John Geirland

The Web may just be the perfect medium for distributing short films. Shorts are brief enough (most on the Web are under 10 minutes) to be interspersed between other activities like answering e-mail or tasks like paying bills. They are accessible on demand. And most importantly, online distributors see greater financial possibilities for shorts online — where they earn revenues through advertising, sponsorship, licensing fees and e-commerce partnerships — than in admission-paying movie houses. “Distributing a film over the Web is cheaper by an order of magnitude,” says Rodger Raderman, founder of the iFilm Network, an online film distributor and community site. “Where traditionally a film might require 100,000 viewers to realize a profit, by using the Web that same film might achieve profitability with 10,000 viewers.”

Back in your grandma’s day, shorts were a mainstay of the local movie house — the preferred appetizer before the main course in American cinemas. (Movie trailers provide the foreplay these days.) But movie shorts, and short entertainment formats in general, were driven out of the U.S. entertainment scene not by changing tastes so much as economics. In the music world, 45s were popular in the ’50s and ’60s, until record companies realized they could make more money selling albums. Similarly, Hollywood studio chiefs found that feature films were easier to market and drew larger crowds to theaters. “The motion picture model was developed on a feature format,” Salmi explains. “There wasn’t an economic model for short films.”

And, while short films do air occasionally on cable TV, they are practically nonexistent on network television. Shorts are unpopular with network executives, who believe that TV audiences like familiar premises and recurring characters. It’s a lot easier to brand a show like “Friends” than a program with new personalities and stories each week. (“Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” are famous exceptions.) While Salmi and others believe we will see more shorts on cable TV in the future, it remains the case that short films have largely been ghettoized on the film festival circuit, less an art form than a calling card for aspiring filmmakers.

Ironically, the fact that short films fail to fit into traditional entertainment business models is the very reason why they have become such a hot item in the emerging online entertainment world.

“Shorts are cheap,” says Frank Biondi, who bought “tons” of them for HBO in the mid-’70s to fill up intermissions. In coming years, he says, shorts could quench the ceaseless demand for fresh content online. “Most video is owned by existing and/or producing distributors,” says Biondi. Web companies that want to distribute conventional TV and film product have to navigate through a tangle of conflicting distribution arrangements. But there are literally thousands of short films floating around without a home — and nearly as many short filmmakers eager to make deals.

One of those filmmakers is Jonathan Fahn, whose “Fast Food” is a favorite among visitors to the AtomFilms site. “Fast Food” is an 11-minute Scorsese spoof about a couple of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci types who run a burger joint. (“Are you talking to me?” the drive-through speaker barks. “Are you talking to me?!?!”) Fahn sees advantages in the short-film genre. “It’s much easier to be good for 11 minutes than for 90 minutes,” he says. “I think a lot of consumers see [feature-length] movies and think, ‘Yeah, that was good, but it was way too long.’”

The shorter format also makes it easier for people to become exposed to a broader range of filmmaking. The Web may be a way for consumers to “experiment with seeing something outside the mainstream without a huge commitment,” Salmi observes. Consumers who might hesitate to invest the time and effort to schlep down to an art house theater to catch a three-hour film about Iran might be willing to sandwich a deeply moving short like “Life in Fog” — the story of an Iranian boy in a mountain village who raises his siblings after the death of their parents — between checking stock quotes and deleting old e-mail.

Plus there’s on-demand availability. “Where traditional channels are already bottlenecked,” says Raderman, “the Internet enables the storage and delivery of a limitless amount of content on demand. So, unlike theaters or television, the viewer can identify and watch what they want and when they want to watch it.”

And the Web fosters just the kind of social environment that work best for short films. Shorts are like jokes; whether humorous or dramatic, they all have punch lines. We use jokes to communicate about anxiety-provoking issues like sex, death, politics and in-laws — and may soon use film shorts on the Web in much the same way.

