I have an ambitious and energetic friend – don’t you hate those? – who has an eccentric morning ritual. Every single weekday morning, before he does anything – really, before even checking his emails or looking at his phone – he opens up a notebook and writes down at least 10 ideas for hugely moneymaking businesses.
These are not always practical. One involved offering home breakfast delivery – sort of like hotel room service.
“It would be like Uber,” he told me, referring to the now-ubiquitous taxi company, in which passengers can summon a car and driver in minutes using a smartphone app, “but for breakfast.”
I suppose “Uber for breakfast” isn’t the worst idea. He described it as a cross between two familiar things, which is the way most of us in Hollywood pitch our ideas.
When I made the irrevocable mistake of asking a writer friend what his new script was about, he described it as being “like Frozen meets The Hangover”.
Right now, studios and networks all over town are busy shooting test episodes of possible series. There are dozens and dozens of them in production – too many to keep track of – so over the weeks a shorthand develops.
“What have you heard about that new pilot?” writers in Los Angeles will ask each other. “You know the one I mean – it’s The Big Bang Theory meets ER?”
Other times they will say: “I just read a great script. They’re shooting the pilot next week. It’s Breaking Bad but the comedy version, and set in an old folks home.”
Most of the time in Hollywood, when you’re pitching a totally new idea the trick is to make it seem like a totally old idea. Executives, investors, bureaucrats of all kinds instinctively recoil from anything truly new and untested.
An idea that doesn’t sound like another idea (albeit with a slight twist) is just too risky a venture for someone with the job title of Senior Vice President or Executive Manager or something equally vague.
That’s the way it works in Hollywood, anyway. In the world of technology, the trick is to present your idea as something utterly new and dazzling. This has become troublesome as the worlds of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have been moving closer and closer together. People from the world of technology see everything as one-of-a-kind and world-changing. People from the world of entertainment see everything as, basically, just a slightly different version of something else combined with something you already know.
Movies and television shows work best when they refresh traditional patterns. As a friend of mine, a very successful horror film writer explained it, every horror film has the same structure: What is it? There it is! Let’s kill it!
Don’t rethink it, he says. Audiences want all three acts, and in that order. Not so in the world of technology.
“Please don’t confuse us with Netflix or Amazon,” the leader of a new online content source told me last week in a meeting. “We’re totally different. Totally new. We’re, like, revolutionary.”
He then went on at length to describe his “revolutionary” and “totally different” way of producing and delivering movies and television to audiences that to thickheaded me sounded, well, exactly like the way Amazon or Netflix do it. When I timidly suggested there were some obvious parallels – a monthly fee, online streaming, everything available on-demand – he looked at me sadly. “You’re not getting it,” he said. “We’re different.”
The latest and most “different” thing to come out of Silicon Valley is a smartphone application called Meerkat, which allows any user to stream live video directly from a camera-enabled phone. It’s a sensational success – so far – and has already managed to entice big broadcasters like CNN into using it. Producers and viewers find each other through Twitter, and the entire application is as simple and clear to use as one of those old-style television sets.
That’s fitting because that’s all Meerkat really is: it’s old-time live television. The service doesn’t allow content providers to save or store their shows. It’s all live, all the time, and that means that if you miss something being broadcast, you miss it forever.
“It’s totally revolutionary,” a venture capitalist friend of mine from Silicon Valley explained, gloating just a little. “It’s going to turn your business upside down.” People from Silicon Valley are always promising to take this or that industry and “turn it upside down” or “disrupt” it.
But in this case, all they’ve really done – amid the shouting and the cheering and the billion-dollar valuations – is recreate 1950s television. On a smaller screen. With worse sound quality.
I didn’t say that, of course. I didn’t respond that way to my venture capitalist friend or my other friend who’s running a copycat Netflix. What I did was shake my head in amazement and sigh heavily and agree loudly that yes, they really have shaken Hollywood to the core.
My motto is to let them have their dreams. Maybe there’s a way, if I spend some time thinking about it, to combine their dreams with something familiar and make some money out of it? Uber, but for Meerkat? I’ll keep thinking.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl
