The Disney-owned digital media firm has hired Gabriel Lewis and Bonnie Pan to its programming division, led by chief content officer Erin McPherson.
Maker Studios is making a significant bet on original content with two big digital media hires.
In a coup for the Disney-owned firm, former AOL Studios head Gabriel Lewis has been tapped as executive vp development and strategy and Yahoo programming veteran Bonnie Pan (pictured below) will join as executive vp programming. Both start Aug. 11 and will report to chief content officer Erin McPherson.
Lewis previously was vp AOL Studios and AOL Originals, where he spearheaded the tech firm’s programming strategy and helped develop its formula for advertiser-friendly shortform content driven by well-known personalities. AOL developed shows such as Nicole Richie‘s #CandidlyNicole and Steve Buscemi‘s Park Bench under his leadership. In his new role, Lewis will be responsible for developing Maker’s pipeline of more than 200 original projects in development, working with the multichannel network’s top YouTube talent and partnering with Hollywood.
Pan was most recently head of originals and programming at Yahoo Video, where she worked with McPherson, formerly head of video at Yahoo, for more than three years. During her time at the Sunnyvale tech firm, Pan oversaw Yahoo Screen’s move into longform content by resurrecting Community and picking up a pair of series from Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and Mike Tollin (One Tree Hill). She also led the programming and development of projects including Electric City from Tom Hanks and The Bachelor spoof Burning Love.
At Maker, Pan will be responsible for expanding the MCN’s 23 content verticals, building out programming under the categories of family, entertainment, life and style, and gaming and sports.
“Bonnie and Gabe both bring this wealth of knowledge and expertise in content and programming and we’re going to leverage that as we grow and expand our business,” McPherson tells THR. “I think the fact that both of them are coming speaks to the incredible growth we’re seeing in our business and the massive opportunity we have with Disney now to really expand our programming offerings.”
Original content has become an increasingly important part of Maker’s business, as it looks to own content and develop more distribution channels off YouTube. The Culver City-based firm made its first presentation at the Digital Content NewFronts this year, announcing a slate of originals that included a comedy from Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele and a docuseries from YouTube creator Shay Carl.
Maker also recently launched Maker.tv, its first off-YouTube platform that includes a mix of original content, videos from its network of creators and shows from third-party partners.
Lewis and Pan join Maker at a key moment for the firm, which was folded into Disney in May. McPherson, who was hired in November last year to jump-start Maker’s content strategy, says that the network now has more than 6.5 billion streams a month and will soon reveal a number of initiatives with its new parent company.
“We’re going from startup to being part of the Disney family and we’re at an inflection point for online video as a whole industry,” she adds. “You combine those two things and it’s just a unique moment in time to be in this business and to be at Maker.”
A Hulu mini-series about food integrity? Don’t have a cow, dude
Chipotle is hardly the first sponsor to brave the programming game – indeed, not even for Hulu, since Subway underwrote a comedy pilot dubbed “The 4 to 9ers.” Still, “Farmed and Dangerous” does mark an unusual entry into production for the restaurant chain, inasmuch as it mixes pointed satire about corporate greed with wonky dissertations about food policy. The result is a four-episode series with more tang than one might have anticipated given the pabulum often churned out in ad-supported vehicles, yet which ultimately falls into a sort of narrative no-man’s land that’s neither fish nor fowl.
In pitch-meeting terms, the show’s money shot comes in the opening sequence, when PR/image guru Buck Marshall (Ray Wise) is receiving a demonstration of the newest product from Animoil, which involves feeding a petroleum-based substance directly to cattle to lower costs. The main side effect of the PetroPellet, he’s told by the CEO (Eric Pierpoint) and the company’s German scientist (Thomas Mikusz), is that the cows occasionally explode – which is precisely what this one does.
So Buck faces the rather uphill task of putting lipstick on this particular cow, enlisting his daughter and newest employee (Karynn Moore) to help him. She enthusiastically dives in, which includes trying to win over an advocate for sustainable farming (John Sloan), who pushes back against the corner-cutting maneuvers employed by Animoil and its distasteful implications for the food supply.
The sparring banter between these two beef-crossed characters is a lot older than Chipotle, down to the complication of her sneering country-club boyfriend. But their exchanges are often woefully stilted, feeling as much like a public-service announcement as an actual series.
“Farmed” fares somewhat better when Wise (“Twin Peaks”) commands center stage, strategizing with his minions at the Industrial Food Image Bureau about how to, say, downplay a YouTube video of the aforementioned cow, with the head of digital expressing relief that it “wasn’t on TV.”
What makes “Farmed and Dangerous” mildly interesting is seeing some of these Occupy Wall Street-type sentiments articulated through the prism of a corporate-commissioned TV show, one that mentions Chipotle – which employs the slogan “Food with integrity” – precisely once in a later chapter, yet which conveys an implied slight to other fast-food chains throughout.
Traditionally, advertisers have gone into programming to create what they see as a hospitable environment for their commercial messages. Here, the company approaches production with more ambition, but also slightly suspect aims, given how inseparable the message is from the messenger.
The marriage between advertisers and programming, in other words, remains an awkward one, even if their heart appears to be in the right place. Because “Why buy the cow when the milk’s laced with a petroleum-like substance?” could just as easily be read as “Why sit through a food-integrity lecture from a company that clearly has a dog in the fight, even if they sugar-coat the packaging?”
Review: Chipotle’s ‘Farmed and Dangerous’
(Limited series; Hulu, Mon. Feb. 17)
Production
Filmed in Los Angeles by Piro and Chipotle.
Crew
Executive producers, Mark Crumpacker, William Espey, Tim Piper, Daniel Rosenberg; producer, Natalie Galazka; director, Piper; writers, Rosenberg, Piper, Mike Dieffenbach, Jeremy Pisker; camera, Marc Laliberte Else; production designer, Bruton Jones; editor, Ross Baldisserotto; music, Deetown; casting, Joanna Colbert. 22 MIN.
