 So why don't we get our panelists right out? It's a round table, but the table has to be imagined. That's what we do in the arts. So Elaine McMillan, Rob Burnett, and David Weinberger, come on down. Where are you? There you are. Wonderful. All right, so Rob, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Softball questions. Well, let's see. I've worked at the end of the show almost my entire life. Is your mic on, by the way? A little technical thing we talk about. Hello? On now? Now, it's on. Very good. I've worked for the David Letterman show. I started there coming right out of college in 1980, a year out of college in 1985. And it's kind of working. And local boy, went to Tufts? I went to Tufts. Don't rub it in. I know this is Harvard. I went to Tufts. My wife also went to Tufts. We're snuckin' behind enemy lines, honey. Here we are. And I started there as an intern and kind of worked my way up. I was a writer and then the head writer and then executive producer. And now we have this production company called World by Pants, where we have produced such shows as Everybody Loves Raymond, which you probably have heard of. I co-created a show with a band named John Beckerman, who you know, called Ed that was on NBC for four years. And now here we are with We Made This Movie. And do you remember the first time that I met you? No. Who doesn't? I think you made the popcorn doesn't eat itself joke. And it didn't go over there. No, there was no popcorn in the room. It was a total non sequitur. But finally, I've been opening every meeting with that. And now finally, there it is. Actually, I remember the first time I met you, you hit me with a question, which was if there are two casinos and a casino number one, all the gamblers gamble until they run out of money and then they go home. And a casino number two, they just gamble for a while and then they leave, whether or not they've made a profit. Will the first casino do better? It seems like it would, but maybe not. Because to a casino, a bet is a bet is a bet. They don't know who's up and who's down. They just process bets and pay out. The answer may surprise you to come at the end of the panel first. Really? So I've usually asked questions that have no answer. But let me ask you why. I also, for the first half hour of meeting Rob, thought he was Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. And we ended up having a perfectly good discussion about reality TV, with me having no idea that it was not Mark Burnett I was talking to. On the third most successful Burnett at CBS, Mark, Carol, and then me. But do you remember the first time the internet impinged upon your consciousness, either generally or in the context of your job as a television writer and producer? Well, that's a good question. Who, the first brush with the internet? Well, I don't know who was the first, but I think when I was doing my show, Ed, that was the first time that the presence of the internet began to bear down upon you. Because of the fan communities. Exactly. And we had a really very vibrant act of fan community and this was at the beginning of this. This was really kind of before this was commonplace. But I remember at some point, some assistant came in and said, you've got to look at this. And I punched it up and the fictional town that Ed took place in was called Stuckeyville. And there was this entire community, Stuckeyville.com. There was a mayor of Stuckeyville. There was all of this stuff. And it honestly was mind blowing. What I remember most was they had quizzes about the show that I could not answer. I wrote, like literally my partner, John Beckerman and I, we wrote all the episodes. And they give us these, they'd have quizzes about trivia, small facts, and we'd compete. And we did not know the answers. And the only way I could answer them, honestly, it would be how much did the pie cost in the pilot episode of such and such? And I literally had to say, OK, if I was writing this, how much would I make the pie cost? You could just reinvent the answer. I had to back into, they knew more about the show than I did. And it was very intimidating because you would do an episode and you'd go, yeah, that was a good one. And then you'd probably say, oh, no, it wasn't. They hated it. And were you ever tempted to poke your head up and participate as you or participate under a nom de guerre? In the very beginning, I remember going on to try to explain something that they had wrong. And it just felt like a bad idea. They just pushed back. You knew the fact. And they're like, no, no. But they didn't want to hear from me at all. I shouldn't say that. They did. It was kind of like being Elvis in a very small pond. I come in there and they're like, oh, my god. And then you feel swarmed. But then it starts to get to the point where you, I don't think they really want that relationship. I think they want it their way. Because mostly the information I had was heartbreaking to them. Because they would have incredible theories about why we had done something. And I didn't have the heart to tell them. You just couldn't afford the boom shot or something. Well, I wish it was even that. It usually was just pure desperation because we had no ideas. And they were weaving stuff together. Oh, do you see how they picked up on this thing in episode 2? And now it's an episode 24. I'm like, no. I'm sorry. But keep thinking that. OK. All right, so that's the opening parentheses of your story for which you've nicely kind of suited the stereotype of old media baron. OK. Right. I'll take it. Yeah. And so we'll hold to that stereotype for a moment. And then that means we can speak to Elaine McMillan, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the business you're in. Well, I started out as a journalist, actually. And that transition from a newspaper journalist was very quickly and turning into new media, as we all know, and then started into documentary filmmaking. So roughly when was this? That was in 2007. 