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June 18, 2003 FLASH DANCE

(This article originally appeared in SPIN a few years ago ­ can't remember the exact issue date.)

The excited Italian tourists think they've stumbled onto some chance fabulousness. The Academy Awards are just three days away, and this particular stretch of Sunset Boulevard between The Standard and the Chateau Marmont, two hotels catering to the hip and/or famous, is swarming with expensively accessorized Hollywood foot soldiers. "This is for the Oscars?" one of the tourists inquires. "There are stars here?"

A year ago, or even six months ago, the tourist would have never made such a mistake, because the event that is actually taking place here now, the Yahoo Internet Life Online Film Festival, would not have drawn such a scrupulously elite crowd.

But thanks to a few technological advances, AOL's purchase of Time Warner, and some big deals between Web entertainment site Shockwave.com and a handful of industry vanguards, online entertainment has replaced Kaballah as Hollywood's latest exotic religion ­ and while its new adherents may not be completely sure about what all the funny words mean yet, or how this stuff's really going to change their lives, it has to mean something, right, because why else would Dreamworks potentate Jeffrey Katzenberg be here, or South Park's Matt Stone, or Swingers director Doug Liman, or noted new media theorist James Belushi?

Look, even Invisible Mom II co­star Micky Dolenz is here, slipping into Shockwave.com's bungalow at the Marmont, helping himself to some complimentary apples and bananas, then politely asking if he can rinse them off in the kitchen. Like a lot of people, he's still a little skeptical about the goods, perhaps, but that's not going to stop him from taking his chances on the Great Internet Fruit Basket too.

***

It's one of those sentimental Hollywood tales that seems manufactured by Hollywood itself ­ toiling away for many years in the privileged, overpaid world of big­budget movies and TV, directors and writers like David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Larry David are finally get a shot at pursuing their true artistic dream: creating brief, herky­jerky cartoons for an audience looking for free entertainment that's a bit more workplace­appropriate than amateurgynecologist.com.

Or maybe it's not quite like that, but still, in the world of online entertainment right now, the hottest sector is animation. Why? Three reasons. One, while we wait for broadband future, where super­fast networks will deliver TV­quality video to desktop computers, Palm Pilots, and enhanced TVs, 10 to 15­frames­per­second cartoons created in Macromedia's Flash and other similar formats can be distributed over today's low­bandwidth Internet more efficiently than live­action video. Two, over 200 million people have downloaded the Flash player, so there's already big audience out there. And three, online animation is relatively cheap and easy to produce. With even the lowest budget movie, you generally need some actors, a cameraman, and a couple of production assistants to belittle. But with animation, one or two people can literally do everything. Because of all these factors, a whole new entertainment genre has developed on the Web over the last few months: the short, episodic animated series.

A couple miles down the road from the glamour at Chateau Marmont and the Standard, on a block of La Cienega Boulevard that features a strip club, a membership­only underpants store called Trashy Lingerie, and several discount Persian rug emporiums, Peter Gilstrap and Mark Brooks are busy recording the dialogue for the latest episode of their series, Creamburg. The main room of their two­room office is small, poorly ventilated, window­free, and furnished with an orange faux­ velour couch and matching armchair, a well­worn zebra­print rug, two large metal desks (for them) and one tiny metal desk (for their assistant animator). The other room, which serves as their recording studio, is even smaller. Still, this modest set­up represents progress of sorts: just a few weeks ago, Brooks' apartment bedroom served as the headquarters of the duo's company, Gifted Men Productions, which is now working on three web­based animation series.

"Here's how we do it," says Gilstrap, whose shaven head and trim goatee give him the appearance of an evil Las Vegas magician. He steps into a makeshift recording booth ­ two mattresses stood on end in the corner of the studio room ­ and assumes the halting, deadpan baritone of Jerry Creamburg, a jaded Hollywood spokesfigure who looks like the improbable offspring of Harry Dean Stanton and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Brooks has slipped on a pair of thick­framed indie­geek glasses and now sits hunched in front of an old PC, listening to a previously recorded clip of Gilstrap­as­Creamburg to make sure Gilstrap is getting the voice right. "Here, get a dose of him," Brooks says, playing back a clip through the headphones Gilstrap has donned. "He's a little more subdued."

