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Jewish World Review Sept. 12, 2005 / 8 Elul, 5765 A night in Michael Eisner's shoes By Joel Stein
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I wanted to crush dreams. I wanted to play network exec and reject TV pilots just like ABC turned down mine. I wanted to feel the mad rush of Michael Eisner power. The kind that makes you feel so confident you honestly believe that people are interested in your summer camp stories.
So I went to Cinespace on Hollywood Boulevard, where, once a month, 400 people vote on which five-minute shows get to make another episode the next month for a website called Channel 101. I wanted to focus-group each episode and make the writers add scenes with more emotional resonance that improve the main character's likeability. I was told that all I could do is vote.
The standing-room-only crowd was full of Hollywood hipsters, cable network executives, agents and Jimmy Kimmel and his girlfriend, Sarah Silverman, who costarred in a show performed almost entirely while drunk or stoned. It will never be canceled because if there's one thing nerdy comedy writers love even more than beer and pot, it's Sarah Silverman.
The leader of this movement is Dan Harmon, 32, who, along with his writing partner, Rob Schrab, created Channel 101. They wanted to create a forum for alternative voices in television because they had made the world's most famous unaired pilot, "Heat Vision and Jack." Produced in 1999 for Fox, the show featured a rogue NASA astronaut with superpowers from radiation (Jack Black) and his talking motorcycle (Owen Wilson), narrated by Ben Stiller.
No one makes any money from Channel 101, which not only doesn't accept online ads, it doesn't charge for the Cinespace shows. Harmon and Schrab may have finally trumped Gerald Levin for the worst business plan ever.
Still, the stakes are getting high enough for me to enjoy recklessly dismissing people's hard work. A series called "The 'Bu" landed its creators jobs on "Saturday Night Live," two other show creators used their effort to get agents at UTA, and Harmon and Schrab just got jobs producing the Sarah Silverman pilot for Comedy Central. If I voted right, I'd prevent someone from creating the next "Cheers."
I worried that my efforts to crush originality would be outvoted by the swell of shaggy-haired twentysomething hipsters in the audience, but Harmon allayed my fears. "After these network execs tell you to throw in a dog because people like dogs, you come here and you find out that people like dogs," he said. "It's a relief. You don't have to walk around with all this hate balled up in you. It's what Joseph Campbell would call the atonement with the father." Actually, I believe it is called trying to seem smart when you're really just a "Star Wars" geek.
Harmon and his inner circle whittled the 30 submissions down to 12. Most were really clever. And most were better written than my network pilot this year. With the thrill of the ballot in front of me, I lost my taste for blood. I felt bad voting against any of them. Even the one with the cameo by "Married With Children's" David Faustino.
The next morning, I found out all five shows I picked were renewed by the crowd. I have precisely average taste. I would make a brilliant network exec.
I figured I should call the losers to inform them of their loss, just like ABC did to me. But Harmon has started ducking that and now lets people check the results on the site. The calls, he said, were horrible: "People bargain with you. They want you to explain what to do so they have another chance."
That's what I did to Stephanie Leifer, ABC's head of comedy development. I got her to take me to Morton's in Burbank, and we had one of those awkward post-breakup conversations, where the woman is giving me one last pity date and I'm trying to stop myself from asking what I did wrong. At least this time, I couldn't interpret Stephanie's awkward glances away from me as signifying "selfish in bed."
No one, it turns out, likes rejecting people. Still, my Channel 101 voting experience taught me that it's a whole lot better than being rejected. Especially when the glance means "not funny."
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Joel Stein is a Los Angeles Times columnist. Comment by clicking here.
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