Waitress Is One of Many New Writers With Big Book Deals
10/31/2014 The New York Times By ALEXANDRA ALTER
Stephanie Danler, who has worked at the Union Square Cafe and Buvette, has a six-figure deal for her first novel, “Sweetbitter.”
In his more than 30 years in publishing, Peter Gethers, a senior vice president and editor at large at Penguin Random House, has gotten used to strangers’ foisting manuscripts on him at inopportune moments. The unsolicited novels are rarely any good, and almost never worth publishing.
So Mr. Gethers’s expectations were modest when a young waitress who works at Buvette, a cozy French restaurant in the West Village where he is a regular, told him she’d just completed her novel — about a young, adrift waitress working at an upscale New York restaurant. As it happens, she was the second waitress at Buvette who let it slip to Mr. Gethers that she was working on a novel.
Mr. Gethers delivered his usual polite deflecting line: Have your agent send it to me.
“The book came in, and within 10 pages, I was going, ‘Oh, my God, this woman is an extraordinary talent,’ ” Mr. Gethers said. “One doesn’t see a lot of first novels like this, or any novels like this.”
The unlikely way the book came to him has the whiff of an urban legend, and will probably further stir the creative ambitions of artistically inclined servers around the city. “It never happens this way,” he said.
But the restaurant connection proved oddly fitting. The novel, “Sweetbitter,” by Stephanie Danler, centers on a recent transplant to New York who gets a job at a fancy restaurant near Union Square. (It is unnamed, but Manhattan foodies will recognize it as the Union Square Cafe, where Ms. Danler worked for a year after moving to the city.) The young woman, Tess, gets tangled up in a sort of love triangle with co-workers, and falls under the spell of a more experienced server named Simone.
Mr. Gethers mentioned the novel to a colleague who acquires books, Claudia Herr. She had already heard about the novel from Melissa Flashman, Ms. Danler’s literary agent. The manuscript came in just before the Frankfurt Book Fair — when the entire publishing industry goes into a book-buying frenzy — and editors were tearing through submissions. “All of us were reading 60 things at once,” Ms. Herr said. But “Sweetbitter” jumped out at her.
Days later, in early October, Ms. Herr acquired the book for Alfred A. Knopf in a pre-emptive high-six-figure, two-book deal.
Ms. Danler’s deal is the latest in a string of splashy book contracts for debut novelists, a sign that publishers are once again willing to make big bets on unknown writers, after years of waning book advances. Random House recently paid $2 million for three books by a 25-year-old debut novelist, Emma Cline. And a few weeks ago, the first-time novelist Imbolo Mbue sold her book, “The Longings of Jende Jonga,” about a West African immigrant who works as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers executive, to Random House for seven figures.
High advances often lead to bigger marketing budgets and more publicity for a book, but they also carry the burden of heightened expectations and pressure to sell well.
“Sweetbitter” is both a coming-of-age and coming-to-New York story, and a novel about the seductive pleasures of food and wine. The story unfolds inside the glamorous, cutthroat and sometimes seedy world of elite Manhattan restaurants. Ms. Danler, 30, who is from Seal Beach, Calif., and went to Kenyon College in Ohio, moved to New York in 2006.
Since then, she has cycled through several restaurant jobs, including stints at two Spanish restaurants in Chelsea. She earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the New School, where she studied with Helen Schulman and Jonathan Dee and worked on “Sweetbitter.” She finished writing the novel this summer. Knopf plans to release it in 2016.
“The way she writes about food, you can actually taste it,” Mr. Gethers said.
He said he’s now looking forward to reading the novel by the other Buvette waitress. “She hasn’t finished it yet,” he said. “I’ve been promised it by the end of November.”
Hollywood Media Bridge has just been infused with a $25 million equity investment from Canadian entrepreneur Jonathan Kitzen and his Kajanga Syndicate, which are increasing their investment in the HMB fund founded by Phillip Goldfine. Hollywood Media Bridge has produced 15 films in the past two years, including the Academy Award-winning documentary short The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life. Kitzen invested in that documentary and was its co-producer.
“I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and although he’s not producing $100M blockbusters, from our perspective, Phil consistently makes money on his projects” Kitzen said in an interview with Deadline. “This gives us access to Hollywood, and Phil has a track record of actually making money on his films. We’re giving them a line of credit of $25M, and they can to tap into it on a per-project basis. There is a 24-month term, and the condition on it is that in that term he will return the principal. By giving them the capital, it allows them to move more quickly. We are then able to access those films for our visual space as we are looking at other entrepreneurial opportunities to capitalize on our investment.” Kitzen, who has interests in camera technology, property and forestry, added that Hollywood Media Bridge has a real business model “not a hit-and-hope strategy that I normally see presented to me.”
Hollywood Media Bridge is developing and producing feature films and documentaries as well as television projects.
The deal was structured by Nicholas Reed, the former ICM agent who was a producer on Lady In Number 6 and owns Shareability, a full-service YouTube-only marketing company that was responsible for the Spider-man Parkour viral campaign for Sony.
“Jonathan is a visionary entrepreneur with great insights into the changing technology and distribution platforms of the media business and by definition of his business success is a natural teller of stories,” said Goldfine, formerly a production exec with New Line Cinema and Trimark Pictures. “It’s great to have a strategic investor that brings more than just money.”
10/30/2014 The Hollywood Reporter by Etan Vlessing
The $100 million joint venture will make mobile, web and TV content for worldwide distribution
Vice Media founder Shane Smith returned to his native Canada on Thursday to unveil a $100 million partnership with media giant Rogers Communications.
The tie-up will see Rogers and Vice jointly build a new production studio in Toronto to make Canadian-focused mobile, web and TV content in Toronto for domestic and worldwide distribution. The partners will also launch a new 24-hour Vice Media TV channel in Canada.
Smith told a Toronto press conference of his early roots with Vice, beginning 20 years ago with a punk magazine in Montreal, before explaining why he had returned to Canada after a worldwide expansion to tie up with Roger and its TV, mobile and online pipes.
“This year we return to the homeland, all our hard lessons learned, to build from scratch a completely horizontally and vertically integrated ultra-modern media entity,” said Smith. That calls for a local studio where Vice can produce next-generation digital content, with an ability to make feature films.
“This is the most ambitious project we’ve ever done,” he added. Smith said Vice had grown online, but mobile represented its future.
He is also back working with Rogers Communications CEO Guy Laurence, with whom he six years ago made mobile phone content when Laurence was with Vodafone U.K. “We were ahead of the game, he was ahead of the game. We got there too quick,” said Laurence.