2007, starting as a journalist at? Well, actually, I worked at The Washington Post with Alex in 2009. That's when the big transitions in the newspaper world really started coming to the surface. And then I decided to go into documentary film. And then at that point, the subjects I'm interested in are sort of evolving stories and involve communities. And so I started asking myself the question of, am I the right person to tell that story? How can I put the storytelling back into the community's hands? And how can we sort of change the path of that story rather than just creating a 90-minute documentary with a the end slide at the end? So there must be an example, then, of your undertaking with this. Yeah, so I'm currently working on an interactive documentary called Hollow. And we'll launch in April, actually. And basically, it's spent five months this past summer in McDowell County, West Virginia. I'm originally from West Virginia. And working with a community that's been very seriously misrepresented and underrepresented by the national and mainstream media, and allowing them and giving them the tools to tell their own story. And so that sort of opens up another whole can of worms with participatory media. And you're getting a ton of crap most of the time. And you have to figure out how. What happened, quality? Well, crap in that it's not so much quality. It's just a lot of content. And when you're trying to create an experience or something that is enjoyable to watch, it's basically fragments of media. And that's dangerous, because that seems to be a lot of what the web's being used for. So this is like somebody going through Stuckeyville and handing the residents of the real Stuckeyville, you gave them cameras and such? Yeah, and then I shot myself. So right now, what we're doing is. Ambiguous statement, but we know what you mean. Yeah. But the whole team of this project is very different than your typical film. It's made up of programmers, developers, cartographers. And we're sort of all putting. Cartographers, map makers. Yeah, we did balloon mapping. So we did participatory mapping techniques in McDowell County. Explain what balloon mapping is. I don't know if it's that relevant to this, but it's a. You already put the word out there. You got it. It's a weather balloon that you attach a camera to. And it was just part of our participatory nature of the project to allow the community to take the images of their community back into their hands. So they created aerial maps. And then they're using. And you gave them the balloons. Yeah, well, we went out. We had a cartographer working with the. And are these like hot weather balloons, hot air balloons? Or these are helium balloons with a little camera on them? They're weather balloons. They're not hot air balloons. Yes, silly me. But the whole idea is that we take the challenge that we're experiencing right now is this idea of the internet being used as buckets of media. So we label things and we put them in these buckets rather than allowing people to experience things. And so we're trying to create a nonlinear experience with the community footage, our footage, data visualizations, maps, all these elements to create a new cinema online. And is there going to be a narrative in your documentary? Is narrative too linear? There's about 50 mini narratives that all make up the larger narrative. But the user creates that narrative. So it's this form of associational editing. You're actually allowing the user to edit the project and then allowing them creating a social component where they could actually tweet or share their edit of the film. So in our stereotyped introductions, you're pretty good central casting, which of course it wouldn't be central casting, sends us new media, totally embraces everything, send in the clowns, the balloons, everything. Definitely balloons, yes. And see what comes of it. And you're still not even sure what it's going to be. And whatever it is could change anyway. Right. And we're creating the vocabulary right now. It really doesn't exist. And that's the exciting part. All right. So there's a hyphen or closed parenthesis. Let me turn now to David Weinberger. Tell us your background and how you came to be sitting in this chair. That I don't know. I'm a little clearer on my own background, but not entirely. I write about the internet and particularly on the effect the internet has on how we think, on ideas, not brain stuff. I don't know any of that. Small pieces obviously joined, the clue train manifesto, everything is miscellaneous. So these random strings of words are, in fact, titles of books. Your books? Yeah. Yes. And I'm finding particularly I have a general interest in the ways in which the internet as a medium sort of isn't a medium and feels like it's ours. Maybe I should unpack that just a little bit. It's not a medium in the sense that traditional medium is something through which you send a message. And the medium is supposed to keep its hands off the message. The telegraph wire is not supposed to prefer some messages, some dots and dashes. It's a good medium, hands off the message. The internet seems to me that if you want to think of it as a medium, then we are the medium. We pass things around. We send a link hollow or we tweet using that hashtag, perhaps, that we just saw Rob's movie. And that moves the link to the next person who likes it or doesn't, moves it along. And that moving it along, we're the ones who move it along. We're the telegraph wire, except we only move things along that we want to move along. Distributed curation. Yeah, it's like that. But it's also way more social than that. Because when I send the link out, I'm affiliating myself with it. It says something about me and some social capital behind it. And I make friends that way, or I get people annoyed at me that way. And so in this environment, it seems to me that we feel like we own this medium more intimately and deeply than we have owned any medium, except maybe our own voice. And that's probably an overstatement, but I'm not sure if it is. We hear being everybody that chooses to participate. Yeah, whether they're participating by contributing content or by passing the link