Patrizia DiLucchio

How big is this community of desktop decorators? Kaleidoscope co-author Arlo Rose reports millions of downloads from 21 sites in English, French, Italian, German and Japanese; he puts the number of amateur designers developing modules for Kaleidoscope at around 2,000. Since an updated version of WindowBlinds was released in February, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell estimates it’s attracted 500,000 new users; he says “tens of thousands” of PC artists are working to create new desktop looks.

Why decorate your computer desktop? Well, why decorate your home? A bare mattress and a dangling bulb might meet basic shelter needs — but what about aesthetic pleasures? “We want a little bit of our own personality to be reflected in the things we use daily,” notes Kaleidoscope designer Patricia Erigero. And, just as pets are said to grow to resemble their owners, so can computers. A mouse click can transform your desktop into a William Morris tribute, a Goth graveyard, a Balinese temple — or maybe a working simulacrum of your late, lamented Apple Lisa operating system.

“Each theme says a lot about its creator and who they are,” says eFX developer Chad Boya. “It’s almost like you don’t have to introduce yourself to someone who has created a theme. Just by looking at their work you instantly become connected to them and so it’s real easy to get to know each other.”

Interestingly, both Kaleidoscope and WindowBlinds evolved outside the operating system mainstream.

Wardell, who distributes WindowBlinds, is a longtime supporter of IBM’s OS/2. “When I first got into computers in a big way, I fell in love with the OS/2 2.0,” he admits a little sheepishly. To pay his way through college he taught himself to program for OS/2 — and created the game Galactic Civilizations. Though he now uses Windows NT, he says, “I run an OS/2 2.0 skin because it makes my computer look the way it did back then.” (A “skin” is an alternative graphical interface to a program that can turn a plain-jane desktop or app, like ICQPlus, into a visual treat, like this Oasis of Sound.)

But it’s not just OS/2 devotion that prompted Wardell’s interest in providing alternative desktop styles for the Windows crowd: “I work differently than Microsoft wants me to,” Wardell says. Using WindowBlinds, he can not only change the look of a window, but also add buttons with new functionalities.

At Mac-oriented Kaleidoscope, Arlo Rose doesn’t give Windows that much credit. “With a Mac, [desktop redecorators] are looking to make their lives more interesting,” he observes dryly. “With PCs, they’re trying to fix the inherent flaws in the Windows OS — from both a design and a usability point of view.” It’s true that the Mac has long distinguished itself with its stylish looks and a variety of customizable utilities, all designed to personalize the experience of staring into a screen. In fact, it was the Mac crowd that enabled Berkeley Systems to turn something as explicitly playful as the After Dark screensaver into a business.

The first time they saw Kaleidoscope, Lloyd Wood and Leo Breebaart — both graduate students in Europe — saw obvious parallels with After Dark, another distribution channel for computer-centric art. Wood set up The Kaleidoscope Way in December 1996 to organize information about different desktop designs and to make it easier for their creators to connect. Shortly thereafter, Breebaart set up the first Kaleidoscope mailing list.

“We built a community of people who began to share tips about scheme design, writing documentation, collaborating on schemes, producing utilities and so on,” recalls Wood. “These days, Web and mailing list communities are commonplace for everything … We were just slightly ahead of the curve, and Kaleidoscope benefited as a result.”

Today, the Kaleidoscope Archive contains thousands of Mac desktops from more than 650 authors; the most popular designs have been downloaded close to 100,000 times. There is a noticeable split in the community between purists experimenting with the usability of an interface under all possible conditions and schemers who see visual motifs as the virtual equivalent of rubber stamps. “Any religion suffers schisms,” says Wood. “Kaleidoscope is little different.” While Kaleidoscope devotees are everywhere, some of the most tuned-in fans may be in Japan, where Mac100% magazine devotes a centerfold spread to the “schemes of the month.”

It’s only been within the last year that the PC desktop has caught up with Kaleidoscope. Though custom wallpaper, screensavers, pointers and theme managers like Microsoft Plus have been fixtures on the Windows landscape for years, the growing interest in Linux, in part, has inspired the Windows GUI renaissance. “Landscaping” is just another manifestation of the desire for choice and control over one’s computing environment.

“I have been interested in art since I was a child,” says Boyda, the eFX developer. “Then I got into computers and programming. Computers are beige, desktops are simple and gray, utterly boring. It’s no surprise that so many people fear computers. I wanted to change this, make my desktop gorgeous and enjoyable. Lots of people like me spend hours and hours in front of a computer. Why should we have to stare at boring gray windows? Does your house look like that? No. You make it comfortable for you, design and fill it with things you enjoy and express who and what you are.”

Boyda and his partner Damian Hodgkiss developed eFX, which allows you to change window borders either by designing your own skin or by downloading one from the Web. “A skin is a set of graphics and templates that are used on a certain application, ” Boyda explains. “They are ‘mapped’ or ‘skinned’ over the interface of the application, such as the border and buttons. Our bodies are wrapped and covered by skin, giving us our ‘look.’ Well, it’s now the same with customized applications. Like tattoos.” Literally thousands of skins are available at sites like Boyda’s Skinz.Org and Customize.org. And there a host of “skinnable” apps — like NeoPlanet and WinAmp, which have made their interface source code available to skin designers.

