Strand sells most of them as such. (When Bass buys from wholesalers, he generally pays about 40 percent of list.) Publishers hate this gray market but accept it; one book publicist I know cringes when she sees her press releases peeking out of copies at the store. Bass shrugs: “I tell them it’s the cost of doing business.”
If the old used-book Strand is built around Fred Bass, the new Strand is a joint production with his daughter, Nancy Bass Wyden. She started working here three decades ago as a teenager, and the family has done well since: Fred lives in Trump World Tower, and Nancy married a senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon. (She is charming with me, although a few bloggers say that she’s not so patient with her employees.) You get the sense that she’s trying to leave the core of the business intact while branching out beyond East 12th Street.
For example, at Fifth Avenue near 21st Street, there’s a satellite Strand built into a Club Monaco. It’s spotless, selling mostly new books plus some expensive first editions. “Not a home run,” Fred says, “but it’s working.” Adds Nancy, “We now have this expanded customer base — people who are Club Monaco shoppers who may not have been to the Strand before.”
The Basses have also tapped into New York’s great subsidizing resource: the global rich. If you’ve bought $15 million worth of living space on Park Avenue, it probably has a library, so what’s another $80,000 to fill those shelves? Make a call to the Strand with a few suggestions — “sports, business, art” — and a truckful of well-chosen, excellent-condition books will arrive. (Fred recalls that when Ron Perelman bought his estate on the East End from the late artist Alfonso Ossorio, the Strand had just cleared out Ossorio’s library; Perelman ordered a new selection of books, refilling the shelves.) In more than a few cases, the buyers request not subject matter but color. In the Hamptons, a wall of white books on a few favored topics is a popular order, cheerfully fulfilled.
Nancy has also grasped that the Strand’s future can be bolstered by selling things besides books. Fifteen percent of the store’s revenue now comes from merch: T-shirts, postcards, notebooks, superhero action figures (they’re near the graphic novels), and especially those canvas tote bags, produced in dozens of variations. The success of the tchotchke business is, she says, one way in which book shopping has changed. Whereas individuals used to come in and root around for hours, today’s buyers shop faster and in a targeted way, often in groups. More tourists come than ever, and books about New York are piled up by the front for them. The store also has a big event space, and the wine flows regularly: launch parties, signings, a book-swapping mixer created in partnership with OkCupid. Bookstore visits are “a social thing,” Nancy explains as we walk past a wall of T-shirts. She points to one that displays a John Waters quote: “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t f**k em.” She chuckles: “My father hates that one.”
Are there existential threats to the Strand? There are. E-books, which require no retail space, have cut into best-seller sales. The Strand has pushed back with remaindered hardcovers, placed by the front door under a sign reading LOWER-PRICED THAN E-BOOKS.
There’s also the Strand’s relationship with its unionized employees, who were organized by the UAW back in the ’70s. They just signed a new contract this past month. Mostly, the labor-management situation seems equable; still, every few years, when contract time comes, someone writes a news story about strife. “The union demands something up here,” says Fred, gesturing, “and we’re down here … There’s always going to be conflict.” In general, the union is quite aware that the Strand is not Google, and the Basses are perfectly aware that relative harmony benefits the business. In October, a pro-union staffer named Greg Farrell published a graphic-novel-style book critical of both management and the union’s representatives. Oddly, he still works at the store. More oddly, the Strand sells the book.
Internet used-book sales, too, would seem to be a long-term concern. When you visit Amazon or AbeBooks (which is owned by Amazon) and search for an out-of-print title, your results are usually listed from cheapest to most expensive. The first “store” on the list often turns out to be a barn full of books in rural Minnesota or Vermont. Some are charity stores, selling donated books—no acquisition costs at all. They certainly aren’t paying Manhattan overhead. Yet here, too, the Strand is holding on, owing mostly to that churning turnover and the quality of its stock. That barn isn’t going to have many of last year’s $75 art books for $40, and the Strand always does. Plus there are the only–in–New York surprises that come through the store’s front door. Opening a box can reveal a Warhol monograph that will sell for more than $1,000, or an editor’s library full of warm inscriptions from authors.
If that’s the future, could the Strand wind up virtual? Surely operating out of one of those barns would be cheaper. “Not with our formula,” says Bass firmly. “We need the store. This business requires a lot of cash flow to operate,” and much of it comes in with the tourists. That funds the book-buying, which supplies the next cycle of inventory.