around. It's obviously different senses of ownership. But one of the things I enjoy about these two stereotypes that you've set up, and I don't want to hear what my stereotype is, is a very grumpy old man and Clint Eastwood is going to show up. It kind of writes itself, doesn't it? Is the way in which the two of you also mirror different ideas about, well, actually, the same idea about the audience's participation and ownership of medium. So in Stuckeyville, I love the Stuckeyville community story, because there's a community that won't let the author own his own work, very postmodern. And they feel such ownership of this that they reject you. It's really quite wonderful. Not the only ones, but yes. So in the extremely brief time we have, less than 30 minutes, actually, I would love to now bounce back to Rob, because we're about to see we made this movie this evening, and hear a little bit about, basically, this is now an opportunity to embark on a new enterprise, kind of reset everything, clean slate from Ed from the series that followed, now in an internet-saturated environment where it looks like you're trying to adopt a number of the lessons from having the internet around. And I'd be curious to hear a little bit about that, and then have an opportunity for David to kind of weigh in on it. Imagine, what's your hourly rate, David? Oh, you couldn't afford it. So here we have a moment to dragoon David into offering his view, basically, offering a view on your strategy now that is an internet-aware strategy in producing, distributing, and making something of this movie. It's so adorable how you think a guy like me has a strategy. Well, in episode two, you were very clear about that. Everything I do is desperation. Is that a strategy? No, this movie, which those who will stick around to watch it will see, it's about kids making a movie. So the start of it from just a creative standpoint, John Beckerman and I, who we wrote the movie together, we thought a lot about how we marveled at how today technology is such that everyone can do everything. My kids are cutting their whole movies on the same stuff that I cut this movie on, the same stuff we work on on The Letterman Show. It's pretty amazing. With the quality of cameras, really anyone can make a, you're not going to make Avatar, but you can make a pretty good studio film today. Anyone can do it. So it's presuming, I couldn't tell if you're presuming that Avatar was a pretty good studio film or not. Right, true. But so we kind of got into this idea of, well, what happens if these kids want to go make a movie, but it doesn't mean that they necessarily are good at it. So that's sort of what the film is about. So to that end, everything in the movie is, though I am a professional, is shot in such a way to make it look as if they are doing it themselves. There are no additional cameras in the movies, in the movie other than the ones they have. And are they, in fact, doing it themselves? So they're professional camera people. We have a professional camera person doing it. And full disclosure, the actual camera that we're using, we shot with red cameras, which is a camera that would be out of their range. But I don't think that's noticeable to an average person. There are special adjustments. This is why it costs so much to make it look like a lesser camera. Exactly. As I've said before, if you want an unprofessional piece of work, I'm your god. I got that covered. But we didn't use any, directing the movie, we didn't use any dollies or cranes or any kind of equipment. And you'll see it all looks sort of like a home movie, but intentionally shot. It's not Blair Witch, where people are like, oh my god, we don't know we're shooting a movie. They intentionally shoot a movie. So an extension of that comes, well, how do we release a movie like this? The movie has no stars. It's all unknown kids by design. It felt out of place to have suddenly a well-known actor in the movie. So from that, now you have this thing that cost $1 million, which in the real world is a lot of money, and Hollywood is really nothing. So you have this thing. And then it became, well, how are we going to release this? If we go a traditional route for this movie, you're probably talking about a few screens in New York, Chicago, and LA. You're probably talking about $3 to $5 million in what's called P&A, Prince and Advertising. And it's going to be a tough road. And so we sat down with this company called Snag Film, who is trying to become a destination site for indie films on the web. They actually started with documentaries. Now they're expanding to indie films, because they feel like in the world today, theaters are more and more becoming four movies, like Avatar and Mission, possibly these giant 3,000 screen releases. And movies like this are starting to get lost, and there is a market for it. So here we are now with Snag. And we came up with this concept of doing a streaming premiere of the movie. So in New York, we had a big, big old Hollywood premiere with a red carpet and journalists and all the whole thing. And we streamed that live on the web for 24 hours, no advertising, nothing. You can watch it for free. And then from there, it will slide into the typical video-on-demand formats. But one of the most innovative things I think we did with this movie is we crowdsourced the music. Partly practical, we had no music budget, to be fair. But also partially because we didn't feel like big, well-known music fit the do-it-yourself nature of the actual movie. We were introduced to Red Bull Soundstage, which is this great website for up-and-coming artists. And they have some kind of curation process. So it's not exactly YouTube. The bands that are invited on to Red Bull are not known yet, but they're good musicians. And we made a deal with them. Red Bull saw the movie. Like the movie, we put four scenes of our movie up on Red Bull Soundstage, gave the community instructions just as we would give a professional composer. Here are the scenes. This is the mood we're looking for musically in this scene. Please submit your