“I envision a day in the near future where software is not only sold by its ability to complete a task, but also the way it looks and attracts the consumer,” Boyda says.

In the meantime, he and his fellow skin artists are enjoying themselves and their community. “Every day I hang out with friends I have met through the skinning community,” adds Boyda, who meets up with these new pals both online and off. “We chat about ideas, colors, help each other learn new skin formats.” Erigero, the Kaleidoscope designer and historical architecture consultant, who lives far from the Silicon Valley epicenter of computer culture, has had a similarly enriching experience. “I have yet to meet another schemer face-to-face,” she says, “but I have corresponded with a number of them now and we do share thoughts and feelings about a wide range of topics. We’ve exchanged photos of kids and pets.”

You may think of remodeling as a lonely job that will leave you without a kitchen for months and cost you thousands of dollars. But you can redecorate your computer desktop for the price of a $25 shareware license, and come away with a whole new set of friends. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.

For one brief moment, Hank became a bona fide Internet celebrity of sorts, an iconic manifestation of the hive mind at work and a pain in my ass. One minute Hank was throwing up on the sidewalks of Fall River, Mass., where he lived with his mother; the next, he was voted the most beautiful person in the world. That’s how fame’s 15 minutes of high beams work sometime. Get used to it.

To the netizens mounting the grass-roots campaign on his behalf, a vote for Hank could have been a sly protest against the celebrity culture upon which People magazine had built its readership. Or it could have been just another interactive goof. To those of us at People Online, where I worked as an entertainment editor, the votes for Hank were a crisis in the making — like the year before when Princess Diana chose the Labor Day holiday weekend to remind the world that no car can sustain a really massive front-end collision and protect lovers in the back seat unless they’re wearing their seat belts. For Hank himself, the votes meant a limo with a full bar on future excursions to Howard Stern Central. Previously, Hank confided in one of our late-night calls, he’d been bussing down to the city once a month on the day his SSI check arrived in the mail. But all that was about to change. He hoped.

One of People magazine’s most popular issues has always been its annual spring pick of the Fifty Most Beautiful. (No one has ever quite been able to explain why there are 50 beautiful people in the world every year but only 25 intriguing people — it’s like trying to explain how Harry Hamlin could ever have been chosen the Sexiest Man Alive.) It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it, and the beauty buck had stopped that year at the office of Susan Toepfer, the executive editor in charge of special issues. Toepfer started in January with a list of between 300 and 400, culled from nominations made by People staffers in bureaus around the world. The specials staff of about 20 then pared the list down to the magic number. “Hot” and “current” were the criteria. Toepfer’s choice for cover boy was Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off the decks of “Titanic.” Readers were presumed to be voting with their wallets at the checkout stand of their local supermarket.

The difficulty in mirroring old media to new media is that the editorial processes can seldom be coordinated. The Internet — at least in those more innocent days — was a democratic medium. That meant that readers got an active voice. For three years, People Online had been running its own beauty poll, separate and not at all equal to the magazine’s beauty parade. The Net survey had nothing to do with People’s cover.

On Friday, April 24, People Online opened its polling to the public. The year before there’d been some unpleasantness between “Xena” and “Hercules” fans who’d duked it out with vote bots and server flooding. Our overworked tech staff had taken special pains to ensure that history would not repeat itself.

But early the following week, Howard Stern got wind of the poll and made an idle suggestion on his popular radio show that listeners ignore the radio buttons for Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson, and instead write in Hank, the Angry, Drunken Dwarf’s name. The loyal minions at alt.fan.howard-stern were quick to heed the call. Somewhere along the way, the spark jumped the asphalt and the Beautify Hank campaign was picked up by college students and bored office workers as e-mail chain letters touting Hank’s cause swept the Internet like wildfire. Votes poured into People Online’s server at the rate of 50 per minute. The mighty machine went down. It came back online a day later, and by the end of the week when the counting was done, Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf — in various permutations of punctuation and spelling — had tallied well over 230,000 votes: the winner by a mile.

Stephen Silverman, a staff writer with a sense of humor, was set up for a phoner on Howard Stern’s show. “So,” asked Stern, “are you going to put Hank on the cover?” In fact, the beauty issue had hit the stands days before the online poll commenced. “What a cop-out,” Stern sighed and hung up the phone.

Never mind the premium space on the supermarket racks: People Online had its own celebrity machine and that was me.

I called Fall River information and asked for the number of the Nastiff residence. A woman picked up the phone. I identified myself as a representative of People Online and asked to speak to Hank. “Which one?” the woman asked. Hank Jr. was not there. I left my home office number.

A day later, he called me back. “Does this mean that I’m going to be in the magazine?” he asked, his voice filled with shy yearning.

“I’m sorry, it doesn’t,” I told him gently. “But we are going to put up a Web page about you. I’d like to interview you for that. And we’d like to do an online chat.”

The sober Hank turned out to be a pretty good interview. He had a droll, deadpan sense of humor and the true performer’s instinct for quick quips. “And, what color are your eyes?” I asked him.

“Well, I don’t know what color you’d call them. Brown, maybe hazel. No, wait. Bloodshot. You’d better say bloodshot.”

“Do you think you’re beautiful?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? I hate the way I look. I have a big head. I have long hair. I haven’t washed my hair in a month. Beautiful? It’s a fucking joke. But that’s OK. I like jokes about fucking.”