As Gilstrip listens to the clip, his dog Bingo wanders around the room. "Come on, Bingo, sit, be quiet," he says, then begins to read his dialogue. Occasionally, he flubs a line and does it again. A couple other times, someone walks loudly down the hallway outside, prompting another take. At one point, they have to stop for a minute as an airplane flies overheard. But since these shows are only a couple of minutes long, at most, the recording session goes pretty quickly. In the time it would have taken to get a drink at the overcrowded poolside bar at the Marmont, Gilstrap and Brooks complete the dialogue for one episode of Creamburg and one episode of another series they've started producing, Adventuremen.

***

"I was always too lazy to get into traditional animation. All that paper and painting and cels and cameras and pencil tests," says Xeth Feinberg, creator of the online shows Bulbo and Astro Chimp. "With the computer, you just keep tweaking on your own little screen til you get it right. It's much more hands­on."

Feinberg started his cartooning career as a Xeroxed mini­comic artist handing out his books to 20 or 30 of his friends in Boston. A few years later, he discovered Macromedia Director and Flash and starting making short animations for MTV. When the Web started to emerge as a distribution medium itself, he agreed to create a 13­episode series for the SciFi Channel's website. That's when he came up with Astro Chimp, a show about a monkey who gets shot into space during the 1950s space­race. "Frankly, their budget was so low, I think I got the job because other more established companies wouldn't touch it," Feinberg says. "But I said, 'Sure, I can make something.' They didn't really have any time or energy to exert any editorial control at all, so it worked out pretty well."

In other words, online animation offers the sort of control over a project that creators love. You don't need hundreds of low­cost overseas animators to complete a project. You don't need a slot on Fox's Sunday night line­up to distribute it. Jokes don't get neutered and airbrushed and refined into focus­group­friendly punch lines. "With two guys, you just don't encounter that too­many­cooks thing," says Peter Gilstrap. "There's not that third person, saying, 'I don't think this thing is funny.'"

So online animation is, or at least has the potential to be, more personal than the humor­by­ committee fare of the sitcom world, quirkier and more experimental, and more open to newcomers and outsiders who lack entree into the chronically overcrowded world of TV and the movies.

At the same time, Hollywood's biggest names are embracing the medium too, because instead of trying to convince the networks and the studios that their more offbeat ideas are worth producing, they can simply put them online and see if there really is an audience for them.

At Icebox.com, for example, veteran TV writer Mike Reiss, an executive producer on The Simpsons and the creator of the animated cult hit, The Critic, has created Hard Drinkin' Lincoln, a series that casts President Abraham Lincoln as an alcoholic loudmouth. According to Reiss, "It's a concept I first had like 20 years ago. I was going through my old high school notebooks, and I found this idea ­ what if Lincoln had been acting really obnoxious at Ford's Theater, and that's why John Wilkes Booth killed him?"

Having worked on five series, including two that he created, he's been through all the usual TV experiences ­ arbitrary schedule changes, capricious programming executives, focus group hell. Thanks to the success of The Simpsons, he has no great need to work, but when the invitation came from Icebox.com to create his own show for the site, he saw no downside. Instead of a paycheck, Reiss is getting equity in a dot­com whose founders are ostensibly on fast­track to an IPO (Icebox.com is funded by A­list Internet incubator, eCompanies.com), but he says that's not really the attraction. "The scripts don't take that long to write, I get to do whatever I want," he explains. "Why not try it and see how people respond?"