Which requires this expensive retail space, and the renovation of 2003 did not just come from a desire to spiff up. It happened because of a specific event, one that probably saved the Strand: In 1996, after four decades of renting, the Basses bought the building. “Frankly,” Fred says, “for a while, I thought, This isn’t going to work anymore.” He’d always negotiated the lease renewal with his landlord at the nearby Knickerbocker Bar & Grill — they once had to reconstruct their deal the next day, after knocking back one too many — and a bookstore would not have been able to hang on to 44,000 square feet for much longer. It took Bass two years to hammer out a price, but once he became his own tenant, he paid rent at a significant discount. “When I want to negotiate my own lease,” he jokes, “I have to go to the bar myself.” He’s got leverage in those talks, because the store occupies four floors out of 12, and rent from the others flows back into the business. Warehoused books, once upstairs, are now in much cheaper space across the East River.
There is only one true long-term threat to the Strand, and it comes from within. Bass, whose entire life has revolved around this business, loves bookselling. It appears that Nancy does, too. The store makes money, if not a crazy amount, and the family has good reasons to keep it going. But the Strand is, when you get down to it, a real-estate business, fronted by a bookstore subsidized by its own below-market lease and the office tenants upstairs. The ground floor of 828 Broadway is worth more as a Trader Joe’s than it is selling Tom Wolfe. When a business continues to exist mostly because its owners like it, the next generation has to like it just as much. Otherwise they’ll cash out. If Nancy stays, the Strand stays. If her kids do, too, it stays longer. Simple as that.
*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
The three actors will share a love scene in the new film about a homosexual man turned Christian fundamentalist
James Franco will portray a gay magazine publisher turned Christian fundamentalist in his next film, but don’t think it’s all fire and brimstone: audiences can expect a threesome from Franco’s character’s pre-conversion days, an individual with knowledge of the production told TheWrap.
In the upcoming “Michael,” Gus Van Sant protege and director Justin Kelly shot a love scene with a party of three: Franco, Zachary Quinto and “The Leftovers” star Charlie Carver.
Franco and Quinto play Michael and Ben, a young couple fond of bedding party boys like Carver’s character Tyler. All three actors will flash some backside nudity for the film, a production insider said.
“It’s a very artistic film, though,” said the individual. Isn’t it always?
“They first meet in a club. The music is pumping. It’s the eighties!” another individual told E!, who first reported the news . “When Charlie’s character questions Franco about having a boyfriend, Franco says, ‘He’d like you, too.’”
While the film has its carnal diversions, its’ not without substance: “Michael” was adapted from a 2011 New York Times article about Michael Glatze, who identified as gay before declaring himself healed by a “spiritual awakening.”
The film also stars Carver’s “Leftovers” castmate Chris Zylka and Franco’s “Palo Alto” co-star Emma Roberts.
11/24/2014 The Hollywood Reporter by Lacey Rose, Michael O’Connell
“This season is going to go down in history,” bemoans one rep as the ratio of hits to flops shrinks and audiences ignore new shows in favor of more “urgent” dramas
‘The Millers’
CBS’ decision to call it quits on a struggling comedy came as little surprise. But word of the network canceling sophomore The Millers on Nov. 14 had many in the industry wondering if there had been a mistake: CBS meant low-rated newcomer The McCarthys, right?
Millers stars Will Arnett and Sean Hayes were similarly surprised, having spent several hours earlier that day doling out interviews about the show to international press. But the unconventional decision to cancel a comedy four episodes into its second season was no mistake. After being moved out from behind juggernaut The Big Bang Theory, the CBS TV Studios-owned show’s ratings had plummeted 33 percent — and the syndication prospects slid with them. “Middling shows owned by a vertically oriented studio/network are not going to last,” says one top agent. “If you don’t think there’s a syndication sale after four years, why produce 22 [episodes for four seasons]?”
The retreat is as much a commentary on the larger comedy genre, which has failed to produce a monster breakout hit since Modern Family in 2009 and is 10 weeks into a particularly dismal season. Of this year’s new broadcast crop, four of the nine series that have premiered already have been canceled, with two of the remaining entries, Fox’s John Mulaney vehicle Mulaney and ABC’s Cristela (starring Cristela Alonzo), each hovering around a 1 rating in the 18-to-49 demographic. A recent airing of NBC’s A to Z, which was canceled but is burning off its final episodes, generated a 0.6 rating — unheard of for prime time. And prospects look equally grim for midseason, causing at least one network to rethink its choices. (NBC preemptively killed Mission Control and traded the Tina Fey-produced Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was all but destined to be niche, to Netflix before its premiere.)