Cast
Ray Wise, Eric Pierpoint, John Sloan, Karynn Moore
Next year’s Academy Awards ceremony — the 85th since 1929 — will be landing in a pool of angst about movies and what appears to be their fraying connection to the pop culture.
After the shock of last year’s decline in the number of tickets sold for movies domestically, to 1.28 billion, the lowest since 1995 (and attendance is only a little better this year) film business insiders have been quietly scrambling to fix what few will publicly acknowledge to be broken.
That is, Hollywood’s grip on the popular imagination, particularly when it comes to the more sophisticated films around which the awards season turns.
Several industry groups, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the nonprofit American Film Institute, which supports cinema, are privately brainstorming about starting public campaigns to convince people that movies still matter.
That seemed self-evident only a few years ago. But the mood has turned wistful as people in the industry watch the momentum shift toward television. Even the movies’ biggest night will feed that trend: the Academy has lined up Seth MacFarlane, a powerful television writer-producer, as the host of the Oscars.
“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets long after the sonnet form fell out of fashion,” James Schamus, a screenwriter and producer who is also the chief executive of Focus Features, noted in an e-mail last week.
George Stevens Jr., the founder of the American Film Institute, said he would not descend “like Cassandra,” with a lecture for members of the movie Academy, when he accepts his honorary Oscar at their Governors Awards banquet on Dec. 1.
“I think they will find their way, but it’s a time of enormous change,” Mr. Stevens said. He spoke by telephone last week of his concern that a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.
But the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.
As the awards season unfolds, the movies are still getting smaller. After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”
“Argo,” another Oscar contender, had about 7.6 million viewers through the weekend. If interest holds up, it may eventually match the one-night audience for an episode of “Glee.”
The weakness in movies has multiple roots.
Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid. And at least since “The Sopranos” sophisticated TV series have learned to hook viewers on long-term character development; movies do that mostly in fantasy franchises like the “Twilight” series.
And a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay, and attracted movie stars like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Laura Linney, Claire Danes and Sigourney Weaver.
Ticket sales for genre films like “Taken 2” or Mr. MacFarlane’s broad comedy, “Ted,” remain strong. And a growing international audience, particularly in China, has brightened the outlook for action-hero blockbusters like Marvel’s “Avengers” or “Dark Knight Rises.”
But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
The drop-off leaves many viewers feeling pained.
“They feel puzzled,” said the critic David Denby. “They’re a little baffled.” He was referring to those who have applauded his argument — made both in a New Republic essay “Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?” and in a new book, “Do the Movies Have a Future?” — that the enduring strength of film will depend on whether studios return to modestly budgeted but culturally powerful movies.
“If they don’t build their own future, they’re digging their own graves,” Mr. Denby said.
Mr. MacFarlane; the Oscar producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron; and the president of the Academy, Hawk Koch, declined through an Academy spokeswoman to discuss the challenges of celebrating film.
Privately some Academy members have said they were jolted by the choice of Mr. MacFarlane as host, in what appears to be a bid for viewers who have flocked to his television hits, notably “The Family Guy.”
But Henry Schafer, an executive vice-president at the Q Scores Company, which measures the statistical appeal of celebrities, said that “if the idea is to attract the younger audience, I think they got the right choice.”
Still, Daniel Tosh, who hosts “Tosh. O,” a hit Comedy Central series that highlights silly Web videos and skewers their participants, has given the doubters a voice. After playing a clip of two Russian men dropping a live grenade over the side of their boat and blowing it up, Mr. Tosh deadpanned: “It’s still a better idea than having Seth MacFarlane host the Oscars.”
The turn toward Mr. MacFarlane, who directed and voiced a foul-mouthed Teddy bear in “Ted,” his main contribution to feature film, has left the Academy scratching for ways to get the public reinvested in the sort of pictures it typically honors. Its staff, for instance, has been looking at the possibility of getting filmmakers who have made Best Picture winners to join a promotional campaign in theaters. In Los Angeles the Academy is also building a movie museum, meant to showcase the medium.
Separately the National Association of Theater Owners recently asked public relations and advertising consultants to submit proposals for a similar push.
Board members of the Film Institute also have been looking ways to strike a new interest in feature film, said Bob Gazzale, its president. Mr. Gazzale said it was too early to discuss details, but another person briefed on the initiative said the group had considered things as far afield as reaching out to prominent politicians — say, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton — as supervisors of film awards programs. The goal would be to re-establish a connection with viewers who were turning elsewhere for cultural direction.
In a discussion at Colorado State University this month, Allison Sylte, a student journalist, suggested that the Academy helped break the connection between her generation and high-end movies in 2011 when it chose as Best Picture “The King’s Speech,” which looked backward, rather than “The Social Network,” which pushed ahead.
“So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away.
The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one.
“Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.
Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 30, 2012
Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about Hollywood’s efforts to restore cultural relevance to the movies described incorrectly the decline at the domestic box office last year. The decrease was in tickets sold, to 1.28 billion; it was not a decline in ticket sales revenue to $1.28 billion.
Erin Brockovich, of movie fame, is aggressively trying to stretch the limits of Medicare law by suing hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare providers. So far, federal district courts in every one of the more than 30 California cases that Brockovich filed last summer have refused to “green light” this production. Rather, all courts have dismissed her claims, and they have done so upon initial motions to dismiss filed by the hospitals and other healthcare provider defendants.In nearly identical, form-like, complaints that Brockovich filed across southern California, she urged that the Medicare Secondary Payer (“MSP”) laws impose “primary payer” liability (and resulting double damages) against hospitals and skilled nursing facilities that allegedly commit professional negligence when treating Medicare patients. Brockovich also asserted that MSP suits may be prosecuted by uninjured, non-Medicare-insured plaintiffs, like herself, on the government’s behalf. At the time she filed her lawsuits, Brockovich was 46 years old. She was neither Medicare-eligible nor a former patient of any healthcare provider she had named.