Last fall, online animated series were still relatively rare, but now there's dozens, if not hundreds of them, and by next fall, there very well maybe be over a thousand regular weekly shows. Shockwave.com has signed up Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Tim Burton, Stan Lee, David Lynch, and James Brooks to produce exclusive content for its site. Icebox.com has enlisted the services of Seinfeld co­creator Larry David, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut co­writer Pam Brady, and a half dozen writers from The Simpsons, amongst others. Martin Lawrence, Eminem, Korn, Limp Bizkit ­ they've all reportedly been looking to do shows of their own. Honkworm CEO Johan Liedgren says his company will produce 500 total episodes of its various shows this year. Wildbrain.com, which currently produces 3 shows, plans to increase that number to 20. Dotcomix.com has eleven shows on its site, including animated versions of This Modern World and Dilbert. Warner Brothers' Entertaindom.com features 7 original animated series and digital versions of vintage Loony Tunes. Animation house Film Roman (The Simpsons, King of the Hill) has created Level13.net, which features 13 "channels" of regularly updated programming. Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard's Pop.com is on the way, and, come to think of it, do Jim Belushi or Micky Dolenz happen to know Flash? Someone needs to draw all this shit…

***

"At first, we wanted to write a sketch comedy thing, like Mr. Show," says Brooks of he and Gilstrap's partnership. "Then, we were like, 'No, let's do a cartoon instead, it'll be easier." He and Gilstrap were both working at The New Times, an alternative weekly in Los Angeles. Gilstrap was a columnist, and Brooks was the art director.

Both were also musicians. Brooks, who'd played guitar for the bands Foreskin 500 and Warlock Pinchers, amongst others, says he was always more interested in music than art. "I never had a big aspiration to be an animator," he explains. "It's just like this weird skill I always had." In the early '90s, he used to draw a comic strip called Mongo Boy for The Rocket. "And then when we'd release a Foreskin 500 record, I'd draw a comic book for it," he says. "The B­side of the record would be the words for the book, and there'd be like a bell to tell you when to turn the pages. So I guess the animation stuff just kind of mutated from that."

Initially, however, they were thinking television rather than the Web. Their first production was a 23­minute episode of Creamburg that Brooks animated in Flash then transferred to videotape. Gilstrap showed it to his agent, whom he'd gotten in the process of selling the movie rights to an article of his about the '60s­era kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. His agent passed Creamburg along to HBO, and that's when Gilstrap and Brooks got their introduction to the maddeningly indecisive world of TV. "We had a couple of meetings and they really liked it," says Gilstrap.

But Creamburg wasn't an easy sell. For one thing, its creators had no TV experience. In addition, an animated show produced by two people instead of a large staff of writers and a squadron of animators had few precedents. "They were like, 'Before we can move forward, we've got to send you on meetings to meet with possible showrunners,'" says Brooks. "So we met with all these half­ stoned writers across Hollywood who were like, 'Yeah, I kind of liked it. I mean, my agent told me I should talk to you guys…'"

Predictably, those meetings never amounted to much more than a little amateur Hollywood anthropology. Weeks of waiting turned into months of waiting, and Gilstrap and Brooks' big break was looking very far away. In the meantime, however, some executives at a website called Mediatrip.com had gotten ahold of the Creamburg tape. "They called us up and were like, 'Look, we want this thing," says Gilstrap. "But we were still hoping HBO was going to do something with it. So they asked us if we had any other ideas."

"We said, 'Yeah, of course, we've got a million show ideas," says Brooks. "And then we basically just pulled Lil' Pimp out of our ass." Brooks sometimes DJ'ed under the name Some Pimp, so he suggested a variant of that. "After we had the name, it took us like two minutes to come up with the concept," says Gilstrap. Brooks made a sketch, and they were ready for their meeting.

The Mediatrip.com guys had no interest in getting stoned Hollywood writers to run the show, so things progressed far more quickly than they did at HBO. "Basically, they asked us how soon we could have something for them, so we said a week," says Gilstrap. Six days later, Lil Pimp made its Internet debut.