If there is anything wrong with this picture it’s … well, the picture itself. Streaming video sucks, at least for the majority of us who still have slow connections to the Web. When the action picks up, streaming video images begin to disassemble themselves — and come to resemble something Willem De Kooning might have painted on a bad day. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of the problem and many are busy testing various solutions while they await massive broadband adoption. The Digital Entertainment Network, which produces its own streaming video shows, has even created a style guide for content creators with tips on working within the medium’s limited bandwidth.

Some 60 percent of the visitors to the AtomFilms site already have broadband connections to the Web. (Many visit the site from work.) But for those who don’t, the site offers a variety of animated shorts, which consume less bandwidth than video — especially those created with Macromedia’s Flash technology. And AtomFilms is now looking into delivering animated shorts to hand-held devices. People could get a subscription to what Salmi calls a daily “crude and Pokimon-like” animated short that could be downloaded into the Palm VII or similar devices within a year.

Warner Bros. Online is hoping to bridge the video quality problem by offering a Web-DVD hybrid. Consumers would receive a DVD disk containing MPEG 2-quality video and other “fat” multimedia elements. To the consumer, the disk is a “key” which he or she uses to “unlock” a Web show.

Assuming that you can transcend the technical limitations of the medium, is there money to be made streaming shorts on the Web? Salmi, Raderman and others obviously think the answer is yes. Aside from licensing fees and advertising, there is money to be made selling videotape compilations, film subscriptions and what Salmi refers to as “various other e-commerce models” that he isn’t ready to talk about.

“Six months ago few people in Hollywood or New York were interested” in online entertainment, notes Macromedia chairman and CEO Rob Burgess, whose company is launching Shockwave.com to distribute Flash-based animated shorts over the Web. The industry had watched both America Online and Microsoft launch costly entertainment networks that didn’t catch on and were ultimately abandoned. But then Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com — for $5 billion — and the venture capitalists and entertainment industry decision makers cast a fresh eye on streaming content. “Now,” Burgess says, “when you meet executives, they are all over it.”

The short film revival — supported not just by iFilm and AtomFilms, but also sites like New Revue and the Bit Screen — received the imprimatur of legitimacy when Amazon.com announced that it planned to start selling indie movie compilations through its Advantage program, beginning with a collection of films from students at the USC film school. Observers expect Amazon to begin streaming movie clips in the future.

And Load Media Network in Hollywood has created a video clip business based on a direct-marketing model. Load uses a form of push
(uh, “load”) technology to download relatively high-quality short videos to customer’s desktops. The catch is that Load’s software decides which clips customers get, based on a few questions they answer when registering for the service and on past clips viewed to completion. Unlike the others, most of Load’s shorts consist of scenes from feature-length films. The company has signed distribution deals with big studios like Columbis TriStar, Fox and MGM.

With all this activity, you get the feeling that the Web is awash in celluloid. Beyond the money, the Web represents an opportunity for filmmakers to get their films out to people who normally wouldn’t go to a film festival. “I think the reason people don’t see short films,” says filmmaker Grant Hesloff, “is that they don’t have access to them … When art is in the avant-garde, it’s harder to get a wide audience for it. That’s the great thing about the Web. It’s not expensive, comparatively speaking, to set up a Web site and get people to view something.”

In other words, once shorts are commonly distributed on the Web, short filmmakers should see a renaissance of their art form — in all its variations. “Anybody can write anything now and get an audience for it,” says Hesloff. “It may be an audience of two.”

Salmi says he believes that the Web’s entertainment sites will stimulate the production of more short films — even by people who would not otherwise become filmmakers. Warner Bros. Online’s Banister sees things on a grander scale: The addition of streaming video content to the Web is part of a larger phenomenon, he says, arguing that we’re seeing the emergence of an “image literacy” movement that is supplanting the written word.

In a paper titled “Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology,” Marc Davis, a member of the research staff at Interval Research, speculates about a time 50 years hence when “computational video technology will enable  [online] communities to make video a part of their daily communication  a world in which you engage in a daily practice of making movies from parts of existing ones to communicate and play with others.”