Federal district courts in California uniformly rejected Brockovich’s theories. So have federal courts in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania in cases filed by Brockovich’s lawyers on behalf of another, similarly situated plaintiff. In fact, no court anywhere has done anything other than dismiss these suits, upon the defendants’ initial motions.
Brockovich is persistent, even if she is wrong on the law. She has appealed each California ruling in a pending (and consolidated) appeal before the Ninth Circuit. Brockovich’s lawyers also have pursued a pending appeal to the Eighth Circuit in one of the identical cases filed in the other plaintiff’s name.
In the California cases, the defendants argued that, as a matter of law, they could not be liable under the MSP absent established liability for payment, such as when a provider is determined in a judgment or settlement to be liable or finally responsible to pay on a patient’s claim of negligent treatment. The defendants further argued that Brockovich could not manipulate the MSP private cause of action by attempting to make it, in effect, a qui tam statute that allows a private citizen to sue in the name of the government. The courts agreed, dismissing these actions without leave to amend. 2
The keys to Brockovich’s legal misadventure lie within the language and purposes of the MSP law. The MSP statute was enacted to help reduce Medicare costs. 3It makes Medicare the “secondary” payer whenever a Medicare beneficiary also has other primary medical insurance, or when another source is determined to be primarily responsible to pay for the care – such as worker’s compensation or a third-party tortfeasor’s liability insurance or its self-insurance.
The MSP statute also provides that the federal government, or a single Medicare beneficiary (through a private cause of action), may recoup double the amount of any sums Medicare paid, if a “primary payer” has a “demonstrated . . . responsibility” to pay, but has failed to do so. A 2003 amendment added that “[a] primary plan’s responsibility for such payment may be demonstratedby a judgment, a payment conditioned upon the recipient’s compromise, waiver, or release (whether or not there is a determination or admission of liability) of payment for items or services included in a claim against the primary plan or the primary plan’s insured, or by other means.” 4
At least three fatal problems with Brockovich’s theory of MSP liability were immediately apparent and decisive:
First, as the California and other courts ruled, Brockovich lacked Article III standing to pursue her claims. The MSP private right of action does not support a claim by the likes of Brockovich, an uninjured person who is not even a Medicare beneficiary. The private cause of action is available, in proper circumstances, to Medicare beneficiaries, but not to simply anyone who decides on his or her own to sue. 5
The second major problem with Brockovich’s claims is evident from the language of the MSP statute itself. Knowing that she had no case or controversy, Brockovich argued instead that the MSP statute is a qui tam statute, which would authorize private suits, by anyone, on the government’s behalf. However, Congress must authorize qui tam actions expressly, if that is its intent – and in the MSP, it did not do so. 6Unlike the quintessential qui tam statute, the False Claims Act 7(a primary tool for policing suspected Medicare abuse), the MSP’s private right of action speaks only to individual claims for damage, and the private right of action is distinct from a separate MSP right of action reserved specifically for claims directly by the federal government.
Unsurprisingly, the MSP private cause of action section lacks any procedural safeguards to protect the government, or any provisions for government ownership, supervision, or control of purely private MSP suits. Congress has been careful to insert such safeguards into the False Claims Act, specifically to prevent runaway litigation by private citizens, ostensibly in the name of the government. Courts repeatedly recognize the constitutional concerns raised by private suits on behalf of the government, and the False Claims Act has been carefully crafted to address them. 8Brockovich’s declaration that she sued on behalf of the government clashed with the Supreme Court’s pronouncement that a tightly circumscribed assignment must exist for qui tam relators to proceed on behalf of the United States. The courts in the Brockovich cases refused Brockovich’s request that they essentially rewrite the MSP private cause of action section to make it read as though it were a qui tam law. 9As the district court in the Pennsylvania case brought by Brockovich’s attorneys noted in its March 2007 order of dismissal, every one of the more than 35 decisions has rejected this “coordinated nationwide effort to persuade the federal courts to find an implied qui tam right of action in the MSP.” 10
The third major problem with Brockovich’s claims also is fundamental, and it transcends the narrower problem of Brockovich’s lack of standing to sue. Neither Brockovich nor anyone else – including an injured Medicare patient – can allege that a provider has a “demonstrated . . . responsibility” to pay, in any instance where the only wrong alleged is an undecided or unsettled allegation of medical negligence. Brockovich was unconcerned with any such real cases. Instead, each of her complaints contained verbatim boilerplate allegations of provider negligence, but none offered even a single allegation about any actual malpractice committed on an actual Medicare beneficiary resulting in care for which Medicare paid. The complaints, therefore, could not fall within the scope of the MSP statute. 11
Brockovich’s only response was to try bootstrapping the MSP’s reference to “other means” by which responsibility to pay can be “demonstrated,” to cover federal and state agency survey reports and mere allegations of deficiencies and claims of non-compliance with certification requirements unique to particular providers participating in the Medicare program. She also cited generally to healthcare providers’ internal incident and investigation reports, and regulatory “plans of correction” and “statements of deficiencies.” These reports contain findings, she argued, that can suffice to create “demonstrated . . . responsibility,” without adjudication or other final finding of fault or a settlement agreement promising to pay.
Of course, none of these things is an acknowledgement that negligence occurred, nor is an investigation of an incident an admission of fault, and attaching MSP liability to such processes could discourage Medicare providers from undertaking internal review and improvement of the care they provide. Moreover, even a provider that renders deficient medical care may be entitled to Medicare reimbursement. Other legal avenues – not the MSP statute – ensure that the government enforces high standards for quality of care rendered to Medicare beneficiaries. 12
Briefing in the Ninth Circuit consolidated California cases will take place in May and June. A similar case has already been briefed in the Eighth Circuit, so a decision from that court may soon establish additional precedent confirming that Brockovich’s attempted expansion of the MSP private right of action exceeds the limits of the statute. 13
Mr. Landsberg and Ms. McCallum are partners in the Los Angeles office of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, LLP. They are members of the Healthcare Litigation and Appellate Practice Groups, with extensive backgrounds defending healthcare providers before the federal and state trial and appellate courts. Together they defended three of the Brockovich cases described in this article.