Since then, Gilstrap and Brooks have produced two dozen episodes of the show, and it has emerged as the most engaging online animated series to date. Like Creamburg, which Gilstrap and Brooks are now producing for Mediatrip.com after HBO finally decided to pass on it, Lil' Pimp employs a simple formula: cuddly pop culture archetype is crossed with a harder­edged pop culture archetype.

In the case of Lil' Pimp, Gilstrap and Brooks mix the aesthetics of Family Circle and Hanna­Barbara with those of ghetto novelist Iceberg Slim to produce a sweet, brightly colored show about a 9­ year­old suburban kid with freckles and red hair, Lil' Pimp, who hangs out with two older African­ American pimps, Fruitjuice and Nagchampa, and their ho's, Yam Basket and Honeysack.

It's a premise that in the wrong hands could lead to little more than predictable hipster kitsch, but Gilstrap and Brooks are smarter and more idiosyncratic than that. In one episode, the pimps go deep­sea diving in an effort to recruit some mermaids for their stable, but these "trump cards of aquasexuality," as Fruitjuice describes them, prove to be more trouble than they're worth.

In another series of episodes, the pimps confront their arch­nemesis, the break­dancing, mind­ controlling Bobby Infiniti. "Oooh. You fools!" exclaims the friendly villain, purring like a demented Merv Griffin. "You dare to test my mind control with thinking caps? Though they certainly are elegant, ooh! Just for that I'm going to force you to do a funny little dance. Oooh, fun! Yes, that's it, please me, with a funny little dance of my own choosing." A lot of weight's given to shock value in online animation these days. To get people to watch stuff that from a technical perspective is so inferior to what you can get on TV, the thinking goes, you have to give them stuff they can't get on TV. Thus, the uncensored rectal action of Doodie.com, where each day brings a shit joke that makes Jim Carrey look like Noel Coward, or the interactive snuff of Joecartoon.com, where you can turn a trash­talking frog into a milkshake.

But Gilstrap and Brooks accomplish something far more rare with Lil' Pimp: they actually manage to develop nuanced, engaging characters in episodes that last a minute and a half each, tops. And, ultimately, it's like Shakespeare, or Chekov, or Vince McMahon said once upon a time: after the thrill of mutilating small helpless reptiles with kitchen appliances eventually wears off, it all boils down to character.

***

"We've got a million projects," says superheroes comics legend Stan Lee of his new company, Stan Lee Media. "We've got six to eight shows in development already. We're working with other companies. We're not only doing superheroes. We're working with the Backstreet Boys. We're going to take Mighty Mouse into the 21st century."

Full of energy and bluster, the septuagenarian Lee is perfect for these hyperbolic times, when new deals are being struck every day and every animator who manages to produce a two­minute Joe Cartoon knock­off dreams of becoming the Warner Brothers of the 21st century. As for Lee and his company, so far so good. "Disney, Dreamworks, Universal, they're shivering in their boots," he jokes. "They can feel us breathing down their necks."

True enough, his company's first series, The 7th Level, has attracted record audiences on Shockwave.com. On the first day it was up, Shockwave.com's bandwidth usage doubled and its servers crashed. Since then, the seven­minute first episode of The 7th Level has recorded over a million downloads. As far as the storyline goes, it's standard spandex melodrama, filled with resourceful teen crime­fighters and villains whose parents doomed them to a life of intergalactic evil­doing by naming them things like Krog and Mongorr.

But from a technical perspective, The 7th Level sets new standards for an online animated series. Watch it on a big screen, with a fast connection, and you might think you're watching HBO's Spawn. The images are rendered with great detail, the soundtrack thumps and shrieks with continuous menace. Approximately 50 people are included in the credits, and that long list suggests the challenge online animation will soon be facing: as increasing production values make it more and more expensive to produce, will the audience be big enough to sustain it? And will the Web's much vaunted creative freedom last as sites grow increasingly dependent on advertising to sustain the costs of their increasingly expensive shows?

