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41 OFF THE LINE Expanding Creativity in the Production and Distribution of

Aymar Jean Christian

“Amazed, and in shock,” Daryn Strauss wrote on her website after her nomination for a 2012 Writers Guild of America East Award in original storytelling in new media for Downsized.1 Downsized was led by a woman and featured a racially diverse cast, all of whom felt the economic downturn in different ways. Started in 2010, the new media category was relatively new and low-profile for the WGA, an outgrowth of the 2007–2008 strike when temporarily unemployed Hollywood writers created dozens of web programs. That zeal waned, and indeed by 2018, the WGA let the category go unfilled, with zero nominees.2 Yet for Strauss, recognition from a powerful guild meant something. Strauss was a writer and actress working as a freelance produ- cer when she made Downsized, an online drama about the recession, which earned her member- ship to the WGA and recognition on a host of sites from the to web TV industry publication Tubefilter. Working in “Hollywood” but without creative ownership and control, Strauss went outside traditional structures and into a new medium and form: web series. By 2012 her series shared WGA nominations with indie darlings like Michael Cyril Creighton’s Jack in a Box but also higher-budget projects like AOL’s Aim High (from studio director McG) and NBC’s 30 Rock. From production to story and release, Strauss’ projects expanded the scope of the media industry. For her series she worked alongside underemployed actor-friends to develop storylines about the consequences of economic decline:

It was a very collaborative process … We shoot in blocks. So we shot a couple of epi- sodes, and then I would watch the footage and see what the footage is like and then I would write more based on what they brought.

Here, Strauss identifies a flexible mode of production driven by actors and crew, rather than clear deliverables, outside of clearly defined roles. Not content with producing, Strauss also started her own network, Digital Chick TV, to showcase and distribute web shows by and about women. Aware that dramas about women and economic collapse were hard to sell, Strauss cre- ated a distribution platform to correct YouTube’s discovery problem, because of the high volume of user-generated uploads, and legacy television’s high barriers to entry: “I knew offhand

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that there were series for women and by women, and women didn’t know where to find them.” From 2010 to 2015, Digital Chick TV streamlined distribution for independent series much in the way cable operators and traditional networks curate corporate content. In their bid to break into Hollywood, independent television creators replicate but also break away from industry practices, ethics and logics, forging distinct models and narratives of success. I call this activity “off the line” for the ways in which creative workers blur the boundaries between creative and technical labor, ownership and execution, tradition and innovation or improvisation. A legacy of industrial film and television production, the “line” divides creation and craft. “Above-the-line” labor defines writers, directors, producers and stars considered most critical to bringing stories to life, whereas “below-the-line” laborers are craftspersons who tech- nically execute the creative vision of those above – camera and boom operators, production assistants, visual effects artists, stylists, etc. “This line indexed the scarcity or surplus of so-called creativity and professionalism, two competing resources for labor value in industrial capitalism since the late 1800s” (Mayer, 2011, 4). Creativity has won out as a more valuable resource. In terms of pay, above-the-line workers are more likely to receive the highest rates of pay, a share of the project’s intellectual property value, and percentages of sales, the payouts from which can easily reach into the millions for studio projects with national and global media distribution sys- tems. This has caused tremendous inequalities in media. Vicki Mayer has further critiqued this divide by arguing there are workers who are not “on set” in Hollywood and so even further below the line: reality TV casting agents contracted by studios in New Orleans, factory workers who assemble TV sets in South America, amateur porn producers making direct-to-video spe- cials, etc. These workers have even less job security and remuneration than the more often unionized Hollywood below-the-line professionals, and they are more likely to be women, minorities or perform work that clearly exploits them. Thus, Mayer argues, the line created a class of workers who are perceived as creative; anyone without those credits lacks claims to intellectual property, which is of the highest value in a creative industry. The Internet emerged as an alternative distribution system in the 1990s, and from the begin- ning independent producers utilized it to expand, critique, and remix legacy practices to expand access to systems of value creation. They created new intellectual properties – TV shows – in new ways, redefining the very nature of production, distribution, marketing and thus TV as intellectual property. Independent television creators – and their peers in other industries, such as bloggers in journalism, mixtape artists in music and podcasters in radio – expose the chaotic and confusing tensions between new and legacy media, amateur freedom and corporate power enabled by an open distribution system without the legacy of the line and the inequality it engenders. What holds those tensions together is the chance for creators to tell a wider range of stories in a system with fewer barriers to reaching fans and profiting from their attention. Markets like these expose blind spots in scholarly and popular works about media, particularly the Inter- net, which tend to focus either on high-value producers making big-budget programs or under- resourced amateurs with little knowledge of distribution. Analyzing what I call “off-the-line” spaces – spaces in which industry workers try to forge what Matthew Hindman calls “the missing middle,” a sustainable market for independent workers and their fans (Hindman, 2008) – contrib- utes substantially to debates over the possibility of a creative economy focused on maximizing value for all workers and consumers. This missing middle remained elusive for the first decade or two of web original programming, and most productions were under-financed and featured the kind of precarious labor workers were trying to escape; creative freedom, however, made digital work attractive compared with legacy TV. This chapter uses the case study of Scott Zakarin to explore how an independent production and open distribution promoted creativity and innovation off the line (Christian, 2018). Known to some as an original innovator of the “web series” for the early sale of The Spot to NBC in the