Studio and network executives surveyed suggest they are still determined to find the next comedy hit, but each acknowledges that the genre’s current dry spell is keeping them up at night. “It’s a state of emergency,” notes one exec, with another top rep adding: “This season is going to go down in history.”
Among the genre’s biggest challenges is its innate lack of urgency, the driving force behind hit serialized dramas (see Scandal) and competition reality shows. That dilemma is prompting top execs to ask: How do you make comedy feel like a must-see event? “Broadcast comedies aren’t considered appointment TV,” notes Sam Armando of media-buying firm SMGx, adding: “Viewers aren’t setting their DVRs or searching comedies out on VOD the way that they do for their drama counterparts, [so] you don’t see the same bump.”
Other obstacles, say insiders, include a dearth of onscreen talent, a heap of derivative offerings and myriad low-commitment distractions for viewers that range from YouTube to Funny or Die. Many execs bemoan the lack of established comedy writers, too, with the current landscape offering few consistent training grounds outside of Chuck Lorre‘s CBS hits and ABC’s Modern Family, where writers are known to pay their dues. Still more complain about the niche appeal of even the most critically favored series, and the fact that the vast majority of comedy writers are drawn to the narrower, if sexier, single-camera format despite what often are middling results. (Take Fox’s The Mindy Project, which is averaging a 1.6 rating even counting a full week of DVR playback. It’s a sign of the times that Fox ordered six more episodes Nov. 14, a move that would have been inconceivable five years ago.)
Looking ahead to the 2015-16 season, one potential solution being considered at the networks is a harder lean on those multicamera offerings. What the format lacks in prestige, it makes up for in cost-savings (as much as $1 million per episode), live ratings (proof: The Big Bang Theory) and international and syndication sales. Other execs note an increased focus on proven titles, star vehicles and experimental ideas like NBC’s live comedy project from Hayes that has the potential to get noticed. Family-centric projects also are on the rise thanks to fall’s lone comedy standout, ABC’s Black-ish, which benefitted from a strong point of view and word of mouth, plus a plum lead-in from Modern Family. What likely won’t be heavy in the mix are female-skewing romantic comedies, with 2014 bets — A to Z and ABC’s Manhattan Love Story and Selfie — among the first series pulled.
“The comedy business is not going away,” notes ABC Studios executive vp Patrick Moran, adding, “And the person who can figure out how to reinvent the multicam comedy will be in a very good position this year.”
When the FX biker drama “Sons of Anarchy” kicked off the Nov. 11 episode with a montage of sex scenes involving its main characters, Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, was less than amused. “In order to watch cable news, ESPN, Disney or the History Channel, every family in America must now also pay for pornography on FX,” Winter groused in a statement. “If history is our guide,” he added, “we should expect a host of other basic cable networks to air similar — or even more explicit — content in the name of ‘staying competitive.’ ”
Sadly for Winter and his constituents, it is not just basic cable that is dropping trou and getting busy. Broadcast television has joined the competition, and together they’re transforming viewers’ experience of sex on TV. What once passed for edgy, “adult” content on television was a woman on top of a man, her breasts strategically bared and everything else improbably concealed by well-draped sheets. But as Showtime President David Nevins put it earlier this year: “Just having sex on television is not so amazing anymore. So you have to have something interesting to say about it and something interesting to explore.”
And so shows have gotten more adventurous in their depictions of dating sex, married sex, adulterous sex, straight sex, gay sex. Television isn’t just showing a lot of it — it’s being a lot smarter about it, with series and scenes that talk in direct and revelatory ways about intimacy, relationships and power.
Start with the portraits of sex and dating in “The Mindy Project,” the Fox sitcom from longtime comedy writer Mindy Kaling, and “Looking,” HBO’s sexually frank drama about young gay men in San Francisco, created by Michael Lannan.
In the third season of “The Mindy Project,” Mindy Lahiri (Kaling) and her doctor colleague Danny Castellano (Chris Messina) have settled into a serious relationship. Their commitment means that the show has room to watch them get to know each other in a new way, which for Mindy includes taking Danny’s mother (Rhea Pearlman) on a terrifying swimsuit-shopping trip.
It also means that they worry about a sexual slump. And in the Oct. 7 episode “I Slipped,” Danny tries a position that takes Mindy by surprise. “Wait. Danny. Danny! That doesn’t go there! Oh my God, Danny!” Mindy says, panicked, in an off-screen scene. “I slipped!” Danny insists.
