The part about changing the world is an overstatement.  We want to change the world.  We think that there are things that need changing, that we could influence.  But so far we haven't made much progress in changing shit.   We've just spent money we didn't have in pursuit of some Don Quixote type dream.  

But the other part is true, we are regular guys.  Although we've been making documentary films for twenty years, we get no ownership of the productions we work on for the networks, so we've got very little money to invest in something huge like this.

The thing is, there's a gold rush mentality to stake a claim on the Internet and every media company, as well as other delusional schmoes like myself, are rushing in to grab a spot and throw up a site.  And we're all being followed in by the people that want to sell the gold rush types their supplies-- design and programming and viral marketing and SEO and advice-- at hugely inflated prices.   

Many of the gold rush folks rushing into the Internet, like the media conglomerates and VC financed companies, can afford a fancy site designed by the companies waiting on the sidelines to charge an arm and a leg.  Those other guys getting their pockets picked, unlike ourselves, arrived with bulging pockets.  When you arrive in this Internet world you are surrounded by people that KNOW THE INTERNET.  We're all told that we need Internet guides, because only the guides know this strange uncharted landscape out there on the Internet and without them we'll all be KILLED, financially speaking.   Those bulging pockets folks can't afford to be killed.  So they sign up the best and brightest, and often the most expensive of the guides.

We at CrushedPlanet were, and are, stupid enough to think that we can go out there with only our small rag-tag band of dreamers.  Everyday someone, even well meaning and knowledgeable folks who have our best interests at heart, tells us to spend more money and make our site better before going out into the big, scary Internet world.  But it cost ten grand to sneeze in the Internet world, and twenty grand to pick your nose, and I no longer trust the guys offering Kleenex. 

Strangely, having spent a lot of money-- at least a lot of money to us-- and barely gotten up and running, we still think that we can change the world.  And the way we plan to do that is by creating a new language of what streaming media is all about.   I can't exactly tell you the alphabet of this new language, because it's so new.  And I can't even speak the language yet myself, I'm sorry to say.  But I know when people are speaking it, and I can understand it when I hear it.  And I get sort of sick to my stomach when I don't hear it for a while.

Our feeling here at CrushedPlanet is this--the world of streaming media is made up of three endless streams.  There is TV (or TV style programming which is now just migrating over to the Internet), there is user-generated media, and there is Porn.  

TV is, with notable exceptions, banal.  It is a medium invented by corporate advertisers to sell you stuff.  And that's what it remains, for the most part, an advertisement delivery device.  Studies have shown that watching television induces low alpha waves in the human brain.  Alpha waves are brainwaves between 8 to 12 HZ. and are commonly associated with relaxed meditative states as well as brain states associated with suggestibility.  Television style programming provides a great way to zone out in a stressful world.  But television style programming is familiar rather than challenging, predictable rather than surprising, and so that leaves a lot of potential to expand on. 

And then there are user-generated sites.  There's some interesting stuff on those sites, but it takes a ton of time to look through the enormity of stuff to find a gem.  Those user-generated sites are like driving a car on the freeway of life.  You look out the window and see an accident, or some scenery, or a girl in the next car with a nose ring.  And each visual you come upon can hold your attention for a moment, and there's enough stuff to stare at for a lifetime, and for the most part there's no point of view, other than your head which swivels on your neck.

And then there is porn.  Porn is also quite banal, even if it does serve a vital function-- giving men a short-term alternative to looking for real partners who might be hurt when they can't fulfill the expectations of true intimacy.  But porn, like TV, is made to put you in a half conscious state where you will spend your money, among other vital fluids. 

We at CrushedPlanet are working to create an alternative to the endless stream of mindless crap.  We are looking for, and we are finding, work that is powerful, innovative, authentic, provocative, and surprising.  We are not finding it easily, it is not falling into our lap, but we're discovering artists and producers that are laboring on the fringes of our product-pumping media world to make strong-point-of-view, personal films that pulse with fresh energy and unique perspectives.  So even though we're struggling, and we're frustrated, we are continuing on.  We are tilting at windmills, we are limping a bit from the journey, we are an unlikely band of dreamers and whores, but we are on a mission here and we must continue.