Twenty-nine of the cases were assigned to the Honorable David O. Carter in the Central District of California. Two others were assigned to the Hon. Thomas J. Whelan in the Southern District of California.
See Manning v. Utilities Mut. Ins. Co., 254 F.3d 387, 394 (2d Cir. 2001) (noting that “[t]he MSP creates a private right of action for individuals whose medical bills are improperly denied by insurers and instead paid by Medicare”).
SeeBurnette v. Carothers, 192 F.3d 52, 57-58 (2d Cir. 1999) (“‘there is no common law right to maintain a qui tam action; authority must always be found in legislation”), cert. denied, 531 U.S. 1052 (2000).
31 U.S.C. § 3730(b), (c). see alsoRiley v. St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, 252 F.3d 749, 753 (5th Cir. 2001) ( en banc) ( qui tam FCA actions only meet constitutional separation of powers requirements because the executive branch retains some degree of control over the litigation, such as the ability to intervene, the ability to dismiss, the ability to supervise).
Brockovich pursued her claims despite the fact that a spate of recent decisions, in the mass tort context, rejected the precise premise of her actions, observing that an alleged tortfeasor has no “demonstrated . . . responsibility” to pay absent an adjudication of liability, a settlement, or some other “like means” – which one court held “encompasses other instances of ‘like kind’ where there is a previously established requirement or agreement to pay for medical services for which Medicare is entitled to be reimbursed.” Glover v. Philip Morris USA, 380 F. Supp. 2d 1279, 1291 (M.D. Fla. 2005) (footnote omitted), aff’d,Glover v. Liggett Group, Inc., 459 F.3d 1304 (11th Cir. 2006) ( per curiam); see also, e.g., United Seniors Association, Inc. v. Philip Morris USA, 2006 WL 2471977 (D. Mass., August 28, 2006).
Erin Brockovich v. Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System, Inc.
Defense of two hospital systems in qui tam actions purporting to enforce Medicare’s Secondary Payor provisions (42 U.S.C. § 1395y(b)(3)). Plaintiff sought recovery of all Medicare funds paid to treat alleged but unspecified hospital malpractice injuries. The cases were dismissed while on appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. (C.D. Cal.)
President Obama meeting with students from the documentary “Waiting for Superman” last October.
LOS ANGELES — Doing well is difficult. So is doing good.
In Hollywood, doing both turns out to be more complicated than you might think.
Participant Media, the film industry’s most visible attempt at social entrepreneurship, turned seven this year without quite sorting out whether a company that trades in movies with a message can earn its way in a business that has been tough even for those who peddle 3-D pandas and such.
“The Beaver,” Participant’s latest picture, is a flop. A mental health-themed drama with Mel Gibson in the lead, it has taken in less than $1 million at the domestic box office since opening early last month, though it cost about $20 million to make, and was backed by a vigorous effort to build a following among those who treat depression.
Despite accolades — Participant took 11 Oscar nominations in 2006, and films like “The Cove” and “An Inconvenient Truth” later became winners — nothing from the company has approached blockbuster status. The biggest ticket-seller among its films — it has produced about 30 — was “Charlie Wilson’s War” in 2007. A star-packed tale about the unintended consequences of America’s past dealings with Afghanistan, it took in just $66.7 million in domestic theaters.
And Participant’s owner, the eBay co-founder Jeffrey S. Skoll, is still pouring in money. In an interview, Mr. Skoll put the amount he has invested at “hundreds of millions to date, with much more to follow.”
Yet Mr. Skoll last week described his growing enterprise — which also publishes books, produces television programs, has a wide Internet presence through its TakePart social action network, and owns a major stake in Summit Entertainment — as only the beginning of a media empire that he and his partners expect to surpass eBay in terms of impact, if not profit.
“This is the very early stage, as far as I’m concerned,” said Mr. Skoll, who joined Participant’s chief executive, James G. Berk, in a broad discussion of their experience in an industry in which many players share their commitment to social causes, but only rarely have tried to build a business around their views.
Ted Leonsis, with his indie-minded SnagFilms, and Philip Anschutz, with his family-oriented Walden Media, have both made forays into film-related social entrepreneurship. But neither has matched Mr. Skoll’s attempt to penetrate the studio system by financing and producing a broad range of pictures that are intended to set off not just ticket sales, but social and political action campaigns.
In the past, those have aimed to pressure senators into ratifying the New Start arms control treaty (via “Countdown to Zero”) or to press for reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (with “North Country”).
Mr. Skoll and Mr. Berk spoke in a conference room on the third floor of their new quarters in Beverly Hills. The offices, Mr. Berk said, are made entirely of recycled material — the carpet comes from old tires, but the look is stylish and green. From the second floor, Mr. Skoll operates philanthropies to which he has donated, by his count, about $1.5 billion.
Eventually, Mr. Skoll said, Participant is expected to become self-sustaining, though both expansion and the soft performance of some films have kept it from making a profit to date.
In strictly financial terms, said Mr. Berk — who was previously the chief executive of Gryphon Colleges, Fairfield Communities, and Hard Rock Cafe International — Participant’s film business appears to perform “just above the median” for similar size companies, thanks to a slight edge in home entertainment sales. Those are helped by long, intensive campaigns that urge like-minded activists to rally for years around message films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” the global warming documentary.
In measuring its success, Mr. Berk added, Participant sometimes resorts to an unusual standard: On losers, the company assesses whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically.
By that measure, “Waiting for Superman,” about the failures of public education, was a hit, Mr. Berk said. It had just over $6 million in worldwide ticket sales, but managed to put the issue of teacher competence into what he calls “the pool of worries” for millions who were caught up in a fierce discussion of the film’s premise, that failing children are hindered by union-protected teachers.