He’d been diagnosed with achondroplasia (dwarfism) a week after birth and had been drinking heavily since age 14. He’d first met Howard Stern after a night of wild partying in New York when he and some buddies decided to crash the show. He’d stood outside the K-Rock offices at 5:30 in the morning howling until somebody inside took notice.

“Does Howard pay you to appear on the show?”

“Pay me? Nah. I wouldn’t want him to pay me. Why should he pay me? I get disability. Sometimes they slip me a little under the table. What do I need money for anyway? People fight to buy me drinks.”

The drunken Hank was a different animal altogether — as I found out a week later when it was time to corral him for his official appearance in the winner’s circle, an online chat. Hank was belligerent, incoherent and mostly wanted to know about my underwear.

I hated to disappoint him with the truth. My entire collection of underwear consisted of several dozen pairs of old-lady panties — you know, the kind you buy at Costco, six for $10 — and a shabby assortment of bras. The panties all had fraying elastic and had long since forgone any claim to color, so traumatized had they been by their experiences with the spin cycle; and the underwire was poking through so many of the bras that a doctor would have advised me to get a tetanus shot before I put one on.

I was a lingerie deadbeat, so to keep both audiences happy — Hank on the phone, and his fans in cyberspace — I grabbed my copy of the Victoria’s Secret catalog and began reading Hank descriptions. From time to time, I would slip Hank a question, he would answer with a grunt or a “Fuck you,” which I would then expound upon in my own words for the edification of the masses. In their infinite wisdom, the corporate masters at Time Inc. New Media (now a proud division of AOL) did not see fit to keep the transcript of the interview online and I cannot now remember what the fans asked Hank or what I replied in his name. I only remember that when that horrible evening was through, I poured myself a big, stiff Scotch.

People Online quickly moved on to other things. And not long afterward, I moved on to another job. But Hank kept calling. Never sober, usually late at night, he was a polite caller and I think he was trying to understand why his own star had burned so bright but so briefly. There was little I could say to enlighten him.

As I understand it, Hank made some appearances with the WWF and continued his association with the Stern show. And now he’s dead, at age 39.

The dancing baby scored a bit part on “Ally McBeal.” At last word “I Kiss You” Mahir cut an electronica track and then disappeared. Internet fame has a half-life that can be measured in milliseconds. Celebrity magazines continue to do well on the newsstands.

Davis didn’t exactly envision this high-tech future; he arrived at Corbis through the back door of intellectual property — as an attorney interested in the process of protecting the copyright of digitally transmitted images.
It was Bill Gates who in 1989 founded the company; it is still privately held by the Microsoft mogul. The Corbis archives contain some of the world’s most significant and recognizable photography and fine art, including works from Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell and the 17 million historical images of the Bettmann Archive. Its recent acquisition of Sygma, the world’s largest news photography agency, suggests that Corbis is positioning itself as a digital platform for real-time news content.

But turning this vast archive into a profitable business seems an odd calling for Davis. His career arc has hardly followed the typical trajectory of a high-tech mover-and-shaker. After undergraduate studies at Princeton, Davis won a fellowship to study Chinese in Taiwan, and spent the next few years wandering through Southeast Asia and Europe, working on international refugee and human rights issues. He returned to the United States for an
advanced degree in Chinese studies from the University of Washington in 1984 and then studied for a time in Beijing. Next came a law degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where Davis won the Faculty Prize in International Law for his work on China’s legal system. Soon thereafter, he made a nimble leap to the law firm of Bill Gates Sr., which put him in touch with Bill Jr.

What’s the connection between Chinese law and digital imagery?

It’s not a direct connection. I’d done a lot of work during the 1980s on human rights and refugees and Asia policy but then life took its own course. Quite frankly some of that was due to Tiananmen — but some of it was due to family interests. The upshot is that I came back to Seattle. And there is not a lot of public law activity in Seattle.

So I decided to step back and try something else for a little while, pursue some other interests. That led to me practicing law in the intellectual property area, a really fascinating, emerging, conflicting area of the law. That must be where the carry-over is; in the refugee and international human rights area, you’re always on the policy front line, looking at new issues that are pretty conflicted. To me intellectual property issues are another way to work through conflict, apply some of my strategic and policy thinking to something which I think is very important in the world.

You worked on those intellectual property issues in Bill Gates’ father’s law firm, didn’t you? I have to ask: How far did the acorn fall from the tree?

They’re very similar in many ways, I think, in their passion and in their intellect. They share an extraordinary capacity for connecting a lot of pretty complicated dots very quickly. Big Bill has been working in a large community with lots of diverse interests, and that brings a certain wisdom to who he is; his son is a technology-driven visionary. That creates quite a few differences.

Art on the Internet is already significantly different from the original vision of its artist creator, isn’t it? When does that manipulation start to compromise the artists’ vision — and “ownership” of a particular image?

The whole issue of alteration and manipulation is a big one. As the technologies evolve, some of the limitations will be overcome by virtue of bandwidth, more sophisticated tools and compression techniques. We’re seeing huge improvements in those areas already.

