This week, I'm talking about Boxee, the great service that allows the user to have the TV watching experience -- sitting on a sofa, ten or more feet from the screen -- but web-like control: by optimizing Hulu, YouTube, TV.com, etc. content for today's larger flat screen televisions.  It's a browser, but for the TV.  Sounds great.

But not to Hulu, and not to the studios and networks that supply Hulu with content.

Of course, this is New Media.  So Boxee responded.  With innovation.

I did this Martini Shot a few years ago, when my beloved dog, Cohiba, died.  That was exactly one year ago today, in 2006.  But I still think of him a lot -- even though my new dog, Illy, is now 2 years  old and I love her just as much.  But I thought I'd post the audio here, more for me than for anyone else.  Just to say: I remember.

God, this new KCRW player makes me feel lazy.  I used to write posts -- write them! With words and everything! -- and now all I do is paste the embed code.

Well, I'm going to try to write more here...more original stuff, less player-embedding.  Right after this.

I'm starting to love this new KCRW.com media player.  Of course, when we say "media," we mean radio.  Which raises the question: why doesn't KCRW just declare itself a video destination too, and distribute video content like it distributes audio content?  Just a thought. 

I interviewed Jeff Jarvis yesterday for KCRW's show "The Politics of Culture."  He's the author of the great new book, What Would Google Do?, which has some solid advice about how companies and entire industries can retool and rethink to prepare for the future.

I like doing these interviews -- this is the second one I've done this month -- and I think I'm going to volunteer for a lot more.

Fred Wilson, who writes an excellent blog, posted this PPT deck last week.  He gave a talk to some television executives in New York.

There's no audio to the deck, but it makes sense anyway.  A lot of sense.

I'm especially taken with his "Six Words to Live By in Television" (slide 20).

My thoughts, which I posted on his blog's comments section, are here:

Great presentation! Even without the audio track.

Your "Six Words to Live By" I'm most certainly going to pass on to my friends and colleagues out here in LA, who are also in the television business.

People are still watching TV -- but they're watching it in a fundamentally different way, and in a way that demolishes the secret business model of the business, which was: People hate to change the channel. Seriously: the television business has been steadily declining since the first moment people didn't have to get up off the sofa to change the channel. From clicking around 13 channels to flipping through 1300, to time shifting and now cherry-picking only the shows a viewer wants to watch, the business has been forced to do something it wasn't designed to do: make money putting on shows people want to watch.

In the not-too-distant past, networks lost money on the hits -- shows like Cheers (which was my first gig) and Friends and Seinfeld ran deficits for their producers for the first few years, but by year 4 or 5, they were all "made whole" by the network. If you wanted to renew Cheers, NBC was told by Paramount, you need to pay us back for everything we've spent, plus more, plus more in the future, plus more for the cast, plus more just because we can.

So NBC's game was to make money on the shows around the hits -- the so-called "Halo" effect -- like Wings, which nobody really liked that much, but which was, you know, on. Why flip around?

The current environment is the worst possible outcome for people in Hollywood: you have to put on good shows. All of them have to be good. And you have to make money on them, too, because you're selling that show specifically, not the time periods around those shows.

But that's not how the system is set up. And the system is changing, and it's incredibly exciting (for people like me who have been in the business for a while and who like to write and produce shows) but it's terrifying for anyone who made money the old way, but servicing a system that only works if the customer doesn't or can't make a choice.

Put it this way: the recent sharp decline in house prices in the Los Angeles area isn't totally related to the overall economic recession. A lot of it is Hollywood-specific, as we all try to learn how to make money in the worst, most painful, least attractive way possible: earning it.

Originally posted as a comment by Rob Long on A VC using Disqus.

I start my weekly commentary on KCRW this way:

Circus monkeys, deep down, are mean. 

Someone once told me that a decent circus monkey is only good for about seven or eight years until he decides to retire, which can come at any time – hanging around  the other monkeys, in the middle of a show – no one ever knows when, exactly, a monkey suddenly says to himself, “Okay, had enough” but when he does, here’s what happens.

He begins, I was told, by stopping in the middle of whatever it was he was doing.  Then he waves his arms slowly in a criss-cross fashion above his head.  Like a surrender.  And then he stops.

And then he attacks.

Yeah, attacks.  Something inside him snaps, I guess – all those years of silly hats and tiny vests and hopping around for the crowds, the performing and traveling and years in a cage – all of it just wells up in him and the minute he’s done, the minute he says to himself, “uh huh, not so much of this anymore” the pent-up rage comes cascading out of him in an immediate and frenzied attack.

And the person he attacks, mostly, is the clown on stage with him. 

Monkeys are vicious – they’re excellent street fighters, totally unencumbered by the rules and traditions of a fair fight.  There’s biting and scratching and eye-gouging and every kind of below-the-belt violence.  Plus, they scream.

And here’s where it gets worse.  The other clowns, they just back away.  When a monkey goes rogue, no clown will come to your aid.  That’s just the way clowns are – every clown for himself.

It goes on from there.   You can read or podcast or listen to the rest of it here.

I interviewed Tony Blankley yesterday on KCRW.  He has a new book out, American Grit: What it Will Take to Survive and Win the 21st Century. 

It's, you know, a provocative book.  I'm not sure I was convinced.

I'm also not convinced I was a good interviewer.  I wasn't tough enough.  I didn't interrupt enough.  The book is sort of "out there" on  number of issues -- bringing back the draft, censoring the media during wartime -- and suddenly I went all Larry-King-interviewing-Suzanne-Somers.  You know what I mean?  I just let him go.

Here's the interview, if you're interested...

I've already written a bit about Jay Leno's move to 10PM.  It's a desperate move by NBC, which isn't the same thing as saying it won't work. 

Desperation sometimes clarifies the mind. 

But I'm not sure I understand why they moved him to 10PM.  That makes for three solid hours of talk, briefly interrupted by the local 11PM news.  It's not much of a platform.

The entire television business was built on the concept of "audience flow" -- how an audience grows and shifts throughout prime-time -- and that concept is built on the principle of "fat-assed laziness."

The giant office towers, the production studios, the string of local television studios -- all of the treasures of an old-tyme broadcast network were bought and paid for by the human tendency to stay put.  If you had to walk across the room to change the channel, you didn't.  You watched what came next.  Audience flow.

Later, the clicker came along.  Which makes it easy to flip around and see what else is on.  And then came 500 channels, so that flipping was an activity all by itself -- it's what a lot of people do with their TVs; they don't watch, they just flip around and then turn it off.   The remote control attached to a 500-channel device was killing network television slowly until the DVR came along. 

In the movie "Casino," at the end -- warning: spoiler! -- some seriously annoyed mobsters beat Joe Pesci almost to death, then one of them tosses him into an open grave, and they all start piling in the dirt.  They bury Joe Pesci alive, still twitching.

So it's like this: the clicker and the multiple-channel universe have beaten the broadcast networks almost to death and kicked them into an open grave.  And then the DVR comes along and buries them alive.  We're now in the dirt-shoveling phase.  If you look closely, you can see the networks still twitching, like Joe Pesci in "Casino."

So the key now is to go for big, broadly appealing platform shows -- "American Idol," football, the Olympics, things like that -- and use those as a promotional platform for your other shows.  Use the biggest tent you've got to channel your audience to other shows.  Remind them what's coming up next, tease them with coming attractions.