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mid-1990s, Zakarin’s story reflects broad changes in television production online and on-air. Open distribution gave him license to experiment with how to tell stories in collaboration with fans and producers. His creative freedom fostered innovation in the production and release of serial stories but also raised questions about its effect on workers and the ethics of developing flexible storytelling practices for profit. Unlike Daryn Strauss, who used web distribution to cor- rect labor inequalities for women and racial minorities, Zakarin’s work replicated Hollywood’s male gaze, suggesting that new technologies for series distribution and organizational structures for series production cannot alone correct inequalities born of the line.

Innovation in Storytelling Production and Release In conversation Scott Zakarin spoke excitedly about how web distributionsupportscreativestorytelling, acombinationoffaninvolvement,collaborativeproduction,culturalimmediacyandtransmediapub- lishing. Zakarin positioned himself as a tinkerer, as acrusaderforsomemasculine, unrealized vision of serialized storytelling, a journey he described with some grandiloquence: “I’ve spent my life chasing aMobyDick… In chasing this, I’mtrulyAhab,” he told me in an interview. Starting from 1995 and continuing throughout the 2000s, Zakarin’scareertrajectorymapstheearlyhistoryofwebtelevision, from accounts of Internet culture’sdemocratizingpowertothedot-combust,fromthereinvigoration of utopianism through Web 2.0 to the subsequent desire from off-the-line producers to incorporate this activity into a structured market. If anyone can lay claim to inaugurating excitement over web series, it is Zakarin. His work also intersects with reality television, branded entertainment and advertising, social networking, text-based storytelling and video streaming, driven by fans and transmedia distribution. His projects are variously profitable and unsuccessful, transformational and unnoticed. He has acted as aproducer,director,writer,executiveand marketer, from creating his own series, films and television shows to starting his own independent distribution networks online. Zakarin’s focus on creativity and experimentation is crucial for understanding why many pro- ducers of independent television work outside the legacy development process. Scholars of organ- ization communication have a number of theories for how creativity occurs within legacy structures: through broken routines and organizational conflict; under the auspices of a struggling network, a producer with past success, a new or hungry network executive; or through the con- stant uncertainty endemic to the production of culture (Ettema, 1982; Gitlin, 1983; Turow, 1982). Yet in legacy television, creativity always happens under institutional constraints, particu- larly the need to routinize labor: “a kind of balancing act between the needs by creators to search for novelty and their need to limit that search in the interests of predictability and effi- ciency” (Turow, 1985, 222). A networked environment with undefined rules, routines and norms allowed Zakarin to experiment with various storytelling and distribution strategies. Zakarin’s history in the web series market is distinct – really, without peer – and so warrants full accounting. He ranks among few producers who have consistently produced and innovated within serial stories for web distribution, making him an ideal site for investigating possibilities and challenges of making television outside the dominant network system. Zakarin has spent his career combining various media – personal blogs, books, photography, television, web video – and disrupting norms of serial television. His story as one the Internet’s longest-working produ- cers began in 1995 with The Spot, his first major endeavor since his first feature film went to Cannes in the late 1980s. A significant shift away from his roots in cinema toward a kind of television, The Spot was a text-based series about the lives of a group of twentysomethings living in a Los Angeles beach house, inspired by The Real World or Melrose Place. Yet Zakarin wanted to increase the audience’s sense of immediacy, so, predating the rise of blogs, the site featured individual web pages – diaries – of each of the houses’roommates. In the very beginning Zakarin wrote everything, creating “layers of history” for each character. Each page included photos and,