music. I thought we would get 30 or 40. We got 1,200. And they were incredible. And John, Beckerman, and I listened to all of them, chose four of them for these scenes and liked the music so much that we put an additional 18 song, I think 22 songs in all, in the movie. And we brought soundtracks. This handsome compact. It's just a compact disc is what this thing is. So yeah. That's very interesting. Either that or a coaster to be honest. But as a result of this, we actually have this incredible soundtrack from all unknown bands that people, everyone that saw the movie, everyone that has seen this thinks they've gone crazy over this soundtrack. And one of the bands we gave a spot to, we let the crowd vote and give a spot to on Letterman. So it's kind of a great thing for us. We got an amazing soundtrack for free that has creatively elevated the movie. And hopefully, some of these bands will get exposure from this and get them to the next step. It's a perfect marriage. And now the product is a movie. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a soundtrack, all that kind of stuff. Again, everybody's about to see it. How would you feel if the residents of Stuckeyville, here described as whatever numerator above the denominator of everybody that watches the movie, gets really into it? The movie speaks to those folks. And they're interested in remixing it and looking for found footage more than just the handful of deleted scenes, typically on a DVD. They want to put a new soundtrack on. They start making variants of this movie. We edited, we made this movie. How would you feel about that? We've had conversations about this. I think that as long as there is a version of the original, my version of the movie that existed in the world, I think I would love. The thing about this, it's almost circular. Because for people to do that, they have to feel so passionately. There's that famous Star Wars, you know what I'm talking about? Seen by scene, remake where people are not even seen by scene. Five second by five second shot. Right, where they remade Star Wars in any way they wanted. It's got. Which has amazing continuity, given that it completely changes format in actors. It's incredible. It's claymation. It's five guys in an office. It's little babies. It's all different kinds of things. It's phenomenal. And people always say to me, well, how would you feel if they did that to your movie? And the first part of that assumes that your movie Star Wars. Do you know what I mean? I say yes. Let's do it. First make my movie Star Wars. First Star Wars, and then let's do that. All right, so you're open to it. I'm open to it, yes. So David Elaine, any other advice for Rob as he's embarking now on this phase of his baby has been released into the world and he's looking to see how many people want to swaddle it? Swaddle it. Sorry, not swallow. It was not a reference to the ancient Greek myth of the Titans, yes, just to be clear. This movie won't swallow itself. See, or a Boris movie. Anyway. I shouldn't have spoken, because now made my stupid little joke, because now I have to say something serious. And nobody knows that. There isn't a science to this. There is at least a pretend science or a set of best practices or methodology in the traditional Hollywood world, where CAA can tell you, or you know, of course, here's how much you spend, where you do the placements, here are the sorts of shows that you advertise on. And if the advertising doesn't work, generally, you know. That's the 3 to 4 million he was talking about. But you know how to do it. At least we think we know how to do it. Pretty skeptical about whether how efficacious that is. But at least there is this belief. And there isn't on the web yet, because the web is very, first of all, because the web is very, very young, is as Doc Searles likes to say, it's a teenager, basically literally in his teenage years. And second of all, because the formations haven't formed. We like to think that the web is flat. At least we used to like to think that. And there's really good evidence that it's not at all flat, that it, in fact. By flat, you mean everybody is equal participant? Yes. OK. And all voices, totally democratic. Everybody's voice is the same. Anybody here can help make your movie into Star Wars equally. And that's just not true. That's not how networks work. There's seemingly a natural topology of networks, where they tend to cluster. Some hubs get really big, and others don't. There's a long tail. And so people have been aware of this for a decade now. But the structures that emerged out of this, we don't know what they are yet. There isn't a site that I know, a single site that you go to, or a stream that is known where independent movies are featured. And if you're interested, you can get a really solid sense of what's there. Maybe there is, and I just don't know about it. There isn't all the ways that we have of finding the things that we want to watch or hear. And within those ways, ways of pushing back out. Do you feel some ownership? Those things are still being invented. And without that sort of formation, everybody has to invent their own way of doing things. And that's the point. It is interesting that Rob's approach, Rob and John's approach, was to involve people in some ways on the input and creation side of things, like with the music competition he was talking about. So then they've got some ownership and reason to be interested in how it goes at the point that it's distributed publicly. I think it was interesting to note, after the premiere, a number of the actors had not seen the final cut until the premiere, which is fascinating to have done so many takes. You have no idea what's about to happen. Elaine, for your production, it sounds like you've turned that dial all the way to 11. You have tons of people invested in making this. And does that mean you have kind of released authorial control of what happens? You're more like a sort of, I don't know. Yeah, it gets sticky. That's where a big question comes in, is who owns what? And who's the hand that's overall? And you