AFI & the Digital World - Excerpt from new book, 'Becoming AFI'

This post is an excerpt from chapter 7 of the book "Becoming AFI: 50 Years of the American Film Institute" by Jean Picker Firstenberg and James Hindman (Santa Monica Press), which I authored. Jean Picker Firstenberg, who was President and CEO of the AFI from 1980 to 2007, will be featured October 26th at a Writers Bloc event in Beverly Hills, in conversation with former AFI trustee--and ex-Monkee, Michael Nesmith. More information on the event, including how to buy tickets, can be found here.

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THE VIRTUAL AFI

It’s difficult to recall a world before the Internet, even for those of us who were there when it started. Just as AFI was setting out on its own digital journey, the Internet emerged from its academic and technical cocoon to take flight as a new and all-pervading data net- work that would soon transform all aspects of culture and business. In its infancy, the Internet was simply a marvel—a miraculous new utility that fostered community and created much beauty, rather than the corporate battleground it would become.

My Internet life started with AppleLink, a private email ser- vice for companies doing business with Apple. Logging on with a squawky dial-up modem, I felt like a member of a secret society of digital somebodies at a time when just having an email address seemed cool. Soon, we built AFI’s first campus email network.

Some in Hollywood heard about the World Wide Web—the graphical component of the Internet—at an “Information Super- highway Summit” in January 1994, organized by Rich Frank, an AFI trustee from Disney, who also chaired the television academy. (Rich Frank’s role on the AFI board, serving almost continuously since 1991, has been extraordinary. His Frank Family Wines have been served at many Life Achievement Award dinners, and he con- tinues to chair the TV jury for the AFI AWARDS every year.) Ev- eryone was there: Hollywood moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch, as well as FCC chairman Reed Hun- dt and Vice President Al Gore, who would subsequently overstate his role in the invention of the Internet.

AFI’s first glimpse of the World Wide Web came a few months later during a campus tribute at AFI to Wired, the magazine that gave voice to “digital lifestyle” before anyone even knew what that was. After entertaining the audience with the magazine’s ground- breaking graphics and McLuhanesque content, Wired founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe blew everyone’s minds with a sneak preview of the web’s first commercial magazine, HotWired, which they were preparing to launch in a few months. Projected onto AFI’s movie screen using the Mosaic web browser, HotWired whipped us from one page to another—from words to images to video and back again—with a simple click of a mouse. This was something completely new, a revolutionary way of publishing, communicating, and connecting, and I knew that AFI had to be part of it.

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Dare to Write

Attention Writers. If you have something to write, I know somebody who can help. My friend, teacher and editor Dan Nussbaum is now available to all. A new slate of workshops begins this week in L.A., with more to follow.

Dan is now available to any writer needing editorial services, in person or via Skype and the web. Dan is a spectacular teacher and a very fine editor. On top of that, his background as a meditation teacher gives Dan special powers of attention and compassion that makes the process of working with him a truly heart-centered experience.

For years Dan’s writing workshops were offered privately by groups and word-of-mouth. Now he is doing the marketing himself, in order to make his very special workshops available to all. Check out his new website  “Dare to Write, L.A.”  for the details of his current and upcoming offerings.And please pass this note along to other writers you may know who could benefit from meeting and working with a truly gifted teacher who can help writers at any stage of their development, experienced, newbies or periodically frenzied like me. Dan helped me overcome my own resistance and doubt and has dislodged my writers blocks more than once.

If you want to learn more, send me a message and I'd be glad to set up a time to chat. Or contact Dan directly from his website. 

2014: How (and What) I Read Now

I continue with my series of year-end posts discussing my favorite media experiences of the year with books, my first love. I cannot go to sleep without reading a few pages. I rarely drive without an audiobook in mid-chapter. I never fly without a Kindle-load from my list. The three types of “books” (paper, ebooks, audiobooks) find their way onto my list in various ways.

Books on paper are almost always gifts. Sometimes because of my Amazon wish-list, but rarely any more, since I specify the Kindle edition, and sometimes from the library, especially choices for my book club. Kindle downloads come as gifts now (I’ve trained my friends), but more than anything, they are impulse purchases, usually after reading a rave review or a relentless reminder from Amazon’s collaborative filter. I even tried Hoopla, an app offered via the LA Public Library. (Not so user-friendly.)