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at times, videos.3 The Spot, produced in-house at the ad agency Fattal & Collins, quickly became popular, logging hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. It ran for two years, spawning a companion book and eventually providing the catalyst for the short-lived online network American Cybercast. The Spot’s institutionalization in an advertising agency, as opposed to a studio affiliated with a television network, allowed Zakarin to take risks and play with storytell- ing, but he only had free rein after office hours until the project started to bring in sponsors. For Zakarin, The Spot showed the potential for the webtodeviatefromtelevision’sstaticrelation- ship with the audience, to incorporate interactivity and greater character depth and flexibility, all of which he positioned as the result of his and his collaborators’creative energy and the web’sabilityto integrate different media formats. He tried to advance these ideas in his next project, Grape Jam, which folded after one year. It had combined elements of a radio show, withchatrooms,avatars, social games and improv comedy for users, all performed by “good-looking” actor/performers who contributed heavily to the programming. “It was all sorts of fun for something that didn’tmakeany money,” Zakarin said. He then spearheaded the development of an entertainment portal for AOL called Entertainment Asylum, designed to compete with Microsoft’sMSNasahubforentertainment news, fan engagement and celebrity interviews. An expensive venture in “interactive webcasting,” incorporating live video and chat with movie premieres, interviews and oddball programming, Asylum did not last long. Its end signaled a sobering period for “Siliwood,”4 ahandfulofpartnerships made between Silicon Valley and Hollywood (Geirland and Sonesh-Kedar, 1999). Freed from some traditional production constraints, Zakarin found monetizing something so unruly a challenge. Soon after, Zakarin moved into mainstream television and documentary production and distribution and worked there for several years. Yet the excitement around Web 2.0 and social networking brought Zakarin back to the web in 2004, starting with a site called Fishbowl. Where once he experimented with scripted entertainment, Zakarin now jumped into reality TV. Fishbowl was a site about reality televi- sion offering original programming – blogs, video and audio podcasts, all of which featured interviews with and testimonials from past and present reality TV contestants. Former stars participated in the social network to talk about their experiences within and after their work on TV; fans of the shows joined forums to talk among themselves and with the talent. Fish- bowl reflected Zakarin’s desire to utilize labor undervalued by Hollywood studios, former reality stars from hits such as The Real World who were not unionized actors: “How’dIget the biggest names? Because nobody else wanted them.” Premiering before YouTube and when both MySpace and Facebook were in their infancy, however, Fishbowl lacked the infra- structure to reach its full potential. It lasted only for a year. The following year, Zakarin made one more heavy push into reality television by producing a series for the U.S. cable channel E! called Kill Reality about a group of former reality stars tasked with making afeaturefilm, eventually released on DVD as The Scorned. In 2006, alerted the mainstream media to the possibility of serialized video online and reminded producers of its ability to break the codes of storytelling through interactivity – its protagonist, Bree, responded directly to fans in the comments, in character. Seeing a connection between lonelygirl’s blend of reality and fiction (Christian, 2009) and his text-based series The Spot, Zakarin re-entered scripted entertainment. As online video reached maturity Zakarin filmed his first full-fledged video web series, Soup of the Day. Soup of the Day was an interactive scripted series about a young man dating three girls at the same time, one each for three days of the week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. For several weeks, Zakarin and his production team released an episode on each of those days, both on YouTube, MySpace and a semi-popular video site called LiveVideo. Fans gave suggestions on how the protagonist should handle his predicament and even- tually decided who he should date permanently. The series was a success, with 14 million views in total, half of which were on YouTube, and was eventually released on DVD.