mean this as an artist more than just since we're in a law school. You don't mean who literally owns it. No, I mean, when that launches and they see their media, what part of that do they own? And do you have them, by the way, speaking as a lawyer? Are they signing all sorts of extremely uncool releases that are like blah, blah, blah? Just that I can use what they shoot. Heirs and assigns, right? Yeah. But I'm curious about your production. You opened it up to the music community. And I feel like that's such a big part of new media storytelling is building these communities. And that's when we used Kickstarter to raise production money. How much did you ask for over what time period? We asked for 25. We got 28,000. Over like a month or something? Yeah, 30 days. And if it had not come through, you wouldn't have done it? It would have came there. We had all of our checks in place. I mean, I had been in pre-production for this for eight months, so I had a list of 250 people that were interested in the topic. So why put it through Kickstarter? Why not just have them send you the checks directly? That's a good question. Well, no, because Kickstarter creates excitement around your project. And it sort of rallies the troops. And right now, all those troops are being used for user testing. And we have a target audience right there who's interested in the end product. We don't have to go out looking for them. And they're excited to be involved in all aspects of production. So we have that community, and we're really banking on that community to give us input. And I'm wondering, where does the community stand on your project? Since it's finished, is it evolving in any way? Or how do you sustain that community? Or is it important to sustain like that? No, I think it's a huge part of it. The discussions we're having now, we too have a community, the music side of it for sure, and then just all of the strange thing about our project, I have to say, is that sort of because of where I sit in the entertainment world, and I don't mean this imodestly, but just because I'm not an NYU film student, I've been doing this for a while, for a project of this size, we had an actor on the David Letterman show, Fallon, Kimmel. We were on all the morning show. We got an unusual amount of press. So we have built a relatively large community through that. We kept getting, originally, all the press we did was to get people to go to the premiere. So we said, go to this website. And on this website, you'll meet our actors. You'll see all of our clips, all of this, trying to build that stuckyville.com community, essentially, where you could also sign up to watch the premiere for free. So now we have all of this, and we are trying to figure out how best to access it. I don't know exactly what to do, but it does exist. And I think, not only is it important, I think, frankly, being very new to this and clearly being the least smart person in this room, I think that is the most important thing. I think it's all you have, actually, is this community of people that may be interested in what you're doing. Yeah, I agree. So maybe you should have done Kickstarter, even though you didn't need to. I don't think you need to. Yeah, yeah. Let's open up to questions. Questions, thoughts, comments? Curious, who's in this room? How many people are, if given the opportunity, would be, or maybe are already, making movies of some kind? There's a lot of filmmakers here. So I don't know if any of you wants to kind of be like, well, with my movie, we did X, or a question from yourself. Yes? Over here. Please feel free to tell us who you are, too. I'm Hila Lipschitz. I'm doing my doctoral program at the Harvard Business School to look at open innovations. So something similar in the scientific and R&D world, where I'm doing research with NASA. So imagine them thinking of, OK, let's, instead of us, like the Hollywood kind of doing all the R&D, opening up to the communities. And I'm looking at how these incumbent and large organizations are challenged to buy it and how do people experience that. Because as you said, in the early days for you, which was scary, it's very different. It's a very different model. So I was wondering if you have any reactions like that from your friends or colleagues at the more Hollywood big institutions. And do they see it as a threat? Is it like an opportunity? What are the challenges, the structure of even like you talked about the production, all those different processes that you have those best practices for years, and now they're kind of challenged on some level? Yeah, my sense of things is that we're so at the beginning of all of this that what you're finding more and more is that people are much more established than I am, particularly in the film world, where I'm not really established at all, more and more people are starting to do these kind of projects. And I think you're going to start to see some kind of tipping point where it's funny. It almost happened. I don't know if this is analogous. It's a little bit different. But there was a period, maybe about seven or eight, maybe even now 10 years ago, where film actors started doing television. And it was very rare for big film stars to kind of deign to do a TV series. But it started. And then you started to get all of these really high quality TV series on HBO, mostly on cable. And what do you think accounted for that? I think ultimately it came down to television networks and cable outlets needing to compete with all of the different channels. So starting to throw a lot of money at big stars. And I think also there was maybe as stars began to age, there was a lifestyle choice there, because TV is easier for them. They don't have to travel. They like it. And once one or two of them started to go, you now start to see it all over the place. You see big Academy Award winning, I don't know, Glenn Close has a show. And there's many, many, many examples. And I think there's a version of this now happening here. It hasn't quite happened yet, but not to name drop, but I remember talking to Alec Baldwin, who