But it only really works for that night.  The "coming up next!" promo is the last, best hope for the broadcast networks to take back some of that audience flow, either to entice the viewer to stop flipping, or to set the DVR for "the all-new House next!"

So here's my question.  Why Leno at 10?  At 10 all he promotes are the local news, Conan, and (for a while, anyway) Jimmy Fallon.

Why not Leno at 8PM?  Kick of the night of prime-time programming, promote that night's shows, use the whole hour as a launching pad for the night?  It's not as if Leno is too risque or family-unfriendly for that hour.  And it might just hammock the primetime comedies and dramas -- and tease the reality shows, too -- instead of batting cleanup at 10PM.

All of this is a long way to say the obvious:  I'm a closet network executive.

Transparency is the word of the moment, in politics and world affairs and finance.

Especially finance.

What is the Madoff scandal, after all, other than a giant failure of transparency?  When a $50 billion enterprise is audited by, essentially, two guys at the end of a strip mall in New Jersey, maybe that should have been, um, disclosed.

So how about this?

In addition to all of the ratings agencies and growth indices, how about a new index?  How about something called The Transparency Index for companies and financial institutions?

This wouldn't measure how well they're doing, or how solvent they are, or anything other than how much information is out there to base an investment decision on.  Enron might have been a high-flying stock, but it would have had a lousy Transparency Index, due to its byzantine Special Purpose Entities.

The market would decide whether it matters or not if, say, Lehman Brothers has too much value at risk.  But at least they'd have a way to judge if Lehman is transparently reporting what its risk is.

I'm sure there's a flaw here somewhere.  But I'm also sure that a smart, enterprising, now-unemployed quant guy could figure out how to do this, do it, and create a brand as powerful and important as the Dow. 

There was a long, long wait at the customs office at the port when I got to Shanghai.  Evidently, not too many people arrive in the People's Republic via container ship.

So as the mess got sorted out -- which (surprise!) took $100 in cash -- I had time to wander around the customs office.  There was an information kiosk with a touchscreen display, and as I tapped my way through the various listings, I came across this screen.

It may be hard to read.  It's the "Code of Professional Ethics" which all customs officers are supposed to follow.

Of course, I agree with all of them.   But you should feel free to choose your own favorite.

I'm in Baltimore for a week or so, visiting with family.  I was born here, and we moved away when I was 8 -- first to Europe, then to Northern California -- but Baltimore is the kind of place you're always connected to.  You're either from here -- no matter where you live or how long it's been -- or you're not.

I'm from here. 

Baltimore people feel strongly about their city.  They make movies about it, and TV shows, write novels about it -- mysteries and elegant, gorgeous stories about family and loss -- and when they hate it, they hate it the way you hate something you love.

So, New Year's Eve I walked up the street where I was born -- never mind how many years ago -- along the narrow, broken sidewalk up the small slope (it looked much steeper years ago) and at the top of the street, at the circle where I used to ride my Big Wheel and, later, my bright yellow Schwinn, I watched a weird, funny neighborhood tradition unfold.

For the past few years, the residents of this street have developed their own classically odd-ball Baltimore New Year's Eve celebration.  Around 11:30PM, the neighborhood gathers at the top of the street.  As midnight nears, a large electric crab, festooned in blue lights, descends on a string, counting down (sort of; it's a pretty casual countdown) the last 10 seconds of the old year.  At the bottom, the electric blue crab hits a large bucket, turns red, and the neighbors cheer and toast and laugh and stamp their feet and rub their hands against the cold. 

The white, solidly preppy neighbors of my era have evolved into an eclectic bunch.  The Junior League moms have been replaced by artists and engineers and an older gay couple or two.  The front yard of my old house wasn't as well-kept as it was when my family lived there.   The street is now a lot more "funky" than I'm sure Frederick Law Olmstead originally intended. 

Still: everyone out there on New Year's Eve -- the older residents and the rowdy teens -- watching a big plastic crab on a string, laughing and wishing each other a Happy New Year and passing around cheap champagne.  And that's all you need to know about Baltimore. 

Here's how I start my piece in today's -- Monday, December 22nd, 2008 -- Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years ago, I had a stupid idea.

I was the co-executive producer on TV's long-running comedy "Cheers." NBC, the network on which "Cheers" appeared, was faltering: Ratings were sliding, money was tight, management was nervous and the then-king of late-night television, Johnny Carson, legendary host of the "Tonight Show," was retiring, and no one knew how his replacement, Jay Leno, would do. 

The rest is here....

Just stepped off the ship for a day in Pusan, Korea.  (Scroll down for more.)

After 3 weeks at sea, it still feels like the ground is moving even though I'm in a hotel lobby.

A long, fun, rough crossing.  Took the northern route to avoid the brunt of 3 major storms.  Hugged the Alaskan coast, headed through the Unimak Pass, down along the Russian coast, south of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, into the Sea of Japan, and then anchored off the coast of Korea.

Where am I exactly?  Here.

If you're like me, and have never really spent any time around a big machine, the Hanjin Miami is a wonder of the world: huge, powerful, like a floating power plant.  7000 containers, 25 knots, it makes its own fresh water.

And it's so efficient.  And neat.  And effective.

Three things I'm really not.

Built in Korea, by Hyundai.  Owned by a German consortium which operates it.  Chartered by Korean shipping giant Hanjin.  There's nothing on it that's American, except the DVDs in the crew's lounge.

It's hard to look at a machine like this and think, "Why don't Americans build ships like this anymore?" 

The beard is coming in alarmingly grey. 

I'm in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, in Pusan, Korea.  Here for the day as they load and unload the Hanjin Miami.  Pirating wi-fi from the hotel -- it's technically free, of course, but still -- and it's amazingly opium-like: after 3 weeks of no web, suddenly I feel all warm and safe and...connected.

I'll post longer stuff in a few days, when I get to China.  (And when my AT&T data card works.  Or so they promise.)

Here's what's supposed to happen: these containers get filled with stuff in China and Korea, then sent to the US to fill the shelves of Wal-Mart and everyplace else.  We buy the stuff, send the dollars back to China and Korea -- and we also send the empty containers back, too (ideally, they should be filled with our stuff, but we don't make stuff anymore.  They build ships and steel and toys and iPods and desk lamps and cars and we invented the Cinnabon). 

So the Hanjin Miami, where I've been for the past 3 weeks, has been anchored off the coast of Korea.  Waiting.  There's no rush to get the empty containers back to Korea and China, because there's no demand for stuff -- Christmas stuff, holiday stuff, Wal-Mart stuff -- back in the US. 

My glamorous view. 

Next post, from somewhere off the coast of Korea.

Please try to have world financial system sorted out by then.

From November 24th to roughly December 10th, this is where I'll be: the Hanjin Miami, a container ship making the regular run between Seattle and Shanghai.  She's a big girl: carries about 7000 containers, can make about 25 knots, was built in 2005, and apparently takes passengers.

I'll be one of them.

Why?

Because this is what it's come to: as long as I have email, and an iPhone, and wi-fi, and a million little things to do and a million distractions, I simply cannot do the thing I'm supposed to do, the thing I tell everyone that I do, the thing that as of this moment has put money in my pocket, bought a house, paid the taxes, and kept me in high thread-count sheets.  That thing is: writing.

