Over the last two years, I have circled the landscape surrounding the art and business of film in this blog. It was my way of thinking through a transition in the future of a medium I had spent nine years of my life learning, pursuing, loving, hating and finally understanding.

I had moved to Los Angeles like many people, to make films. I was living in New York before that, and like most New Yorkers, hated Los Angeles as a point of pride. I admit I grudgingly saw that everyone who wanted to make it in “the biz” worked extraordinarily hard. Sure, you might not consider buttering up an established producer or director hard work but actually it is, take it from me. Humiliation is hard work.

There was a kind of “dream contract” that everyone signed when they arrived in Los Angeles. And it was indeed beautiful to be part of a world of people who worked hard and had a shot at the dream. Dreaming is after all, what we ALL came to do. Some of us did it with a camera lens, or a pen and paper, and others, with their hands and a can of paint, and many countless people with their bodies and faces.

The dream is seductive, and brave in its true American-ness. Everyone knew someone who suddenly went from waiting tables to starring in a movie. Guys like Jon Hamm, who was still working crappy jobs to pay the bills past his prime, until someone invented a show he was born to lead–were more common in the biz than you would think. Sure, there are many more who never get their Mad Men but that promise is the stuff of dreams. And those of us who dream in Technicolor are seduced, and all desperately want a piece of that promise.

The perfume of that desire was strong in the room of students at a prestigious film school in New York where I spoke some months ago. I felt cruel inserting some truth into their hopeful twenty year old minds, but it had to be done. I started by telling them I graduated from film school in 2004 and asked them what important event marked that year. They scratched their heads for a few minutes, and slightly skeptically came up with the correct answer: Facebook. “That was a very unfortunate year to be launching a film career”, I told them. Why? Because once the currency of content hinged on engagement, however casual/social, and film as we knew it died. A raise of hands in that very room revealed that this next generation spent two-thirds less time engaging with film than they did with other media, particularly of the immersive variety.

This generation – the millenials, are not quite social-digital natives who will inherit a world in which trees and ipads are learned as equal inevitabilities of life, but they themselves describe their younger siblings as precisely those people. Given that, we can assume there is roughly a 10-15 year maturity gap before the entire focus of entertainment will shift to serve their needs. Right now, I told my stunned new young friends, we are operating on the cache stored from another era – all those film dreams are artifacts of a bygone era. And as powerful as the facade may feel to them standing on the outside looking in, it is worth considering that even for institutional legends like Louis B. Mayer (once the highest paid man in the US), once the time comes one can be humbled by changing times.

I know, you’re thinking: blah, blah everyone’s been writing film’s epitaph since television was created and it’s still here. Well, it is, and it isn’t. For the first time this year, we saw box office numbers decline despite the best efforts of studio marketers; I myself saw fewer than 10% of the films on most top 10 lists of the year and the ones I did see were filled with audiences of mostly middle-aged people. That, is what I think of as the nostalgia factor – filmgoing is a tradition we love, and there will hopefully always be a place for that good feeling. But I can no longer see what the “future of film” is. In my mind, it is a dream passed, a brilliant and grand one which, like opera has seen its day.

Without making any grand proclamations of what the future holds, I can say I know after the two years of writing this blog that it has a whole lot less to do with film than I could have imagined. I have been watching the zeitgeist – both anecdotally and statistically – and what I see is a future in which the gorgeous seductive artifice once traditionally the domain of film can be anywhere. My dream to make films was only a heightened extension of the audience experience of dreaming in a dark room. But the dreaming space is no longer in one place, whether we like it or not. Our job as professional dreamers, is to keep dreaming for collective enjoyment and though we are still muddling through the forms, visions will emerge, clear as they were when the magic of film materialized through the flickering light of a projector.

Without knowing where on earth the most fertile visions will take hold, I can only say it will be unexpected, and will not follow the rules we all memorized when entering into the well-established world of film art and business. I myself decided to root in New York because the soil here is full of raw promise and the farmers are eager experimenters in the business of the future. For my part, I have planted my company AINA MEDIA, and founded STORYCODE a nonprofit to support immersive/crossmedia storytellers. Needless to say, 2011 has been a rather busy planting season. I look forward to the crop of goodness that the coming years will bring to storytelling, the future of visual entertainment and most importantly to dreaming. In my mind “Hollywood” remains at its purest, a standard of rare openness, possibility and the vastness of mind it takes to dream.

I will soon launch a new blog related to new endeavors. In the time being, you can follow my real time musings at @ainaabiodun.

…a movie experience is a passive experience.  The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world.  And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience.  And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it. What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability.

Katzenberg’s contention is of course, that the stories Hollywood is shilling lately are simply bad art–and that’s why consumption of passive entertainment is declining. Meaning, of course that the root cause of our widespread cultural preference to play around on social networks as opposed to watching movies is simply a content issue, and not a changing habits issue.

For those of you who read my blog, you know I’m a huge proponent of raising the quality of film, and innovating within the medium, so I should be the biggest proponent of the Katzenberg theory on this…but I’m not. Why?  Because I think the ship has sailed. By the time (if ever) the movies come around to being better again, audiences will have developed different habits, and the coming generation of digital natives will not understand the meaning of “passive entertainment”.

Among many arguments for the evolution of consumption behavior changing rapidly is the neurological one posited by writers such as Nicholas Carr, whose book Shallows suggests we are rewiring our neural pathways through digital age behavior. A recent article in the Scientific American concurs, quoting studies that suggest the inevitability of this change.

There’s also the very simple fact of cultural tastes changing with the times, and the introduction of more highly interactive forms of entertainment simply draws people away from the more passive forms. When guys like Katzenberg and his generation who came of age in a kind of golden age of cinema talk about the possibilities of film making a comeback, some part of me feels like I’m hearing my grandfather talk about the days before everyone had a telephone, and people actually talked to each other, face to face. I’m sure it was an awesome experience, and had its merits, but we can’t stop the change from happening. Along with massively world changing inventions like vaccines and and moon travel come these other cultural changes, many of which we are less in control of than we’d like to believe.

So while I applaud Katzenberg for having the balls to say that the emperor has no clothes on (I concur that the sequel nonsense is a dead-end game), I’m not so sure he should be as sanguine about our future willingness to rediscover this elusive LOVE of passive entertainment.

Boy, I sound like such a bummer today! But  really, I have faith in our ability to guide cultural/creative change in a meaningful way into the purely digital era. It’s just that I don’t think it’s ever going to be like the good old days.

Courtesy of WITNESS.org

When I saw the title of The February 2nd New Yorker blog post Does Egypt Need Twitter? , I looked to see if Hosni Mubarak wrote the post. After all, it was a case of dogma superceding the truth, and that was a signature Mubarak move during the 17 days that preceded his resignation. But in fact is wasn’t the famed dictator who was suspected of having been living in an alternate universe each time he came on Egyptian state TV to reaffirm his position; it was Malcolm Gladwell reaffirming his position on the role (or lack thereof) of social media in political movement, with an ever so slight pivot that well, reminded me of the now departed despot. I responded to his first New Yorker piece here last year.

Shall I belabor the despot point? Maybe not. Since the people of Egypt did it loud and clear for the world, I need not. But you get my drift. But I will quickly raise my placard in protest of social critics who, at great pains to remain right do the world a disfavor. It is an insult to the intelligence, collective power and passion of the revolutionaries of the world that Gladwell on his cushy New Yorker pedestal pontificates on what revolution is or is not. He says:

…the least interesting fact (….) is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented….People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.

Ahem…interesting to whom? To Gladwell, and his feeble-minded supporters, none of whom has ever endured the repression and brutal conditions of a dictatorship? As someone who grew up without free speech or the freedoms Mr. Gladwell enjoyed in this country, I say “Please” right back to Gladwell. Please don’t belittle the apparatus that enabled a generation of young people to lead a revolution to topple a 30-year long dictatorship. Please stick to subjects that don’t involve truth and human pain and suffering as you are patently unqualified to tackle those subjects. Please enjoy yourself in the faculty dining room pontificating among those who allow ideas to trump truth. But, please, instead of decreeing what’s “interesting”, you might want to consider what matters. To me, and certainly to the Egyptians, that would be the truth.