The first project my brother and I worked on together was an unusual little documentary called "Couples Arguing".  This was 1985, and back then it cost $75,000 to buy a professional camera, and it cost $65,000 to buy an editing system.  We didn't have much money to work with, so we said fuck it and we bought a good consumer camera for $3,000.  We never had taken a film class and I had never shot anything on a video camera at that point.  But for lack of other options, I decided to shoot one camera and my brother Harry, who had never done anything like sound before, became the sound mixer.

 

We advertised around the bay area for couples that argued a lot, and we asked them to beep us whenever they found themselves in an argument.  The whole crew could be sound asleep, we'd get beeped and jump out of bed, throw on our clothes and rush over to film an argument in progress.  (We asked the couples to go into separate rooms once they beeped us so the argument wouldn't continue until we got there).   It was simple, just five couples flat out arguing and talking about their relationship.  Then once we finished shooting the film, we moved on to thinking about how to sell it.  Not the usual order of doing things, but the best way to not get bogged down in the idea that your project might not be possible to accomplish.

 

In 1985, there were only three networks plus PBS, and none of them were interested in something so raw and real.  For several months there, as we sent our ten-minute trailer, it felt like we were screwed.  But then, on a whim, we decided to take the trailer to England and see if anyone was interested in our little film over there.

 

We somehow wound up at Channel 4 in England, and my brother and I were floored when they said they'd love to help us produce our documentary.  So we rushed home and edited it, and it showed in England.  It even made a big splash there, with complimentary reviews in several newspapers.  One had a big picture of Harry dashing out of the van with all this equipment in his arms, and the caption said that he was running to film an argument.

 

So with that under our belts we decided to take Couples Arguing to a big television market in Cannes, France, called Mip Con.  When we showed up at Mip Con, we didn't know how one of these markets worked, but we quickly found out that it cost $100 a day for one person to even go in.  That represented a huge part of our budget.  So we paid for one of us to go in, and then took the badge they gave us to the copy center nearby and made a color copy for the other brother.  Each day the market would change the color of their badges, so we would just make a new trip to the copy center and change the color on our badges to match, and we'd go back in.

 

Once we were inside the convention there were tons of booths.  We had cassettes of our film, but we didn't have anywhere to show our film, if we were convincing enough to get a buyer interested.  Then, while walking around trying to figure out what to do next, we saw the one person who had seen "Couples Arguing" in the U.S., who had actually liked our film.  His name is Phil Kent and he is now the head of CNN.  At the time he was distributing the show "Divorce Court".   He's an extremely nice guy, and when we explained our predicament, he offered to let us show people our film in his private viewing booth on the expo floor.  Because of that lucky break we were able to bring people by all week, from countries all over the world, and ended up selling "Couples Arguing" to France, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Israel.  It was crazy, and we were ecstatic.  (Props to Phil Kent for letting two broke interlopers use his private viewing room to show a little film about couples shouting at each other.)

 

The point is, that back then most people didn't think that they could make a film if they couldn't come up with the huge money it took to buy professional equipment.  And if you were daring enough, or stupid enough, to shoot a film with your own money, there were very few options of ways to get that film seen.  Now one can buy everything you need to make a professional looking film for $3,000 to $4,000, and there are many more options for getting a film out there.

 

Way back when, in 1985, my brother and I made a film that was simple, innovative and meaningful to us, and we were passionate about finding an audience for it.  We made our money back and got our film seen all over the world, but most importantly, we got the impression that we could make a film about any crazy idea and then somehow find a way to get it seen.  That didn't prove to be true in the long run, but it did give us momentum for years to come in our quest to make our own brand of unusual films.

 

And, we learned a little something that may have contributed to our creating CrushedPlanet... that there is a big world out there.  By going to England, we discovered that our film was not dead in the water anymore.  Instead of having to give up after our disastrous attempt to sell our film in the U.S., we were rescued by Channel 4 and we charged onward into the abyss.  Now we are charging onward into the world of the Internet.

 

CrushedPlanet is about presenting powerful, innovative films.  A filmmaker, or just a person with a camera and an idea, can make something special and personal and out-of-the-box, AND find an audience.  With CrushedPlanet, we're just trying to make this process a little less excruciating and more accessible to all of the talented artists and free-thinking filmmakers out there who deserve to get their work seen.  CrushedPlanet is about breaking free from the limitations of the traditional outlets of film and television, and creating an unrestricted venue for unrestricted voices.  So send us your films.  Let's get this party started.