What about a cabin in the mountains, some have asked.  Do you really need to cross the Pacific in a container ship just to finish a couple of scripts?

Sadly, yes.

I've been on a wonderful fifteen-year gravy train -- studio deals and network contracts and a fantastic country-club life.  But the old way is done: Hollywood is contracting, money is tightening up, and people are starting to ask for an amazing, astounding, incredibly unbelievable thing.

They want us to write first, get paid later.

Which is new.  And surprisingly hard.

So: the Hanjin Miami, crossing the Pacific, 2+ weeks of isolation and work.

Although, to be honest, I also like the idea of it: clambering up the ladders and standing on the deck, sea spray stinging my face.  Me, with a mug of coffee spiked with bourbon, watch cap on my head, a stubbly beard, squinting into a Pacific squall.  Speaking in an accent (I'll develop one of those sea salt accents) and keeping a weather eye out for pirates.

Although I don't think I have to worry about them where I'm going.  But just in case, I'm already practicing my basic survival skills: craven begging and what I call the "Patty Hearst Flip." You haven't seen cowardice until you've seen me face a couple of Somali pirates.

Something like:  "Fellas!  Hey!  I'm with you guys, okay?  What's with the -- ouch! That hurt!  Friends, come on!  I can be of service here.  I've got media savvy and I can help you with your overall message and -- ouch! Quit it with the pointy knife and the -- is that thing loaded?  What is that, some kind of -- Guys!  Seriously!  This is not what you want to do, okay?  I'm with you here.  I get it.  I'm, like, basically a pirate myself and -- hey, stop pointing that thing in my direction -- we're a lot alike, I'm serious.  Where are we going?  What is this, some kind of plank?  No, no, no.  This is wrong.  This is not right.  This is a mistake.  Fellas!  You've got no beef with me!  I can help.  I can interface with the media and be a public -- stop it with the pointy knife! I can serve as a go-between, a conduit if you will -- ouch, seriously, that hurt -- and be a kind of honest broker -- why are you pushing me? -- I'm, like, close to the edge here and it's pretty deep down there and I can be of some service to your organization -- quit pushing -- this is a waste of my talents -- it's awfully slippery -- let me help you, let me --"

You can track the progress of the ship here.

You can't really track the progress of the writing I'm supposed to be doing.  You'll just have to trust me.

I'm not sure which container is mine. 

Alls I'm saying is, maybe a little humility is in order here.  Especially since it's pretty obvious that for the next few years, at least environmental concerns are going to take a way back seat to economic ones.

Ask the Europeans if you don't believe me. 

Thanks to my friend Ed Kinsey for the clipping from the Toledo Blade.

Here’s a word you hear a lot these days – content.  People talk about new media content and web content and old media content, and talk about how important content is, about free content and paid content.  They talk about it like it’s all one big thing, one big pile of content that you can dribble over here or scatter over there.

But all content isn’t the same, is it?  I mean, it’s like food.  There are lots of things in the world that can technically be considered food, but most of them you wouldn’t want to put in your mouth.  And there are lots of things on the web that can technically be called content, but you wouldn’t want to watch it.

Look if someone you don’t know came up to you on the street and said, “hey, here’s a free turkey sandwich I made.  Go ahead.  Eat it.”  You might, you know, hesitate.  Because although everybody loves free stuff, there are limits. 

Still: people like to talk  about “content” – how to monetize it and distribute it and aggregate it.
 
But nobody bothers to talk about what, exactly, it is.  News is different from comedy which is different from porn which is different from wikipedia.  I’m not sure the audience is ever that indifferent to what’s appearing on the screen.  And if the audience cares, then the advertisers care.
 
Whenever I hear people fuzz-tone or blur a distinction like that, or use a vague word like content, I can’t help but think they’re subliminally trying to make a really big problem disappear. 

You know, just, you know, get some content and….First, get some great content which will drive traffic.  Then, monetize it and….Content is key, we know that, so we’re going to get really great content….User Generated Content really is a great content solution to getting great content…Monetizing content is really about distributing content and then getting more really great content.
 
I’ve been in the content business for 17 years.  It’s really really really hard.  And I have the proof right here.
 

I wrote this a while ago, but since my old blog posts seem lost somewhere in the Mystery of Wordpress, I thought I'd repost the essence, here, again.

This is what's known as "repurposing" material.  It's quite popular among writers, even though (or maybe because) it's laziness masked as efficiency. 

I know two guys who make three bean salad.

A few years ago, they pooled their money, bought a small machine that fills jars, and they went into the three bean salad business.  They buy beans from some huge wholesaler, already cooked, and the machine dumps them into jars, fills the jars with pickling solution, seals the jars, and then another machine slaps a label on the jars that says something like, “Kountry Kupboard” three bean salad, or maybe “Artisan’s Pride Salad,” or maybe “Sunny Ridge Ranch Three Bean Salad” – I don’t know what the name is, only that it’s not from a sunny ridge or an artisan or a kountry kupboard, it’s from a machine that dumps wholesale beans from some gigantic industrial food company – something like, probably, Drax Chemical, Munitions, & Foodstuffs – and puts it in friendly jars.


And it’s good.  If you like that sort of thing.  So good, in fact, that a few years ago these guys got a visit from Wal*Mart, or someone like them, and they wanted to sell their three  bean salad in their gigantic stores that pepper the globe.

The rest of it is here, if you want to read it.  Or here, if you want to hear it.

But fair warning:  I’ve said some of this stuff before.  Well, okay, I’ve said all of it before.  I promise to get some new material soon.

 

Something strange is happening in Hollywood:  people are getting fired.

Well, let me clarify: people get the sack all the time around here.  Executives are tossed out with such routine indifference that any executive who hasn’t been fired at least three times in his career is probably not very good at his job.

A couple of bad television seasons, an outright flop at the box office, or maybe just a long-simmering blood feud with a new boss – all of these are respectable reasons to get tossed out on your ear.  In fact, there’s sort of a cushy career carousel operating in Hollywood: studio executive gets fired, gets a nice severance package which includes a production deal, he produces a few movies, get rehired at another studio, gets fired from that studio, gets a nice severance package which includes a production deal, he produces a few movies….you see where I’m going with this. 

The trick is to hang on; it’s all about staying on the carousel with the painted ponies and the pretty music and the atmosphere of fantasy and fable.
But for the past few years, with advertising spending going down and the web-based  audience going up, with production costs soaring and box office profits flat at best, the entire entertainment industry has been trapped in a tight margin squeeze. 

And that always means one thing, no matter whether your business is movies or mousetraps or hamburgers: you’ve got to cut overhead.  People are going to get fired.

 
And the timing couldn’t be worse.  The carousel, right now, is broken: the ponies aren’t going up and down very well, the paint is peeling, and the music is distinctly off-tune.  A lot of people are getting fired without getting plush packages and production deals.  A lot of people are getting tossed off the carousel entirely.

I have a friend who works in investment banking, and she says that when layoffs in her industry come -- usually in a wide, sweeping wave – they come as a surprise to almost everyone.  Of course, recent headlines would suggest that people in that business know – how could they not? – that the house is burning down. 

And yet some quirk of human nature encourages the delusional sense that disaster is going to strike…someone else.  That guy in the next office, the person in the cubicle next to mine – everybody’s getting fired except me.