In March, Trey Parker and Matt Stone showed their first efforts to executives at Shockwave.com. Apparently what they created is so raunchy Shockwave.com will put some measures in place to keep children from watching it. Asked whether or not the site might require Parker and Stone to make changes to their work before airing it, a Shockwave.com spokesperson declined to comment.

Of course, one way to make the economics of online animation work is just to keep things simple, and expectations relatively modest. For example, Honkwork.com's Johan Liedgren is planning to introduce 25­ 30 new series this year, but isn't looking for mass market, TV­sized audiences. "If we can get 50,000 people watching an episode, we're safe," he says.

According to Liedgren, Honkworm.com log records indicate that one of its series, Beans, attracts at least one loyal viewer from the Vatican on a regular basis. That's the kind of patronage any animated series might hope for, because as more and more of these shows battle for viewers, the casualties will start mounting and any special blessing will be welcome.

Still, even divine intervention won't be able to save a lot of these shows, and rightly so: most of them are mediocre at best. "I keep looking for other funny stuff online," Gilstrap says as he and Brooks sit in their new office.

"We keep waiting for someone who's going to kick our asses." Brooks continues.

"We can't be the only geniuses."

"Maybe we're assholes," Brooks concludes. "But none of this shit makes me laugh. There isn't anything on the Simpsons level. There isn't anything on the Ren & Stimpy level. There isn't anything on a Beavis and Butt­head level."

Which isn't that surprising. After all, you can't blame bad TV entirely on the various inefficiencies and obstacles that plague the production process ­ a lot of TV's badness has to do with the fact that there's so much airtime to fill up, but only a limited number of talented people to fill it. Magnify that content­to­fill gap several million times and you have the Web.

So while there's the occasional online animated series like Lil' Pimp, which probably would have never made it through the TV development process for the right reasons, there are far more online shows that would never make it through the TV development process for the wrong ones, i.e., they're lousy. Just as anyone who's ever browsed MP3.com for a while begins to have a new appreciation for record labels, traditional TV­style programmers will have a place online too. "These Internet companies, they're going to find out that programming is harder than it looks," Matt Stone told the crowd at the Yahoo Internet Life Film Festival. "Those guys aren't getting paid for nothing."

Indeed, people see the success of a site like doodie.com, which generates millions of monthly page­ views while showing only the faintest skid marks of wit, and they think, "How hard can it be?"

The reality, however, is that for every incredibly popular lame site out there, there are thousands of incredibly obscure lame sites, and even some incredibly obscure good sites. So for most online series, even getting those 50,000 regular viewers that Honkworm's Liedgren is shooting for will be a battle. The great majority of online shows will ultimately die deaths more anonymous than even the worst TV flops, because even a show that only costs a few thousand dollars a week to produce needs to attract a few thousand dollars a week of advertising to survive, and it's unlikely there'll be enough viewers to go around.

"No one seems to be really making any money," says Gilstrap of the current state of the Web. "They just have all these investors coughing up millions because no one wants to get left out in the cold if this becomes television in five years. But all these sites have to start making money at some point. I'm not really worried about our career, because we sort of got in under the wire and established ourselves. A year from now, though, two schmucks like us with a cartoon, it's gonna be like, 'Get in line.'"

Having gotten in under the wire, however, he and Brooks have big plans for Gifted Men Productions. Recently, a big Hollywood studio asked them to pitch ideas for feature films. A couple of cable channels have expressed an interest in turning Lil' Pimp and Adventuremen into TV shows. Venture capitalists keep offering them money, they're thinking of doing a one­hour, straight­to­ video version of Lil' Pimp themselves, and they're even considering bringing in some outside voice talent for Creamburg.

"From the start, we always wanted to get all these old comics like Shellie Berman and Louie Nye to do voices," Gilstrap explains. "But we couldn't really contact them until we got this place," he says, jokingly gesturing at the less­than­luxe accommodations of their new office. "I mean you can't really call up Don Knotts for a meeting and then invite him over to your bedroom."

Posted by G. Beato at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) Copyright © 2003 G. Beato