was just a guest on The Late Show. And I remember I was talking to him, and he was telling me that he was looking at, I think, Kevin Spacey just did a thing for Netflix. And there was some big people now starting to kind of go into this world. Ed Burns is making a living now. I don't want to say he's making a living. I don't know how much money he's making, but he's dedicating himself to making a lot of small indie films, because the one thing you get in this world is you get complete creative freedom, which for many people is more valuable than anything else. So I think that will open. In this world, do you mean the movie world or the TV world? Well, really, both. No, I mean, in this world, meaning this kind of this independent film where you can be in charge of your own distribution. Yes. You know, if you look at a different example, if you look at Louis C.K., who did a stand-up special, and then decided, I'm just going to put this out myself. I don't need HBO. I don't need Showtime. I can just do this. And he did a great job of it, and it was financially very successful. And is the industry totally chattering about that? Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely. But it's particularly conducive, I think, to stand-ups. There's low production value. You don't need a lot. It doesn't cost a lot to make a stand-up special. Comedy is very, you know, it's easily consumed on the internet. So yes. And now there's a lot. Many, many comedians, Jim Gaffigan did one. Aziz Ansari did one. They're all starting to do that. So I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but I think this is going to become more and more common place and become, you know, there'll still be theatrical movies. There'll still be big movies and theaters. But I think you're going to start to see a lot of major people doing movies where someone, you know, give me $3 million, I'm going to do it. What it's going to take, I think, is for the distribution to become organized in a way where people can say, oh, here's a company, like SnagFilm, for example, who's at the beginning of this, the company we're with. They're not there yet. But imagine in success, 10 years from now, you knew that if you got your documentary on SnagFilm, it would be akin to me getting a TV show at NBC. That they'd have so much traffic that you knew that would be success, then they start funding their own things and, you know, off you go. Sounds like almost PRX as an organization that agglomerates packages of reporting for distribution in the public radio channels or something like that. It's also really interesting that we have two parallel futures that aren't in conflict with one another, one in which the new medium allows for so much more independent control by the auteur. That's what you're talking about, the Lewis CK kind of model. You get to do it without having to make compromises to the network suits or to whatever producers or maybe bankrolling. And on the other hand, the new medium is making it where you may have much less power or you're having to navigate a lot of interests, not the network suits, but the townies who are the subject of your document. And that both are plausible futures for this medium. David, you want to say something? I was wondering whether in the pickup on sort of a minor thread that you spun, it's the move by Hollywood stars to TV shows. When they're moving to cable shows that are the 100 hour novel, Stephen Johnson talks about the complexity, the new complexity in storytelling. When you have 100 hours of sopranos, you can do a lot more than you can do in 90 minutes of the soprano's movie. What you're doing is also really complex as well. In some sense, unplanned or uncontrolled and deeply 50 different narratives, you say. I'm wondering whether you feel that there's a challenge, that the web's ability to let us be as complex as we want to be outside of the constraints of a 90 minute film or a single book and so forth, whether you feel that is going to challenge the craft of telling a 90 minute story. I'm not sure if this is going to answer your question exactly, but I think ultimately what the web will do is it will create new forms of things for people to consume. But I don't think that will cannibalize the old forms, in my opinion. I think we spoke about this earlier, but it's a little bit like reality television. When reality television came along, everyone thought. See, I thought he was Mark Burnett. If I were Mark Burnett, I wouldn't be here. I'm just kidding. No, he's not. Sort of. But when reality television came on, everyone thought, oh my god, here's this super cheap product that gets a lot of viewers traditional television is done for. But of course, that's not the case. You still have shows like CSI, which probably cost $4 million in episode in a production budget, and then you have Jersey Shore, which costs the price of Snooki's self-tanner. I don't know, whatever that is. So I think likewise on the web, I think you will get new pockets of things to consume, but I think the other stuff will still exist in all of its forms, I think. I just think that the difference will be once some kind of organization of it happens, and I don't know what that is. It has to do with, I think, curation. The hard thing about the web, or entertainment in general, is that I mentioned to you before, the gates have not come down so much. It's just that they've moved. You know what I mean? It used to be you couldn't make a movie because you couldn't get a camera and film and all of this. Now you can do that. So people say, oh, anyone can do it. Well, that's true. They can. But the gates have just moved from here. Everyone's in the lobby now, but now they're here, which is how do you get everyone to see that? That's another way of making David's point of it. We thought the web was flat, but it's too big to be flat. There's going to be new things up. And it has ever tempt you to see possibly something like a late night talk show as one of those curators that you could more formally get into the business of picking winners. Well, we've talked about that very