A lot of the photography that we have is intended to be manipulated. A lot of our artists work in the world of commercial photography and that’s their intention, to allow people to take a tree and move it or whatever, so we certainly don’t want to discourage that. That’s also part of putting creativity and the tools in the hands of the people. We do put restrictions on historical and news imagery where we say: This is an accurate news image; you’re prohibited from altering it. But that’s an age-old problem in the news business. There you have to rely both on enforcement techniques and trust in people.

A lot of people characterize Corbis as Bill Gates’ personal trophy collection, a baseball card catalog for the richest man in the world.

It’s obviously something that I’ve heard a lot over the years. In the early days of Corbis, particularly when the company was doing more research and development, the idea that there would be a viable, sustainable, profitable enterprise in handling, managing and distributing digital images and digital content was considered crazy. I can see why people jumped to the conclusion that this was a personal project by the richest man in the world. But in fact, it’s never been that.

The acquisition took place because Bill realized in the late 1980s that a number of critical technologies were going to be developed over the ensuing decade that would profoundly affect the way people bought, sold, experienced, used and managed content, particularly visual content like photography and fine art. Some were in the area of hardware development — affordable desktop printers and large screen technologies creating a new demand for images. Some were in software — desktop publishing and multimedia authoring software; plus there were the Internet developments for distribution, developments for managing large quantities of different kinds of data and all the digitization technologies. Those were five major driving technologies that Bill saw.

The market wasn’t ready to get into digital images yet because there wasn’t the bandwidth or technology on the desktop. So the early ’90s were about acquiring a collection to prepare for that eventual market.

In the last three years, we’ve seen evidence that the market we bet on 10 years ago is beginning to flourish. As bandwidth and desktop publishing have reached the consumer desktop and as almost all business-to-business users — graphic design firms, publishers, magazine publishers, book publishers — have digital capabilities on their desktop, the demand for receiving photography, fine art, illustration, video, through an Internet-driven digital environment is growing tremendously.

But the Internet is kind of a dangerous distribution channel for pictures, isn’t it? Lots of pirates on those high seas. Ownership and intellectual property rights aren’t given a whole lot of attention by many end users.

The focus question you’re trying to raise is the whole consumer Internet — the ability to download pictures for your personal use. This is central to where we’re headed. We believe first of all — and this is a core principle — in artists’ rights and copyright and intellectual property protection. These will evolve given new technologies, but fundamentally they won’t change. Artists should be protected — artists and writers and photographers — their copyright should be honored online as well as offline. We strongly reject the notion that the Internet is a free-for-all. It’s simply not. It’s not true legally, it isn’t going to be true economically and it shouldn’t be true artistically.

You seem very vehement about that!

The thing that initially attracted me to Corbis was the idea that Gates was starting what was then a research and development project in putting really high-end intellectual property online. My first job here was to come in as a lawyer in-house and to think through the policy and business structure and models for that kind of opportunity.

Corbis deals with the finished products of the photography process. But what about that creation process itself? Why aren’t digital cameras more popular?

In five years, you won’t ask that question, because the adoption of digital cameras is starting to ramp up very fast. There are three reasons it hasn’t happened more quickly. The best digital cameras are still fairly expensive, and it’s just a pure economic choice that a lot of professionals make. They say: I’ve invested $20,000 or $30,000 in my existing equipment so I’m going to wait until the price comes down and the equipment becomes a little better before I make the digital investment.

No. 2: The resolution still isn’t very good. For a spot-news photographer for Reuters or Sygma or something who uses only an 8-meg file or even a 1-meg file for a newspaper image, that may be fine. But most creative professional photographers want high resolution because it gives them more marketability, you can do more with the picture, you can sell it as an advertisement or a billboard or for a book. Until the resolution gets better, that’s going to be a disincentive.

The third reason — and this is an interesting one — is that we haven’t really changed the workflow of professional photographers and editors. How do they want to use a digital camera? One of their biggest concerns is that you don’t have the ability to have all the images available. With your first edit from digital you eliminate all these potential images that might have future value. An interesting example is that famous picture of Clinton kissing Monica Lewinsky in that crowd. If that had been shot by a digital camera, that would have been erased instead of saved. There’s a fear a lot of photojournalists have that they’re going to lose valuable shots if they use digital cameras. And what that means is that we’re going to have to adopt new standards for editing from digital cameras. It will take some time for photographers and editors to work through how to create their criteria for new types of editing.

With the consolidation of so many photo archives in the hands of such a small number of companies or individuals, does our visual history become proprietary? Who owns the past?

That’s an interesting question. I think that the ownership of the past visually stays as it has been. There’s going to be a number of public collections ranging from the Library of Congress to the National Archives.

But the fact is there’s also a consolidation of some of the key historical private archives. It’s important to note that they’ve been in private hands for years. Yes, they’re in a fewer number of hands. That’s a given. But they’re also being conserved by this digital process. The reason consolidation is occurring in our industry is because the cost of technology demands that there be a scale against which you plot all those costs.

It’s very expensive to take the Bettmann historical archives and digitize and catalog them. And fundamentally it’s only with that digitizing and cataloging that collection of the past can be preserved, because most of that material is deteriorating. Without private companies willing to invest in the technologies to preserve these collections, you wouldn’t have these collections in the next 50 years.

“Internet marketing,” notes Gordon Paddison, director of interactive
marketing at New Line Cinema, “is the most inexpensive and efficient mode of marketing around. And it’s available to those with limited resources. Online is all about word of mouth.”