In the meantime, you can visit sites like iFilm or AtomFilms and while away two and a half a minutes with Joe Byrnes’ “Louie the Fly” as he “talks about life at the bottom of the food chain” — or purie Joe Cartoon’s obnoxious animated amphibian in “Frog Bender 2000.”

Bunnell is a legend in computer journalism — the founder of PC Magazine, Macworld and New Media, and the CEO of Upside magazine. So readers might be predisposed to take what he has to say seriously. And to be fair, “The eBay Phenomenon,” co-authored with business writer Richard Luecke, looks more like a primer aimed at the business crowd than a serious journalistic exercise. The book does a workmanlike job of describing how the eBay site functions and of recounting the company’s humble beginnings in founder Pierre Omidyar’s apartment in 1995. Bunnell also deftly explicates eBay’s business model and its positioning within the “demand-based or dynamic pricing” segment of the e-commerce sector.

Once the reader gets past these surface details, however, the book’s intellectual laziness begins to emerge. Bunnell attributes eBay’s success in part to the company’s willingness to trust the community that has grown up around its site — its “hands-off approach to user transactions.” He feels eBay executives have done a good job of keeping corporate trappings on the site to a minimum and staying focused on the user experience.

As might be expected, the book occasionally gets tripped up by Internet time. “[By] the spring of 2000,” Bunnell writes, “it appeared that the frequency and severity of past service outages was unlikely to repeat itself.” EBay auctioneers who experienced last month’s service outages might take issue. The book does contain the occasional compelling observation: “Over the long haul, business-to-consumer (B2C) auctions seem destined to shoulder out person-to-person (P2P) auctions in terms of transaction numbers, participants, and gross sales. The reason is simple: for manufacturers, retailers, and airlines alike, auctions are an efficient way to liquidate unwanted inventory.” Nothing revolutionary, but a useful insight.

Unfortunately, the book is studded with just as many obvious and empty observations: “In all likelihood, eBay will continue on its current course of making many small, little-noticed changes and improvements to its site.” What major commercial Web site doesn’t? At times the tone turns sanctimonious: “To their credit, eBay’s newly minted millionaires were quick to give away portions of their sudden wealth.” Often the writing style is tired and hackneyed, as in “[T]he site had all the appearances of a money-making machine.”

Bunnell’s main point is that eBay has succeeded in designing an efficient commercial system. But apart from pointing out that eBay’s “asking and bidding prices are not far apart,” Bunnell offers little support for that assertion. In fact, he later belies his own point by telling the story of a woman who saw her late brother’s homemade mandolin being auctioned by Barr’s Fiddle Shop on eBay. The woman rushed to the brick-and-mortar shop and tried to buy back the mandolin. Rather than sell her the mandolin outright, the owners showed her how to register on eBay and participate in the bidding. The mandolin eventually went for $1,500 when, one of the owners admits, “a reasonable price would have been seven hundred to eight hundred dollars.” Where hath chivalry gone?

Nor has eBay proved efficient for sellers. As former eBay auctioneer Claudia O’Keefe has pointed out in Salon, the sheer number of auctions running under some categories makes it difficult for bidders and sellers to find each other.

For a short book (224 pages, including index and notes), “The eBay Phenomenon” feels padded. EBay policy statements are printed at length, as are not very interesting quotes from the site’s discussion boards. Many pages are devoted to general discussions of decision-making and effective management practices in dot-coms, none of which are specific to eBay.

The major problem with the book becomes clear on Page 97 when Bunnell belatedly admits that “eBay would not make its executives available for interviews, or let me roam the corridors, and no ex-employees could be located” — this in a chapter entitled “Inside eBay.” OK, so we can’t all be Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters. But Bunnell also admits he’s never even met eBay’s VP of communications, Kevin Pursglove — though that doesn’t prevent him from speculating about Pursglove’s state of mind. Surely the CEO of Upside Media has enough clout to quaff lattes with eBay’s top flack — especially if he’s writing a book about the company?