Smith said he was partnering with Rogers because it had the broadcast, mobile and online assets Vice needed to exploit the cross-platform potential of making convergent broadcast and over-the-top content at the same time.
“This is the future,” he argued, pointing to making mobile, online, TV and over-the-top content all at once. “We will be under the microscope here, and all the majors will watch because these are all the questions that every major has and they can’t figure it out,” Smith said.
“If it works here, it will be replicated not just by us, but everyone,” he added when asked whether Vice will expand elsewhere internationally with its new Canadian production model.
Throughout my professional life, I’ve tried to maintain a basic level of privacy. I come from humble roots, and I don’t seek to draw attention to myself. Apple is already one of the most closely watched companies in the world, and I like keeping the focus on our products and the incredible things our customers achieve with them.
At the same time, I believe deeply in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” I often challenge myself with that question, and I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today.
For years, I’ve been open with many people about my sexual orientation. Plenty of colleagues at Apple know I’m gay, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the way they treat me. Of course, I’ve had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people’s differences. Not everyone is so lucky.
While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.
Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.
The world has changed so much since I was a kid. America is moving toward marriage equality, and the public figures who have bravely come out have helped change perceptions and made our culture more tolerant. Still, there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay, or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies. Countless people, particularly kids, face fear and abuse every day because of their sexual orientation.
I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
I’ll admit that this wasn’t an easy choice. Privacy remains important to me, and I’d like to hold on to a small amount of it. I’ve made Apple my life’s work, and I will continue to spend virtually all of my waking time focused on being the best CEO I can be. That’s what our employees deserve—and our customers, developers, shareholders, and supplier partners deserve it, too. Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality, race, or gender. I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things. I hope that people will respect my desire to focus on the things I’m best suited for and the work that brings me joy.
The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California. And we spoke up in Arizona when that state’s legislature passed a discriminatory bill targeting the gay community. We’ll continue to fight for our values, and I believe that any CEO of this incredible company, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, would do the same. And I will personally continue to advocate for equality for all people until my toes point up.
When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.
The Gay-Straight Alliance at Norwood High School in Norwood, Ohio, is a small but tight-knit bunch. Amira Bauer-Hutsell, a senior at the school, is president of the group that meets once a week to discusses everything from school gossip to current events. For one transgender member who has no support at home, it is the only place to open up and vent.
“It kind of just gives people in the LGBT community somewhere to go, where they can talk and not feel judged,” said Bauer-Hutsell.
The GSA has become an in-house LGBT family, she said, where upperclassmen look out for younger students and even the principal gets schooled once in a while on LGBT etiquette.
“I taught him that ‘queer’ wasn’t a dirty word,” said Bauer-Hutsell.
The club has also slowly opened up the rest of the student body to the gay and transgender community. Joann Payne is a social worker who has worked in the district for 14 years and helped create Norwood’s GSA. She saw the club’s tangible effects last year, when two boys were seen holding hands on the front steps of the school.
Payne recalls a fellow teacher coming up to her to say, “Before GSA, that could never have happened without a whole lot of ridicule.”
Norwood is just one school in the Cincinnati area that’s taking concerted measures to improve LGBT inclusivity on campus. Supportive staff, strict anti-bullying policies, on-campus gay-straight alliances, and LGBT-inclusive curricula are key steps to reducing homophobia and harassment at schools, according to a report released last week by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network.
The biennial survey looks at the conditions for LGBT students across the country. The year’s questionnaire was conducted online, with nearly 8,000 students from all 50 states answering questions about how they were treated at school. The study shows some marked improvements for LGBT students overall, from lower rates of verbal and physical harassment based on their sexual orientation to the decline of the common campus phrase “That’s so gay.”
But 55 percent of students still reported feeling unsafe because of their sexual orientation, and 71 percent said they heard “gay” used in a negative way on campus.
“Progress is being made in our nation’s schools,” said Dr. Eliza Byard, GLSEN’s executive director. “But when more than half of LGBT youth continue to report unsafe or even dangerous school climates, we all have a responsibility to act.”
In 2011, Ohio schools were deemed “not safe” for most LGBT secondary school students, and nine in 10 students reported hearing slurs such as “fag” or “dyke,” according to GLSEN. School liaisons like Shawn Jeffers are trying to change that. Jeffers is the lead trainer for GLSEN Cincinnati; he visits area schools and helps teach students and staff how to create more inclusive environments.
Ohio is the perpetual swing state in every election, said Jeffers, a mixed bag of far-right- and far-left-leaning communities, making it an interesting case study when it comes to LGBT students. When he began visiting schools a few years ago the mere mention of the word “gay” or “lesbian” in GLSEN’s name made teachers uncomfortable, he said. They’d often have to get his visit cleared by an equally uncomfortable school principal, as administrators were hesitant to invite LGBT discussion onto campus in fear of angry parent phone calls or threatened job security.
“I think schools by their nature tend to be risk averse,” said Jeffers.
But things reached a tipping point. In 2009 and 2010, there was a dramatic rise in teen suicides across the country, said Jeffers, often by kids who were out or assumed to be LGBT.
There was Seth Walsh, a gay California teen who couldn’t take the relentless bullying by his classmates and hanged himself in his backyard. There was Asher Brown, a 13-year-old Texan who was taunted at school and then shot himself after he came out. These are just to name two.
School administrators were forced to start addressing LGBT issues on campus, said Jeffers, and in Ohio, much of this support came from the top down. The state passed a law requiring all schools to enact anti-bullying policies, and then in 2012, an additional law was passed requiring a cyber-bullying policy be created as well.
Although these measures are now fairly common in states across the country, the Cincinnati Public Schools Board of Education took things one step further in 2013. It voted to add language to its anti-bullying policy that explicitly protected students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Only 10 percent of students reported attending a school having a policy like Cincinnati’s, according to the GLSEN report; those that did were less likely to hear homophobic slurs on campus and more likely to have staff intervene when those remarks were made.
So although national progress is slow, it is being made. Its success will rely on administrators making LGBT inclusivity part of the school culture, said Jeffers, and putting the needs of the students first, no matter what their personal beliefs.
As was the case at Norwood High, when the Gay-Straight Alliance was formed about six years ago.
“Our principal was supportive and forthcoming that this was an issue that’s a little bit out of his comfort zone,” said Joann Payne. “But he welcomed the group into the school.”