 

 

CrushedPlanet has chosen to be a subscription-based model.  For the cost of a movie ticket a month, about $10, one can join CrushedPlanet, support innovative online video and help us to cover our overhead so that we can provide the most amazing programming of any network.  

Many people have told us that no one will pay for Internet programming.   Our critics have pointed out that everything is free on the Internet, so why would people pay to subscribe to CrushedPlanet?  

I would counter that the television viewing public, and the Internet viewing public, pay either way.  Let's start with television--free, fast, and predigested into bite size morsels.  The cost of not paying for your television shows over a lifetime can be enormous.  Because what we watch affects how we think, and communicate, and how we live our lives.

On Television there is little that is real and almost nothing that challenges us.  Humongous corporations own the airwaves, and massive corporate advertisers have an enormous influence on what we see and what we won't see.  They've determined, over the years, the soft center of what is television viewing in America.  And in the process they're creating a soft center in our brains.  

Our programming impacts us from the moment we're old enough to be placed in front of the screen.  Corporations must condition us to be the only class that matters in this country -- the consumer class.  And the advertisers don't want the viewers to be too concerned about our world or our future, because then maybe the potato chips or the car they're selling might seem insignificant by comparison.

And now, because there is technology allowing us to skip commercials, they've put the commercial inside the show.  Or rather the show is the commercial.  From the Hollywood Reporter, 5/6/08, "Among the broadcast nets, product placements jumped 39%, with 15,404 occurrences in the top 10 programs.  Among broadcast nets, NBC's The Biggest Loser had the most product placements with 3,977, followed by Fox's American Idol with 3,291."  To me, it's scary to not know what is a commercial and what is programming.

These corporations don't have our best interests at heart.  In the LA Times, 6/7/08, "General Motors Corp. and 21 other carmakers denied claims that they could comply with the state's carbon reduction rules and asked a judge for an order blocking the requirements."  They want to continue to make their inefficient, polluting vehicles, but they will certainly soft-pedal that in their sensual, beautiful commercials selling cars and trucks.

And what do you get when you go on the Internet?  Either you get the same type of show that you see on mainstream TV.  Or you get to watch user-generated uploaded videos that can pass the time, or even pass the lifetime.  Watching the U-tubes of this world is like going on a long car ride with an accident always outside the car window--you can't help but look, but it isn't often worth a second look.

At CrushedPlanet we want to change the way business is done in Hollywood.  The artists who make our programming retain all the rights to their work. They also get the majority of the fees from the viewing of their shows.  The split is in gross receipts, not net.  The whole net receipts concept has been used to confuse and cheat artists and we've been on the wrong side of this accounting equation too many times.  Instead, we offer transparency and a fair split of the fees paid to view our programming.

CrushedPlanet provides innovative, provocative, intimate content. We have animation, comedy, documentary and fiction films, theater and dance, environmental films, blogs, "disorganized" sports and the Joke Love community site.  And there are a ton of people who do powerful, challenging, provocative work, who aren't able to get that on mainstream television, or are fed up with the deal that they are offered from traditional outlets.  So we already have lots of amazing work that has been entrusted to us to distribute, and more great stuff is being sent to us everyday.

The Internet allows us to imagine an alternative.  Please give CrushedPlanet a try.   And let us know what you think.

Today marks the launch of an exclusive, webisode series on CrushedPlanet called Gender Blender; Gender Blender follows three Transgender Beauty Pageant contestants as they navigate their lives, their loves and their gender.

The women in this series have a ton of heart. They're honest, funny, and full of insight into what makes us all human. Watching this series is a wild ride as each of them explores who they are and who they want to be.

The world is racing in two opposite directions.  Fundamentalism verses openness and self-expression. Fundamentalism is not just happening in far away countries, it's deeply entrenched here. Many people in the United States don't believe in basic human rights including gay rights, don't believe in stem cell research, don't even believe in evolution.

It's so much easier to preach hate and fear than openness and self-expression. Hate and fear bring people to the polls, they're powerful emotions which can harness what we focuses on and what we ignore.  Openness and self-expression can feel scary, and perhaps the part of openness and self-expression that is the scariest, is when it comes to our sexuality.

