A few yrs ago a friend left nyc to go work on something called Quibi. They described the idea as ' short content exclusively for the phone.' I didn't get it. Videos exclusively for the phone is like a publishing house that prints novels exclusively for the bathroom. People don't treat their screens that way. But I shut my damn mouth and wished them well. A lot of money and a lot of names were involved. It felt like a typical Hollywood Titanic: big, expensive, doomed...with old heads.
Hollywood is a 'run that back' kind of town. You don't go to Hollywood to innovate. You go there to repeat the thing that gave you a buzz. Motown moved to Hollywood and its sound became trapped in amber. Oprah moved to Hollywood and OXYGEN flopped. Then she got OWN and the hits that kept her network alive came from a man from Atlanta who likes to dress up in women's clothes. When the sirens of LA-LA land called, Tyler Perry didn't listen. He built his own studio...in Atlanta with his own people. If you arrive in Hollywood without a job or a buzz then you better be a whore. Or whore adjacent.
Knowing all this, why would anyone ever go to Hollywood? Simple: there is just an overwhelming amount of money and attention focused in that town. But they're not focused on nurturing emerging stars. If you are an artists that gets nurtured in that town, so be it. Consider it a happy accident.
To innovate you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to where the young people are, where the hunger is, right at the edges of madness; follow the howls.
Online videos are a howl-based media. It is not a big media company with top-down management. It is alchemy with weirdos and freaks. The metrics for 'a hit' shift like quicksand. Algorithms don't offer answers but merely report the contributing factors to a hit. Prognosticators will never be able to devise the perfect equation for a guarantee. We're all just guessing at that strange 'ah ha' moment that triggers an audience.
Money loves certainty, figures, facts, and assurances. Creativity deals in probabilities, clouds, possibilities. We are talking about the contrast between left-brain classic physics and right-brain quantum physics. Wall Street's need for certainty poisons the creative discovery. The most successful entertainment executives can't speak with certainty...and the second they do, money comes and another Titanic is built.
In the writers' room today someone compared a pitched idea to Kramer in the operating room with the Junior Mints. We all started laughing. We knew EXACTLY what he was talking about. But why? There is something about that particular Seinfeld moment which is so insane and -at the same time- kind of logical that sticks in the memory decades later. You can't predict that Junior mints + zany character + operating room + stupid accident = memorable tv. There are so many other Seinfeld episodes that tried to combine a product with a zany character doing something in a weird place that just felt...stupid. Why does the Junior Mint story become a classic and the other ones become trash? I can't say exactly but I know that the answer isn't in board rooms or in any marketing plans.
Quibi was trying to manufacture top-heavy, star based content. They were looking for Kardashians when they should have been looking for its Junior Mints.
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