Jack Antonoff, best known as the lead guitarist for crowd-pleasing indierock band Fun., and — we’ll say it — as the boyfriend of Lena Dunham, is honest to a fault about his personal style.
“I have a very Jewish face,” he says, “so I can get away with almost borderline Nazi looks, like army pants and stuff like that… I grew up in the ’90s; I like big sweaters, grays, fleece. All those things came together to look like a weird Jewish military person.”
Fashion aside, Antonoff doesn’t have much in common with a marine — except, possibly, for his to-the-minute time management, a necessity given his schedule lately. The evening before our shoot, he was backstage at Saturday Night Live, supporting Dunham in her debut as host. The day before that he’d Instagrammed a pic of them on a double date with President Barack Obama and the first lady. Two days after SNL, he was in Dallas, then Austin, to play his new solo project’s first-ever shows at South by Southwest.
That project, Bleachers, exhibits traces of nearly every irrepressibly catchy, stylish pop-rock act of the past 30 years, from John Hughes–soundtrack types like The Cure and Cutting Crew to modern stadium-fillers like the Killers. Just don’t call it a side project. “I didn’t do Bleachers because of Fun.,” he explains. “I did it because I wanted to make my own albums.”
It’s understandable that he’s concerned about the comparison. Just a year ago, Fun. won Best New Artist and Song of the Year at the Grammys, following the success of their Queen-y power ballad “We Are Young,” which catapulted to number one on the Billboard charts following a Glee cover and a high-profile placement in a Chevy ad that premiered during the 2012 Super Bowl. All of which is a lot to live up to. But with Bleachers, Antonoff insists, “It was never like, ‘OK, fantastic, now I’m going to do the opposite.’ It doesn’t sound reactionary or apologetic. It all just fits.”
Of course, there have been upsides to Fun.’s success: When making the Bleachers album, Antonoff had an impressive roster of consultants on hand. They included Vince Clarke of Erasure and Depeche Mode, who helped produce the LP, as well as Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and Taylor Swift, both of whom provided feedback throughout the writing and recording process. “I need them to be extremely critical and I need straightforward opinions,” Antonoff says.
You get the feeling he really means it. Bleachers’s first single, “I Want to Get Better,” couldn’t be more straightforward and candid. And it’s a handy mantra considering Antonoff’s extracurricular activity of choice: The Ally Coalition, a sort of grown-up gay-straight alliance he founded in 2012 with his band and his sister, fashion designer Rachel Antonoff, to support LGBT rights. He’s keenly aware that his involvement might come off like straightsplaining, and quickly addresses it.
“There’s a weird line,” he says. “You want to help, but I wouldn’t want to be in the position where, during this massive moment in civil rights, anyone felt like there were too many straight people talking for them.”
His main goal, instead, is properly allocating resources and funds. In practice, this has meant everything from donating a cut of Fun.’s ticket sales to marriage equality organizations to working with high school GSAs. The Ally Coalition has lately directed its efforts toward raising $250,000 to build a community health hub for the Ruth Ellis Center, which provides shelter and services to homeless LGBT youth in Detroit.
Neither of Antonoff’s high schools had a gay-straight alliance. He recalls being bullied at public high school in New Jersey: “I grew up in a time where if you had blue hair, you were gay. Every- thing different was just ‘gay,’ in a very bigoted way.” Transferring to the Professional Children’s School, a performing arts school in Manhattan, was a sea change. “I was one of two straight boys in my entire class — it couldn’t have been a more opposite scenario,” he says. “I feel like it saved my life, in a way.”
For Antonoff, a project like the Ally Coalition is a no-brainer. “Unless you are a white male who’s had the most privileged existence of all time and never had anyone make fun of you — which I can’t really imagine is anyone besides, I don’t know, fucking Rick Santorum — you’ll be able to give a shit about what’s going on.”
Rebecca Eisenberg, an editor for the viral website Upworthy, works from the back of her Jersey City apartment, surrounded by Star Trek posters, felt Muppet versions of herself and her boyfriend (he’s a schoolteacher), and a cat named Bones with an unerring instinct to hop on the desk during work-related videoconferences, nuzzling his head at Eisenberg and, by extension, pointing his anus directly at the camera lens. This happens often, because working for Upworthy involves a lot of videoconferencing. One of Eisenberg’s computer monitors has a rotating background of comedy heroines (Tina Fey, Lisa Simpson, the cast of Pitch Perfect); the other has her colleagues popping up from other apartments around the country (some next to unmade beds, some with toddlers trying to open the doors of the rooms they’re in, others from immaculate, Apartment Therapy–looking pads) to discuss some bit of information they’ve found—a video about bigotry or sexism, an infographic about beauty standards, an inspiring quote, a startling statistic, an interesting ad campaign, an illuminating clip from a TED talk—and the best strategies for getting millions upon millions of people to look at it. This is what Upworthy does: It finds stuff on the internet, identifies it as somehow meaningful or socially redeeming, adds a killer headline and a trace of description, and then gets lots and lots and lots of people to look at it.
It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to hate without feeling like a churl, villain, or snob. The site’s mission is to “draw massive amounts of attention to the topics that really matter,” which is almost tautologically hard to argue with. The things they collect can get fluffy, smarmy, or manipulative, but there’s no denying the amount of it that becomes Gangnam-style viral-smash material, leading millions of Americans to spend a few extra moments pondering meaningful societal issues; I mean, are you against millions of Americans pondering meaningful societal issues? One of the site’s founders says the most exciting thing about its success is that “people would laugh if you said, ‘This 13-minute video from the point of view of a black kid getting stopped and frisked is going viral.’ ” Hear this, and you do worry there would have to be something seriously gangrenous happening in your heart to account for any suspicions you harbored.
Left: Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser.
This hasn’t stopped anyone from resenting Upworthy. It’s one of the fastest-growing media sites in internet history; in its two years of existence, it’s bent the fabric of the web to make itself chillingly ubiquitous, a level of success that presents as a cultural sore spot. The site is jealously, relentlessly obsessed over by everyone else fighting for online traffic, and it’s disdained or distrusted by a solid percentage of the human beings who are constantly offered links to its content. It publishes both some of the web’s most successful material and some of its most widely mocked and reviled. Some are allergic to the site’s tone (cloying?), its substance (pandering?), or the machine-tooled headlines it uses to lure visitors, many of which read like the taglines for terrible movies that nevertheless make you cry (“The Things This 4-Year-Old Is Doing Are Cute. The Reason He’s Doing Them Is Heartbreaking”). Some associate Upworthy with the same terminal uncoolness that descended on Facebook when grandparents signed up; some insist that “the topics that really matter” can only be tackled with hard noses and daunting complexity, not (as Awl co-founder Choire Sicha once put it) “feel-good weepers”; some just enjoy the way any given tweet can be turned into a solid Upworthy dis by adding “You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.” And some simply note how quickly the site’s amassed web-breaking amounts of traffic—up to a high of 88 million unique visitors in a single month last fall—and assume, based on all prior experience with viral content that drives staggering amounts of traffic, that the people behind the stuff must be the most craven, cynical content-mongers in a field already plenty crowded with them.
The site’s founders, Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley, are, in fact, mellow, affable guys with half-beards and pleasant demeanors; they’re both married, in their 30s, and possibly the only people I’ve ever interviewed who seemed worried I might think I was cooler than they are. They have well-worn and convincing responses to all but one of the complaints above. Upworthy’s tone, they say, is what gets the job done, and if it grates, you’re probably too old. (Younger audiences are “more sincere.”) The content’s designed to “reach people where they’re at,” building from points of agreement rather than points of contention. (“You don’t want to be that guy in your Facebook feed going, ‘These ReTHUGlicans out there …’ ”) Emotional narratives are the most effective way for human beings to process information, even in a culture that denigrates feelings as “feminine” and irrational. Coolness is about standing apart, whereas Upworthy’s mission is to reach a broad mass of Americans. (Pariser, last year: “I’m not going to pay too much attention to some snarky New Yorkers who see [our headlines] too many times.”) But that last assumption—that they’re mere cynics—irks them, especially if you happen to bring it up after having spent time with Upworthy staffers. When I mention it, in the shared Manhattan workspace that constitutes Upworthy’s only real “office,” Pariser looks sort of thoughtfully wounded; Koechley looks indignant and asks: “Have you met anyone cynical here?”
Upworthy’s leadership team at a strategy meeting in Brooklyn in January.
I have not. There was one meeting where somebody was trying to figure out how to promote a video of orcas being hunted, and Adam Mordecai, one of the site’s star curators, asked if there was any chance they were feminist orcas—but that was pretty funny, in context. I’ve watched the staff hold long debates about what kind of content is truly “upworthy,” a word they use far more often as an adjective than a noun; I’ve met a woman who told me, “I don’t own a TV,” without even a trace of whatever knowingness normally halos that statement; and I’ve seen people collectively lip-sync “Bohemian Rhapsody” over video chat. No cynicism, though. It’s been a lot closer to Koechley’s description of the company as “the most earnest, do-gooder, touchy-feely group of 40 people that you’ve ever met in the world.”
Still, it doesn’t matter either way. Upworthy takes that old binary—earnest versus cynical, fair versus manipulative, righteous versus self-interested—and twists it into meaninglessness, from the mission statement on down. It turns out that if your noble goal is to “draw massive amounts of attention to the topics that really matter,” then the success of that mission (i.e., driving eyes toward meaningful content) and the short-term success of your company (i.e., attracting visitors to your for-profit, investment-backed website) are precisely identical. It’s the ultimate in “social entrepreneurship”—the good of the company and the good of mankind are, allegedly, the exact same thing. And not that the founders will say this explicitly, but there’s even some ambient implication that if this situation nags at you, you might on some level be more critical of getting the masses to think seriously about important issues than you are of a web-media status quo that on certain days seems to be 90 percent rage-bait essays and side-boob slideshows. Which would make you the cynic, nitpicker, hypocrite, or elitist.
Whereas the founders, says Pariser, are “ultimately kind of Sorkin-esque idealists in the role of the media in society.”
“But early Sorkin,” says Koechley. “West Wing Sorkin, not Newsroom Sorkin.”
“We see Upworthy as confirmation that the potential to have a broadly well-informed public still exists,” says Pariser. “And underestimating that, or writing people off because hey, reality TV gets great ratings—when you haven’t actually tried the experiment of making important stuff as compelling as reality TV—is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Much of Upworthy’s content does feel like reality TV. A lot of it also feels like advertising. This isn’t an accident; the site’s built, tactically and deliberately, to appeal to what skeptics once called the lowest common denominator. Its choices are the ones you’d normally associate with a race to the bottom—the manipulative techniques of ads, tabloids, direct-mail fund-raising, local TV news (“Think This Common Household Object Won’t Kill Your Children? You’d Be Wrong”). It’s just that Upworthy assumes the existence of a “lowest common denominator” that consists of a human craving for righteousness, or at least the satisfaction that comes from watching someone we disagree with get their rhetorical comeuppance. They’ve harnessed craven techniques in the service of unobjectionable goals—“evergreen standards like ‘Human rights are a good thing’ and ‘Children should be taken care of’ ”—on the logic that “good” things deserve ads as potent as the “bad” ones have. “I think marketing in a traditional sense, for commercialism—marketing to get you to buy McDonald’s or something—is crass,” says Sara Critchfield, the site’s editorial director. “But marketing to get people’s attention onto really important topics is a noble pursuit. So you take something that in one context is very crass and you put it in another. People will say, ‘That’s very crass,’ but in the service of doing something good for humanity, I think it’s pretty great.” This happens often when you ask questions about Upworthy: It turns out that whatever you were curious about is actually wonderful, because it’s ultimately in the service of the good of humankind. Would you need to be a black-hearted monster to feel that there must be a catch? Or that one will arrive next month, when Upworthy is slated to announce its long-awaited monetization strategy? (Over the past year, the site has run content sponsored by Skype and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on an experimental basis.)
“There are tons of media outlets,” says Koechley, “that end the process when they think they’ve done something good. They think it’s beneath them to try and get people to see it.”
“I worked on a literary magazine in college,” says Pariser, “that was read literally only by the people who did the college literary magazine. Ever since then, that’s what I’ve wanted to avoid. And I think there’s a lot of that happening in the media world.”
There are two main factoids that illuminate Upworthy’s place in the online universe, and both have to do with Facebook. (One of the social network’s co-founders, Chris Hughes, was actually an early Upworthy investor.) Factoid one: At some point in the site’s still-brief existence, someone found a statistic indicating that 52 percent of Americans on Facebook “liked” or had a friend who “liked” Upworthy’s page; now, according to the company, it’s more like 78 percent. Factoid two: Those people share Upworthy posts at a rate that positively dwarfs the competition; according to a chart that made the rounds in December, it’s nearly eight times the rate of the next comparable site. The core audience may not be the biggest, but it can be relied on to echo links to everybody it knows. As Eisenberg tells me, “You’re not preaching to the choir. You’re preaching to the choir’s friends.”