That's why I have tremendous respect for the women of Gender Blender. To understand and accept who we are, we must claim our sexuality. We need to understand what drives us sexually and try to appreciate where those powerful impulses come from. Those who insist on denying their sexuality can become a ball of confusion, and have a hard time loving themselves or anyone else. By claiming their sexuality, the cast of Gender Blender opened themselves up to live their lives and are able to love themselves and others.  That's something to learn from.

CrushedPlanet is all about accepting who we are and sharing that, and then being open to others without judgment.  Gender Blender gives us a view into life with honesty and openness, and we are thrilled to present Gender Blender to our viewers. Come try CrushedPlanet and be a part of our community.  The fringe is our middle.

Here is the information on our premiere party for Gender Blender.  Please come!

CrushedPlanet invites you to the Premiere of GENDER BLENDER
this Thursday night, June 12th.

GENDER BLENDER, a CrushedPlanet, a exclusive, captures the high stakes, drama and excitement surrounding a group of transgender beauty contestants who compete in the Queen USA and the Queen of the Universe pageants.

Click here for GENDER BLENDER trailer.

By the way: Gender Blender is, like all CrushedPlanet shows, free of product placement, advertisement or subtle manipulation to make you consume the stuff America wants you to buys.  It is also free of agenda from corporations, free of censorship and free of moral judgment. Try to find that on TV!

We're celebrating the Premiere of Gender Blender this Thursday and want to invite you.  The cast will be there and it's going to be a lot of fun.  

Remember the party is this Thursday, June 12, 2008, 10 pm - 2 am

Club Cobra, 10927 Burbank Blvd, North Hollywood, CA  91601

for information or questions feel free to call Felicia at 818-594-8881
or send Felicia an email: fcaplan@crushedplanet

We also hope you can support what CrushedPlanet is trying to do by spreading the word, especially to your artists and filmmaker friends.  You can also purchase a membership to CrushedPlanet by clicking here.

Explore the site some more.  Check out "It Just Might Work" - a humorous solution to the wolrd climate problem on our "Enviromaniacs" channel.  Then there's the raw, hilarious "War on Comedy" channel.  Leave a comment and let us know your favorite video.

 

Much has been written about how everyone is drinking bottled water, and carries their water bottle with them everywhere.  It's been pointed out that bottled water costs three times as much as gas, that tap water is clean, and that at least tap water is tested.  Bottled water has no information on the label because the bottling people have no responsibility to inform the public about how pure or impure their water actually is.

But I have great sympathy for those of us that clutch our water bottle to our collective chest.  We're all swimming in a sea of pollution-- breathing it, eating it and drinking it. We don't know what's in our water bottle, and we don't care.  Because what the water bottle represents to us, really, is a little lie we tell ourselves to feel safe, "at least this bottle of water is free of pollution".  The water bottle, like the Cross or a Star of David, has become a talisman that we tell ourselves will somehow protect us.

Most of us would rather not talk about how toxic our world is.  It's too depressing.  We all have to live in this muck.  We can see the brown air in cities around the country and around the world.  Why talk about it when you have to breathe it.  And the same goes for the water.  Most lakes and rivers around the country are unfit to swim in.  Our bodies of water are contaminated by chemicals from years of factories dumping waste, run off of all the stuff that runs down our drains, or they contain a toxic cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs that we flush down our toilets.  And study after study shows that fish harvested from every corner of the oceans are full of chemicals.

But if we can avoid thinking about the water, we still have to eat.  What about our food?  Fruits and vegetables are grown using a ton of pesticides.  The very pesticides that are killing weeds and bugs we are told won't harm us.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that those pesticides are affecting our bodies as well.  The meat we eat is pumped up with additives, drugs and antibiotics.  Some of the meat is cloned, and the vegetables are transgenic, though that simple fact is hidden from us because the powers that be don't want a warning label that could give us the opportunity to decide if we want to eat cloned food or not.  Our government refuses to clearly tell us if the meat they approve is genetically modified or not.  Even organic, that magic word, is loosing its meaning as well.  There is a long list of substances that can be added to foods labeled organic, that are anything but organic.  But if the corporations need to call food organic to make people feel safe so they can make more profit, then they will just lobby the legislature to define organic to mean whatever is convenient.