As a result, the longer I live, the more behind I get. I just can’t read enough, or fast enough, to get to all those books-in-waiting. Hence, I make no pretense of trying to rank the year’s “best” books as I do with movies and television. These are the titles that brought me the most pleasure in 2014, no matter the year in which they were published. And to which I gave four stars on my trusty Goodreads site, where I review most everything I read. Feel free to friend or follow me there or Facebook to get reviews more quickly.

The Kills (The Kills, #1-4) by Richard House

A war novel with few soldiers and little fighting. A mystery within a mystery. A meditation on fraud and memory.  This and much more, House’s massive story cycle or collection of related books -- shall we call it a quadtych (yes, a very bad neologism) manages despite its 1,000 page length to hold one's attention with a cavalcade of characters, settings, hurling plots and, well, mysteries. It wouldn't work, of course, if the writing weren't so damned good, which it certainly is -- the chilly lovechild of an unholy three-way between Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene and John le Carré,  and maybe a soupcon of David Foster Wallace's brilliance at making the quotidian feel quite compelling.

The first book, in which a military contractor in Iraq escapes from what becomes the central event of the story cycle -- the fleecing of a multi-million-dollar budget earmarked for a brand new secret city in the Iraqi desert . Is our hero a dupe, under the sway of the puppetmaster who hired him, and who runs the Halliburton-like contract firm?  His misadventures on the run in Turkey and Malta with some German filmmakers made me think of Greene, a bit like The Comedians.

By the time we finish the cycle, though, most of the assumptions about who did what and who knew what are brought into question, or at the least, in very high relief. Down in Malta, we have a diplomatic family in disarray, having fled chaos in Syria, cleverly intertwined with a tale of the Russian Mafia, corporate hit men, private language schools and various factotems who are still trying to figure out what happened to those pursuing our original fugitive.

Hovering above both stories is the tale of a bloody multiple murder which imitates a crime in a novel -- this is the subject of the third book, set in Naples. Baroque double switchback would be how I'd describe that plot. Is everyone lying?

Finally, I would not want to leave out book #2, which is in some ways the most rooted in the point of the whole exercise, since it's set in Iraq and involves a range of men, recruited to run a remote "burn site" in the desert, up until the point when they learn that this is to be the site of the new  and secret "Liberty City." Chronologically, its events come first. Gritty, confounding, confusing, maddening, this is the world of military contracting and the time-honored methods of fleecing governments and exploiting the working class.

If you've got the time, this masterpiece is worth the effort.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I want to deliver a breathless rave of a review about this scrumptious novel, coin a blurbable quote about the incomparable narrative thrust, endearing cast of characters, and pristine depiction of time and place, but my words are not up to the wonderful experience I had reading this book, one of the best reads for me of the last few years. I'd not read Tartt before, but compelled by some great reviews and its appearance on the best-seller lists, I added The Goldfinch to my wish-list and got it for Christmas. Boy am I glad!  Slightly longer than typical best sellers at 700+ pages, I found myself racing through the thing, a hundred pages a sitting, often into the night. Tartt has a gift for storytelling, that's for sure, and I'm glad I opened the package.

Police (Harry Hole #10) and The Son, both by Jo Nesbø

Harry Hole snarls more authentically than most angry, brilliant, alcoholic police detectives. He is one angry Mutha, and with good cause. He seems to be the only Norwegian cop who can actually solve complex criminal cases, but the bureaucracy and the criminal underworld just won't let him do his job, and won't leave him alone when he tries to give up. I love Harry Hole, and I love the tales Nesbø weaves for him to interact with. They are, in many ways, the apotheosis of the Scandinavian police procedural, a genre I have been in love with since the days of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (See this year’s New Yorker profile of Nesbø for more back story).

We have here, indeed, another very complex tale of crime perpetrated against cops, and the solution blocked by other cops, all coming together to reveal the motive, and therefore, the criminal. Thanks Harry. Thanks Jo.

Is there a word for the feeling a reader (at least this reader; at least when reading genre fiction) when you cannot figure out why, but you cannot stop reading? Nesbø is that rare writer, right now at the top rung worldwide, whose mastery of the form is so perfect that the strutwork disappears and the reader is left gasping from the combination of perfectly realized scenes, indelible characters, perfect depiction of place, and thematic importance. What makes one gasp is that each of these elements is revealed through the propulsive and accelerating engine of the narrative, the plot, the sheer storytelling power -- what happens next is the itch and the scratch of this kind of reading.