We could here descend a deep analytical rabbit hole concerning a bunch of questions media people and analysts are forever debating—why do people share things? Does it mean they care more? Do the people they share with care?—but I will give you, based on my reading, the layperson’s upshot. The first answer is that nobody really knows—although Tony Haile, CEO of the analytics company Chartbeat, did recently say that available data shows no link between how much a piece of content is shared and how much time the average person spends with it before closing her browser tab. The second answer is that, even if nobody really knows, some people nevertheless worry that Pariser and Koechley know better than they do.
Read about Upworthy, and amid all the wonky discussion of traffic metrics, Facebook algorithms, and testing tools, you detect a collar-tugging fear that these guys have, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, seen into the drizzle of numbers that hides behind virality and are now able to bend it to their will. Toward the start of the year, there was much happy crowing when a change in Facebook’s news feed appeared to have decimated Upworthy’s traffic—palpable glee at the thought of Upworthy as a naked dethroned emperor—but the apparent drop was just the comedown from a huge spike in November; zoom out a bit, and you still see steady growth. (The company line is that Facebook’s news-feed algorithm is like the weather: It’s always changing, so you dress appropriately and go about your business. Besides, they’re now dropping traffic as a main metric and focusing on “attention minutes,” the amount of time people spend actually watching stuff.) The unsettling thing about all this stats-talk is the way it assumes all “content” is equivalent, an interchangeable widget Pariser and Koechley are better at distributing than the competition; you see precious little talk about what makes Upworthy’s relationship with the web different from, say, BuzzFeed’s. Nevertheless, it’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to think about. Upworthy really is constructed from the ground up to make sure its content spreads far and wide. Even phrasing it like that feels backward: On some level the site was built from the start to figure out why things spread far and wide, then operate accordingly.
The founders first met through the world of viral videos “back before YouTube, when that meant QuickTime and AVIs.” Pariser’s background was in nonprofits and organizing; Koechley’s was partly in comedy, including time as managing editor of The Onion. Both, interestingly, grew up with educators—Koechley’s parents started a Waldorf school in rural Wisconsin, and Pariser’s ran an alternative high school in Maine. They wound up working together at MoveOn.org, where, during the 2008 presidential campaign, they made a video that got 23 million views. “There’s something about sharing and how ideas spread that we’re both really interested in,” says Koechley. “And then Eli got all big-thinky about the structure of algorithms on the internet”—Pariser wrote a book, The Filter Bubble, about how personalizing algorithms shield people from outside points of view—“so we argued about that for a while. And then we were like, let’s pick something to do.” Critchfield, the editorial director—tall, sharp, confident, and friendly, a firm handshake of a person—answered an ad they placed for interns. When I meet with her at the massive Clinton Hill loft the company booked on Airbnb to house employees during a New York conference, she tells me that before Upworthy she’d studied graphic design, co-founded an intellectual-property research firm, and worked on international development. “When you’re in D.C.,” she says, “you’re talking to legislators, and they’re like, ‘It would be great to feed hungry children in Africa, but we don’t hear about that from our constituents.’ And I wondered how we get from not hearing about it to hearing about it.”
Upworthy isn’t really these people’s vision; it’s merely the best answer they’ve found to that question. Even core aspects of what the site does—like the way it curates and aggregates content produced by other people—turn out to be answers to that question: Koechley tells me they chose curation because it “increases the learning curve.” (You can post and analyze dozens of videos in the time it’d take to create one.) When he and Pariser describe their original idea for the site, you get the sense it was something snappier, funnier, edgier, maybe more overtly political. But this wasn’t the answer: Any kind of edge or stridency is a no-no for shareability.
Critchfield lived in Cleveland when she started with Upworthy and says she worked “from the perspective of a Clevelander. I was completely unexposed to New York media, so I wasn’t thinking anything like that. I would just go to the 7-Eleven and be like, Hey, what’s in the news, what are you thinking about? And whatever that person said to me, I would go home and write about.” The media reference is a running theme: She and Pariser and Koechley all talk about the world of “New York media” with a kind of arm’s-length amusement, casting it as an insular elite that struggles to connect with most Americans. “Being in New York,” says Koechley, “and living about where you’d expect us to live in Brooklyn, there’s a mind-set and a clubbiness that we try to aim wider than.” They find it strange that journalists obsess over Twitter when “it’s not where people are.” (Facebook is.) At one point I suggest to them that Upworthy works because it is, for lack of a better word, “uncool,” something I assume they’ll take as a compliment. Both founders make slightly pained faces in response. “For a long time,” Critchfield tells me, “we were describing our site persona as ‘the cool kid at the party.’ And eventually we started calling ourselves out on that. Are we really? I think we wanted to be a little more Daily Show when we started, and wound up being more … Upworthy. Mothers think we’re cool. People who do charity work think we’re cool. People in D.C. tend to think we’re a lot cooler than people in New York.”
Something funny happens, though, when you track the decisions Upworthy’s made in order to differentiate itself from the rest of what they call “medialand.” They emphasize quality, not quantity, taking their time to cull content down to the most potent material. (“Nobody was desperate for a media site that offers a faster stream of content.”) They stress videos, visuals, narratives, and emotional experiences. They aim to drive the topics the internet’s discussing on a given day, not latch onto them. They care about fostering deep engagement with their brand as a one-stop provider of substantive experiences. Their target audience is the whole broad mass of Americans. Sure, they may be wary of online media’s usual suspects, but what they’re creating is not some bold next step beyond the Huffington Posts of the world; it’s a step back to the broadcast values of older media. What they’ve come up with is a lot like old-school general-interest programming, a sort of web-based cross between 60 Minutes and Reader’s Digest and a very socially responsible TV morning show.