Speaking privately to avoid conflict with the company, some filmmakers who have worked with Participant expressed concern about turning off potential viewers who usually are not looking for new worries when buying a ticket. Mr. Berk and Mr. Skoll acknowledged that they had done best with smaller films that garner intense interest from those who share their views. But they continue to believe they can break through to a large audience.
A test will come in August with the release of “The Help,” a film based on the best-selling novel about racial reconciliation that was made by DreamWorks for release by Disney, with backing from Participant. Another, in October, is “Contagion,” a pandemic-themed thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, and set for release by Warner Brothers, with Participant among its producers.
“They’re the first and probably the only place you’ll go if you have a movie that’s about issues, and also entertaining,” said Michael Shamberg, who is a producer of “Contagion,” and counts “Erin Brockovich” and “World Trade Center” among his credits.
On a smaller scale, Participant later this month will join Magnolia Pictures in distributing “Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times,” a documentary about The Times and some of its media journalists. The film’s aim, according to Mr. Skoll and Mr. Berk, is to provoke discussion about the role of traditional media in a news-gathering process that has been changed by new competition and the Internet age.
(In promoting “Page One,” some Times employees have made appearances for which expenses were paid by various film festivals, and one promotional trip by a reporter was paid for by Magnolia, which receives a contribution from Participant for social action screenings and panels. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, said The Times would reimburse Magnolia for the trip.)
After founding Participant in 2004, said Mr. Skoll, an early lesson was the folly of relying piecemeal on the major studios for film distribution — an arrangement that almost always meant unfavorable terms. In 2007, the company bought a stake in Summit, and remains its second-largest shareholder. It also made an agreement under which Summit would distribute as many as 18 films for Participant under terms Mr. Skoll finds more favorable.
“It gives us, as a regular studio, a different view” of how movies can be marketed through activist networks, Robert G. Friedman, Summit’s chief executive, said of the arrangement.
Another lesson involved spreading risk. In 2008, Participant formed a joint venture with Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a division of the government-owned Abu Dhabi Media Company, to finance its films. According to Mr. Skoll and Mr. Berk, the Imagenation joint venture is obligated to underwrite its slate, though the Abu Dhabi partner is permitted to remove its name from any film with which it is not comfortable.
Through a spokeswoman, Danielle Perissi, executives of Imagenation Abu Dhabi declined to discuss the venture.
Both executives said the reliance on money from a foreign government with extensive oil interests would not affect their own choices — overdependence on oil is a core concern at Participant. But the financing may sometimes complicate a project.
In one instance, Summit joined Participant and Imagenation in buying an option on the rights to a New York Times article from Dec. 26 of last year, about the final hours on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Mr. Skoll, Mr. Berk and others, a script being written for the producer, Lorenzo DiBonaventura, is expected to focus on the heroism of men on the rig. But any resulting movie, like the rest of Participant’s output, will aim to provoke social or political action. If that were to impede further off-shore exploration here, it might give an advantage to a foreign oil exporter.
“We are not participating in this film in any way, we have only optioned the rights to the story,” Ms. Murphy said of The New York Times’s involvement. She said The Times had the right to withhold its name from the movie if it became uncomfortable with it. Any further involvement by The Times or its employees would have to be approved by the paper’s standards editor, she said.
Ultimately, Mr. Berk said, a Deepwater Horizon film, like most Participant movies, would probably involve a cluster of five or six issues. Those may include oil dependence, climate change, care for the oceans, and, not least of all, he said, “the need for transparency and accountability.”
When Tina Fey visited the Bay Area in April on her book tour for “Bossypants,” she made just two stops. She gave an interview before a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theater, as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. And she dropped by the Mountain View headquarters of Google.
At an Authors@Google “fireside chat,” Ms. Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and star, had a friendly conversation with Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, in front of an audience of hundreds of employees who greeted her with a standing ovation.
As Google’s reach into many aspects of media production and distribution grows ever greater, A-list authors, actors, musicians and others are taking part in the company’s six-year-old on-campus speaker series.
Lady Gaga recently shared the stage with Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for location and local services, as did Christy Turlington, the supermodel turned documentary director. The YouTube video of “Google Goes Gaga” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
The unlikely spectacle of technology executives chatting up celebrities talk-show-style originated as part of Google’s effort to create a quasi-collegiate atmosphere on its campus. The events increasingly dovetail with Google’s interests in publishing, broadcasting, music distribution and other media businesses. The company is selling “Bossypants” as a Google e-book for $12.99 in its online bookstore, which it opened in December.
For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company’s sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business — but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google’s complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world’s books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company’s search services.
“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing this,” Chris Clarke, a natural history and environmental writer, said of the talks. “I don’t think that it clears their karma as far as trying to become the sole-source provider of all intellectual property everywhere.”
The speaker series began in 2005 with the New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki as its first two guests and has since featured hundreds of authors, musicians, chefs, economists and politicians.
Google employees involved in the program say that it evolved out of employees’ interests and at their initiative.
“The program was a grass-roots effort that started when a few Googlers realized that some remarkable people were passing through the halls of the Googleplex,” said Ann Farmer, an information engineer. She is one of more than two dozen employee volunteers who organize the events, which are now held three to five times a week.
Since 2005, more than 1,000 guests have appeared. Garry Kasparov, the chess master, and Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, are among some 600 authors, mostly of nonfiction, who have participated. The list includes a number of authors who have written books about Google.
Talks now take place at Google offices around the world, with employees from 18 offices participating via videoconferencing. At larger events, employees use Google Moderator software, which fields questions from the audience, ranking the most popular ones.
In the early days of the series, the employees had to cajole speakers to attend, working personal connections, since the company did not pay an honorarium. But the program gained traction, with some talks drawing more than a million viewers on YouTube. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ms. Farmer. “The tables have turned.”
As of April 1, Cliff Redeker, 27, is the company’s official “speakers specialist.” He used to organize author visits in his spare time as a support specialist, but now his full-time job is dedicated to the speaker series.