Mindy is skeptical, and she is right to be. Her bragging about her sexual experience had convinced Danny that she was more adventurous than she really was, and he figured she would go for it. “He thought it was something I had done thousands of times, like jaywalking or lying under oath,” Mindy confesses to her co-worker, Peter Prentice (Adam Pally). “. . . I know that I talk this big talk, but really, I’m a prude. A prude that slays dudes like, whoa.”
“The Mindy Project” may not have been able to show Mindy and Danny in bed or to name the act in question. Instead, the show had Dr. Prentice give Mindy hilarious sex lessons with the office skeleton, the perfect tool to elicit her revulsion and nerves. And even with limits on what they could say, Danny and Mindy still found a way to talk about their sexual anxieties — especially after Mindy gave herself a date-rape drug in an effort to be more receptive to Danny’s advances.
In HBO’s “Looking,” free of the restrictions of broadcast television, the characters can do and say almost anything to one another — but that doesn’t mean they are communicating clearly or honestly with each other.
During the first season, Patrick (Jonathan Groff), an anxious video-game designer, begins dating Richie (Raúl Castillo), a working-class hairdresser. During the Feb. 16 episode “Looking for the Future,” Patrick calls in sick to work so he and Richie can spend the day together talking about everything, including Patrick’s sexual discomfort zone. After Patrick turns down a sexual request from Richie, he tries to explain that he is not sure of his own desires. “I’m not sure I’m into it. It feels kind of weird,” he confesses. “Pretty much as soon as it’s in, I’m like, take it out, take it out, take it out, take it out.”
Richie diagnoses Patrick with shame and discomfort. And after they break up, pulled apart by race and class, it seems he might have been right. But Patrick, who has had a season-long flirtation with his boss, Kevin (Russell Tovey), finally sleeps with him. And with a partner who he feels is his match in race and education, Patrick is quick to set aside the concerns he used to turn down Richie.
But what Patrick sees as emotional intimacy, Kevin just sees as a fling: Later, Kevin goes back to his partner. Patrick realizes that being physical was no guarantee of an emotional bond, and that being honest with Richie might have been the riskier but more rewarding path.
TV shows are also becoming bolder and better about exploring the complications and possibilities of the marriage bed. Indeed, in one of the relationships in the time-traveling period drama “Outlander,” sex does not even start until marriage. Nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) is reuniting with her husband, Frank (Tobias Menzies), after World War II, a second honeymoon that includes a vigorous sexual awakening for both, when she is transported back to the 18th century.
There she meets a young Scotsman named Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), whom she eventually marries so she can gain protection from a vicious British officer. The idea of an experienced woman breaking in a younger, grateful man is a well-worn trope at this point — from “The Graduate” to “American Pie” — but as Jamie says on their wedding night: “I said I was a virgin, not a monk. If I need guidance, I’ll ask.” The sexual relationship instantly becomes more complicated than the stereotype: The episode that follows acknowledges Claire’s fear, grief and lust (Jamie would be hard to resist in any century) as well as her new husband’s nerves. They spend the night talking about their lives, drinking whiskey and slowly exploring each other’s bodies, their focus shifting from marital duty to physical pleasure. Jamie may know the basic mechanics of sex, but the idea that Claire might enjoy herself is foreign to him, as is the notion that making her feel good would be satisfying for him. Six episodes of foreplay before the wedding night makes sex better for everyone — perhaps for those watching at home, too.
Even couples deep into marriage have sex lives that grow and change. And “The Americans,” an FX series about a honey-trapping pair of Cold War-era KGB spies who live in the Washington suburbs with their two children, offers one of the most piercing and tender explorations of marital sex anywhere on television.
Two scenes in the show’s second season stand out. In one, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Phillip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) are engaged in simultaneous oral sex when their teenage daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), walks in on them. For Paige, it is a shocking introduction to the idea that her parents are sensual beings who very much desire each other. And for Elizabeth and Phillip, whose marriage has shifted from an arrangement brokered by their KGB handlers to a late-blooming love match, the way Paige casually walks through their bedroom door is a low-stakes but unsettling reminder of how vulnerable their secret identities are.
While Phillip and Elizabeth are sexually experienced, they are novices in navigating the connection between their bodies and their hearts. Phillip, using a false identity, has pursued a relationship and even entered into a not-quite-legal marriage with Martha (Alison Wright), a secretary for the FBI office that is hunting KGB agents in America. Elizabeth, who poses as his sister as part of the ruse, visits Martha in her apartment and ends up getting an earful about how her husband performs in his alternate marriage. Back home, a curious Elizabeth asks Phillip to treat her like he does Martha.