The health problems from pollution affect us deeply.  Who doesn't have a sibling or a parent or a close friend who has or is now battling cancer.  It is a known fact that though Cancer is overall the number one killer, cancer would be reduced exponentially if we could clean up the pollution, the poison that we're breathing, eating and drinking. 

Since denying the existence of Global Warming  is no longer a political possibility, this looming reality should, in theory, no longer be ignored.   But as governments and scientists acknowledge that Global Warming is perhaps even too far along to be stopped, and that Global Warming is an end of the world scenario, the car companies and the Bush administration are doing everything in their power to prevent  California  (and by extension the rest of the country) from instituting higher gas mileage on our vehicles, while dragging their feet on numerous other easy to implement improvements.  Even facing the dire consequences that are coming in the not too distant future, even with that information, corporations want to slow down the progress and sell more carbon spewing, gas guzzling vehicles because it is more profitable in the short run, and our government is backing the corporations every step of the way.



So, back to our water bottles... For the moment at least, I must breathe the toxic air, ingest the pesticide and hormone-laced food, drink the questionable water, and drive the cars they find profitable enough to produce.  And so I don't feel that those of us who are clutching our water bottles are being ridiculous, we're just scared.  When we carry that small plastic bottle along through life we feel a little more protected, we tell ourselves that we are doing something healthy.  In the grand scope of things, there are small things we can do, but we can't really change our environment without the governments and the corporations totally changing the way they think.  Forget the war on Drugs, and the war on Terror, we need a war on Pollution.  We need a worldwide change to the way we interact with this planet of ours.  But until then I need something to protect me-- like my little water bottle.  It's the adult equivalent of the teddy bear that toddlers carry to feel safe.

Me and my brother, Harry, come from Cincinnati, Ohio, which in my view is the Iran of the United States.  Cincinnati always tried to legislate morality.  When I was growing up, X-rated films were not allowed to be shown in Cincinnati, and a few years later the curator of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Museum was put on trial for exhibiting the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.  It's a very conservative town with a lot of racism.  But my family grew up in a great neighborhood, North Avondale, which is very integrated and cool.

I'm four years older than Harry.  I remember when that little sucker was born.  My dad came home from the hospital and gave me a candy bar.  It hasn't been all candy since then.  My brother and I officially started working together about 20 years ago in a tough fucking business, making documentaries, which budget-wise are on the low end of the totem pole, and degree-of-difficulty-wise (at least the way we make them) are on the high end.  Still, despite the daily gamble and stress that is our chosen profession, we still get along.

Harry and I started working together in San Francisco in 1985.  I had wound up in Paris when I couldn't get an exhibition in the US to save my life.  And at the same time Harry was living in New York City and doing experimental theater.   Then we both wanted a change and moved to San Francisco were lots of people were trying to make art, there were lots of parties and everyone was wearing all their sexual energy around.  While in San Francisco we kind of developed our approach to filmmaking by just stumbling around, and not knowing what we didn't know.  We'd never been to film school.  When we later moved to this lovely little town of LA in 1991, we were lucky enough to make Taxicab Confessions, first as a little pilot for Telepictures and then as a series for HBO.  And a lot of things changed after that.

 

Looking back, those years working in San Francisco were pretty pure.  We had a tiny office in Sausalito, we lived in Mill Valley, we were making no money, but we were having fun.  It was always a fucking uphill battle, but we didn't have LA to compare it to, or even know anyone from LA, to compare it to.   We were young and living that fringy, artisty life.  And we couldn't decide whether or not to move to L.A.

 

So we compromised by flying to L.A. once in awhile to pitch shows, and then high tailing it back to San Fran.  Until on our third trip we were on a plane to L.A. and mid-flight a co-pilot walked down the aisle and began to pull up a piece of the carpet and look through this little window in the floor.  He was looking to see if the landing gear was really not coming down, as his instruments had told him.  And yep, the landing gear wasn't coming down on one side of the plane. 

 

So we flew around for forty minutes to use up gas, and then we made an emergency landing, surrounded by fire engines on the runway of LAX.  We all went out the emergency exit and slid down the inflated slide.  And when we hit the tarmac and realized we were all in one piece, Harry and I looked at each other and said, "fuck this flying back and forth, let's just move down here."  And a month later we were living in L.A. 

 

And of course that's when the real uphill battle began...