The series has made the Googleplex an increasingly important stop for authors promoting their work in the Bay Area, as many major bookstores that featured readings have closed.
“It’s not going to replace bookstore events,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent in Brooklyn, “but if I have an author going to San Francisco, I always want my author to stop in at Google and do an event there as well.”
The Google books lawsuit, though, combined with a broader concern that the Internet is undermining the ability of authors to get paid for their work, remains a big issue for some.
As of last October, Google Books had already scanned more than 15 million titles from more than 100 countries in 400 languages. On March 22, a federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers. The Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over copyright infringement.
Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer and author of “Close to the Machine” and “The Bug,” is a member of the Authors Guild, and she sees the speakers program as a way to “soften the blow.”
She said, from Google’s perspective, it is “ ‘Look, see? We’re not making money off of you. We’re promoting you.’ ”
The YouTube factor also introduces a novel dynamic.
“You know this is going to be videotaped, and there is a sense that you’re speaking for posterity,” said Christopher McDougall, the author of “Born to Run,” who has appeared at the company’s offices in Mountain View and New York. “With the Google events, it was more about talking to the camera than talking to the people.”
Typically, some employees have their laptops open during the talk, and the guest speaks not just to them but also to a future audience on YouTube.
Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together,” who directs the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, appeared at Google’s office in New York to promote her book. Yet she says, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves that going on YouTube to watch an author is the same thing as going to a bookstore.”
For many authors, though, it’s all good. T. J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who is on the executive council of the Authors Guild, said of the speaker series: “That’s Google focusing on authors, not just addressing books as the subject of an information aggregation operation. It’s a healthy development.”
For one Bay Area independent bookstore, the program has been a boon. Books Inc. provides books for the events held at the Mountain View campus. At most talks, employees can buy the books at a deep discount, because Google subsidizes the purchases. For some special events, the company simply buys the books and gives them away.
Having a chance to attend the talks is a great perk for Googlers that reinforces the sense that their work, and technology in general, is driving the cultural conversation in a way it never has before.
“This didn’t happen in Web 1.0,” said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a division of Frank N. Magid Associates, who was a consultant to Excite in the late 1990s. “I never saw a single celebrity ever.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2011, on page A23A of the National edition with the headline: At Google, the Book Tour Becomes Big Business.
LisaRaye McCoy, left, Stacey Dash and Charity Shea will star on “Single Ladies,” a new dramatic series to start this spring on VH1.
Stacy Littlejohn worked her way up in network television like so many other writers and producers — she was a writers’ assistant on a Fox show, a joke writer on a CW show, a writer-producer on a half-hour ABC show.
Now, for the first time, she is in charge of a one-hour drama, but it is not for any network she envisioned earlier in her career. It is for VH1, the older-skewing version of MTV.
Niche cable channels like VH1 that have depended solely on unscripted programs or repeats of others’ scripted programs are now trotting out their own comedies and dramas. Their aim is diversification. When Ms. Littlejohn’s drama, “Single Ladies,” has its premiere late this month, “it’ll distinguish VH1 amid their steady diet of reality shows,” she said.
Top-tier cable channels like USA and TBS have been creating dramas and sitcoms for more than a decade, but now relative small fry are doing the same. The shows are a way to stay competitive.
“I think the bar has been raised in scripted,” said Jennifer Caserta, the general manager of IFC, the Independent Film Channel, which may be better known now for the sitcoms “Portlandia” and “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.”
The trend toward more scripted cable shows has been evident at advertiser presentations by VH1, IFC and other channels this spring.
Cable channels are in the middle of the upfront advertising period, when they secure commitments for ad spending for the rest of the year.
Channel owners like Scripps Networks and Viacom have forecast big gains in the upfront period this year because ratings continue to drift toward cable and away from broadcast, and the advertising marketplace is rebounding. Cable ad time, which is generally less expensive than broadcast ad time, is expected to grow faster than broadcast.
The cable and broadcast marketplaces “seem well positioned for truly strong results,” the News Corporation chief operating officer, Chase Carey, told investors last week.
For small channels, scripted shows are centerpieces that can be displayed to advertisers — and can command premium advertising rates.
“More scripted shows, more incredible performances,” screamed a banner at the presentation last month by the cable channel BET, which has struck ratings gold with scripted comedies and is looking for its first drama project. Often, though not always, scripted programs are perceived to be safer harbors for advertisers than reality programs. Bhavana Smith, a vice president at Draftfcb, an advertising network owned by the Interpublic Group, called scripted a “more controlled environment” for brand integrations.
“Do you really want to rely on Snooki to do justice to your brand?,” she asked, referring to a “Jersey Shore” cast member.
At IFC, the Cheetos snack brand was featured on the most recent season of “Portlandia” and the Jameson whiskey brand was featured on “Todd Margaret.” Ms. Caserta said each companies’ advertising “is humorous in itself, so incorporating them into our scripted comedies was easy.”
Most cable channels still subsist largely on so-called reality shows. They are generally less expensive to produce than scripted shows, and they are generally repeatable dozens or even hundreds of times.
But there are advantages to having an original scripted show on the schedule. Such shows convey status — they can define a channel’s identity, help to deliver higher per-subscriber fees, and impress executives at the parent company.
In other words, sometimes it is about ego.
Small channels like AMC, with “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” and TV Land, with “Hot in Cleveland” and “Retired at 35,” have provided something of a blueprint for others. BBC America, for instance, is developing its own dramas to supplement what it imports from Britain. With the trial in scripted television can come error. CMT, the country music channel, last month canceled its first sitcom, “Working Class,” due to low ratings.
Simon Applebaum, who hosts the television podcast “Tomorrow Will Be Televised” and who has been attending cable upfront presentations all spring, noted in a blog post last month that production companies that have traditionally specialized in reality shows, like Endemol U.S.A. (“Big Brother”) and Bunim-Murray (“The Real World”), have started up scripted divisions.