The request turns out to be a terrible mistake. Elizabeth is a rape survivor, and Phillp’s rough handling of her recalls her assault. Her bid to prove that she is just as game as Martha, and to make sure she gets everything in her real marriage that Martha gets in her fake one, ends with Elizabeth twisted into herself, crying. As a couple, the Jenningses learn that Elizabeth has limits she was not aware of.
A similar scene unfolds in the first episode of “The Affair,” Showtime’s drama about an adulterous liaison. Noah (Dominic West), a struggling novelist, is struck by Alison (Ruth Wilson), a waitress at a Hamptons diner, when she serves his family. And when he later sees her bent over the hood of a truck by her husband, Cole (Joshua Jackson), he is not sure what is happening. Is Alison being raped? Sexually humiliated?
Viewers find out in the second half of the pilot that Alison, grieving the loss of her son, initiated that sex with Cole in an attempt to shock herself back into feeling. When Noah later learns that the sex was consensual, he insists to Alison that married people do not behave that way. Alison has to remind him that marriage is a public institution that means radically different things to everyone who enters into it — and viewers are reminded that what outsiders see as obvious rarely reflects the internal logic of a marriage.
On-screen, that public institution has long been open to gay couples. But broadcast television has been so squeamish about gay sexuality that ABC’s “Modern Family” practically had to invent a phobia to explain why the show’s gay spouses barely touch each other. That has changed dramatically this season, at least on Thursday nights on ABC, where superstar executive Shonda Rhimes has broken racial and sexual barriers to what broadcast television can show and tell.
On Rhimes’s “Scandal,” heterosexual couples and gay ones are equally entitled to their jollies. But “How to Get Away With Murder,” a creation of Rhimes’s protege Pete Nowalk, goes further. It may be a broadcast show, but it gives “Looking” competition in discussing the mechanics of gay sex. And it leans into stereotypes of gay men as manipulative sexual predators, only to resolve them in unexpected ways.
The steamiest character, an amoral law student named Connor Walsh (Jack Falahee), is not just promiscuous, he is conniving. Part of a study group working for law professor Annalise Keating (Viola Davis), Connor uses his prodigious seduction skills to help dig up helpful information for Annalise’s cases. But over the first half of this first season, Connor experiences the consequences of his purely instrumental sexuality. One of his early marks is Oliver (Conrad Ricamora), a sweet computer geek who turned into more than a one-night stand. But when Oliver overhears another man’s taped testimony regarding Connor’s talented tongue, Oliver dumps him, leaving Connor unexpectedly heartbroken. The problem is not that Connor is having a lot of sex, as scolds of another age might caution, but that he wants both the emotional security of monogamy and the freedom of single life. Little surprise that “How to Get Away With Murder” has become a cult hit at some New York gay bars.
Television is in the midst of a sexual revolution, one that feels enormously different from the adolescent rush so many shows — think “Entourage” or even “The Sopranos” — seemed to get from depicting sex, often with scenes that were little more than showing marginal female characters in various stages of nudity. Now, even the most lascivious characters on series dedicated to shocking cannot help but find their hearts and their minds, not just their bodies, engaged in the action.
Whether the tender vulnerabilities of dating, the mysteries of marriage or the conviction that sex can just be a tool, the subjects being addressed make for more interesting — and more genuinely sexy — programming. If the Parents Television Council frets that smart, explicit television is the future, I say, let’s get it on.
11/21/2014 The Hollywood Report by Lesley Goldberg
Broadcast networks aim for “proven commodities” to get back on top in a challenged market
After getting off to a late start, which TV industry insiders attribute to a growing crush of competition for original series and, to a lesser extent, a changing of the guard at Fox, the broadcast networks’ traditional buying season has stretched well into November. But what are the five networks buying? And why does so much of it look familiar? Here are five key takeaways from the 2014 development season thus far.
1. It’s all about the IP
After last year’s onslaught of comic book adaptations, the broadcast nets are betting big on recognizable film and TV titles. Big andHitch at Fox, Uncle Buck at ABC, Marley & Me at NBC, Rush Hourat CBS and The Illusionist at The CW are just a few reboots the networks hope will cut through the clutter. “In a risk-averse environment, for any of these networks, it’s a proven commodity,” says Amblin co-president Justin Falvey, who’s behind Fox’s Minority Report. Other execs see the recent remake wave as an alternative to packaging projects with talent attached, hoping the presold concept can be enough of a hook. Warns 20th Century Fox TV’s president of creative affairs Jonathan Davis, “It’s exciting to have a name, but you have to make sure there’s a series in there.”