A couple years ago I was driving in LA and an intern who was working with our company was in the car with me.  He was fresh out of film school and was all excited about starting out in the film business.  He took the opportunity as we drove down Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood to ask me if I could give any advice to an aspiring filmmaker like himself.  

I liked the guy.  He had grown up gay in a very religious home, and he had done some short films that were interesting and challenging.  He seemed responsible and hard working.  I turned to him and gave him my simple answer, "turn back now".  

It wasn't what he wanted to hear.  And it wasn't what I wanted to tell him.  He was creative and had drive, so working in film and television should be a perfect way to make a decent living and get to express oneself at the same time.  This young guy looked at me as someone successful.  I have my own business with my brother, I've had many shows on TV, we've gotten some awards.  But from my perspective, I couldn't bullshit him and give him all sorts of happy stories.  

I told him, it's hard as hell to first find an agent and then to sell a show, period.  But to try to sell a show that you believe in and where they let you craft it in a meaningful way--that is extremely rare.  And then, even if you are lucky enough to get to that point, you still won't get any ownership of your project.  So your deal will be that you get a salary to work on your film or TV show, plus some mythical back end that you will never see a penny from.  And at the end of the day, you will have worked your ass off to make a very moderate amount of money, and they will own your project so there is no upside.  So you better get a huge thrill from just working in this industry.

While you're young and single, that thrill is probably all that matters to you.  All you care about is getting the chance to produce something, make something, prove yourself.  And the companies you pitch to will take advantage of that enthusiasm.  Eventually, your lack of upside, your lack of ownership in your work, will become frustrating.  If you have to create because it's in your blood, then you'll stay in the business.  Otherwise, you'll find a line of work that will reward you somewhat fairly for your time, energy and creativity.

I've spent thirty years making my art.  And please pardon me if I indulge myself by using that word... art.  The first eight years I was writing and photographing, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to live in Paris and to exhibit my photographs at the Georges Pompidou Center, the Vienna Museum of Modern Art and the Munich State Museum, and to publish a non-fiction book on the first generation of children growing up in openly gay homes in the United States, entitled Whose Child Cries.  

I loved living in Paris.  I loved the architecture on every corner, I loved the way people hung out and talked to each other, and I loved the way men and women flirted over there.  But after awhile I grew to dislike the side of the art world where you have to cultivate rich people to collect your work.  And I was not doing artwork that was traditionally beautiful or decorative, so it was a hard sell for the galleries that were representing me.  

I moved back to the US and I began making documentary films with my brother Harry.  We've been doing that for 20 years now.  Fuck, that is a looong time.  I've always hated that song, but I think that 'we did it our way' (if you cue that song in your head, please play the Sex Pistols version).  What I mean by that, is that Harry and I only pitched ideas that we believed in, and we would stick with an idea for years never giving up until we could somehow get it made.  

Most producers in this town are like pitch machines; they need to be since they get no ownership.  If they want to make a decent living they feel they have no choice but to go for volume.  We brought our overhead down by living and working in the Valley, owning our own equipment, and working with a small staff.  We've managed to make a living while we made films and TV shows that we really cared about.  We didn't get rich, which wasn't our objective, and we worked harder than almost anybody else I know, which hasn't always been fun, especially when you have a family.

The fact is, to sell a show that is innovative, meaningful or provocative is very difficult to do in this advertiser-dominated, corporate world we work in.  And to get some real ownership and financial upside in the process is next to impossible.  But that's why we started CrushedPlanet, to try to make that happen.  CrushedPlanet is about making the most amazing, out there, powerful, artistic, intimate or surprising shit imaginable.  And then it's about giving the artist or producer a fair piece of their own creative pie.  So they can afford to make their next project and to raise a family if they so choose.  And we plan to do that --or try anyway-- with a little support from viewers who want to see something that really moves them.  

So, as serious as I was when I told the intern to "turn back now", I was perhaps being a bit overly cynical.  Eventually there's a chance that there may be a way out of this tunnel of no ownership and the TV mentality of doing the same shit over and over again... and it will probably be due to the Internet.  We at CrushedPlanet plan to put our little spin on that dual concept-- the artist retaining ownership and the distribution of innovative content.  We are making a go of this!  And now I'm getting excited to see how it all unfolds...
 
 

This is blog number two for CrushedPlanet and I think I have to start by admitting something... We are losing our minds and going broke trying to launch this damn Internet Network.  