thing, actually. To some extent, this contest that we had with Red Bull was really sticking our toe in the water, just putting on my late show hat for the moment. I thought it was a great thing for the late show to have this very cool, accomplished music community get together and crowdsource and vote for, here's a band you should put on the late show. And then we did. We had these gentlemen in cowards, these young Canadian kids from college, came down, wide eyed, standing on the stage next to Paul Schaefer and David Letterman. And it was great. And we've talked about trying to perhaps do that for stand-up comedy. What's prevented us from doing it is we want to try to think of some way to do it where it's not just another contest. It feels like there's a lot of contests. And we're not really in the contest business. Because you seem to think it's going to come about a new form of curation, maybe building that form rather than a one-off. Exactly. But I guess that would be the beginning of it as you start to hear the stand-ups that you've had that have done this and now you're going to build a community of this and that. Now, this wouldn't be a show business interview at all if I didn't say, what's next for Rob Burnett? Well, actually, I just bought the rights. Well, I actually have not closed the rights to a book that I'm hoping to turn into a movie. You may have heard of it, The Hobbit. That's right. Actually, I bought Harry Potter with one B. With one B, so it's a totally different book. It's a little trademark law story. So yeah, that's probably the next thing. What's the book? I'm not sure I can mention it now only because we haven't finished the deal. It's a small book that you've never heard of, because no one's giving me The Hobbit. But there are those who love it. The author loves it, yes. But it'll be a small, independent movie, and we'll see where it takes us. I'm not opposed, necessarily, to crowdsourcing music again for it, and I feel like I've learned a lot of things in this journey that can potentially be applied to this other project. And anything major you would do differently now that you have the benefit of hindsight? That's a good question. I think the thing that's been hardest for me, I don't know that I would do it differently, but the hardest thing for me is that everything else I've done in my career has had a big machine around it. So it's very easy. When I did Ed, you get that show in the air, and then you're doing interviews, and they're seen everywhere across the country. You're doing, it's just all, there's a machine. NBC, they just do this all the time, and you're in that. This, I feel like it's a version of me begging people for a lot of things all the time, which is not in my nature. So I think it's not really what I would do differently, but I think I would have emotionally prepared myself for, A, I'm going to have to beg people. You beg people, right? Yeah, what? Yeah. I'm guessing you're better at begging than I am. I'm a really good begger. Yeah, I was about to say. I've just met you. I'd do whatever you asked. But it's a combination of begging. And the other thing that is unique to it is that it is never ending. Like with a normal, not that I've released movies, but released television shows, you build, build, build, build, build, and here's the release. And then you're kind of done. You sort of launched this thing. We did our premiere a month ago. And here I am begging all of you to watch the movie. And then we're going to be begging other people to watch the movie. And that's just kind of what this is. It's a lot of begging. Elaine, any questions? One thing you mentioned, the narrative. And I guess that sort of goes out the window when you're thinking about there is no one narrative when you're thinking about the project I'm working on, at least. But I'm assuming that I'm going into this under the assumption that people use the internet and experience the internet differently than they sit in a movie theater. So they're consuming a film, whereas they're actively participating with their computer or the internet. So that's where I think that not everything is suited for this type of format. I get very frustrated when someone who has leftover material from their PBS stock is like, I want to put it on the web. I don't know what to do with it. And they just stick it up there. But they don't think about their experience. And I'm like, well, it didn't make it in the film for a reason. So you shouldn't just stick it on the web. People are not just, that's what it's being used for now. And rather than taking the same amount of time that you use to craft that narrative to craft an experience for someone, that's meaningful. I mean, the word user experience, the term user experience and user pathways was not in my vocabulary as a linear filmmaker. So I think that it's important that we all keep in mind that not everything is suited for this new media world. So do you find yourself overwhelmed by your project? Yeah, it's kind of big. Oh, it just keeps getting bigger because of the content that keeps growing. But it's fun. I'm not overwhelmed. I enjoy it. Yeah. Is that your final answer? Ask me tomorrow. There'll be a difference. That's the great thing about a project that is never done. And that's sort of the theme from everybody. Well, before I turn it over to David to introduce, I think, the preview that we have before we then see the film itself. First, we owe a thank you to Elaine and Rob for coming out and sharing their experiences with us. Thank you. And I had the joy of being at the premiere of We Made This Movie and just enjoying the so many ways in which it wasn't a typical movie. That I don't know how much of that you would say is accident or randomness or something. But my guess is it might have been a little more carefully planned than that to actually capture the idea of something where anything could happen, sort of thing, rather than the standard. I don't know how it goes in screenplay speak, but there's like the reversal and then the this and then. It didn't seem to be insisting on hitting