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9781138724341C41.3D 488 [488–498] 7.9.2019 12:28PM 41 OFF THE LINE Expanding Creativity in the Production and Distribution of Web Series 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 Los Angeles Times 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 488 9781138724341C41.3D 489 [488–498] 7.9.2019 12:28PM Off the Line 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 489 9781138724341C41.3D 490 [488–498] 7.9.2019 12:28PM Aymar Jean Christian 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:

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