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Soup of the Day marked the beginning of a clear Zakarin web video aesthetic, mixing lo-fi realism and audience participation, sutured with a binary gendered address to clarify the gaze to prospective fans. “I need to let the audience be part of it. I need truth,” he said. In his next series, Zakarin honed this aesthetic into something he would eventually repurpose and deploy with new actors, settings and contexts. Following the success of Soup of the Day, LiveVideo com- missioned another set of series, NoHo Girls, about attractive young women living in Los Angeles, a series which created a number of spin-offs and permutations including FlashBash, HiHo Girls, WeHo Girls and Van Nuys Guys, all running until 2007 and some having sub-series and shows based on specific characters. The series were incredibly popular, garnering millions of views between YouTube and LiveVideo. The combination of attractive young people, a casual reality TV aesthetic and the tropes of online video – a gritty guerilla filmmaking approach mixed with vlogging – made them infectious for users looking for something more accessible than the increasingly scripted and thriller-driven lonelygirl franchise. The NoHo Girls series and its permuta- tions featured actors who spoke to and interacted with audiences through the series, ad infinitum (the shows are not bound by seasons), a process about which Zakarin waxes idealistically as the zenith of new media creativity. Seeing this success, MySpace, looking to compete with YouTube and the insurgent Facebook, contracted Zakarin to film a branded web series called Roommates, which premiered in 2007. With more money, Zakarin’s aesthetic improved in technical polish but retained improvisation, self-reflexivity, the reality TV aesthetic, and vlogging. Roommates prefigured shows like The Hills on MTV, with its blend of situation comedy, mundane events and emphasis on personality over plot. MySpace and its brand partners were pleased with the series and ordered a second season. After Roommates, Zakarin continued to produce shows guided by the aesthetic that made him famous, including Model Ball, which ran for one year, and Upstairs Girls and Downstairs Guys, all of which were published on YouTube and resemble his other Girls and Guys series. Later shifting to distribution like Strauss before him, Zakarin started developing a home site, a kind of inde- pendent network, for his production company, Iron Sink Entertainment, to house a library of his recent web series alongside new episodes, forums and other ways for users to interact with the characters and content.

Producing Independent Television: Collaboration, Flexibility and Immediacy While Zakarin justified his projects as a break from television, his production strategies revealed more negotiation between old and new. Zakarin emphasized flattened hierarchies and shared responsibilities between writers and actors, the possibility for greater immediacy and audience interaction and the scrappy source material of some projects. To integrate flexible production strategies with fan engagement, relied on a clear gendered address, as we can see by even the titles of his later works, signaling to audiences a heteronormative gaze – Upstairs Girls, Downstairs Guys, NoHo Girls, HiHo Girls, WeHo Girls and Van Nuys Guys. Many of these elements, includ- ing binary gendered production and marketing, had been present in television production for decades, while many new media strategies for production and fan engagement were simultan- eously, if slowly, being incorporated by mainstream film and television. What indie production and web distribution offered was the ability to rapidly and improvisationally experiment with who shapes the story, how, and when – to experiment with creativity itself. The Spot was the genesis of and template for most of Zakarin’s subsequent explorations in filmed series and interactive websites. It is the foundation of his argument for reinventing televi- sion reception and production. The Spot arose after Zakarin started participating in chatrooms, first on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks and then on AOL. On AOL Zakarin chatted with random strangers and eventually started experimenting with creating characters: “I became very