Oh, of course there’re a few in the quiet offices upstairs who know the names – Know them? What am I saying?  Who crossed them out personally – but for the rest of the crowd it seems to come out of the blue, despite the bad news in the paper and the downward profit curve and the subtle signs all around them that things are changing, powering down, getting worse.

A few years ago, when I had a television show on a major American broadcast network, and I was completely convinced – despite the slow southern drift of the ratings chart, despite the total lack of buzz or interest from the media – that we weren’t just doing well, we were thriving.  I saw hope in every piece of bad news; I saw opportunity in every sad look from a network executive.  

I didn’t notice the small things: the snacks laid out for the production crew went from top-shelf cookies to off-brand chips.  The bottled water was no longer Fiji but something from Arkansas.

  The real clue, however, was the melon.  Each day, our on-set caterer would set out an assortment of sliced fruit.  When times are good, the fruit is replenished hourly.  The banana is sweet and ripe; the melon is firm and juicy, and the edges are freshly-cut, sharp and pointy. 

  But at a certain point, he just stopped replenishing the tray.  The melon sat there, getting soft and mushy.  

When we were cancelled – as we inevitably were – I was stunned.  I was like that investment banker who is given the sack and can’t believe it’s happening to him.  When bad news comes, I guess, it surprises all of us.

Well, not all of us. 

One guy is never caught off-guard: the indispensable system administrator.  The IT guy in the tan Dockers and the cell phone holster.  He knows.  He sees the list while it’s still warm from the Xerox machine.  Because, you see, it’s his job to wait until exactly 10:33 on the morning that the axe is going to swing -- that’s three minutes after each doomed employee has been summoned to a meeting with a cheery, upbeat IM  (“Got a sec?  Can U pop your head in2 my office?”) – and when the big hand points to three  minutes and the second hand sweeps to twelve, he runs a finger down the list of names, and one by one disables their computer passwords and shuts off their email.

We don’t have system administrators in show business. 

But we do have Unit Production Managers – UPMs, for short.  The UPM is the guy who manages the finances of the production unit: on a movie or TV show, he’s the one who pays the bills and issues the salary checks.  And he’s the guy who talks directly to the guys  in studio finance and business affairs.   And those guys talk to guys in network business affairs.  And they hear things in the hallways.  They hear the bad news first. 

And then the word comes down: no more expensive cookies.  Use yesterday’s melon.  Cut your costs.

So the real question to ask yourself, if you’re in show business or banking or any industry, really, is: how pointy is my melon?  Because if it’s not pointy, you’re in trouble.

Whenever I can, if I'm heading up to the SF Bay Area, I try to drive along Highway 1.  I know, I know: it takes hours and hours.  On the other hand, every now and then you get to see something like this.

I grew up in Northern California, and got spoiled by views like this.  It's a cliche, I know.  But cliches are cliches for a reason. 

My talented business partner, Tim Fall, produced and directed a personal introduction video of me for a conference I'm attending next week.

Tim's a man of many talents, and is involved in many capers, some of them with me. 

The video he shot is pretty funny, and it can be found here.

Of course, this is a perfect time to talk about the Blues.  They exploded in popularity in the 1930's, when the country was broke.

I'm here in Clarksdale, Mississippi this weekend, listening to music and working on a script for a TV show I'm trying to get off the ground.  I'm working with some incredible people -- more about exactly whom, later -- and I can't imagine anything more fun than spending some time in the Delta, working on a television show that's both funny and sad, silly and deep.  Like the Blues.

The first picture is of Ground Zero Blues Club, run by my friends Bill Luckett and Morgan Freeman.

The second is the interior of Red's, just down the street a bit from Ground Zero, and about as authentic as they come.

Let me ask you a question:  if someone gave you, say, 50 million dollars today, would you think that’s a lot of money?  I’m not ashamed to say that personally speaking, I would.

But yesterday I was lunching in a local establishment, and I overheard two guys in t-shirts talking about a recent big screen release.  

“Yeah, you know, it kinda bombed, man,” one of them said with a kind of sad, slightly disparaging tone of voice.  “I mean, it only made, like, fifty million dollars.”

The other dude nodded sadly.  “Fifty million!” he scoffed.  “How embarrassing! That guy’s career is, like, dead.”  

“Hate to be him,” said the other one.

“Guys,” I said, interrupting their conversation.  “Can I get my turkey sandwich?”

You see, I was at a local sandwich shop, and the two guys with such lofty and inflexible standards about what, exactly, constitutes success in the entertainment business were behind the counter, stuffing pita bread and slicing turkey for what I’m guessing was roughly $9 an hour.  But that’s the problem with living in Los Angeles: everybody’s a critic.  Everybody thinks that they’re just a few steps and one hit away from being in the big leagues.

They looked at me blankly for a moment, and they both went back to work assembling and toasting my turkey sandwich, giving them a brief pause in their day of showering pity and scorn on the director whose movie only took in 50 million dollars, and the star with the career trouble.

And it struck me that this kind of thing happens a lot in Hollywood – people scoffing at what are actually large sums of money just because they’re not huge sums of money.  People calling something a failure just because the sky didn’t open up and rain lucre on everyone involved in the show or the movie.  Of course, it’s one thing to have this attitude from the deck of your beach house in Malibu – if you’ve ever had a hit, you’re qualified to judge.  But it’s quite another to be looking down your nose at something when your hands are spreading mayonnaise and mustard on my turkey sandwich.

“Personally,” an agent’s assistant said to me once, when, instead of putting me on hold he engaged me in a brief conversation about the opening night ratings for a new TV show, “Personally, I wouldn’t be happy with those numbers.”

“You wouldn’t be happy with those numbers?” I said.  “Are you kidding me?” I said.  “Let me tell you something, you smug know-nothing punk,” I said.  “If you were the producer of that show with the so-so ratings and not what you are, which is the terrified assistant to a sociopathic agent boss, you’d be thrilled with those numbers, okay?” I said, silently, in my mind.

I mean, I said all of those things to myself.  Look, I don’t need any more enemies, and who knows where that guy will end up?  With his total lack of understanding of the economics of the business and his idiotic sense of  self-importance he’ll probably end up in comedy development at a big network, or a production executive at a large studio.  I’ll probably be in a meeting with him, at some point, and I’d like him to remember me as a pleasantly affable writer, rather than as the guy who dressed him down over the phone.

Because the truth is, by the time he climbs and backstabs his way up the studio ladder, he’ll understand the while the blockbuster hits get all the attention, the bread-and-butter of the entertainment business is in solid, dependable, mid-range product.  Contrary to what the sandwich-making dudes might think, a director whose movie tops out at $50 million is doing fine.  He’s a sought-after commodity: a dependable director who delivers.  The only people who can afford to have such uncompromising standards of success in the entertainment industry aren’t really in the entertainment industry.  The rest of us take success however it comes.  

Years ago, when I was a young screenwriter, I found myself at lunch with a couple of older producers.  They were all funny, cynical guys – nice to me but sharp and competitive with each other.  And each one of them had a number of giant hits to his credit.

At one point during lunch, I made a passing, dismissive remark about one of the most famous movie flops of all time, Howard the Duck.   I can’t remember what, exactly, I said, but it was in the same vein as my sandwich dudes.  Something along the lines of, Boy, I’d hate to be the guy who did that movie.”