“‘The Blair Witch Project’ filmmakers are using their friends to generate their fan sites,” says another industry executive point-blank. “That was an organized effort. What happened is that they tricked the press.”

Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez declined to be interviewed for this story. But whether or not people involved with “The Blair Witch Project” have been seeding the Net with faux-amateurish fan sites or writing pseudonymous reviews of the movie, such practices seem to be increasingly popular in Hollywood. Many believe that deceptive cyberspace marketing is the movie industry’s latest secret weapon in the campaign to take that opening weekend by storm.

A fan site for American Pie boasts an electronic counter labeled “Days UNIVERSAL Hasn’t Shut Us Down” as well as a disclaimer that “I scammed some stuff of this movie off friends that work for a movie company in CA and posted some clips up on the net.” OK. But wouldn’t those purchase order numbers — clearly visible on the purloined files — give Universal a good idea of which employee had leaked it? And would a fan really create a scrolling credits area, playing up the film’s writer, director and producers — and pausing to add “In theaters July 9th”?

“You never quite know who the hand is — the filmmaker, the studio. But I don’t have any doubt that ["American Pie"] site was put up by somebody from Universal,” says David Poland. Poland’s insider column for TNT’s Rough Cut, The Hot Button, frequently serves as a reality check for the Hollywood hype machine. “Can I substantiate that? No. And in fairness, when I asked, Universal denied any involvement.”

The “Blair Witch Project” fan sites deploy similarly suspicious language. The creators of The Blair Witch Project Fanatic’s Guide, for example, tell site visitors, “We’re just very dedicated fans,” and until recently offered suggestions on how other fans might help promote the movie: “Buy TBWP Stock at the Hollywood Stock Exchange! Rank TBWP at the Internet Movie Database! Rank TBWP at Ain’t It Cool News!”

But the creators of the site, Abigail Marceluk and Eric Alan Ivins, seem to be more than average fans. They appeared in the Sci-Fi Channel special “Curse of the Blair Witch,” and the Rough Cut site links them to the film’s back story: “A bit of trivia: Abigail and Eric are the two anthropology students who discover the three film students’ ‘lost’ footage.”

Fan sites, of course, are one of those cyberspace metrics beloved by the traditional media, which uses them as a kind of compass to determine the sources of the pop culture Nile. Nearly two months before the film’s release, for example, MTV News ran a story on the proliferation of “Blair Witch” fan sites — thereby giving the film cachet with that all-important 13- to 25-year-old moviegoing demographic.

The big studios have been aware of this phenomenon for quite some time and are sometimes heavy-handed in their attempts to manipulate it. According to industry insiders, it is not uncommon at the time a movie project is announced for a studio to buy up every domain name that has the slightest connection to the project, use them to set up amateurish sites and then, when the official Internet marketing gets under way, “affiliate” with those fan sites.

“The more a film shows up on different places throughout the Net, the more traditional media decides to cover it,” says Poland. “The Internet doesn’t have that much of a direct promotional effect on getting people to see a movie, but when traditional media starts picking up on it, that’s when a movie gets the buzz.”

Harry Knowles, the self-styled film fanatic behind Ain’t It Cool News, may have more to do with enticing filmmakers and producers into the gray area of anonymous self-promotion than anyone.

Knowles was a 25-year-old college dropout and dealer in movie memorabilia in 1997 when his movie review site broke ahead of the pack of other underground entertainment sites like Corona’s Coming Attractions, Zentertainment Buzzstation and CyberSleaze.

His M.O.? Reviews of test screenings from anonymous moles who claimed to have infiltrated the impenetrable studio labyrinth. These reviews were coupled with message boards where other users could “Talk Back.” Quentin Tarantino called him “the Wolf Blitzer of the Internet,” and rumor had it that Hollywood studios circulated his photograph to make sure he didn’t slip into any test screenings.

But those days are long gone. Today AICN is a full-time operation, using reports from 35 to 40 freelance movie spies, and Knowles, taking a cue from onetime mentor Matt Drudge, is reportedly trying to launch his own weekly TV show. When Premiere magazine named him to its power list of the top 100 Hollywood players last month, it raved, “His aint-it-cool-news.com Web site and its film-geek spy network have become the source of early test-screening reviews untainted by spin control.”

Untainted by spin control? Not according to Poland, who views Knowles as spin central: “Studios know if you bring him on a set, you’ll get good buzz out of him — and that will translate into other media attention. Studios also send in negative things about their competitors’ movies in order to torpedo them. Journalists who cover the film business look to sites like his for scoops.”

Poland cites the case of “Iron Giant,” an upcoming animated feature from Warner Brothers. The film has been written up on AICN 61 times, beginning back when it was in its earliest developmental stage as pre-production art. Gushed one recent anonymous reviewer, “It was one of the best movies I have seen all year. I am a 27 year old guy. This movie brought a tear to my eye … I am a big supporter of any studio that wants to run the animation
[gantlet] with those pricks at Disney.”

When the Los Angeles Times wrote up “Iron Giant” in April, it made note of the movie’s “hot Internet buzz.”