If Bunnell wasn’t able to gain the cooperation of eBay executives in writing this book, as was apparently the case, why not shift the focus to the consumer side of the story? Some online auctioneers were interviewed, but Bunnell doesn’t dig very deeply into this potentially rich side of the story. We are hard-wired to seek novelty, social interaction and bargains, which is why tens of millions of people fan out to swap meets, flea markets and garage sales every weekend of the year. Better than any company I can think of, eBay has leveraged the Web to appeal to these aspects of the consumer experience. If the Internet is fundamentally a P2P phenomenon, as is increasingly clear, then the real lessons of eBay are to be found out there among the community of users, not in the telling of yet another rags to riches Silicon Valley story.

Bunnell notes that eBay’s site is “fun” to use. He misses the deeper point that eBay is also the most successful entertainment site on the Web, an observation made last year by Jim Banister, the former executive vice president of Entertaindom, Time Warner’s online entertainment portal. Banister believes that sites like eBay appeal to our right-brain sensibilities as much as do movies like “Titanic” or television shows like “ER.” EBay executives must be catching on, as they are now in discussions with the major networks to produce an eBay television show.

Nail together any two pieces of crap — no matter how dissimilar — and some American will offer you $1.50 for it, comedian George Carlin once opined. Judging by eBay’s expansion overseas into markets such as Australia, Japan and France, Carlin’s joke might now apply to the whole planet. Someday a fascinating, insightful and instructive book will be written about the eBay phenomenon, but “The eBay Phenomenon” is not that book.

Launched four years ago, Voyeurweb is the brainchild of 42-year-old Igor Shoemaker, an entrepreneur who says he holds citizenship in four countries including the U.S. and Germany. (He won’t reveal the other two, “in case I need somewhere to run to.”) A former top marketing executive at one of the biggest software vendors in the world (again, he won’t say which), Igor quit his job after one too many reorganizations and took time off to pursue other interests. He surfed the Web and was struck by the way most Web sites treated content like a “one-way street.” “Why are you using the Web?” he’d rant. “Why don’t you just Fed Ex me the CD?” Convinced that content should be an interactive experience, he decided to ask “netizens to help me to build a site with their photos.”

Today Voyeurweb draws about 1 million unique visitors a day (1.3 million on a recent Monday). People send in about 200 “contris” a day. Two eight-person crews work 18 hours a day reviewing and processing submissions. Contributors include a “story” along with their photos, and five editors provide “commentary.” The photos vary in quality from the awkwardly posed to the artfully rendered. Content is organized into sections such as Voyeur Shots, Private Shots and Nude in Public. Shoemaker claims the company operates in the black. Most of the revenue comes from 400,000 subscribes who pay $20 a year for access to “RedClouds,” the site’s explicit photo section. Because of the risky nature of the business, Shoemaker says, the company operates out of five different offices in the U.S. and Europe.

By this point you’re thinking, “Aren’t we talking about just another adult site here?” But Voyeurweb is more than yet another porn emporium. It’s a compelling demonstration of one of the things the Web does best — providing a forum in which the users are also the producers. Voyeurweb shows what can be achieved if you combine a strong editorial voice with a popular format for user contributions and a regard for community.

Content is like strawberry jam, Sony of America Chairman Howard Stringer once observed. “The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets.” When the demand for content exceeds the productive capacity of professional writers and producers — as Stringer argues it has in the age of the Internet — quality heads south. Sample the offerings of even the most professionally produced online entertainment sites and you get the idea that the “jam” is spotty at best. Building community around such sites — an essential element for future financial viability — is like trying to grow roses in frozen tundra.

But some Internet sites are bucking Stringer’s sticky theorem by tapping a new and limitless source of free content: Ordinary Web users like you and me. Call it “user-generated content,” “consumer created content” (Jupiter Research’s term) or simply “interactive content,” the approach offers more than just a solution to the “content problem.” Guided by a distinctive editorial “voice,” user-generated content can also be a powerful method for building strong communities of virile viral marketers. An as on so many other fronts on the Net, the adult sites are leading the way.