The world of mega-influencers is no doubt an elite one, and Oprah is a phenomenon like no other – she is the gold standard for measurable influence. As her daytime show comes to an end I wondered if there could be, in the digital era, an influencer as powerful as Oprah. She is no doubt a one-of-a-kind, and her combination of empathy, support and self-improvement struck a cord with individuals who sought a powerful connective point in their increasingly isolated worlds.

Incidentally, over the weekend, as I led a discussion group for filmmakers about using social media to promote their films and build their audiences, it occurred to me that the spheres of online influence are quite different from those of the offline variety. So much so, that despite Oprah’s 4.5 million fans on Twitter, her rank on influence metrics site Klout is 65 (out of 100) and her “amplification” level, defined as “the likelihood that your content will be acted upon” is 0.

Clearly, this does not reflect the true measure of her power. If Oprah says jump, the reverberations are felt throughout the mediasphere- so the idea that she cannot motivate people to act based on her words is inaccurate in the offline world if somewhat true in the social media world. But it begs the question of who the mega-influencers will be when audiences are more diffused across media platforms. Personalities like Ashton Kutcher, whose real fame quotient is lower than an actor like Brad Pitt, wields enormous influence online, based solely upon his building his influence quotient as one of the first “celebrities” to embrace the influencer role in social media.

When I talk to artists and marketers about reaching influencers, I speak almost entirely in terms of niche. Niche has become the holy grail of the web marketing and social media game and it is enormously empowering. But what artist, author or guru wouldn’t want to have access to the online version of Oprah, and see the kind of enormous effect that her stamp of approval has on one’s life and career? The question is whether that kind of mega-influencer is even possible in our ever-fragmented digital world. But I look forward to that kind of phenomenon…and to seeing who will be the digital Oprah.

And if you didn’t see the movie, all you need to know is that Facebook was created as an extension of real-life social networks, in which you “friend” people whose acquaintance with you either reflects your status – ie: popular (you have 1500 friends), or smart (your grad school or work “group” that everyone sees on your page) or achievements (your marathon photos, or new baby pics). So when Zuckerberg took the STATUS game online, it was a natural human fit– an extension of one’s local friends, a chance to show off your status to more people – your high school friends, extended family members and maybe even future work collaborators.

When one asks, as I have, why Facebook became so popular so quickly, the answer is simply that its primary function gives us an identical payoff to joining that country club or enrolling your child in that exclusive school gives us – STATUS. You belong to a club – granted, it is of your own making – but a closed group nonetheless. No matter your culture, class or race, this is a fundamental human desire that drives much more of our lives than we are often willing to admit. I’m sure if Foursquare gave a badge called “Snake” instead of “Mayor”, the mobile geo-location based game would be a lot less popular. Even as the Mayor of my corner deli, I get status. That status means something. If it didn’t, Foursquare wouldn’t exist.

And this is why Michel Reilhac’s talk on the “Gamification of Life” at the recent Power to the Pixel Conference struck me as very interesting. In his view, the trend towards “gamification”–a term which (at its most benign) describes real life behavior that incorporates the mechanics of game play such as competition and rewards–suggests a desire to experience game-like emotions in the “real” world.

In an example game designer and gamification theorist Jesse Schell often uses, some very simple daily functions are already being gamified when Ford Fusion installs a digital “tree” on your hybrid car dashboard that “grows” as your fuel efficiency increases.

Nice, right? A very cute visual incentive for those green-minded folks out there. And as most people who drive hybrids can attest to, the game is always on: who can get the most MPG from their hybrid. Within those circles, that ability wins points….and STATUS. It’s easy to forget that these are all subtle indicators of where we are in the food chain of our social lives but from the prolification of even the most mindless of games – Farmville, with its 85 million players, it is so clear that winning does mean something to us. Otherwise, why would social gaming, especially those proliferating on social networking sites be more popular across ages and demographics than we’ve ever seen before?