And they’ve developed an entire data-driven system to get this done—a system, and a far-flung network of contributors to operate it. (The founders are tickled to have one curator in a town called Brooklyn, Michigan, “on a farm that got Wi-Fi,” and in one meeting someone jokes that when climate change leaves New York underwater, Upworthy will be uniquely situated to take over the media world.) Curators like Eisenberg trawl the web for “seeds”—content to feature on the site—and develop them into “nuggets.” A nugget is, for the most part, a list of 25 potential headlines, developed in a kind of high-octane one-person brainstorming session. Then comes “click testing.” Curators load potential headlines and thumbnail images into a testing system, which shows each option to a small sample of the site’s visitors, tracking their actions—did they click it, did they share it? The system used to return detailed numerical feedback on each option, but it was decided that hard numbers overinfluenced the curators; now it tags options with things like “bestish” and “very likely worse.” There’s fact-checking and copyediting and internal discussion involved—nuggets take days to actually wind up on the site—but the process itself, as played out in bedrooms and kitchens and back offices across the country, is surprisingly simple: Find something. Ask yourself, “If a million people see this, will it make the world a better place?” (“If we can’t say yes to that,” says Koechley, “then we’re not going to post it”; many things on the site suggest a loose interpretation of this rule, but he says they’re working to keep raising the bar.) Keep writing headlines, and keep testing them until the results are maximally explosive.
Watching a curator crank out headlines is a bizarre experience, insofar as it’s almost indistinguishable from watching people toss out parodies of Upworthy headline styles—either way, the mind runs immediately to stock phrases like “you’ll never believe,” “you’d be wrong,” or “everything wrong with [topic] in one [piece of content].” This does not bother Critchfield at all. “I’m not making a fashion statement here,” she says. “I’m trying to get shit done. We could hit the next big thing in testing tomorrow, and then completely reorient and change.”
The advent of click testing seems to have been a pivotal development for touchy-feely Upworthy, with each staffer developing his or her own balance of hard data and intuition. (Critchfield likes to dismantle this binary by talking about “emotional data,” arguing that a gut feeling is every bit as meaningful as hard numbers.) The foremost data-lover might be Mordecai, a former actor and Howard Dean organizer—he likes to credit his audience-riling for enabling that memorable Dean “scream”—who beams into video meetings from Denver, and seems equally loved and head-shakingly tolerated by his colleagues, like a grumpy uncle whose tics everyone’s learned to enjoy. Eisenberg tells me with some happiness that Mordecai didn’t have a single “hit” until click testing came along; now he’s the staff’s biggest advocate of using data to optimize content, testing dozens upon dozens of headline variations until one succeeds. “The guy’s brilliant,” says Critchfield. “But because he’s so brilliant, his ideas are, like”—she mimes a scatter with her hands. “And the data channeled his energy in a really powerful way. He was like: I could do this, or this, or this. And the data was like: Do that one.”
He and other Upworthy staffers keep cycling through Eisenberg’s screen. They convene for “lunchtime karaoke,” dominated by a highly put-together redhead named Melissa Gilkey, who’s previously auditioned for American Idol (the experience was disappointing) and plans on trying The Voice next. (One guy explains his lack of participation by introducing the Russian idiom for tone deafness: “A bear stepped on one’s ear.”) Then comes the “nugget race,” in which a set of curators all try to create as many complete nuggets as they can within an hour. Eisenberg works on an infographic that recommends some of the great books of the current century—the greater-good logic allegedly being that school curricula are stuck on the classics and not responsive to new literature. She starts firing off headline options: “If you liked Reading Rainbow as a kid, you’ll love this flowchart as an adult.” “Do you think the only good books are old books? You’d be wrong.” “The best books of the 21st century—take that, Dickens!” One of the first things she told me when I arrived at her apartment was “I have ADD,” which was meant to explain why she doesn’t drink coffee but could just as easily go under “special skills” on her résumé: At one point she’s writing in two separate documents, checking email, video-chatting with other nugget-racers, text-chatting with someone else, and ordering a pizza on GrubHub, more or less simultaneously, and is still the person to notice and call five minutes left in the race.
As the curators work, they discuss thumbnail pictures in great detail—when to split between two different images, when it helps to tilt one way or another, whether there’s any real difference between pictures of different whales. Headlines are discussed more in theory than in detail. One curator shares the tip of trying to express the core point of the content in four words. Mordecai gives it a shot: “Racism bad. Eat kale.” Then he lets everyone in on his newest data discovery, which is that descriptive headlines—ones that tell you exactly what the content is—are starting to win out over Upworthy’s signature “curiosity gap” headlines, which tease you by withholding details. (“She Has a Horrifying Story to Tell. Except It Isn’t Actually True. Except It Actually Is True.”) How then, someone asks, have they been getting away with teasing headlines for so long? “Because people weren’t used to it,” says Mordecai. “Now everybody does it, and they do cartoon versions of ours.” (CNN, for instance, recently ended a tweet about a child-murder story with a ghoulish “the reason why will shock you.”) There’s general delight about Upworthy leading the curve. “It’s like everyone’s watching whales on a boat,” says one curator. “And we’re the ones going, they’re all on this side!”
Photographs by Amy Lombard
*This article appeared in the March 24, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
As Hazy Mills hits its 10-year anniversary, the duo — friends since college — reflect on their diverse stable of hits, the occasional miss and why they’re ready to go to space (well, sort of)
This story first appeared in the Oct. 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Sean Hayes and Todd Milliner formed Hazy Mills a decade ago, they were in markedly different places in their respective entertainment careers. Emmy-winning actor Hayes, now 44, was co-starring on NBC’s long-running comedy Will & Grace, while Milliner, now 45, was teaching at Chicago’s sketch comedy theater Second City. Today, their company — its name was inspired by combining their last names and the old mills that dotted their home state of Illinois — has built an impressively diverse roster of programming that includes NBC’s hit horror-crime drama Grimm; TV Land’s recently syndicated sitcom Hot in Cleveland; NBC’s competition show Hollywood Game Night (for which host Jane Lynch recently scored an Emmy) and NBC’s upcoming live comedy Hospitality, about life inside a Manhattan hotel.
“We definitely both ‘visualized’ success,” says Milliner on a sunny October morning at Hazy Mills’ new offices on the Universal lot. “But there were a lot of valleys in between where it was hard to really see the success because this a business that punches you in the balls.” Hayes, who juggles acting on the CBS comedy The Millers with producing, says passion has been a key component to their surviving television’s most volatile decade in recent memory. “We don’t stop until we get what we want — in the most respectful way,” says Hayes.
Here, the friends and producing partners reveal why comedy always matters (even in drama), what they learned from the failure of Sean Saves the World and what genres they want to tackle next.
How has your working relationship evolved over the years?
TODD MILLINER When I met Sean, I was loaning him my Blockbuster card, and now I give him the password to my Netflix account.
SEAN HAYES Ten years ago, we didn’t know the ropes of the business. We were equal that way. (To Milliner.) You were learning the business, I was learning how to work together.
Milliner Our relationship’s weathered everything.
What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from each other?