The conversation stopped.  The producers, who up to that moment had been sparring and jabbing each other, all looked at me with incredulity.  Finally, one of them spoke up.

“What are you talking about?  That movie made millions.  Don’t say stupid things, kid.  Make a movie yourself.  Make a hit movie yourself.  Then, maybe, you can derogate.”  The guys at the table all nodded, sagely.

My face got hot and red with shame.  I sputtered my apologies.  They all smiled and shrugged.  And one of them added: “Don’t worry about it, kiddo.  You’ll learn.  The thing is, the trick to moviemaking is to make money no matter what.  Even on a flop, to use your word.  I made a movie once that cost thirty-six million dollars.  It made eight million back.  Technically, the movie lost twenty-eight million dollars.”

His eyes suddenly twinkled.

“But somehow,” he said, with a huge grin, “I ended up making six million.  You see?  The movie lost money.  The producer made money.  Do you get it?”

I didn’t, really.  And still don’t, unfortunately.  But I’m trying.  

Please join My Friend's Place for our
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I heard a story recently that may or may not be true, but since it perfectly conforms to my prejudices and biases, I’m going to just go ahead and tell it, act as if it’s true, and not bother to pin down its accuracy. 

Okay?  Here goes:

This happens to all network presidents at least once a year – sometimes more than that – and it’s pretty much the most important job they have, aside from taking credit for hits they originally hated and foisting blame for bombs they championed.

Okay, so in this instance, this particular network president was supposed to order a few pilots from among the scripts on his – or her – desk.

And he – or she – wouldn’t do it.  

The network president’s deal, apparently – his (or her) employment agreement with the media behemoth that owns the network over which the network president presides – wasn’t done yet, wasn’t finalized, to the satisfaction, I guess of the network president. 

And so the network president staged what was, essentially, a work-stoppage.  A mini-strike.

  A picket line of one.
The point here is, this wouldn’t be much of a story if it was about an actor, say, or even a writer. 

Actors are always holding people up for more money, waiting for the deal to close – pretending to be sick or something, staging mini-rebellions, just for a little bit more money or bigger title card or a producer credit or something. 

And writers – well, if we had any leverage at all you can bet we’d be storming around the place, walking out of meetings, stopping mid-pitch – anything, anything childish or embarrassing or silly – just to up the deal a bit, to get a bump here or there, to – to use the phrase I used to love to hear my agent use – “tweak the internals” of the deal.

But a network president is supposed to be, I don’t know, an executive.  

But -- and this is a worrying trend among all executives, all over the place – more and more, they’re behaving like talent – like spoiled, impulsive divas, with deals of their own to work out, and childish deal points to settle, like car allowances and perks and severance packages.

I can’t tell you how many years I spent, working for various studios and networks, without a fully-executed deal in place.  I can’t count the number of projects I hopped onto without nailing down the details. 

Maybe that was foolish, but the idea that I’d stop at the studio gates, refuse to go to work, until the long form was signed, is just ludicrous.  I would have been embarrassed to behave in such a silly, childish way. 

And I’m a writer.  

You see, the entertainment business used to be run like a lower-rank, slightly seedy boarding school: actors and writers and directors were like kids running  around wild until the few grownups in charge stepped in and cracked some heads.  

And that’s the difference. 

Back then, you always knew who the grownups were.

Either way, his brilliant Caucaus Diary is worth reading, not only for its sprightly and detailed reporting, but also for his masterful sense of the atmospherics of the place.  We both appreciate what I call the "travel to alarming and crappy places just before and/or just after violence erupts" genre of writing.

And when we get the chance, we like to go to those places and write about it ourselves.

Actually, there's lots of good stuff at John's site.  I'm awfully jealous of his dashing life -- living in Prague, jetting to Armenia, filing from Tblisi.  He's the one who's straight out of Ambler.

Deep down, I think every business is really a version of the entertainment business.  This is partially because I only know about the entertainment business, and when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

But on the other hand, the recent news from the financial markets has seemed pretty familiar.    It's hard to hear phrases like "huge losses," "cash hemorrhage," and "colossal mismanagement" alongside "enormous executive pay packages," "whopping year-end bonuses," and "platinum parachutes," and not think, hey!  Rewarding failure! That's just like in show business!

Of course, the past few years in the entertainment business have been challenging.  The country-club years of the 1990's and early 2000's are gone.  The huge cash tide has receded, and along with it the fat studio deals.  The business looks leaner these days.  Which has benefits: leaner industries take more, cheaper, risks.  And they also start exploring real growth areas, rather than just pumping money into maturing businesses.

Reading today's Financial Times, this jumped out at me.  A European investor who runs a private equity fund had this to say about the future of the private equity business:

Guy Hands, chief executive of London-based Terra Firma Capital Partners, told a Hong Kong conference that over time "there will be less people working in the industry and they will get paid less and that is not necessarily a bad thing."

    "Private equity firms were incentivized to earn as quickly as possible as much as possible, and raise as much as possible and to spend it as quickly as possible."

Spend it as "quickly as possible?" And just when I was about to say Dude! That's just like in show business!  he goes and does it for me:

    Mr. Hands, whose firm bought the troubled EMI music group last year, drew parallels between the music and banking industries.  

    "Both employ too many people on too high compensation and are facing a customer base which is not as predictable as it used to be. My guess is that the music business will take longer to reform because it does not have a regulator forcing change."

I had dinner with a friend of mine last night, and he pitched what, to me, is a surefire hit:

Pick any four actors.  Let's say....

Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Clint Eastwood.

And then film them performing in four episodes -- with no script changes -- of TV's "The Golden Girls."

Not in drag, of course.  Just....straight out.  Could be a pretty funny movie.

For that matter, when you start casting these things, it might be funny to do it with the four living ex-presidents.  Well, the four almost ex-presidents.  We'll have to wait until after Inauguration Day, 2009 to roll film.

But we know who would be the Rue McClanahan role.  Right?

And in keeping with the show, we'll have George W. play the Bea Arthur role, and George H. W. play the other one, the old one.

And that leaves the slighty batty one.  Nailed.

Or how about:

Meryl Streep.  Sally Field.  Gene Hackman.

in...

"Three's Company."

Remember: no script changes, no adjustments.  See how it works.

Hollywood could do a lot worse.  A lot.

When Bob Crane, the star of  the hit sitcom of the 1960’s,  “Hogan’s Heroes,” was found murdered in an Arizona motel in the late 1970’s, among his personal effects were several hundred pounds of video equipment.  Crane had state-of-the-art equipment for 1974: a huge video camera, a heavy playback tape machine (roughly the size of four microwave ovens stacked together), and enough lights to form a small production company.

(Can we take a moment, just to reflect on the weirdness of a TV show set in a Nazi prison POW camp?  And, by the way, it was a big hit at the time -- it lasted 6 seasons -- which was barely 20 years after the war.  Now, of course, it's unthinkable.  But aren't we supposed to get less sensitive to stuff, over time?  Nazis, I guess, are the exception.)

Crane was a porn freak.  He didn’t just like to watch it; he especially liked to make his own.  But back then, being a porn freak wasn’t for the casual hobbyist.  The sheer weight and bulk of the equipment required – the camera and the playback machines and the giant editing deck – required a certain dedication, a deep commitment to the enterprise.  The airline overweight luggage charges alone were suitable barriers to entry, and the enormous cost of what was essentially professional television equipment managed to keep the riff-raff out.  Or in, depending.