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popular as a 23-year old blonde-haired blue-eyed film student. I was also amazed at how stupid guys are.” This combination of blending reality and fiction, the creation of personae – notably, young attractive women – and his effort to foster dialogue between producer and user/consumer became a critical part of his practice. The use of diaries in The Spot, the focus on the inner feel- ings and personal dramas of a discrete set of individuals, seemed to work online. Using text, photos and a couple of videos each month, Zakarin created not only a world – a mysterious beach house – but also a set of people prepped for interaction with fans. Having characters interact with the audience via digital platforms was quickly taken up by a number of legacy networks in the late 1990s looking to keep fans engaged in a competitive media environment (Christian, 2018). Marketers emphasized greater consumer interaction to obtain higher rates from advertisers, with mixed success. Independents employed it to get users more invested in the characters as web projects proliferated and competed for attention. As William Boddy shows, changes in media distribution compel companies to adapt their business models and re-shape them to survive; gender routinely shapes this process, as seen in early TV when serial radio and television became gendered feminine through passive consumption and in digital innov- ations gendered masculine because consumption was active (Boddy, 2004). We can see in Zakarin’s call for active audiences a masculine perspective on media consumption of women’s bodies. For other series – and many of the most popular on YouTube – pretty women and a relentless focus on personal drama worked quite well. From WeHo Girls to Downstairs Guys, Zakarin indulged the tendency toward narcissism and petty sexual drama among a certain segment of the youth market, all while dressing it with a sexually attractive veneer. Writing about the politics of spectatorship and the gaze with women and webcams, Michele White noted how online video offers opportunities to see “real” bodies and intimate spectatorship, since viewers were presumed to be closer to the screen than for TV, and yet continually forecloses the possibility of real, material connection (White, 2003, 2006). This interplay between voyeurism, gender and intimacy lends to Zakarin’s videos an intoxicating appeal, encouraging users to interact. The immersive, immediate quality of web video lends itself to fan participation and spreadabil- ity, where users share cultural products to reflect on themselves and spark conversations in their communities (Jenkins, Green and Ford, 2013). “The ways in which people can connect with each other is revolutionary,” says , co-creator of thirysomething, My So-Called Life and the short-lived web series, , which premiered online to much fanfare only to be cancelled once NBC aired it to low ratings. “It’s just not a business yet,” he told me in 2010. In a post-YouTube marketplace, scripted series producers used direct address and social media platforms and functionality to engage fans and sell them to sponsors. Zakarin’s work presaged the rise of social media platforms and scripted/vlog hybrid series. As web video entered its third phase after YouTube, having attractive women engage users directly – direct address – became a trend as producers pursued engagement: most popularly with lonelygirl15, then with Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s Quarterlife, NBC’s Gemini Division, MTV’s Valemont, Day’s The Guild and Pemberly Digital’s The Lizzie Bennett Diaries.5 Many of the serialized streaming video hits were extensions of Zakarin’s gendered address, appealing to men who desire women or women who see themselves in community with the leads. As with Zakarin’s, few have become years- long franchises, save The Guild. To produce immersive, engaging worlds, series do best with writers who can respond to fans immediately, shaping or deepening the story without excessive intervention. Zakarin needed a team of writers and actors, each with some agency over a character’s story. Zakarin wrote the basics – the history of the house, the relationships between the characters, and the general plot and character outlines – but the writers acted, or developed, the characters through text. Contrasting the writing structure with legacy television, he said they “weren’tbeingledbycommittee.Scott was very hands-on about the big picture story, day, week, month and season. How it played out