“What’s more, if cable networks turn their projects down, they have alternative routes to go,” he wrote, noting that Netflix recently licensed its first original scripted show and that DirecTV had carried “Friday Night Lights” in a deal with NBC.
Ultimately, the hunger for richly detailed characters and robust plot development benefits writers, because ideas have to start somewhere.
“It has provided a lot of incredibly talented people with great creative outlets,” said Dana Walden, the chairman of the 20th Century Fox Television studio.
It also provides channels with a distraction from the monotonous hours of reality and repeats that otherwise fill up their schedules. As Ms. Littlejohn put it, “Single Ladies” could be a “jewel in the crown” for VH1.
“Single Ladies,” backed by Queen Latifah, is a comedic drama about three best friends. It is set in Atlanta, where production is wrapping up this month.
Ms. Littlejohn says working for VH1 feels precedent-setting. Because the channel has never had an hourlong scripted show before, “I’m creating the formula,” she said. To save money, episodes are being produced two at a time, more swiftly than Ms. Littlejohn is used to.
“There’s less money on cable,” she acknowledged. But “less” is relative. “VH1 — bless their heart — they’re spending more money than they’ve ever spent, so I love them for this,” she said.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Cable Niches, Less Reality and Repeats and More Original Shows.
AT the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I wheedled a ticket to “Becoming Chaz,” a documentary about the sex change of Chastity Bono. Having long admired the Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato World of Wonder productions — slyly edu-taining films like “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and oodles of just-louche-enough-for-reality-TV shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — I anticipated their usual mix of human interest, alternative lifestyle and salacious tabloid.
Chaz (formerly Chastity Bono) at home in California.Chastity Bono with her parents, Sonny and Cher Bono, in 1972. Chaz Bono, after his sex change, with his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, and with his mother.
This unflinchingly personal film, which will have its premiere on Oprah Winfrey’s network on Tuesday, details Chastity Bono’s journey from her spangled childhood in rhinestone pantsuits on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” to a more recent two years in her televised life: Chastity, now Chaz, invited cameras to witness the searingly intimate experience of his gender transition.
Chaz, 42, and Jennifer Elia, his longtime girlfriend, must navigate his hormone injections, mood swings and personality changes, and live through a medical procedure that is part of the process of making Chaz a legal male in the State of California: he undergoes “top surgery” and has his breasts removed.
The operation is so graphic, and such a commitment — physically, emotionally and financially — that as a wincing viewer you come away with a palpable understanding of how unendurably he must be suffering in his body to want to have his own sex characteristics amputated.
Yet despite being a lifelong liberal from San Francisco and friendly with a number of transgender people, I found the film as unsettling as it was inspiring.
I came away forced to confront a whole swag-bag full of transphobias that I didn’t know I’d had. So I went to Los Angeles to talk to the filmmakers, and to Chaz himself.
Just sitting on a couch with Chaz at his publicist’s office is a consciousness-raising experience. He’s an affable, candid, pudgy, regular guy: very sweet, very comfortable in his skin, jeans, navy blue polo shirt and simple boots. His look might seem deliberately invisible if not for his hair, which he shapes into an excellent controlled pomp that could be described as Office-Casual Elvis.
At this point in his transition, Chaz is in his “second puberty,” a six- to seven-year process of hormone injections. The medical technology for genital reconstruction surgery (masculine genitoplasty, for a transgender man like Chaz) is still too new, expensive, imperfect and risky for him to opt for “bottom surgery.”
“I am in a holding pattern,” he said. “The payoff just isn’t quite enough. I wish I had a penis, but I am O.K. for now.”
At age 13, Chaz told me, he knew he was attracted to women, and assumed he was a lesbian.
“I knew my whole life something was different,” he said. “As a small kid, I could be one of the boys, playing sports, fitting in. When I hit puberty, I felt like my body was literally betraying me. I got smacked everywhere with femaleness. That was really traumatic.”
Realizing that he should be male took years of deduction.
“Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.”
Though emboldened by seeing transgender people in the media, he still thought of gender-transition as the last resort of the suicidal: “I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That’s why they’re willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.”
Several scenes in the film are interviews with Cher, who I assumed would act as a guide and interpreter through this signal event in her family. Yet Cher struggles throughout the film and never quite offers a sound bite of unequivocal support for her transgender son. Seeing Cher — gay icon nonpareil — so uncharacteristically jangled raised a sticky batch of questions:
Could it be possible that the fact that Chaz is now a man is somehow Cher’s fault? Did the toxic culture of celebrity damage Chastity/Chaz’s gender identity? Did Cher’s almost drag-queenlike hyper-female persona somehow devour Chastity’s emerging femininity? Could Chaz’s transition have been motivated by gender-bent Oedipal revenge? Is he reclaiming the childhood attention his superstar mother always diverted?
I had to ask: It is remotely possible that he needed to make the transition because his mom is Cher?
He gave me a warm and genuine smile.
“I don’t think the way I grew up had any effect on this issue,” Chaz said. “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”
But being born into celebrity created a different hurdle: Chaz knew he would not be able to change sexes privately. “I thought, the whole world is going to find out! How am I going to be able to live a life after that? I was scared. I believed that people were going to be actively hostile towards me.”
As a “last ditch effort,” he tried to live as a male but without medical intervention. It didn’t work. “I feel very traditionally male,” he said. “I needed a male body.”
Being in-between genders, Chaz said, was far more difficult than becoming a man. He was a misfit. Now, he said, he is treated much better by people, especially men.
“I’m constantly shocked by how friendly and cool straight men are to each other. ‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ I expected to feel better and happier, but I really underestimated the impact my transition would have. I didn’t realize that life could be this easy, that I could ever feel this comfortable. It was unimaginable.”
In the film, Jennifer is hilariously outspoken about her ordeal, coming to terms with her lover’s gender transition.
“Jenny and I had to relearn how to be together,” Chaz said. “I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now.”
I laughed. Chaz blushed.
“No, really. There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen can talk endlessly.” He shrugged. “I just kind of zone out.”