“Warner Brothers knew they’d get positive stuff out of [Harry Knowles],” says Poland. “There were clearly people involved with the movie saying good things about it on AICN.” Poland is appalled that the newspaper took what it found online at face value, treating it as honest and legitimate adoration. “When the L.A. Times goes into a Web site, gets an unverifiable review and says this is what people are saying about this movie — that’s scary.”

Of course, not all the spin that movies get online is positive. In a
recent interview, Wild Wild
West director Barry Sonnenfeld fumed, “You can ruin a movie through anonymous reviews on the Internet. And don’t for a minute think that studios themselves aren’t anonymously writing good reviews for their own movies and bad reviews for other movies.”

“Barry uses the test screening process to help tweak his films,” explains Ira Rubenstein, vice-president of marketing at Columbia Tristar Interactive. “This is particularly critical for comedies. Now he can’t, because people [who attended the test screening] are writing, ‘It’s awful, its special effects are bad, the music sucks, the timing’s off.’ Etc. Listen — I find it difficult to watch films that aren’t finished — they’re missing all sorts of subtle cues. And I’m in the industry. When a regular moviegoer sees a test screening, chances are he won’t get it. And then if he goes off and writes about it in a way that ultimately hurts the finished movie, it undermines the whole process.”

Poland says that the Net has changed the landscape so much that Hollywood execs are now talking of doing away with test screenings all together.

“Look at the monsters we’ve created,” mused another industry executive, who asked that his name not be used. “People think they can co-opt Harry Knowles — and sure, you can co-opt him for one film. But every time the dog turns around and bites you.”

Knowles declined to be interviewed for this story. But
word has it that he hadn’t actually seen “The Blair Witch Project” when he first wrote this about it on AICN: “As for movies coming up at SUNDANCE the one to see it ‘THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT’!!! The most creepy fuckin mockumentary made … ever.” Figuring AICN as the best way to get the word out to an obsessive fan base, Myrick and Sanchez had apparently slipped Knowles the blurb. In the next six months, the indie film was reviewed 12 more times — and each review was more positive than the last.

At least some AICN frequent flyers suspect that one of “The Blair Witch Project” reviewers setting the buzz-generator on high was … someone directly involved with the film. Whoever was doing it, the reviews were working. How else to account for the increasing number of rabid fans whose postings began, “I’ve seen a tape of ‘The Blair Witch Project …’”? Particularly when the film’s distributor, Artisan Entertainment, was enforcing a strict no-tapes policy?

“We haven’t created screeners for this film,” says Artisan spokeswoman Jessica Rovello. “Piracy is a big issue.”

John Pierson, the independent film guru who put up part of the seed money for the film, suspects that when the hype reaches a certain level, people start confabulating. “What happens in the more buzzy world is that people end up posting about a film that they haven’t seen at all — thousands and thousands are already on board talking about a movie that they haven’t seen.”

You couldn’t ask for a better way to promote a movie.

And “Blair Witch” fans defend the marketing campaign. As Anthony Pryor-Brown puts it: “There’s a significant difference between saying, ‘You liked the movie? Tell your friends,’ and [studios] specifically planting people to rave about the movie.” Pryor-Brown is a 38-year-old technical writer from Portland, Ore., who faithfully visits AICN once a day.

“To the extent that Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick have been encouraging people to spread the word about ‘Blair Witch,’ there is indeed a publicity campaign going on,” he offers, “but I’m encouraged to see that it doesn’t involve huge ads in the trades, massive TV campaigns or action figures at Taco Bell. Although I probably would get ‘Blair Witch’ action figures if they were available.”

“Here it is,” she said. “On the ALA’s home page list of recommended teen Web pages, the ALA recommends Go Ask Alice, a site discussing many graphic issues including bestiality, sadomasochism, group sex and other. In my opinion, the ALA has done something evil, which — as you know from Mother Laura — is something way past dumb.”

Go Ask Alice is, in fact, a site produced by Columbia University’s Health Service to provide “factual, in-depth, straightforward and nonjudgmental information to assist readers’ decision-making about their physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual health.” Its Q&A format lets people ask questions anonymously; they are answered by university health educators and practitioners. The site has earned favorably attention from media like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Health Letter. And in 1998, Columbia’s Health Service won an American Public Health Association award for developing the Internet resource.

Alice is a searchable database, answering questions about body maintenance, colds, aches and pains, nutrition, emotional health, drug and alcohol use, relationships and well, yes, sex. “People write in and they say that they’re too embarrassed to ask their parents, their health care provider, their friends, their partners about lots of these concerns,” says Jordan Friedman, Columbia’s director of Health Education. “We also get a lot of questions — and these tend to be from younger people — that say: ‘My friend told me this about drugs or sex or depression or a diet and I’m not sure if it’s true. Do you have any information that can help me?’ They want information and they want it from a source that’s reliable. And they want it on their level. Alice does not talk down to people. Alice does not criticize her readers. Alice does not dismiss her readers.” Alice, in other words, is no Dr. Laura.

The ALA has supported a link to Go Ask Alice for over a year now, almost as long as it has had a Web site. But the link is not exactly prominent. It’s buried nine levels down in a series of subdirectories that act as informational turnstiles. “What we’re doing is providing access to information that kids need if they want to take the time to find it,” says Joel Shoemaker, the president of the ALA’s Young Library Services Association. “Nobody is going to accidentally stumble on to sensitive language without knowing what they’re getting into, not from our site.”