HAYES I’ve learned a lot of patience. I’ve learned approach — it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. I have a more abrasive approach sometimes.
MILLINER I learned to act more quickly. What makes our business successful is the combination of the conflicting styles we have, where he wants to act and I want to slow down. Now I’ll take more risk and he’ll [take the time to] measure whatever that [project] might produce a little more seriously.
The projects that you back are measured by your passion for them. Have you refined that approach?
HAYES Everything we do has to have some comedy in it. Even Grimm (which returned Oct. 24), where in the most horrific moment, there will be a funny line from [actor] Silas [Weir Mitchell].
MILLINER We started by having a simple mission statement: only producing what we would want to watch. We were lucky that we had a confluence of things, where doors weren’t shut to us; we sold Grimm, Hot in Cleveland and Hollywood Game Night around the same time. Now the thing that people want to paint us into is a “celebrity monster comedy that has gay overtones.” (Laughter.)
HAYES No one can do it alone! Todd runs the company, and we have many employees. It’s a machine we built with love and care.
MILLINER It helps when you love what you’re doing. Persistence
and passion — that’s a great tagline for someone’s company.
What’s the farthest you’ve gone to get a project on the air?
HAYES It was a one-hour drama series based on the life of Billy Joel. I said, “Let’s call him. If he says no, then he says no.” He said yes, we sold the project to Showtime and it ended up being a pilot. The next thing you know, we’re in New York eating with Billy Joel. You don’t know a result until you actually go out and seek it. I don’t mind noes, they just point me in a different direction.
MILLINER I hate noes. That said, it does make me work harder to get a yes. Grimm took the most persistence and fortitude to get a pilot made. It was cut [at CBS] during the [2007-08] writers’ strike. We sold it to NBC probably three times. We felt like Grimm — it was put on a Friday against Game 7 of the World Series — was an afterthought. We worked so hard to get it on the air: What do we have to do to get a break? Then it did great [in the ratings].
MILLINER We learned a lot from that. We learned that [creator] Victor Fresco is a great writer and that launching a comedy now is hard anywhere. We learned that Linda Lavin, Tom Lennon and Megan Hilty — and all the actors — were wonderful to work with. And you can never plan for a hit. Who knows? If it was launched 10 years ago or 10 years from now, would everything have aligned differently? It didn’t align this time. If everybody knew what made a hit, I’m sure it would be a hit. Thursdays are hard for everybody — except Hollywood Game Night, weirdly. It’s the alternative to everything.
Is there a show from the company’s portfolio that holds special meaning?
MILLINER I feel particularly tied to Hot in Cleveland because it really did put us on the map as a company. Those four ladies [BettyWhite, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick] are so special, and [creator] Suzanne Martin is our work wife. I missed my first Hot in Cleveland tape night out of 109 shows a couple weeks ago for a family vacation.
Do you have a plan for the next decade?
MILLINER We started this company when Obama wasn’t president. We talk a lot about the future and a lot about new, interesting partnerships and developing stuff that’s not just for traditional television.
HAYES A friend of mine said a while ago: “The business is constantly changing and you must change with it.”
Premium cable is a space you’re hoping to branch into. Are there other areas you’re eyeing for expansion?
MILLINER Space is a genre we love, and even though we are in sci-fi with Grimm, space is its own thing. We’re infatuated with it, from a Guardians of the Galaxy level to Ancient Aliens.
HAYES We have something in development in that area now. There hasn’t been a game-changing space/sci-fi show since Star Trek on network television.
MILLINER I’m a big fan of Airplane! — very pun-heavy, broad comedy. I don’t know if people’s appetites warrant it, but it seems like that’s been missing: Naked Gun, Airplane!, Top Secret! Or some kind of twisty-turny spy, heist drama like Three Days of the Condor, The Sting or Heist.
Are you still working on a concept for a Broadway show?
HAYES We have one that’s almost ready to talk about.
MILLINER Our live, half-hour NBC show coming up, Hospitality, will also feature live commercials. That’s our bridge into theater. Then, hopefully we’ll have a show in New York.
Any nerves about doing a live show?
HAYES It is ambitious, that’s why you do it.
MILLINER Eventually, you just have to say “f– the nerves” because anything exciting will make you nervous. If you can get your butterflies to fly in a pattern, then you’re OK.
There is a surge in reviving old properties. Is there a classic TV title you’d want to bring back?
MILLINER If it made sense. If I said, “No way, don’t ever do a remake,” then there wouldn’t have been great new versions of The Fugitive. Or 21 Jump Street. We wouldn’t be opposed to it. In some ways, Grimm is a remake — it just happens to be from public domain.
If someone told you they wanted to bring back Will & Grace, would you consider it?
HAYES Sure, let’s do it!
MILLINER Sometimes I think these things happen a little too early.
HAYES That’s the example of me being instinctual and him being methodic.
MILLINER I think we’re just going to relaunch NBC’s The Blacklist — while it’s still on the air. We’ll just change the color in the title.
—
Hazy Mills By the Numbers
82: Percentage growth for NBC’s heavily time-shifted horror drama on Friday nights, Grimm, in 18-to-49 in season three.
2006: The year Hayes and Milliner first pitched their idea for a live comedy series, which will finally come to fruition early next year in NBC’s Hospitality.
2: The number of retro arcade games Hayes and Milliner have stationed by their desks. They include a combo Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga machine and Asteroids.
5.9 million: Hot in Cleveland‘s total viewership for the June 16, 2010, premiere, TV Land’s highest-rated telecast.
100-plus: Number of celebrity guest stars on Hot in Cleveland over six seasons, including Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie Harper, George Hamilton, Carol Burnett and Carl Reiner.
210: Number of territories in which Hot in Cleveland is licensed, including Australia, Ireland, Croatia and South Africa.
‘The Straight Out Report’ co-hosts Stephen Guarino and Mike E. Winfield
‘The Straight Out Report’ premieres Nov. 7
Logo TV has ordered a new comedic satire breaking down the news of the week from gay and straight perspectives.
The Straight Out Report, premiering Friday, Nov. 7, at 10 p.m. on the Viacom-owned cable network, will be led by Stephen Guarino, who is gay, and Mike E. Winfield, who is straight, as they round up the week’s headlines. The program is being touted as the first to feature two men of different sexual orientations and races as co-hosts of a weekly TV show.
The program will include guest appearances every week from a social media star. Segments will include topics that have been over-covered in the media, a cheat sheet of important pop-culture items, “unintentionally gay” moments from entertainment and Twitter trends, just to name a few.