After all the hurdles we've faced making documentaries for over twenty years, and dealing with every imaginable production problem along the way, nothing seems to have prepared us for building CrushedPlanet.

We've spent a year and a half putting together CrushedPlanet in the version 2 mode.   Version 1 of CrushedPlanet launched in 1999, in the Chinese year of the donkey.  In that go around my brother, Harry, and I invested a lot of time, money and energy to stream postage stamp size videos to the few folks around the world who were tuned into the Internet then.  It was a dial up world and a labor of love.  We did it for a couple years and then folded up shop, having learned that launching an Internet network with minimal resources was extremely fatiguing.

But here we are again.  Go figure.  They say that women forget how difficult childbirth is or they wouldn't do it over and over.  Giving birth to CrushedPlanet the first time was extremely painful.  Internet networks, like CrushedPlanet, have a big head and we still have scars from getting that sucker out the first time.  And now we're doing this again?  All together now -breath-- and one, two, three, PUSH!

We've had our share of headaches this go around.  Our first programmer disappeared the weekend we were originally scheduled to launch about ten months ago.  He just suddenly was gone and wouldn't return my calls or my emails.  We discovered that he had not created the all-important back end yet.  And we had already paid to do the PR around the launch.  

That was a weird feeling, him disappearing like that.  He was in Boston.  I am in LA.  I just kept calling.  The only experience I've had which was like that, was one time a girlfriend broke up with me by disappearing.  That was in France in 1986.  But I will say that the disappearing trick is a pretty effective technique to fuck with someone's brain.  The girlfriend eventually showed up.  We argued a lot, had sex a few more times, and had some sort of ending.  The programmer never resurfaced.  Never heard from him again.

You know how people go to a rebound lover who is totally wrong for them, but they have a broken heart and can only make the worst decisions for themselves?  That's what happened with the next programmer.  We got his name from someone that was helping us with CrushedPlanet at the time.  And here's how he sold him to us-- we were told that before doing programming, this guy was a rocket scientist.  I'm serious, that's the story that we fell in love with.  They say that TV is not rocket science, but CrushedPlanet was indeed going to be designed by an ex-rocket scientist.  We sure liked the sound of that, and we hired the guy.  Nothing he did worked and then he started yelling at people over the phone.  Rocket scientists, evidentially, can get pretty temperamental.

After we gave up on the rocket scientist we admitted that we were not able to judge programmers very well and we hired a guy who had worked at a company that made web sites.  He had been an account executive there, but he was about to move to Canada to marry a Canadian girl, and he said that he would work with us for eight weeks while he sold all his worldly possessions.  

He found us a programmer who had made mainly porn sites.  This piece of information made us strangely comfortable.  The reasoning was that porn was way ahead of the curve when it came to programming, so this guy would be using all the latest and greatest techniques that porn had pioneered.  Unfortunately, this programmer was actually a designer, sort of, who said that he worked with a programmer who lived in San Francisco.  In our first couple meetings I kept insisting that I wanted to talk to his/our programmer directly to ask a few questions, but the guy said he preferred to do all the communicating with his programmer without us "interfering".   And the crazy thing was that the moving-to-Canada fellow told me not to push to meet the programmer, because they, supposedly, worked together all the time.  The crazier thing was that I took his advice.

When that programmer suddenly vanished, the porn designer guy said that the missing programmer now lived in New Hampshire.  Plenty sounded fishy but we still let this porn designer guy find us a fourth programmer, who he was going to pay himself.  But then he didn't pay the guy, and by the time we figured that out the front end was looking okay and we were dreaming that the back end was all coming together.  Let me tell you a little piece of information that I have learned--the front end is easy, it's the back end that is hard.  So we paid the fourth programmer directly and that guy turned out to be the most incompetent of all.

Now we're on Programmer number five.  Right at this moment, thing's seem to be falling into place (knock on wood, please), but the pain still lingers...

All this being said, like any guy who is about to become a new father, I feel very lucky. I'm sure that over the years lots of TV executives would wait until Harry and I were out of the room to turn to their colleagues and say, "they've got to be kidding, that's the strangest pitch I've had in a long time".   We were doing the same thing we're doing now, way before there was such a thing as reality television, when no one had a context for some of our productions.