2. A big multicam push
Multicamera shows are making their annual appearance, only this time insiders think the trend will carry through to series orders, particularly with so many pricey single-camera entries like Fox’s The Mindy Project struggling in the ratings. “There are new writers interested in playing in that form — and they can be successful,” says Universal TV executive vp Bela Bajaria. The trend has studios optimistic because multicam sitcoms can cost up to $1 million less per episode and have a history of generating big syndication money in a way that single-cam entries do not. Also hot on the half-hour front are family comedies and diverse families (thank you, ABC’s Black-ish), more semi-autobiographical fare a la ABC’s The Goldbergs and anything with a female point of view. Not on that list: romantic comedies, a genre that came and (quickly) went with the canceled Manhattan Love Story (ABC), Selfie (ABC) and A to Z (NBC).
3. Drama writers go MIA
“This is the first time we’ve seen comedy wrap before drama, and that’s largely a symptom of the lack of available writers,” says ABC Studios executive vp Patrick Moran of his buying season. Indeed, with myriad hourlong entries across cable and streaming outlets, fewer proven writers are free to pitch. And given network TV’s creative confines and lengthier seasons, fewer top talents want to develop for broadcast. Add to that the slim chance of scoring a second season, smaller back-ends and what can be low-level script fees. “[Broadcast has] far bigger budgets than cable, but they are constantly buying $150,000 scripts,” bemoans a top agent, noting that those deals are similar to those of cable nets. “For the first time this year, we saw clients pitching at Amazon, FX, NBC and Fox simultaneously and going to cable or digital if the money was the same.”
4. More doctors in the house
Insiders say there’s a real appetite for fresh takes on the doctor genre (evidence: Jason Katims‘ Silicon Valley medical drama for CBS) as nets want to replicate how ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder has provided a new twist on the legal hour. “People see Grey’s Anatomy doing well but also see that it’s long in the tooth — and they all see a potential space there,” says Sony Pictures Television drama head Suzanne Patmore Gibbs. The steady success of Dick Wolf‘s Chicago Fire franchise has helped the procedural make a comeback, too. Also hot: the usual crop of cop and FBI shows, and a dependence on tried-and-true procedurals over heavily serialized soaps. “I don’t see a lot of genre buys,” adds Paradigm’s literary co-head Debbee Klein, “Even The CW has a mandate to buy more grounded shows.”
5. Big names, big demand
With top TV writers in short supply, proven multitaskers — and marketable names — like Howard Gordon (Homeland), Greg Berlanti (Arrow) and Bill Lawrence (Undateable) are in even higher demand. Gordon and Berlanti have set up four projects each (including a POTUS drama at Fox and a Supergirl entry at CBS, respectively), while Lawrence has five (including Rush Hour). Joining them on the network lists are a host of midrange feature writers eager to make a shift to TV as opportunities dwindle in today’s tentpole-heavy film business. “There’s comfort in original storytelling that doesn’t exist in film,” notes another agent, “and there’s a creative paradigm shift where people are excited for TV.”
Development Season’s Overachievers
Aaron Kaplan (15 plus)
Peter Chernin & Katherine Pope’s Chernin Television (10)
Will Gluck & Richie Schwartz’s Olive Bridge Productions (9)
Eva Longoria’s Unbelievable Entertainment (8)
Peter Traugott & Rachel Kaplan’s TBD Productions (8)
Greg Garcia’s Amigos de Garcia (7)
Jamie Tarses (7)
Mark Gordon Co. (7)
Amblin Television (6)
Max Winkler & Jake Johnson’s Walcott (6)
Mandeville’s David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, Laurie Zaks (6)
Jerry Bruckheimer Television (6)
Bill Lawrence & Jeff Ingold’s Doozer Productions (5)
Will Packer Productions (5)
Howard Gordon’s Teakwood Lane (4)
Greg Berlanti* (4)
John Glenn (4)
Jason Winer’s Small Dog Picture Co. (4)
John Wells Productions (4)
Timberman-Beverly (4)
Intrigue’s Tariq Jalil (4)
Shonda Rhimes & Betsy Beers’ Shondaland (3)
Carol Mendelsohn (3)
Dan Fogelman (3)
Chris Morgan Productions (3)
Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s Lord Miller (3)
Ruben Fleischer Productions (3)
Neal Moritz and Vivian Cannon’s Original Film (3)
Julie Anne Robinson’s Canny Lads Productions (3)
Neal Baer (3)
Pete Huyck and Alex Gregory (3)
Fake Empire (3)
Scott Silveri (3)
Working Title Television (3)
Justin Halpern & Patrick Schumacker (2)
Tagline (2)
Hoodlum (2)
* Behind CBS’ Supergirl, which with its series commitment, ranks as the season’s biggest bet
This story first appeared in the Nov. 28 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
It’s a Thursday at Tastemade’s studio and she’s got about 45 minutes’ worth of work to do before cameras can roll on her weekly cooking show, The Healthy Voyager, and she’s decorating the standard set with her own autumnal touches. I follow her as she grabs a cart and heads to the prep kitchen, grabbing basics like oil and salt, plus small bowls and plates to dress her set. Filming can take a brisk 30 minutes or less on a single episode, but that’s thanks to all the hard work Scott-Hamilton has to put in before they call action.