While technology has certainly enabled more casual gaming behavior, it’s nothing new. We see offline corollaries everywhere – Ebay, a site where you get to bid for an item is a very clear version of the traditional auction. Auctions are games with the objective to beat one or more individuals in procuring an item. Some people call that particular kind of gaming gambling, and certainly at its most compulsive it can be. Just like the stock market. But TED FellowJane McGonigal, whose endless optimism about our collective skill and potential as gamers, sees a silver lining in gamification – and it is that we can take our rewards based mentality and put it to use for global change. Her argument is persuasive – she suggests that if we game for conservation as in the Ford Fusion example and have fun doing it, then isn’t all we need better games that have real life results?

McGonigal has a point – her approach is to harness the power of the gamification trend in that Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus way and use it for good. And perhaps this has promise: the idea that we can essentially encourage people to transform this primal need for status that our gaming fulfills into important productivity. I won’t go into the less benign forms that this kind of “encouragement” can spawn, especially from marketers (watch the last half of Jesse Schell’s talk below) but I will say that we are in some very slippery territory here.

Do we create incentive-based participatory entertainment such as games, stories as a way to “trick” people into our narrative – whether that is selling toothpaste or even a blockbuster movie? But since companies like Zynga, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars are unstoppable (recent valuation puts it at $5.5 billion), it certainly puts strong evidence in the worlds of commerce and art that we ARE buying the kool-aid. We DO want to be gamified.

While acknowledging the force of gamification, Reilhac also critiques it as a “caricature of the American cultural utopia” in which we need the black and white questions and answers that gaming provides. Maybe so. But as long as that’s the prevailing ethos, the gamification model will be the only way to stay in the fray.

One need only look at history to see that ideas germinate and proliferate where history allows it – so when affluence abounds and it has recently to an unprecedented degree – we look for ways to pass time, engage our minds, and of course, improve our social status. And make no mistake, we always play to win.

Over at The Consumerist, they offer an elegant, simple explanation:

The Consumerist / Meg Marco

The graphic indicates a steady and solid defeat of Blockbuster by Netflix. Looking at the trajectory of this “war” we see steady neck-and-neck growth from 2000 until 2002 when Netflix began to pull away, rising at what looks like a meteoric rate.

So let’s return for a second to the landscape of 2002 for a moment: Remember, it was the year My Big Fat Greek Wedding busted indie box office charts? Remember way back then, when indie film was booming? Friendster was a fringe player and MySpace had just launched. Social networking was pretty much just for tweens, fan-seeking indie musicians and pornographers.

As a population, although we had begun to rely heavily on the web for goods and services, we had not yet become reliant on it for social purposes and entertainment nor become tethered to it via every device imaginable…perhaps because there weren’t THAT many devices back then.

So why 2002?

The answer is simple: It was the year Netflix went public, raising $82 million and expanding its then mail-only business aggressively throughout the US, building on three new ideas to potential customers: 1) No Late Fees,  2) Home delivery and 3) Fixed monthly plans that included an all-you-can-rent option. These clever pitches eased the pain Blockbuster was clearly causing consumers and there were enough reasons to sign up for that free Netflix trial.

But that was just the short term game. It turns out that the infusion of cash didn’t just benefit their DVD-by-mail business; it helped them build the business of the future–streaming.

At that moment, what Blockbuster had which Netflix did not, was a deep well of Hollywood relationships which, as most insiders can attest to, is the key to any successful enterprise built around film. So it seemed that despite Netflix’s rapid growth, it would remain the underdog and there were many naysayers who felt Netflix was a clever young upstart that could never ultimately crack the Hollywood code. But by the end of 2002, this underdog Netflix (NFLX) was trading at about $9 a share and Blockbuster (BLOKA.PK) at $12.

In the years between 2002 and 2008 when Netflix launched its completely game-changing streaming service, Facebook was invented, YouTube came on the scene, and the whole new worlds of entertainment and engagement flourished. In those six years, Netflix rolled the dice on a DVD-free future, a model that would put them so far ahead of their competitors that it would be difficult to catch up.

Turns out Netflix was right. After their streaming service launched, Netflix saw a rapid incremental rise in the price of its shares that put it well over $40 by mid-2009 and into the $100s by early 2010. Of course their recent deals with major Hollywood players like Warner, Relativity and Epix have contributed to their current position–a fact that only suggests their growing weight within the business.