All of that changed, of course, a few years later with the introduction of the VCR and a camcorder the size of a plump chicken.  Eventually, even those items were consolidated into a tiny notebook computer and a camera the size of a chicken sandwich.  Both of those two items are so small and compact that they would barely show up in crime-scene photographs.  Thirty years ago, poor Bob Crane had to schlep back-breaking crates all over the country to satisfy his creepy hobby; now it all fits conveniently in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you.  Golfers have more luggage.

This wasn’t a coincidence.  New technology relies on “early adopters” to pay more for ground-breaking equipment.  Audiophiles subsidized the introduction of the compact disc with their single-minded pursuit of perfect sound reproduction.  Computer geeks brought us the BlackBerry and the iPhone.  Nerdy, dateless college tech-heads were driven by their real-world, three-dimensional loneliness to create virtual, two-dimensional social lives – presto: Facebook and MySpace.

And poor, dead Bob Crane gave us the VCR.  He lugged all that stuff so that we could slip in “Prince Caspian” and keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours.  From there it was a short high-tech hop to online, web-based video – which, as you’ll pretend not to know, was developed and perfected because enough citizens want to watch other citizens roll around naked together to make it worth the time and expense of figuring out a way for them to do just that, without leaving their home or their desk.

Pornography, then, is a bellweather.  Pornography is a trailblazer.  People in search of dirty pictures created a market for new technology, which people in search of less dicey things – like videos of cats, people using pretend light sabres, my funny family, whatever -- follow, a year or two later.  So if the pornography business is always a few steps ahead of the rest of the entertainment industry – in distribution and business model – why not check in with it and see what’s up?  

What’s up are online revenues, to almost 3 billion dollars.  What’s down are DVD sales, by at least 15 percent.  What’s up are individual, ad-hoc sites, which have taken business and market share away from the older, bigger brands.   What’s down are production costs, a consequence of the fragmented, tighter margin business.  In other words, what’s going on in the pornography business is what’s going to be going on in the rest of the entertainment industry in two years: costs pushed down; online distribution; individual brands eclipsing studio brands, the slow collapse of the big players as the smaller, more nimble players rise.  Pornography has always been a niche business, if you’ll forgive the pun.  Now, Hollywood is following suit.

All over town, studios are slashing film budgets and production deals.  The major film studios are concentrating resources on a few large releases – called “tentpoles” – and spreading the rest of the money around on a lot of smaller, independent, micro-scale pictures.  And in television, as the audience for the big broadcast networks plummets, it scatters across a 600-channel dial, each channel tailored to a more specific, more particular taste.  And of course it’s all ending up on the web, just like the dirty pictures did a few years ago.

If you’re a writer, this can be a very exciting time.  The country club era of fat studio deals is over, but the exploding diversified entertainment market – the web, the 600 channels of content, the indie film market – mean a lot more places to sell your wares, and a lot more entrepreneurial opportunities to take advantage of.

So if you want to see the future of the entertainment business?  Just take a look at our financially flexible, technologically innovative tacky second cousin.

As a writer, there is one development, though, that bothers me.  Pornography isn’t really what we might call “writer driven.”  People don’t pop in a porn DVD and say, “you know, I really loved that dialogue. Crisp.  Subtle.”  Billions of dollars aren’t being made on the web, streaming videos of naked people doing naked things,  because of the brilliant storytelling craft of, say, Night Nurses on Holiday.  So let’s hope that among the many developments in the future, no one figures out a way to do it without writers.    I know that Bob Crane, who made all of his money in the sit-com business, would agree with me.

I have a friend who has made a terrible mistake.

Things started off well: last month, he wrote and produced a promising, funny television pilot.  A pilot is the first test episode of a proposed series.  If a network likes it – the cast, characters, setting, etc. – then they’ll order more.  

But it’s also a test of the writer, a way of observing him under pressure.  In the television business, for some absurd reason, the writer is in charge, and how he manages the pilot process – and especially the multi-million dollar pilot budget – is a very important indication of how well he might manage the eventual series.

Luckily for my friend, he managed the process of casting, shooting, editing, and delivering the finished project with grace, efficiency, and (mostly) good humor.  Even better, his relationship with the network, which the pilot process tends to fracture and fray, was still collegial and strong.

And then he made his mistake.  We met for a drink late one night to talk about it.

“I did a stupid thing,” he told me.  “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get over it.”

“Come on!” I said.  “You just made a great pilot.  What could you have possibly done? I’m sure you’re over-reacting.”

“I went to the focus group,” he said.  “I watched them test my pilot.”

“You idiot,” I said.  

“I think my career is over.”

“I think it is, too.”

Of course, I didn’t really think his career was over.  But I understood the problem.  For the writer, a focus group experience is a dangerous thing to toy with.  While a demographically precise panel of viewers sits in a small conference room, discussing the product of the past nine months of your life, you pace frantically in the next room, watching the event unfold on the other side of the one-way glass.

“A guy in a ‘Hooters’ t-shirt said he was  bored!  I mean, who is that guy?” my friend shouted.  “And the young woman in the group kept saying ‘I just didn’t get it,’ over and over again.  You should have seen the looks on the faces of the network executives.”

“I thought they liked the pilot,” I said, helpfully.

“They did!” my friend bellowed.  “Right up until it was clear that the only member of the focus group who liked the show was the really fat woman who described herself as a ‘committed Wiccan’ on the questionnaire.”

“Well,” I said, trying to be encouraging and light-hearted, “obese pagans watch TV too.”

My friend stared at me for a moment, deciding whether or not to throw his drink at me.

“The problem,” he said, slowly, “is that I now have these people rattling around inside my head.  I’ve become my own focus group.  I sat down today to work on another script, and all I could hear was ‘boring,’ ‘don’t get it,’ ‘can’t relate’ and ‘more wicca.’”

“Try to think of them as just another set of network executives.  That’s why I do.  I mean, we all get script notes, we all get ridiculous feedback and idiotic suggestions from studio and network executives.  How is this any different?”

“Because,” he said, “because those people behind the glass are real people.  When I get notes from executives, it’s okay because I know them, I know they’re morons.  But those people behind the glass….” His voice got small and baffled.  “I don’t know them,” he whispered.

And there’s the real trouble.  Writers – at least, good writers – are vaguely unbalanced ego maniacs.  They can take any kind of criticism or insult, as long as it’s delivered face-to-face.  But the eavesdropping quality to the focus-group experience gets past even the most arrogant writer’s ego.  It feels like you’re listening to what people might be saying behind your back. 

It feels worse than criticism.  It feels like the truth.

“So I’m totally frozen now,” my friend said.  “I don’t know what to write, or even if I should be writing.  And I’m furious that it was a guy in a ‘Hooters’ t-shirt who basically did this to me.”

I’m not really sure, even now, what advice I could have given to my friend to snap him out of it.  He had been infected with a nasty virus.  Somehow, a focus group had penetrated his immune system, and now he was carrying it around with him.  But I did what I could. 

I told him the stories that we writers tell each other when one of us gets the focus-group virus.  I told him that “Seinfeld” and “Friends” had all received unenthusiastic focus-group responses.  I told him about one of the biggest drama hits of the past five years, which was also trashed by the Hooters t-shirt brigade.  Finally, I told him that it didn’t matter what a dozen-or-so randomly assembled people thought of his show.  What was important was that he thought it was good – that he was proud of his writing and pleased with the production.  