each of those bases. Yeah. So very cool. So with that, we should push towards the movie. But thank you again. David, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Rob, you should not go anywhere. Oh, what? I've got to sit down again? Well, you can stand up. Thank you so much, as always, bringing order out of chaos. So Jonathan, by the way, I'll say one last thing. When I was doing our, if you ever, I don't know if any of you ever saw my show, Ed. Yeah, that's what I thought. I was kidding. It's my favorite thing to do is bully people into applauding for me. But Jonathan was, so in the show, the main character was a lawyer and had just these very odd law cases. And Jonathan actually went to school with my high school and grammar school, actually, all the way through with my partner, John Beckerman. And Jonathan became our legal advisor on Ed. And I can tell you that nowhere in the world has there ever been a bigger waste of talent. It's like getting a Supreme Court judge to answer some little dispute you have with your neighbor. But we call him, nonetheless, and he'd be very gracious in helping us with these ridiculous things. And I've got to say, nine times out of 10, they'd be like, OK, so here's how the scene is going to work. And I'd be like, that would never happen in a million years. That would be a mistrial. And they're like, OK, thanks very much. And then it would just air the way they were planning it. And I used to actually watch the show with a great law school friend of mine who he himself had thought of a meta-show called the Television Court of Appeals, where any show that had a legal scene, you could take an appeal petition for sarshiari from the Television Court of Appeals about why this made no sense. Law and Order would be appearing all the time in front of the television. And then the Television Court of Appeals would give a judgment. And so there was one particular show of Ed. We were watching. And Ed started testifying about his personal experience, even though he was a lawyer, testifying up to the jury, just like, well, when I was a young boy, this happened to me. And my friend is just going apoplectic. He's going like, that would be a mistrial. That would be a mistrial. And there's this beat. And the judge says, Mr. Stevens, I declare a mistrial. And I was like, holy crap. It actually worked. I remember the one time we listened to you. Yes. That was, it made it all worth it. It was like the ending of The Sopranos. I didn't quite understand it, but it was fitting. What you didn't realize is that we were using you. Because what would happen is we would talk to you. Then we'd do whatever we wanted. And then when the network called and said, this would happen. We talked to each other. We talked to each other, and then they'd leave us alone. I'll also say the puzzles that they worked into that show, much like the casino puzzles, were the most interesting kind of exam question sort of things. The prenup about if the guy cheats on the woman, and the deal is off, and then the woman afraid that the guy is cheating on her, kind of entraps him and the whole. And I found myself the only times I was going to the Harvard Law School Library to do research were on the show. And I'm looking at these old treatises and stuff. It depends on the jurisdiction. Where is Stuckeyville anyway, and all this kind of stuff. It's just wonderful times. Thank you for your help. It was all worth it for that millisecond that my name appeared in the credits after they shrink the screen and then do the ads for the next show. It's really, Datsun, you know it's a job well done. That's exactly right. I love it. The things we don't know about, Jonathan Zittrain. So we're going to watch the movie, but first there's a three minute introductory piece. We just have a little press reel that we can roll for you if you want to see it. I don't know. Yeah. OK. Yeah, let's show it. Yeah, yes, right. Of course. No, no, no, no. Man. Guess where I'm going. Where? Sam. Now I want to talk about your movie. We made this movie. This is the soundtrack right here. But this is major for you. You wrote and directed this movie. I co-wrote it with my good genius buddy John Beckerman. We produced it together. It's a small indie movie. It's about these five high school kids who decide we've got the video cameras. We've got computers. We're going to go make a movie because everyone can do it. How hard could it be? But not everyone should do it. You know what I mean? You can realize that. Not everyone should. Just completed the first shot of the movie, panning walking feet of the Boxtown Five Walking, shot by Franklin, and John's comment. I think it was awesome. But this movie is sort of a coming of age film. These kids from Bucktown High School in New York make this crap movie. That was the idea. They set out to make a movie, but they're terrible at it. And their movie's horrible. So when you're watching it, you think, oh my god, this is the worst movie ever. And then you realize there's something else going on. And it's really, it becomes about them. Rob, I have to say, I started watching. I thought, oh my god, this is so bad. Does Rob Burnett know that this is bad? Because I didn't read anything at all about the movie. But then the premise of the movie is it's supposed to be a bad movie made by teenage kids. Which once I made that shift, I realized it's very well done. Oh, thank you. But by accident, they've made a very sweet touching kind of coming of age film. I love that. Oh, that's very, very nice. You love it because you haven't seen it. Well, I do love coming of age movies. Well, that's why we did it. They're my favorite movie. Because we thought, what does Jimmy Fallon like? The coming of age movies. Thank you, buddy. I got you. Art J. Smith, everybody. Please welcome Michael Charles Roman. Ladies and gentlemen, Arthur Meyer. Take a seat. He made this movie. He made this movie. We made this movie. He made this movie. We made this movie. And we made this movie for New York City. And you can watch it for free online. If you're registered, we made this movie.com.