In many ways, my brother and I have been making Internet programming since we made our first documentary, Couples Arguing, in 1985.   We just got lucky that the Internet came along.  In the beginning just getting any of our projects on TV was a huge uphill battle, back when we were making little productions by the seat of our pants.  And now we're shooting again on a tiny budget, without anybody telling us how to make it more commercial.  We've even started an apprentice program at CrushedPlanet, which is like a school situation, to get people in to help us create this behemoth.  Granted, we still don't know if there is a market for content driven, edgy, authentic, intimate programming.  But we're giving it another go.  And suddenly I can breathe again.

 

BLOG #1

 

I've never done a blog.  I'm a blog virgin.  That being said, the idea that I can share my thoughts without censorship or getting some kind of stamp of approval from the Corporations of Public Broadcasting, well, that's right in line with CrushedPlanet's vision.  It's in the moment, personal, emotional --it's kind of exhilarating actually.  I think I will give this a try, so here goes...

 

We are launching CrushedPlanet today, after ten months of faux launches and promised launches--each of which ended up being a heartbreaking crash and burn.  It's been frustrating getting to this point.  But here we are at the finish line of our design and programming phase, which is really just the starting line for getting CrushedPlanet out there.  

 

We started this dream of creating an Internet network almost ten years ago when we launched CrushedPlanet the first time in 1999.  That was when people could only stream itty-bitty postage stamp sized media.  On this go around CrushedPlanet rivals the image quality of any TV.  But we're not obsessed with the tech stuff.  We're all about content. 

 

CrushedPlanet will show the most innovative, provocative and intimate programming on the Internet.  TV was started by Corporations to sell advertising, and they don't want anything too edgy or mentally taxing.  The Corporations would put you to sleep for the programming and then wake you up for the advertising if they could.  And sometimes I think they try to do that.

 

I honestly think that the spectrum of entertainment possibilities offered right now is a sliver of what it can and will be.  We haven't exploited a tenth of what can be done when it comes to content.  CrushedPlanet is going to be about Powerful, Innovative content and --as The Unrestricted Voice-- we are going to help reinvent programming possibilities in this country and hopefully around the world.  (Sorry about using so many capital letters but I feel passionate about this.)

 

The second concept behind CrushedPlanet is to treat producers and artists and filmmakers the way we wish we had had been treated when we were coming up in this business.  Over the last fifteen years artists and producers in Hollywood, in the vast majority of cases, did not get ownership of their ideas.  Instead we had to sign over the ownership of our ideas, and we were offered this mythical back end, always calculated using net receipts rather than gross receipts.

 

At CrushedPlanet, everyone who allows us to distribute their work keeps all the rights to their content and we give them 51% of gross, if their work is exclusive to CrushedPlanet, and 33% of gross if it is given to us on a non-exclusive basis. 

 

And these two concepts --innovative and provocative content, and retaining ownership of all one's rights and getting a very fair percentage of gross receipts-- have already allowed us to sign up some of the most amazing artists from around the world who do absolutely phenomenal work.  I am in awe of the artists that we have signed up for CrushedPlanet, and we are only getting started finding these amazingly creative folks.

 

CrushedPlanet has short and long form films and videos that are honest and intimate, that are surprising and powerful, we have films that break the mold and come at filmmaking from a completely different direction, and we have films and videos and blogs that are such a simple, strong statement that they can astonish you and blow you away.   (Sorry about the run on sentence, I'm getting myself excited here.)

 

The goal with CrushedPlanet, and with this blog, is to reach out to the people who look around and say to themselves:  That's it?  That's all there is?  It seems like Art continues to get squeezed into tiny boxes by a few huge corporations that, as keepers of the gate, are picking out all the content they feel we need to see, or that we supposedly can handle.  We're in a democracy that has freedom of expression but the range of expression is incredibly stifled.  Well, CrushedPlanet is about passion, innovation, creativity, a strong point of view, and a refusal to relent to the pressure of conforming to the mainstream.  We want to showcase art, media and personal expression that is off the charts.  That shouldn't be too hard, right?   I think we have some great examples of that on CrushedPlanet already, and I'll be curious to know what you think.

 

Okay, so that felt pretty good for a first time.  And whoever reads this first blog will always have a special place in my heart.  Hey, I may just like this blogging thing.  Now it's time to towel off and get back to work.  Thanks for checking us out and stay tuned...