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on journal entry level, he would be very vague.” Zakarin acted as an editor for writing and plot consistency but left most of the details to the staff. In perhaps the most marked shift from televi- sion, in the beginning Zakarin acted as the network executive giving “notes” while also a showrunner running a writers’room whose writers nevertheless had more creative freedom. Networked distribution, then, made explicit the collaborative nature of television writing, but it allowed for more producers – like actors – to participate in the process. For a number of his subsequent projects, actors were given a great deal of creative freedom. “A lot of these guys, they write their own dialogue on their feet,” Zakarin told me. The demands of new media produc- tion – constantly updated content for a fickle audience – limits how much work one person can handle and benefits those with creative ideas. Zakarin privileged improvisational actors for his comedy site, Grape Jam, in part so they could shoulder some of the labor. In his two subsequent projects, Entertainment Asylum and Fishbowl, Zakarin used celebrities-as-producers. Celebrities such as Alyson Hannigan and Denise Richards, Gavin Rossdale and Dustin Hoffman were tasked with playing interactive games with audiences, answering questions while chatting with fans. Fishbowl took the notion of celebrity-as-producer to another extreme, literally hiring reality stars to host shows, blog about their lives, and participate in fan discussions. Years later Instagram and Twitter would provide current and would-be reality TV stars platforms for audience engagement, serving ancillary narratives in between legacy TV seasons. Easy to execute in lower-cost text-based episodes Zakarin continued producer–fan interactiv- ity in his filmed series, in spite of the high financial stakes of video production. “He was always willing to listen to ideas and really cultivate the talent,” actor Tarah DeSpain told me about her time working with Zakarin as an actor on WeHo Girls, Roommates and Model Ball. As an impro- visational actress, she appreciated the room to “breathe creatively.” For a series not controlled by media outlets or large brands, actors had more control over how to interpret their characters and advance the plot, DeSpain said, comparing Roommates (distributed by MySpace and sponsored by brands like Ford) to the independent WeHo and Model Ball. Much of WeHo was improvised, and Zakarin’s series included separate spaces for characters to vlog, confessional-style. So DeSpain dir- ected herself numerous times. Character vlogs for many years became the standard response to demand for transmedia content: cheap and simple to make, corporations (legacy TV networks) and independent web series distributors followed the lead of lonelygirl15 in breaking the “fourth wall” and having the characters address the camera in the tradition of reality TV (Miller, 2009). Zakarin’s productions reveal how collaboration, flexibility and immediacy can greatly shape how series develop in an open television market. Independent production renders unambiguous the vital role actors play in the production and circulation of media, along with the importance of writers and producers in determining the engagement factor of the final text. Independent productions focused on creating engaging shows online benefit from being flexible enough to disperse agency over the narrative to its producers and fans. Yet these changes are not necessarily progressive. One writer-producer, Rob Cesternino, noted how for NoHo Girls Zakarin and the crew were shooting 15 episodes (at around three to five minutes in length) each day in order to keep up with the publishing schedule. Without legacy television’s multimillion-dollar licensing and production fees, budgets for these kinds of series tended to be small, as sponsors were wary of promises of engagement, even as they feared losing legacy television audiences to new, more interactive media forms.

Releasing Independent Television: Expanding Audience Participation The expansion of creative ownership and control in Scott Zakarin’s series extended beyond writers, directors, and individuals and corporations sponsoring the series: it included the audience as marketers and participants. Much has been written on the participatory nature of new media,