He thought about this.

“You know,” he said finally, “you’re right.”

We clinked glasses.  He smiled.  

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I thought it was kind of slow and hard to get, too.”

Which was when he threw drink at me.  But the truth is, we both had it coming.

People are lazy.

Okay, I'm lazy.

One of the things that built the TV business, early on, was the reluctance of the viewer to get up off the couch and change the channel.  So the network that got you with the 7PM newscast had a good chance to keep you all night.

And then they invented the remote, and the DVR, and 500 channels of stuff, and it got easier to be lazy, to have instant access to everything, all the time.

The music business worked sort of the same way.  You kept your music collection in stacks or piles or (if you're old enough) milk crates, but for some reason, it was easier to buy new music than to sift through the old stuff.  And it was such a hassle to get up and reload the CD changer, or (if you're old enough) restack the turntable.  I used to occasionally look through my shelves of CDs and think: When was the last time I listened to that?

And then they invented the MP3 player and the iPod and it got easier to be lazy, to have instant access to your whole music collection, all the time.

Everything, always, effortlessly.

That's the direction the web seems to be driving towards.  And what it means -- or at least, one of the things I think it means -- is that the new stuff isn't just competing with other new stuff anymore, it's competing with old stuff, too, on equal footing.  

I thought about that this weekend, when I read this article in the New York Times.  It's been hard to find a really big hit on the web -- a "franchise" hit, we call it in Hollywood -- and some people are wondering what that says about the financial opportunities in new media.  

I think the mistake we make here in Hollywood is that we think of the web as just some kind of turbo-charged distribution channel -- a more efficient and flexible way to get our stuff onto your screen -- whichever screen you prefer using.    But it seems to me that the really exciting, fun, and revolutionary part of the web is in the social realm: connecting and linking and socializing with people.  The web as a one-way screen may not be as attractive to people as the social web.

No matter how you slice it, the entertainment business is really about: you sit, you watch.  Oh, sure, you can "favorite" something and send it along to your friends, but that's still a one-way operation.  It's not social.  In fact, in a way, it's anti-social.  It's what you do instead of talking or communicating with people.  It's one of the reasons going to the movies is such a popular activity on dates: it's two hours when you don't have to talk...

It's a rather new phenomenon, though, this nighttime activity of sitting on the sofa, watching stuff.  In all of those Jane Austen novels, people used to sit around together, in groups, and chit chat, or listen to music, or play games.

Groups. Chat.  Music.  Games.

We might be going back to that.  

This article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal – sorry, subscription required; I’ll quote the important stuff – illustrates what’s been happening in the TV business for a while.

We’ve been buying a lot of foreign shows – correction: foreign formats – and retooling them for American television.  Emphasis on the tool.

(Although sometimes a studio looks at a foreign show and thinks, “Why bother to buy it when we can just retool it without paying?”  Again: emphasis on the tool.)

I’ve heard a lot of explanations for this:  the lingering effects of the writers’ strike, the cost of  pilot production, the global diversification of the large media companies.  All of these are basically wrong.

The writers’ strike may have been pointless, ultimately, but it didn’t create this trend.  And global reach and pilot budgets aren’t the reason, either.  The truth  – and this is something awfully hard for people who work at networks and studios to accept – is that the development system in the television business is broken.

The system they’ve created to source, develop, and pay for new television shows needs to change.  Starting, I’m sad to say, with them.  The system is broken.

Broken and bloated, which is a lot worse, at least from the shareholders perspective.

Networks have development vice presidents, executive vice presidents, and senior executive vice presidents for comedy, drama, reality, and something alarming called “alternative programming,” not to mention the various “Managers of comedy development” and “directors of drama development” and assistants and extras cluttering up the cubicles.

The studios match the network personnel person-to-person.  Go to the table reading (the first day of production, when the script is read aloud by the actors) of any television show on the air and I dare you to find an unoccupied chair.

The last reading I went to had sixty people – all executives – from the network and studio, all scribbling notes and giving concern-face.  

Even the foreigners are getting it.  From the WSJ: 

On Oct. 17, a lavish castaway drama, "Crusoe," will make its debut on NBC. The show was created by the London-based studio Power. Long accustomed to working with European networks, Power says it found NBC more demanding.
One example: Studio executives wanted daily conversations over small details, from costumes to make-up, according to founder Justin Bodle.
"They love conference calls, the Americans," Mr. Bodle says.

Mention this to anyone on that side of the business and the first thing they do is get defensive.  “We work hard,” they’ll say.  Which is true, I guess.

But my fantastic dog, Illy, works hard, too, chasing the tennis ball and bringing it back – she pants and huffs and puffs and flops down hard at the end of a session – so  I guess that makes her Executive Vice President in charge of Tennis Ball Retrieval. 

 There’s a lot of panting and huffing and flopping in the offices of the networks and studios.  But the reason they buy so much overseas material is precisely because there are so many of them, dithering and fearful.  Because the more people you have involved in a decision, the less likely it is that you’ll make a decision.  

I remember, a few years ago, hearing from a writer friend of mine who had just pitched to a network.  They passed on his idea, and when they did, this is what they said:

“The problem with your idea is that it doesn’t remind us of anything else.”

And that’s why they keep buying overseas material.  Because it exists.  Because they don’t have to imagine it.  They can see it and touch it and rewind it and it seems less risky, less dangerous to the career, to buy a foreign show and retool it.

With an emphasis on….well, you know.

All of which is fine, really.  But if you’re going to outsource your development to the UK, or France, or wherever, then what do you need all those executives back here for?  Look, when Nike builds a sweatshop overseas, they at least have the sense to close the factory in Murietta.

This is the kind of thing that I love to read.

I love QIK.  And Justin.tv, and Kyte, and all of these kinds of mobile/personal/broadcasting tools.  The more the merrier, I say.

Which is weird, because I’m still firmly reliant on Old Media to pay my bills.  About 80% of my time is spent writing and pitching and dreaming up stuff for the kind of television screen you can’t QIK to.  

When Tim and I created Yurth, that’s sort of what we envisioned.  (Well, not at first: at first we thought we were going to create a video Craigslist.  Part of doing anything, though, is learning how to shift and surf and improvise and respond to what’s out there.)  We’re still trying to do that: to create a place for a video-based, phone- and webcam-based global conversation.  

Part of our thinking was to strip out as much of the text-based stuff as we could: just keep it simple and visual (a map; a row of videos) so that people who don’t live in the United States and who may not feel confident about their written or typed English – and let’s be honest: most Americans shouldn’t be all that confident about theirs, either – would still be able to interact and join in the conversation.

We’re not there yet, obviously.  We’re still trying to raise a little money here and there to finish out the features.  And since neither one of us really knows how to open the hood and fix stuff ourselves, it’s a challenge.

But it’s nice to know that there’s competition out there, that other smart people are thinking along the same lines.

It’s called being “directionally correct,” which is a lot like being actually correct, except that there’s no money in it.  

Last week, for a whole bunch of peculiar reasons too complicated to get into, I was in Azerbaijan.

I don’t mean metaphorically.  That’s not a euphemism.  I mean I was actually in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, an oil rich but everything-else-poor nation on the western banks of the Caspian Sea – that’s the one with the caviar and the Iranian nukes.  