Certainly, it is made easier by Nesbø’s fluency as a writer, but he isn't showy, he's efficient. Which is not to say mechanical or heartless, I hasten to add, since he (and we) are always aware that he's working in a genre which is almost 80 years old, and to succeed, he must advance the form while maintaining its conventions. Which he does better than anyone writing now. He has provided me with many hours of reading pleasure through the Harry Hole series, and of course, the series that centers on a protagonist over time and many novels is itself a mainstay of the genre. Here, Nesbø introduces a new detective whose qualities seem, at least at first, to be a bit more conventional than Hole's. Until we find that, well, he's a compulsive gambler, rather than a drunk, and his backstory plays significantly in the unfolding of the plot. I don't do spoilers, but let me just say, the last ten pages of the novel not only wrapped up loose ends and plot points, but blew my mind in the process. Jo Nesbø, I think I love you.

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2014: The Glorious Bubble of Scripted Television

End of December, and time to take stock and make lists. Here I go again with a series of posts to discuss my favorite media experiences of the year.

I begin with television, our intimate, ubiquitous, omnivorous medium, which of course now includes digital-native content. (Here are  my 2011, 2012 and 2013 choices).

My focus here is mostly scripted TV, and my, oh my, there is a lot to consider – as many as 350 new and returning scripted series ordered for the 2014-15, and that doesn’t include digital-only networks, which are investing hundreds of millions in new product. Says Variety: “Industry executives are quietly starting to use the B-word” (bubble) with worries that the bubble will inevitably burst.

What’s behind this surge? (besides greed)... well, it’s us – the audience – a “staggering level of engagement viewers now have with favorite programs,” according to John Landgraf, who heads cable’s FX Network. 

Transparent (Amazon Studios) – The irony in this outrageous dramedy of Angeleno family dysfunction is that the most “normal” person in sight is the guy in a dress, namely the divine Jeffrey Tambor, born as Mort Pfefferman, but finally coming out as Maura, a transvestite. His ex-wife, played by Judith Light, is the apotheosis of the Jewish mother, and together they raised a brood of world-class neurotics. Episodes unfold as each of the three kids – Sarah, Josh, and Ali – learn of their father’s new life, and we (the audience) learn via flashbacks of Mort’s journey from college professor with a secret to full-fledged commitment to his emotionally appropriate gender identity. Be forewarned, you have never heard dialog like this on TV, I mean never. Nor had I, at least, ever experienced quite the tone of melancholy, joy, sadness, pain and craziness all jumbled up into a coherent and satisfying package. Bonus: authenticity in the representation of Los Angeles’ many neighborhoods.

The Americans (FX) – Season 2 got even better, as we dive into both sides of the spycraft culture in 1980’s Washington, D.C. under Ronald Reagan. Our KGB agent couple Elizabeth and Philip Jennings and their neighbor, FBI agent Stan Beeman, are tangled in a complex web of missions and actions, believably tied to the real world Cold War struggle we all lived through, but unable to escape their own personal demons, just to spice up the action. The cast is breathtaking, and so are the wigs. I’m particularly fond of Margo Martindale as the ruthless old KGB handler, though we got much less of her this season. The palpable uncredited star of the show is the deadening suburban culture to which both sides have been sentenced and from which the world of spycraft offers an escape. This is a world of truly harrowing assignments, tarnished ideals, persistent doubts, lies, double- and triple-crosses, and yet, love and an odd, asymmetrical form of beauty seeps into scene after scene. This is spy love without the cynicism. 

Peaky Blinders – Seasons 1 & 2 (Netflix/BBC) – A crime family to rival the Corleones, the Shelby clan are Irish ex-pats living in Birmingham after the first World War, clawing their way up from a hardscrabble neighborhood to London over the course of 12 glorious episodes. Led by Cillian Murphy, a monster mobster with one a beautiful screen face and an awesome haircut, this BBC production is typically pristine, with design and photography that often simply takes away the breath -- perfect for a nice weekend binge, which is what Netflix enabled me to do when I was down with a flu. Performances by A-class actors like Helen McCrory, Sam Neill, Tom Hardy and Noah Taylor provide almost as much pleasure as a propulsive narrative tale of intrigue involving British toffs, Irish (both orange and green) IRA terrorists, spies, counter-spies, labor agitators, Bolsheviks, and dueling gangs of Jews, Irish, and Italians.