“I always bring all my own props because so many people use these sets,” Scott-Hamilton explains. “I make it a little different. I’m a holiday freak, so for the holiday ones, I have everything. For the other stuff, my signature stuff is my compost bin and towels and and flowers that match that. I pull out all the ingredients I need and measure them. I don’t show all the chopping; it’s boring to watch. And it makes it easier to film if everything’s pre-set.”
Food content is a major driver in the YouTube space, according to a Google research study. Subscriptions to food channels grew 280 percent in 2014. Half of all adults who consume YouTube content consume food content, and millennial consumers engage with 30 percent more foodie content than any other demographic. Those views translate to purchases in the food space, with 68 percent of moms buying items featured on the YouTube videos they view. Food even made the cut when YouTube decided to market their own stars in this year’s splashy ad campaign, with Rosanna Pansino’s “Nerdy Nummies” taking the spotlight alongside Michelle Phan and Bethany Mota.
But for the bulk of that scene, the YouTube DIY crowd, a cooking show is not all Martha Stewart glamour. There isn’t an endless stream of assistants to help pre-frost cupcakes or measure out ingredients. Often there’s barely even a second take.
“I figure out my menu a month in advance,” Scott-Hamilton says. “We shoot two days in a row per month, and I knock out a ton at once. I usually do three or four [episodes] each day. A month beforehand, I figure out what I’m going to cook so I know the timing, and if I can get any sponsorships, they have time to send me the stuff. The week of the shoot, I do all the shopping or pre-prep. I’m doing cornbread stuffing today, so I made the stuffing at home so we don’t have to wait around 60 minutes while it bakes. There’s some trickery for sure, but it’s all my recipes.”
For the YouTube DIY crowd, a cooking show is not all Martha Stewart glamour.
Scott-Hamilton has the advantage of being a part of Tastemade, a two-year-old multichannel network focused on the food demographic on YouTube. Tastemade provides her a set at its Santa Monica stage to film her segments each month, and the Tastemade team works with her on branding deals, as they do for hundreds of other food-based video creators around the world.
“Our tagline has always been, ‘Connect the world through food,’” Tastemade Head of Production Jay Holzer told The Kernel. “We wanted to be a global social version of a cooking company. There’s three components to us: There’s the studio portion of our business. We’re a creator of award-winning programming—we won a James Beard award for one of our shows. We’re also a multichannel network. We have people across the globe we work with… all these creators we work with who fall under the Tastemade umbrella. We’re similar to the other MCNs in the operational bits, but we’re different in that we’re vertically focused. We’re definitely focused on quality over quantity.”
Tastemade’s third component is an app aimed at helping home cooks and video hopefuls make the leap to filming their own shows. It allows users to make a one-minute food show from their mobile device; it takes away some of the pressure if you’re just using the HD camera everyone has in their pocket, Holzer reasons.
“Video is intimidating,” Holzer says. “That’s why we made the Tastemade app. We wanted to make the process of creating high-quality video in the food space as easy as taking pictures. In the same way Instagram set out to make you a better photographer, the Tastemade app should make you a better filmmaker.”
Food programming is more than just pointing and shooting, however. Food is notoriously tricky to shoot well, and Tastemade’s value to the DIY chef is the company’s years of expertise helping creators work in their medium.