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the communities of bloggers, fans, YouTubers, etc. who collectively create and remix mainstream media content (Jenkins, 1992; Lessig, 2008; Penley, 1997). Still, we have few examples of series and films actively guided by both the original creators and the audience it targets. Television his- tory has some antecedents, particularly in unscripted shows: talent shows on television from Star Search to American Idol (Jenkins, 2006); radio, both on talk shows and call-in advertisements; and in film through the circulation of cult objects, whose fans “authenticate” which versions are most true (Jancovich, 2002). The immediacy with which new media production – both in text and film – can respond to audience demands rivals earlier film or television products. Once again, starting at The Spot is instructive. In an amusing anecdote, a particularly irascible viewer sent an email diatribe to “Michelle,” a character written by writer Troy Bolotnick. The reader was irked by The Spot’s coy real-versus-fake posture and accused the production of being “Hollywood.” To prove the fakery (and corporate slant) of the entire series, the viewer dared Michelle to take a picture of herself in a bikini in front of a refrigerator holding strawberries, writer Rich Tackenberg recalled. Within several hours, the series had the actress playing Michelle take the photo and posted it online with a “fuck you … this is the one time I’m going to do this” message. This is a salacious example of how the producers regularly incorporated user response and utilized cheaper produc- tion contexts into how they ran the series. They rapidly reacted to current events – the O.J. Simpson verdict or the death of Jerry Garcia. They monitored which characters were popular and which were not, using emails and hits as guides. One character, for instance, was almost universally detested but received the most (hate) mail and twice as much traffic; he stayed on the show. Throughout the series, fans sent emails suggesting what individual characters should do or say, and while the vast majority were “bad” ideas, a few made it into the narrative: “It felt very different from a focus group on a television show,” said Tackenberg, citing a legacy TV develop- ment strategy. “It was something very organic. That was a very powerful tool that I think kept the show successful for a very long time.” Here co-creative labor serves not only to “give the people what they want” and bridge the gap between creator and consumer but also to hone the marketing of a series lacking the support of legacy distribution. The immediacy of producer response to fan demands supported their ideals of new media storytelling as collectively imagined by a community of fans, a concept well-researched in studies of new media (Askwith, 2007; Banks and Deuze, 2009; Benkler, 2007; Bruns, 2008; Jenkins, 1992; Shirky, 2008; Szulborski, 2005). Zakarin’s body of work reveals a sincere respect for the audience’s ability to imagine a world. In The Spot, for example, Zakarin often preserved discrep- ancies in different characters’recollections of events, allowing fans to make sense of the truth and presaging the rise of complex, ambiguous storytelling seen in “quality TV” such as Lost, The Sop- ranos and Mad Men (Mittell, 2014). “In no other medium can audiences have such a pivotal role in developing characters and story lines. We have found that audiences are eager, indeed resolute, in having their input utilized in the evolution of a show,” Zakarin once said of his storytelling ambitions (Business Wire, 1996). In his first full-fledged entrée into online video, with Soup of the Day, Zakarin jumped headfirst into “interactivity.” Each episode the lead character spoke in character with the fans on MySpace, trying to solicit feedback on which girl he should choose to date. In the end viewers chose one of the three girls to whom he should dedicate his time, but audience input occurred throughout. “We were shooting and writing with not a lot of lead time. When we saw the audience responding, we would change the story up,” said producer Rob Cesternino, who said they shot each episode two weeks before publishing it on YouTube and other sites.6 By delegitimizing the author’s hand and giving the series a “casual” tone Zakarin did away with the need for ambiguity over the story’s veracity. His newer shows, including Model Ball and Upstairs Girls/Downstairs Guys, focused instead on making the characters personable, vlogging

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back and responding to users, all within an informal, handheld visual style. Actors spent time making their own vlogs – Zakarin says there was “no storytelling to it,” meaning its function was emotive not narrative – and engaging one-to-one with users. Once again, these practices were not new. Fan participation with stars and the role of stars as authenticators of media dis- course were indelible facets of film and television aesthetics and storytelling (Dyer, 1998; Schulze, White, and Brown, 1993). Zakarin’s focus on developing intimate, immediate connections between producers and fans allowed him to experiment with narrative by lessening the import- ance of plot in scripted entertainment. Further enriching his version of new television was Zakarin’s “networking” of his shows. Since NoHo Girls, Zakarin created complex universes in which different series intersect with one another and expand based on how producers and fans shape the narrative. Characters from one series show up in others. Two series can run side-by-side with characters engaging in social and sexual intrigue, as in the companion series Upstairs Girls and Downstairs Guys, two separate shows that took place in the same house. Series like Model Ball had “second tier” shows – Ashley’s Hug- time, Sandy’s Channel, Stupid Jim – in which individual characters perform various hijinks, execut- ing situational gags or revealing new emotional layers on a regular basis.7 These practices of networked storytelling put the viewer in the role of assembling the plot, deciding what is import- ant and what is not, a project too complex and nonlinear for most on-air television at the time. While these methods of television storytelling shimmered with the gloss of the new, they carried a unique set of production issues, most notably the amount of labor needed to sustain the inter- actions. Toward the end of The Spot, when the series was regularly amassing over 100,000 visitors each show, the possibilities for one-to-one communication between producer and fan dissipated. With the newer shows, constant communication with fans took an emotional toll on the actors and some balked at the added labor. “The name of the game was to be interactive. You’ddefin- itely respond to comments, we would make videos commenting on other comments,” DeSpain said of her work on YouTube. “But it crossed a line for me as an artist. You want your work to be your work.” DeSpain, who, like many of Zakarin’s actresses, was valuable both for her comedic talent and her looks, found the constant engagement with drooling male fans “gross.” Participatory culture was not exempt from the male gaze and gendered relations (Mulvey, 2000), and in fact, such dynamics are integral to how videos circulated at the time (Shifman, 2012).