“You just don’t care!”
“I just don’t care!” He laughed. “I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”
Sex, for him, is completely different now. “I am completely monogamous,” he said, “but I need release much more often than Jen does.”
The weirdest guy thing he does now?
“I got way more gadget-oriented, I have to say. I don’t know why. Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”
IN their offices on Hollywood Boulevard, Messrs. Bailey and Barbato, the directors, disabused me of the rest of my Cher-related notions.
“That’s a sexy theory, but no,” Mr. Barbato told me. “People don’t change their sex to get back at their parents, any more than people become gay to get back at their parents.”
The two men compared today’s cultural blind spot regarding transgender people to attitudes about homosexuality during World War II, when homosexuals in the armed forces were considered psychiatrically abnormal and were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider gender identity disorder a medical issue, it is still classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association — a stigma that is difficult for any marginalized group to shake.
“The notion of trans is incomprehensible to most people,” Mr. Bailey said. “It is so foreign.”
One of the most interesting aspects of their film is the fact that although Chaz makes the physical transition, the more demanding transition, arguably, is the emotional one that everyone around him must make. There is, in essence, a death and mourning of Chastity, the woman, and an adjustment to Chaz, whom his girlfriend now compares to dating “Chastity’s twin brother.”
But I couldn’t stop asking about Cher.
“Cher is very real in this film,” Mr. Barbato said. “She’s not editing herself. She’s processing this majorly traumatic thing for any mother: She’s struggling with the fact that her daughter has turned into a man.”
Mr. Bailey brings up a fascinating moment in the film: He asks Cher a question, and she just stares, motionless and unblinking as a cobra — an excruciatingly long and pregnant pause. Then her whole posture shifts. She says, “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough.” Right then and there it occurs to her how to relate to it.
I bring up how uncomfortable we are as a society with people who don’t fit into the usual gender roles, how they can seem unsettling on a visceral level, like a dangling participle or an unresolved chord.
“I like things that are incomplete,” Mr. Bailey said. “Life is unresolvedness.”
I felt slightly less lame about my own process of understanding when Rosie O’Donnell (a curator of OWN’s social documentary series) told me, in a phone interview, that she, too, had to pave some inner potholes en route to accepting gender transitioning.
“As a gay woman, I found it hard to understand,” she said. “I know some very masculine gay women, and I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of repressed homophobia, where being straight makes it more O.K. But all of us struggle with whatever it is: special-needs kids, gay people. We all have our speed bumps.”
History mostly demonstrates the violence of embracing either pole of moral certainty. The black and white of gender identification has always pushed an infinitude of differences into the margins. Who knows? To finally usher a complete color wheel of sexuality into the mainstream, perhaps it takes a child of Cher.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 15, 2011
An article last Sunday about the gender transitioning of Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono misstated the classification of gender identity disorder. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider it a medical issue and there is considerable debate over whether to classify it as such, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — IV, the standard reference for psychiatric disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, classifies it as a mental disorder; that classification did not end in 1999.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2011, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Reluctant Transgender Role Model.
SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube, the video site owned by Google, formally announced on Monday that it had acquired Next New Networks, a Web video production company, in its biggest effort yet to move beyond short, quirky home videos to professionally produced content.
The acquisition of Next New Networks, which produces original programming and helps video creators distribute their films and make money, is YouTube’s biggest leap into creating its own programming. But that will be minimal, the companies said. Original programming has taken a back seat at Next New Networks, and Google has shied away from producing its own content.
“We want to make as clean a line as possible for us to build the platform on YouTube and then let the content production happen with our partners,” said Tom Pickett, director of global content operation at YouTube.
Google will pay less than $50 million for the company, according to two people briefed on the terms of the deal. The New York Times first reported YouTube’s interest in the company in December. The companies declined to comment on the price.
Improving its original programming is crucial for YouTube, which faces competition from Web video services like Hulu, iTunes and Netflix. For its part, Google, which is trying to popularize its Google TV service, needs more Web video that people will watch for hours at a time.
“There’s still a lot of YouTube that’s about the single video experience right now,” Mr. Pickett said. “We want to think about sets of videos and program experiences. That’s where we’re heading and we think this team is going to help us get there.”
Many video creators on YouTube “are making money and doing great, but as a group they have not added up to shake the foundations of the way people watch content,” said James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. “Maybe it’s just that they’re not aggregated in a meaningful way, but as long as YouTube remains something you do between phone calls at work, it won’t change the way the industry envisions its relationship with the viewer.”
The company also said Monday that it was creating a program called YouTube Next that will help the video makers with whom YouTube shares ad revenue to produce more professional content by giving them grants and training.
Next New Networks, which attracts two billion views a month, compares itself to cable networks, which do not own all their programming but package and broadcast other people’s shows. It helps video creators with advertising, distribution of their shows to various Web sites, and in building an audience by including shows as part of a programming package.
It created the shows “Barely Political” and “Indy Mogul.” It produces videos for the Gregory Brothers, whose video “Bed Intruder Song” was the most-watched video on YouTube last year, and Hungry Nation, a series of online food shows. The Gregory Brothers’ videos, for instance, had up to 20,000 views an episode before the group started working with Next New Networks, and now they have up to two million views for an episode, said Lance Podell, chairman of Next New Networks.
Most of Next New’s shows are on YouTube, but others appear on services like iTunes and Vimeo, and that will continue.
“At this point, we are YouTube-focused, but that doesn’t mean that as an adviser to creators we won’t be able to suggest to them how their business can build on YouTube and off of YouTube,” Mr. Podell said.
He will be director and global head of YouTube Next lab and audience development. YouTube also said it hired the former head of digital distribution at Paramount, Alex Carloss, to work on content acquisition.
Next New Networks, which was founded in 2007, has raised $26 million from investment firms including Spark Capital, Fuse Capital and Goldman Sachs. The company is based in New York and will remain there. YouTube is based in San Bruno, Calif.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition.