I love to travel – I had already been to Azerbaijan – this was my second trip – which I recognize starts edging out of fun, eccentric territory and into weird, creepy, what’s-with-the-oddball-tourism? territory, but, well, I’ve been to a lot stranger places.

And it’s always a good idea – and if you live in Los Angeles and work in the entertainment industry, it should be compulsory – to get out of the bubble and see something way different, meet people with whom you have almost nothing in common.

Which gets harder and harder to do, in our iPhone World.  It’s great, I guess, that we’re all getting connected, but that makes it harder and harder to take a week and really turn yourself all around.

Recently, I’ve heard from two old colleagues – and by old I mean former, and by former I mean over-40 – who are busy writing and producing and show-running two of the most successful comedies currently on the air.  In other countries.

Countries in Europe and South America are flying to LAX and scooping up Hollywood talent – the writers and producers who made the 1980’s and 1990’s such a magical TV wonderland – and importing them, in a kind of perverse, reverse outsourcing, to create and run – and in some cases simply explain – the hit TV shows of the recent American past.  So you can, I’m told, see a pretty letter-perfect Bizzarro episode of  “The Jeffersons” on Turkish television.  Somewhere there’s a Malay “Friends.”  

(So the next time you’re in a foreign city and jet-lagged, lying on your hotel room bed, flipping through the channels, don’t freak out:  that probably is the “Golden Girls” you’re watching.  Just the Egyptian version.)

The plum jobs, I’m told, are in Russia, where the cascade of new, vaguely gangsterish wealth has created a whole new class of robber baron.  Instead of importing European opera companies or buying up whole museums, as the American robber barons did in the 19th century, it’s popular in Russia to spend huge sums hiring the top sit-com writing talent of the 1990’s to come to Moscow and train the local writers in such tradecraft as managing a writing staff, organizing and running a rewrite session, story structure, the “scene button,” the “act break,” and also more arcane but still important techniques like  the “expensive lunch order,” the “veiled network executive insult,” and the very crucial “reusing old material.”

And because they’re not really making the great, old fashioned multiple-camera comedies anymore in this country, it’s a pretty sweet third act twist in your career to spend some time overseas, lionized like a sit-com Yoda – “Tell me please,” a Russian writer asked a friend of mine, “We would like to know how to do this wonderful thing, this “Caroline in the City.”

Plus, you get paid in Euros.  

So while I was in Baku, Azerbaijan, I did drop some not-so-subtle hints.  I told them I thought what their television really needed was a good wacky neighbor.  Maybe a too-smart-for-his-own-good teen.  A smart wife with a dump husband.  Young people living the single life in Baku, in one of those fantastic Baku apartments that they couldn’t really afford in real life.  I sold myself pretty hard.  Now, I’m just waiting for the iPhone to ring….

The day I left Baku for home, this happened. Of course, if you scroll down, you see that I’m already paranoid. But, you know, sometimes life is like an Eric Ambler novel.

So, a mostly Wahhabi Mosque was bombed. Wahhabis, as we all know, tend to be awfully conservative. And the Azerbaijani government (and most of the society) are overwhelmingly secular. It’s a pretty modern country – they make passable wine, truly awful brandy, couples walk around town hand-in-hand; headscarves are rarer there than in London – but they’re also on the doorstep of an unpredictable Islamic neighbor, a neighbor known to meddle a lot in Azerbaijan's internal affairs.

The Azerbaijani government cracks down on any sign of fundamentalism, Wahhabi-style or Iran-style, and in the run-up to October’s presidential elections, maybe that’s what happened here. Some over-zealous government tool tossed a hand-grenade into a Wahhabi mosque, killed a couple of people, and moved on.

Trouble is, what the Azerbaijanis prize more than anything is what governments in tough spots always prize: stability. It’s simply not in their interests to crack down that hard, in that place. I’m not saying they’re incapable of thuggish behavior – the government is very much a break-a-few-eggs organization -- but the longer I was in that region, the more I began to think like a spy novelist. There’s always something going on underneath the thing that’s going on.

Instability in Azerbaijan serves a certain power to the north. Two weeks ago – before the war in South Ossetia erupted -- the rumor in Baku (and in Tibilisi, and in Ankara) was that the Russians were (secretly) behind the Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan pipeline blast, even though it was being unofficially attributed to the Kurdish separatist organization, PKK. Today, a friend in Baku emailed me to say, simply, “It was the Russians. They want to screw us before the elections.”

So, a thought experiment. What if a large, powerful state – a state with huge resources, a history of meddling, fomenting instability, supporting terrorism – that has been saddled with a sluggish, backward economic system suddenly casts off that system and becomes, instead, a sort of enormous, powerful, ruthless gangster-state? What would it be capable of? How would we stop it? Could we stop it?

And with that, I’m home. Back in Los Angeles. Back to work: I’ve got 2 scripts to write. Time to sit down and do the thing that brings in the money that pays the Whole Foods bill. No more international intrigue for me. Unless, you know, I get lucky.

Which is, roughly speaking, my advice to the good people of Azerbaijan. And to good people everywhere.

Did lots of weird, offbeat media events in Baku -- this just happens to be the most photogenic. Most of them began and ended with a discussion of a single topic: the occupation of Nagorny-Karabagh -- a region inside the territorial borders of Azerbaijan -- by Armenian nationals. It's a complicated issue. I'm not sure I satisified any of my interviewers by saying, basically, that looking to the United States, or the west in general, for some kind of active help in solving this not-quite-war, not-quite-peace situation.

But I did tell them that producing 934,700 barrels of oil a day is a terrific way to get your point across.

This, for instance, which happened a week or so ago in Turkey. Blamed on the Kurdish terrorist organization, PKK. But there are lots of dark rumblings around Baku (and Tiblisi, I'm told) that it might have been someone else. Someone who doesn't like the oil pipeline that connects Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey.

I wonder who that could be?

The proposed gas pipeline, to trace along the same Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan route, might eventually go south, to Israel. And west, to Greece. And into Europe bypassing Russia entirely.

Which won't make them too happy.

This is the original nest of conspiracies -- the Caucases, Central Asia -- and so it's tempting to see the world like people here do: as a dark clash between powerful forces. You know, like a spy novel.

But spy novels have to start somewhere. And a lot of them start here.

I'm back.

A few months ago, I started getting alarming emails from people. My site, apparently, was infected.

"This Site Will Harm Your Computer," is what it said on Google.

Odd, really, because when I saw that for the first time, I thought it was a metaphor. A euphemism. I thought it was Google saying, essentially, "Don't bother with that guy. Waste of time."

And then I spent some time listening to Jonathan Zittrain -- he's a friend of a friend -- talk about web security and his new book, The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It, and he was talking about exactly that: web sites getting infiltrated (Hi, Wordpress!) and infected, and then people like me getting dramatic emails from people we don't know.

So I contacted a very smart, cool guy, Geoffrey Gifford, who has a web business of his own, and he helped me clean up everything. Geoffrey helped with the admin stuff, and the design -- he runs a great site of his own, Culture Now, which I recommend highly. I'm really grateful for all of his help on this site...

And not just for cleaning it up, either. Now the site looks much better: cleaner, sharper, more white space.

Oh, and comments. We now have comments.

So, I'm back.

More later.