Silicon Valley (HBO) – Mike Judge nails the geek gestalt of today’s tech start-up culture with laugh-out-loud insanity. Just when these characters teeter beyond the edge of stereotype, we get something so wonderfully specific and crazy that, well, we just laugh out loud. The pinnacle of the season was, of course, the finale, “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency,” which combines so many geek tropes and fanboy obsessions that to simply describe the scenario defies belief, but, believe me, it was delish.

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Dawn of the Next Big Thing: I Get Glass

While other Americans were trampling each other for retail bargains on Black Friday, I was driving through the rain to Google’s Venice Beach facility for an appointment with a Google Guide named Sam, whose job was to introduce me to my new Google Glass wearable technology device.

We traversed a predictably whimsical courtyard (giant chess board, etc.) and a gourmet lunchroom (Sushi Specials!!) bereft of the 600 Google employees housed in the former Chiat-Day binoculars building because of the Thanksgiving holiday. The joint was empty except for Google Guards, Google Guides, and Google Explorers, the latter group being the one that includes me.

My first pic with Glass.The Explorer program launched back in the Spring with a #ifihadglass contest. Some 8,000 folks were offered the chance to buy their own Glass (at $1,500) and, as Google put it, “Being part of the Glass Explorer program is pretty insane (good insane): let's face it, using cutting edge technology that changes every month requires a certain sense of adventure.”

I did not enter the contest, though I must say, I was tempted. A friend and colleague Shawn Hardin had told me privately that his next company, Mind Pirate, was developing a full-scale game and app platform for Glass and other wearable computing devices, premised on the conviction that this market will be huge.

Shawn is incredibly convincing. His research suggests that the wearable tech market, which includes smart glasses, watches and clothing, will grow to $18 billion by 2018, up from $1.4 billion this year, with more than 64 million units worldwide. He told me that 10 million smart glasses will ship by 2016, and not just from Google – many companies are jumping into this.

In the intervening months, I’ve joined the Mind Pirate Board of Advisors and helped formulate a new production lab program between the company and the Canadian Film Centre’s ideaBOOST media tech accelerator, which I advise. We launched that program November 21^st in Toronto with five participants (SmokeBomb Entertainment, Imaginary Computers’ Sean McCracken, Normative, and Little Guy Games and the CFC Media Lab). It was an extraordinarily creative and energized experience, diving deep into the technology of developing for Glass, learning about Mind Pirate’s Calisto platform, and jamming with some insanely smart folks. It’s called Flow.

So, of course, I had to apply to the Glass Explorers program and I had to accept when my invitation arrived a few days after my return from Toronto. I plunked down my own dough at a decidedly non-Black-Friday price, even though I know that other, cooler wearable gear is likely to make this thing on my head seem quaint in a matter of a business cycle or two. I’ve got to hurry up and be cool.

Rainbow outside the Google office, taken with Glass.So here I am again at the dawn of the Next Big Thing:  a new and very disruptive generation of devices, applications, and services, to rival previous revolutionary platforms such as the PC, Internet, broadband, social media and mobile.

I’ve been in the land of tomorrow in the past. Somewhere in the closet I have, for example, Apple’s QuickTake camera (boo), a Newton (ugh) and several Palm Treos (yea). None of those turkeys lasted. In general, being on the bleeding edge is messy and time-consuming, since pioneering devices are never as useful as their progeny. Which is why it’s better to get them for free.

Still, I do like the idea of being first, seeing the technolust in the eyes of my fellows, though so far, most people have ignored me. As my friend Carol said, “I thought it was going to be Goggles.” No, Carol, Googles, not Goggles.

So far, I’m just learning the interface, which is kind of tricky. I’ve set up my account, learned how to take a picture and record a video, set up WiFi and navigate pointless Twitter posts on my eyelids. When I sent an email to my college roommate, I couldn’t figure out his reply, which was “Wow, Alice, is it really you?” until I read what I had actually sent:

hi Michael this is my first email response on Google glass

Followed by:

Sent Through the Looking Glass

Seriously, the Glass default signature is THAT?

Then there’s social etiquette of using the device – the Internet was alive with the story of an Explorer who got kicked out of a Seattle restaurant.

I’m more afraid that I’ll look like I’ve got Tourette’s or epilepsy as I twitch, tap and shout to my little friend in the screen inside my head. 

I will be in Silicon Valley and New York City in the next week, which should give me plenty of experience to report here, and on the Explorers website. I figure I’d better hurry up and act like an early adopter before everybody gets these things, rumored to be in a matter of months.