It’s much easier to find the URL for Go Ask Alice on Schlessinger’s own Web site, where it appears under “Monologues,” as part of a press release from the Minnesota Family Council that was posted on April 23.

Interestingly, Go Ask Alice has seen an increase in traffic since the link went live on Schlessinger’s site. “We can’t tell where things are coming from but in the last month we have had an increase in outside hits to the site,” notes Columbia’s Friedman. “We are about half a million hits over the average for a given week.” Could it be sheer coincidence?

Meanwhile, in contrast to the ALA’s cautious placement of its link to Alice, Schlessinger’s site offers a pretty provocative tease into the Alice site — direct quotes from what Schlessinger has characterized on her show as Alice’s “pornography”: “Several things might make sex with animals, also known as bestiality, appealing: It can be forbidden, secretive, and/or exciting. An animal doesn’t kiss and tell, nor does the animal complain about performance or desire orgasm — you are in control of the when, where and how.” This, of course, raises an interesting question: Is Schlessinger putting “pornography” on her site? When is “pornography” not pornography? When it’s being used by the forces of Good? When it’s being used to educate people? And who gets to decide what’s Good and what’s education?

Is there a difference between sex education and pornography? Columbia’s Friedman thinks there is: “The purpose of pornography is sexual arousal. The purpose of sex education is education.”

But regardless of how liberally the word “porn” may be scattered through Schlessinger’s radio monologues, this is a distinction that she herself does not feel qualified to address, says Keven Bellows, vice president and general manager of the Dr. Laura show and Schlessinger’s spokeswoman: “She’s not an expert on pornography and she’s not a medical doctor. This is not her issue.”

So what is her issue? “The issue is that it’s wrong for the library not to filter,” Bellows says. “Her issue is protecting children. Go Ask Alice is just our example of inappropriate material.”

Ann K. Symons, the president of the American Library Association, sees value in sites like Alice. “I know that some kids are sexually active in high school,” Symons says, “and it’s always [a librarian's] goal to make sure that young people get factual good information. Go Ask Alice has accurate information, it answers a broad range of questions and concerns, and not everybody is interested in everything on there. I would recommend it to my child — but I would also tell him that I would want to be there and I would want to talk about it with him. We believe that it is the parents’ job to decide what is appropriate and not appropriate.”

And therein lies the rub. Unquestionably, the Internet contains material that is unsuitable for young users. But there are differences in opinion about the best way of controlling access. The ALA is adamant in its stand against uniformly adopting filtering software. “Filters are only one way to modify Internet use,” says Symons. “They may be the best way in the home but they’re not the best way in the library.” Well, reasonable people may disagree. Both Schlessinger and the ALA seem to want responsible use of the Net — but while Schlessinger’s approach favors the mechanical, the ALA’s leans towards the philosophical. What we have here is a difference of opinion.

But Schlessinger does not suffer differences of opinion graciously. Over the past year, the talk show doyenne has redefined the scope of her radio practice considerably. No longer content to administer tongue-lashings to callers lamenting their divorce, infidelity, unwanted pregnancies or abusive spouses, lately Schlessinger has become a woman with a mission, a scriptural absolutist, seeking nothing less than a complete moral make-over of society. There’s no room for conscientious objectors outside of Mother Laura’s army. But does she go too far?

Bellows says she is only responding to the current cultural climate. “Many librarians have written to tell us that they’re having terrible issues with pedophiles since computers were introduced into the libraries,” Bellows says. “Now that pedophiles can access porn on the Internet they’re hanging out in libraries.”

But those letters do not appear on the Schlessinger Web site. And the ALA’s Symons counters, “We are not hearing this nor did a survey of its membership by the Urban Libraries Council” — an organization of major metropolitan libraries — “show this.” Is Schlessinger using hyperbole to make her point?

Schlessinger certainly appears to have leaned toward excess in crediting her faithful with influencing the outcome of a legislative committee vote in California. On May 18, the state Senate’s Public Safety Committee voted to reconsider SB238, a bill that if passed into law would require Internet blocking software in California libraries. Previously the committee had deadlocked on moving this legislation along for appropriations consideration. The May 18 vote allows that decision to be revisited.

“All of your letters and faxes have made a significant and meaningful difference,” Schlessinger gushed in a letter posted May 18 to her site. Not so, according to Sen. John Vasconcellos, the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, who has denied seeing any mail at all and told the ALA that he was “aghast at the hypocrisy” of Schlessinger’s claim. Reconsideration is a routine courtesy extended to every bill’s author, Vasconcellos said, characterizing Dr. Laura’s version of events as “preposterous and offensive.”

Veteran talk show host Ronn Owens of San Francisco’s KGO radio sees the danger of demagoguery as an occupational hazard. “You eventually fall into one of two categories. Either you view your program as info-tainment and a wonderful way to make a living but don’t take yourself that seriously or you begin to believe your own press clippings. Laura and Rush [Limbaugh] tend to fall into the second category. Both shows want (Laura demands) listeners who agree with them. Thus they are validated with every call. After a while you begin to see your opinions as incontestable.”