“By spotlighting each host’s distinct and hilarious viewpoint, The Straight Out Report not only offers a fresh perspective on the headlines and newsmakers of the day, but also underscores that comedy is the perfect device to emphasize our similarities and differences,” said Pamela Post, vp programming of Logo TV.
Guarino is a comedian and actor who has appeared on Happy Endings, Finding Carter and Marry Me. Previously he was a castmember of Logo’s sketch comedy The Big Gay Sketch Show and appeared in the 2009 feature Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Winfield recurred on The Office and made his comedy debut on The Late Late Show.
Adam de la Pena (Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, The Man Show) created the show. Post and Stevenson Greene serve as executive producers.
The creator of Amazon Studios’ acclaimedTransparent has an endgame timetable planned out for the streaming series, she said today. “In my mind, it’s 5 years It’s 5-years because Six Feet Under went for 5-years, “ Jill Soloway told me after delivering the filmmaker keynote Saturday morning at the Film Independent Forum, held at the DGA HQ (UPDATE – 10:15 PM: See video of the speech below). “Five years because for some reason 5-years equals syndication money, even though this is a whole different ballgame. I don’t even know if syndication is part of the model,” the former Six Feet Under producer added.
Transparent was renewed for a second season just two weeks after its September 26 debut of all 10 episodes of Season 1 went up simultaneously on Amazon Prime. At the time of renewal, Amazon said thatJeffrey Tambor-led ensemble of a family dealing with its patriarch becoming a matriarch has proved to be the most binge-watched TV series on Prime Instant Video ever. Nearly 80% of all viewers binging on two or more episodes in the same day, claims the Jeff Bezos formed company.
That access and business model is clearly a big part of the industry’s future as Hollywood concentrates on big budget action movies, says Soloway. As is the lack of network notes, she adds.
“Silicon Valley is up in San Francisco and they’ve got nothing but ideas and money,” Soloway said of the new players in town. “Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and even places like YouTube, these are people who are trying to reinvent content and they are absolutely going to spend money on it. And they don’t do the kind of micromanaging that the TV networks do.” the director/writer noted. “The only person I deal with on a day-to-day basis and it isn’t even day-to-day but once a week, is Joe Lewis,” Soloway said of the Head of Comedy at Amazon Studios. “He comes in a speaks about big ideas not small ones, he doesn’t micromanage, he doesn’t give me line notes.”
Transparent is the first of four new series to emerge from Amazon’s second development season. The Gary Trudeau created Alpha House was the breakout show of the first development season and had its Season 2 10-episodes debut on Friday.
“At the networks there are people who believe they can make things better by changing the rhythm of a sentence, about a joke not being funny,’ Soloway recalls of previous gigs. “They have 20 people involved in every page of the content. Now I just have Joe.” Soloway noted that the whole philosophy of AS was summed up for her by a note in Lewis’ office that reads “More creative freedom equals better quality equals more audiences equals more money equals more creative freedom.”
Traveling the road to creative freedom was the theme of Soloway’s keynote at the 10th annual FI event. In a sharp one-liner heavy 45-minute address, Soloway told the packed main DGA auditorium that her remarks were going to “be very motivatey and inspirey.” She added to the first of many laughs, “I ain’t going to sugar coat, I have some horrible truths to share.” And Soloway did share.
The ex-United States Of Tara showrunner told the crowd that 3-years ago after HBO passed on a pilot of hers, she was seriously thinking of leaving Hollywood for a life in northern California. “Lot of balls in the air, no money balls. I had to get a job.” Even with her established credits that was a lot harder than Soloway expected. “The word out there is you’re difficult,” Soloway revealed to the audience her agent told her.
Without naming almost any names, except actress Jane Lynch and a meeting on the set of “Blamerican Blurry Blory” that never happened, Soloway spent the first part of her speech detailing the all too brief highs and that very hard scramble of getting work in Hollywood before deciding to make her own film. That film eventually became 2013’s Afternoon Delight, which won Soloway the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance that year. It was supposed to happen so I could write Transparent,” she said of the whole experience from being so despondent and broke to success with her feature debut.
“Getting the green light to make the Transparent pilot and then season divided my life to before and after,” Soloway admitted. “When people ask me if I like TV or movies better, I say there is no difference – except I couldn’t finance a series or a 5-hour film on my own,” she added, praising the relationship with Amazon and the way they have marketed the series.
Soloway noted that she tried to do things differently on Transparent than she had experienced on past shows. “Filmmaking is really like throwing a great party,” she said of the tone and organizational skills she brought to the series’ set. ” I set up an environment that reversed the polarity of filmmaking and TVmaking,” she added, rejecting the industry standard of time and money constraints determining so much of the process. “It’s artmaking, it’s play. We have plenty of time, we have plenty of money and there is light everywhere, we’re not running out of anything.”
“I went through my whole life felt like I was trying to get somewhere, say something and there is a feeling with Transparent that I’ve done enough for minute and feel that feeling that people like it.”
“I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and although he’s not producing $100M blockbusters, from our perspective, Phil consistently makes money on his projects” Kitzen said in an interview with Deadline. “This gives us access to Hollywood, and Phil has a track record of actually making money on his films. We’re giving them a line of credit of $25M, and they can to tap into it on a per-project basis. There is a 24-month term, and the condition on it is that in that term he will return the principal. By giving them the capital, it allows them to move more quickly. We are then able to access those films for our visual space as we are looking at other entrepreneurial opportunities to capitalize on our investment.” Kitzen, who has interests in camera technology, property and forestry, added that Hollywood Media Bridge has a real business model “not a hit-and-hope strategy that I normally see presented to me.”
and they are absolutely going to spend money on it. And they don’t do the kind of micromanaging that the TV networks do.” the director/writer noted. “The only person I deal with on a day-to-day basis and it isn’t even day-to-day but once a week, is Joe Lewis,” Soloway said of the Head of Comedy at Amazon Studios. “He comes in a speaks about big ideas not small ones, he doesn’t micromanage, he doesn’t give me line notes.”
Traveling the road to creative freedom was the theme of Soloway’s keynote at the 10th annual FI event. In a sharp one-liner heavy 45-minute address, Soloway told the packed main DGA auditorium that her remarks were going to “be very motivatey and inspirey.” She added to the first of many laughs, “I ain’t going to sugar coat, I have some horrible truths to share.” And Soloway did share.
Transparent,” she said of the whole experience from being so despondent and broke to success with her feature debut.