I look at the facts and wonder: why didn’t Blockbuster play a better game? They had money, connections and a very well-developed brand. And while I have no particular interest in the company itself (I might even join my fellow art-house video aficionados in throwing some dirt on the grave of the big bad wolf that killed a lot of great video stores), I am sure that the way this drama played out has a larger meaning in the way Hollywood and the media business establishment deals with the “future” and the inevitable changes it brings to our world.

Nobody could have predicted in 2002 that Youtube and Facebook would transform the world the way that they ultimately did. BUT, we could see that just as Google had transformed the experience of information, that it was inevitable that a future–though uncertain–would involve the re-thinking and re-use of the web as an entertainment and networking portal. What frontier has not looked to expand when there was opportunity? We need only look to the history of Blockbuster’s own home turf, the state of Texas, to find compelling historical evidence. This was common sense, not some far-out techy-imagined future.

So who did Blockbuster and the studios really think was going to occupy the frontier? Martians? Or did they just close their eyes and ears to the rapid evolution of viewer habits and technology that supported and expanded them. To CEO Reed Hastings’ and Netflix’s credit, they planted where the soil was fallow and and they are reaping the benefits of that risk today.  (As of this morning Netflix was trading at a whopping $164 a share while Blockbuster was at .04 cents.)

Over the last few years, the only response to questions of how Hollywood is moving into the digital age have been equivalents of “we won’t let it happen”. I get it: new models mean new thinking and new strategy and people have to change (gasp!) the way they operate and analyze and do business. Listen folks, I didn’t invent this concept. This is America and that’s how it works. Businesses adapt in changing times – that’s what Netflix did with the major first corpse of the industry – DVD rentals, and the failure to follow suit is what killed Blockbuster in less than 10 years.

A word to the wise: The Ostrich Method didn’t work for Blockbuster and there’s no reason it will work for the studios as that frontier begins to open up.

It seems one such incarnation of Internet Evil made its way to the Toronto Film Festival, in the shape of Trust, directed by the actor David Schwimmer. I only viewed the trailer as I am not at Toronto but from what I can surmise, it’s a Facebook predator story with a good cast, but less-than-promising B-movie premise which simply replaces the neighborhood predator with online predator – which cleverly and tastelessly allows the victim to be older and more sexually appealing to an audience. (See first trailer below)

Then my keyboard travels took me to the controversial and potentially less tacky Catfish, the Sundance sensation of last year which is a documentary that the distributor Universal calls “A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times…a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.” Again, I haven’t seen it either, and it sure sounds like the “shocking product” of our times they are pitching is basically the old adage “if it seems too good to be true, then it is”… with the added extension: “on the internet”. Ever get those offers for free money in your email that sound too good to be true? This isn’t much different, in my opinion. It’s an elaborate blind date that probably turns out to be as disappointing as blind dates tend to be, on or offline. (See second trailer below)

And then the giant spaceship landed–the REALLY BIG KAHUNA, evil so pleasantly benign that it comes in the form of the baby-faced Jesse Eisenberg, playing the “real life” story of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. I will admit a certain glee at the prospect of watching this one (which again, I have yet to set my eyes on) simply because the story contains a certain level of intrigue that defines the way the internet and its attendant “evils” truly manifest themselves in these times. Is it a big Boogeyman? No. But depending on how you view this kind of social network and other products of the closed web age, the potential evil is exponentially more terrifying than an online predator. And watching the ruthlessness of its beginnings is dramatic, even if the danger seems less horrific, or thrilling to the viewer. As I am a futurist, it remains my duty to remind: Lest we forget, many great and devastating world events began with a person, usually persuasive, highly intelligent and supremely capable of a kind of logic that seems measured in their time. Incidentally, that’s how great stories also begin.

TRUST

CATFISH

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Your attention is required at 4:00 for the Ninja cameos, and then again, at the dramatic turn of events at 4:27.

I would comment but I’m speechless, helpless and now slave to the charm, tunes and brilliant dramatics of Ismail YK, German-born Turkish pop star with a serious love of Facebook.