Promise and Peril in Off-the-Line Markets Zakarin’s series broadened the means of production and invited users into worlds, but producers still had to contend with the limitations of media production, the politics of labor and gender. Undergirding this chapter’s focus on production, distribution and storytelling has been a narrative about the perils of the open market for online video. Web television was a vast sea of program- ming, where no one could control distribution. Unlike legacy television, sufficiently scaled to shut out most aspirants and well-endowed enough to enrich a small number of producers, online video lacked structure. In this liminal space, amidst hustling for views and producing new videos on which to serve advertisements, would-be auteurs like Scott Zakarin became entrepreneurs. They lacked the luxury of separating art from marketing, authenticity from aesthetics, the audi- ence from the producer and creativity from labor. They had to engage fully with everything, and in their practices, they shone a light on the limits of legacy institutions while offering new possi- bilities for storytelling production and release. One conversation I had with Zakarin illuminated this dynamic. Discussing his plans for the Iron Sink Network, a site intended to house a large part of his video library and to create new opportunities for engagement, Zakarin proposed an alternative business venture. Zakarin contem- plated creating a network of text-based “content sites” based on particular topics – dogs, cars,

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Off the Line

etc. – all aimed at amassing a large mass of cheap advertisements from the powerful ad networks (which currently control the bulk of ads served on media websites). The strategy was not an art- istic one, but a pure business plan: sponsors value large audiences and targeted content, not “quality.” Now shuttered, the mere existence of the plan was revealing: online producers lack the relatively clear structures of legacy media. To keep producing, they have to do both what they creatively desire but also what the market demands. Their aesthetic and production strategies are tools for creative survival and worthy artistic contributions to television production practice, but workers must be paid, and during the time Zakarin produced web series, sponsors still spent most of their money in the old system. Zakarin’s work emerged before the rise of big data and the need for web platforms to increase scale in order to remain competitive. Today these kinds of flexible, producer- and fan-driven video series are under threat as distributors such as Netflix and Amazon increase production budgets and work with pre-existing intellectual property where characters and their worlds are already established. Zakarin’s career and the many indie TV producers working at the same time might have spanned a period of experimentation before larger corporations moved in and re- standardized production for more predictable audience sizes and profits. Nevertheless, this period instructs us of the innovation possible, as well as the dangers implicit, with open access to distri- bution for agents outside legacy systems and structures.

Notes * Scott Zakarin quoted with permission – he can be contacted at [email protected]. 1 www.darynstrauss.com, retrieved July 17, 2012. 2 The WGA was among the first guilds or academies to give awards to new media storytelling, but eventually found actively curating online series a challenge. For more on web series awards, see the introduction and chapter four of Christian (2018). 3 Obviously, given its time period, videos were short, usually less than a minute, and took quite a bit of time to load. 4 The term describes Hollywood’s interest in new/web-based technologies as an alternative distribution tool and Silicon Valley-based tech companies’ investments in creative productions as they worked to create audi- ences for their new tech, services and platforms. 5 This was the first of five vlog adaptations of late-19th-century novels with women as protagonists, perhaps related to the serial, epistolary form and the dominance of women as both fans and actors online. 6 As before, the series also benefitted from an ambiguity over whether the characters on the show were real or fictional; yet since Soup of the Day intersected with lonelygirl15, by the end of the show skeptical viewers were hip to the game. 7 Such practices have since become commonplace on primetime television series; prominent examples include Glee on Fox, Heroes on NBC, Ugly Betty on ABC, and Gossip Girl on CW, all of which have given beloved side characters their own web series.

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