“Food’s unique in that it is challenging to make it look good on camera, and it’s got logistical challenges to film,” explained Holzer. “There are great food shows that shoot in their home and have embraced the DIY aspect. There’s definitely people who do it purely from a DIY standpoint, but it takes a lot of practice and a lot of knowhow just in terms of how you work with food from a production standpoint. We have a full prep kitchen. If you’re doing it yourself, at home you don’t have those luxuries; you’re shooting in the same kitchen where you make dinner for your family.”
“In the same way Instagram set out to make you a better photographer, the Tastemade app should make you a better filmmaker.” —Tastemade Head of Production Jay Holzer
Scott-Hamilton says having Tastemade behind her has made certain aspects of her career much easier, although she’s still “chief cook and bottle washer” of her whole enterprise.
“I got lucky that I live local and can use this set, because my kitchen sucks,” she laughs. “[The set] lends itself to a professionalism that I wouldn’t have at home.”
Scott-Hamilton suggests aspiring food show hosts focus on finding their niche and emphasizing what makes them stand out from the rest of the food world. For Scott-Hamilton, that’s a focus on vegan cooking. The food part of her digital empire grew out her traveling and often being unable to find suitable vegan options around the world.
“I started with my travel show in ’06, and that came out of necessity,” she explained. “I’ve been vegan since ’98, and I’ve been figuring out menus and doing funky stuff. I figured I must not be the only person who suffers when they travel. I started pitching it around as a show, and everyone loved it, but it was way too early in the game of healthy travel. So I started on my own, in the infancy of YouTube.”
The YouTube show has since taken on a life of its own. She often has special guests on her shows, like Sleepy Hollow’s Orlando Jones during her Halloween episode. Scott-Hamilton no longer works as a private chef, which gives her more time to focus on the travel and food shows. She’s also shied away from mainstream established routes to cooking fame, like popular television competition shows.
“They’re not very kind to vegans,” she said. “They make vegans look bad. I don’t want to be subject to that. I’ve been asked to judge some shows; I’ll do that, no problem. If I were a regular chef I totally would, but I think they want to purposely make vegans look bad.”
With her own show, she can control the discourse and really showcase vegan cooking for an audience that cares. But with that control comes a lot of responsibility that falls squarely on Scott-Hamilton’s shoulders. After she finishes her prep and does a costume and makeup change, her three-person crew, plus her husband, finish setting up sound and cameras for the first episode. Back on set, Scott-Hamilton poses as her director leaps up on the countertop and coordinates all the cameras to roll at once, including an overhead rig to get her ingredient action.
Without a teleprompter, Scott-Hamilton nails her lines in a single take, even doing an extra for variety, but once the ingredients for her vegan cornbread stuffing get poured in the pot, there’s no turning back. Scott-Hamilton doesn’t have the time or budget for extra versions of the prep, so every take counts. Those kinds of issues would be alleviated in a television production, and Scott-Hamilton admits that she’s working toward a food career that goes beyond YouTube.
“It’s a one-woman show, and it’s tough. But if you want something done, you can’t wait for it to happen; you just gotta keep plugging away.” —Carolyn Scott-Hamilton
“That’s the end game for sure,” Scott-Hamilton says. “I do a lot of TV already, I do the Today Show and Ricki Lake Show. [My YouTube channel] is building the brand. I love doing the show, but it would be nice to walk in and [see] everything is done. It’s a one-woman show, and it’s tough. But if you want something done, you can’t wait for it to happen; you just gotta keep plugging away.”
Holzer says he thinks the changing world of digital in the past few years has shifted many YouTube chef’s priorities to a digital focus.
“The content landscape is dramatically changing,” Holzer explains. “You can build as successful of a business online as you can in the traditional avenues. Of course we have people who start a YouTube cooking show because they want a TV cooking show, but we have just as many if not more who start a YouTube cooking show because there’s an amazing business that can be made building a brand around an online show.”
Some YouTubers have already cashed in on mainstream fame. The guys behind Epic Meal Time made the jump to TV this year with Epic Meal Empire on the FYI Network. YouTube has also attracted seasoned chefs who want to expand their domains and find a more personal touch, since the space offers a kind of flexibility you don’t find with a television show. For example, heavyweight Jamie Oliver has begun focusing on his digital presence, even partnering with YouTube’s drunk sweetheart Hannah Hart on videos.
“You can connect with audience in a way that you can’t when you have a 30-minute television show,” Holzer says. “The line between the two will continue blur as more players get into the over-the-top distribution game, when you start to see what you think of as online media next to traditional media on the same devices. The line is going to blur enough that digital is going to be just as attractive if not more attractive than traditional.”
In the meantime, DIY chefs are continuing to cook up content for their dedicated followers.
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