In other words, maybe Schlessinger is taking herself — and her role as the righteous moralist — a bit too far. “A lot of people talk about how they loved Laura when she first came on,” says Owens, “but she is becoming too strident, dogmatic, preachy, religious, unpleasant … She will either heed these listeners and continue her success or will eventually fall victim to listeners turning her off.” But for now, at least, Schlessinger remains America’s top-rated dominatrix.

Event Horizon’s creators, Ellen Datlow, Rob Killheffer and Pam Weintraub, proudly describe it as a professional venture. To Datlow, a critically acclaimed editor, this means, “We pay professional rates and we have editors who know what they’re doing, who have some experience in editing, who have an editorial voice, who work with authors on stories, and who are not afraid to turn stories down.” This distinction is particularly significant in two mediums whose culture is dominated by fan efforts.

Yet professionalism has proved no hedge against declining circulation in the traditional science-fiction magazine market, as subscriptions to the big three — Asimov’s, Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction — continue to plummet. And professionalism in electronic publishing has yet to prove it can fuel a profitable business.

Although Event Horizon was partly designed as bait to draw attention to its successful parent Web production company of the same name, producer Killheffer stresses, “We don’t want to be a vanity project. ” And the site has drawn between 15,000 and 20,000 unique users per month since its inception in August. But is that enough to survive?

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Science fiction, of course, is ubiquitous on the Net: Multitudes jam the local area networks to download their very own personal copy of the newest “Star Wars” trailer, while TV-oriented sites like The Sci-Fi Channel’s Dominion host three-day electronic sci-fi conventions. Since its earliest days, science-fiction fandom has had a community sensibility, and it has flourished online since the first cyberspace pioneers — programmers by day, speculative dreamers by night — colonized the distributed bulletin board system that would become Usenet in order to have a place to talk about their favorite “Star Trek” episodes.

But the army of people interested in science fiction spun off from movies and TV far outnumbers those interested in the genre’s written words. “We’re not growing a bunch of new readers,” Killheffer admits. “The barrier that written science fiction has always had is the willingness of the reader to encounter unfamiliar concepts and do a little bit of work in reading. That barrier is as high as it ever was. ‘Star Wars’ is evidence that the imagery of science fiction has become familiar to people. They’ll buy stories in a familiar world with familiar characters, but there’s little evidence that they’ll pick up a new world — even when the book is aimed directly at that audience, telling a similar story of high adventure and using the imagery of science fiction in a similar way. They’re not looking for science fiction, they’re looking for ‘Star Wars.’”

Event Horizon includes few of the bells and whistles that mark other science fiction-oriented sites. “We try and make a story online look the same as a print story generally,” allows Datlow. “Although I’ve seen stories on a black background, I think it’s a really bad idea. You want to make it as easy on the eyes as you can.” And there are some advantages that virtual publishing has over print: Length is not a limiting factor, so novellas — a format science-fiction writers favor — can be more easily accommodated. Although the site does host a section called Superstrings — round-robin exercises in collaborative fiction among teams of up-and-coming talent — it eschews more elaborate hypertext experimentation. Datlow says: “I think the brain is still wired to read a certain way, and I don’t think it’s easy to get involved with fiction if it’s not written in a traditional structure, or one that the brain is used to following.”

The question remains: Can Event Horizon succeed where an established brand name like Omni — supported by the deep pockets of Penthouse publisher General Media — failed? Notes Gardner Dozois, editor of the venerable Asimov’s and a well-regarded author in his own right: “The problems with publishing fiction on the Net are two-fold: You need seed money to pay for editorial material — you have to be able to buy stories from authors. You need start-up money, pockets deep enough to allow you to buy stories until your site earns a profit. Which brings us to the second problem: How do you make money reliably by publishing on the Internet? The track record is not good.”

Was the Omni model that Event Horizon has adopted — a Web publication supported by ad revenues — simply ahead of its time? “In my opinion,” says Event Horizon’s Weintraub, “Omni was in step with its time. It had a tremendously recognizable brand name, it was linked ubiquitously throughout the Internet at many thousands of junctures, and it had a level of traffic” — approximately a million page views a day when the plug was pulled in April 1998 — “that other companies who spent far more are making a profit on today.”

Gerard Van Der Leun — a senior editor at Penthouse who is also an online veteran and co-author of “Rules of the Net,” a sardonic survey of Net manners — disagrees. “The site was not making any money because it was an ad-driven site and the ads weren’t supporting it at the level it needed to be supported — through no fault of the editorial staff. It was a great team and they all worked hard. But if you add up all of the Web sites that are free to users and what it costs to maintain them and then add up all the ads, the amount needed to support those sites is vastly larger than the amount generated from those ads. Especially when those advertisers figure out that they’re paying $5,000 a month for a tiny banner with two click-throughs. The model works better in the print world, when you don’t know for sure your advertising isn’t working.”

Event Horizon believes the secret to success is attracting the right kind of advertisers. The site has aimed to cultivate advertisers who specifically want to target a literate audience — book clubs, book publishers, publishers of interactive CD-ROMs.

“Maybe 1 percent of users on a ‘Star Wars’ site will respond to an ad. But on our site, every single one of our people will be interested in a product,” says Killheffer. “We may have a smaller audience, but we have a focused audience. If people come to our site, they’re declaring a certain kind of passion and devotion that is unusual in a market today. They’re making a strong statement about how much they want it. There remains a very enthusiastic and deeply intellectual community that engages in conversation about the literature.”