The personality of its eccentric and restless founder is what sets Voyeurweb apart from the many thousands of world-weary adult sites out there. Igor likes to call breasts “funbagos” and refers to the female receptive position as “WFI” (Waiting For Igor). Apart from a phobia about white cotton panties, he is an effusive and supportive commentator. “Igor is Da Man!” “@I@n” recently noted on the site’s main message board. “Why would I submit my clips and captures to a copycat site and miss out on the chance of having Igor make his comments on them?”

Submitting “contris” to a site like Voyeurweb — or any Web site — requires a small act of courage. (Maybe a big act of courage.) People may be more willing to put their egos on the line if they feel there is a likable human being on the receiving end. “@I@n” adds: “How many Web sites have you visited and not known who the webmaster is?”

User-generated content on the Internet is nothing new. The early Web was largely built on the backs of user-generated content in the form of amateur Web sites of the “Uncle Art’s Fly Fishing Homepage” variety. What distinguishes sites like Voyeurweb from those amateur efforts — past and present — is the “Law of Large Numbers.”

Visit an amateur Web site on any subject at random and the content is likely to be mediocre at best. Even if you spend an entire day sampling similar sites — a stultifying prospect — you may get content from a few dozen persons at most. User-generated content sites, on the other hand, aggregate content from thousands of individuals. Out of all the flotsam and jetsam, gems are bound to emerge. In the case of Voyeurweb, some of the photos on its pages are as artfully erotic as any found on the Web. “We contribute because we like photography and we are very proud of our photos,” writes one contributor. “We work hard to try and get good results and [Voyeurweb] is a great place to share them.”

A non-adult humor site that has been taking advantage of the law of large numbers for years is Hecklers.com. The site’s David Letterman-style “Interactive Top Ten” features user contributions on subjects like “Top Ten Reasons ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ was canceled.” (Reason No. 6 from nynyagene@hotmail.com: “Finally reached bra-shrinking threshold.”)

When thousands of contributors send in photos, opportunities abound for “found humor.” IloveBacon.com is a humor site that specializes in this type of twisted content. Mike W. sent in a photo of the tombstone for a couple named “DUMFART” (“Haunted by a bad name even after death”). Derek M. found a billboard for a car wash promising “the Best HAND-JOB in Town!”

Access to thousands of individual contributors doesn’t mean that the “garbage in, garbage out” rule is suspended. Many of Heckler’s Top Ten lists fall flat. No. 1 on the list of “Top Ten Things Israel and Palestine Can Agree On”: “It sure is hot out.” Hmmm. And some of the pictures on Voyeurweb look like rejects from a gynecological handbook. A visitor to any of these sites — adult or not — has to dig to find the good stuff.

Voyeurweb has attempted to proactively boost the quality of “contris” by implementing a numerically based user-rating system and paying $200 to first-place winners each month. A new feature, “Igor’s Photo Lessons,” offers straightforward advice on basic technique (“Focus focus focus”), posing (“Is less more?”) and content (“pictures can tell stories”). Still, it’s hard to say whether “Igor’s Photo Lessons” have helped anyone shoot more aesthetically pleasing “spread invitation” photos of his wife.

A mass appeal to contributors, just the same, can yield surprising results. “I started a special contest titled ‘Shaved in front of the cam.’ More than 2,000 ladies lost their pubic hair during that contest,” Igor recalls. “That was scary. Much more than I expected.”

And never mind if the quality or the level of creativity of the submissions is uneven. Another powerful argument for employing user-generated content is that it seeds community. Sharing content — even pictures of naked people — serves as a pretext for people of like minds to gather together and socialize. “We get feedback on our pictures,” writes Voyeurweb contributor nikki, and “requests for new pictures.” Interactions eventually steer toward other subjects, even topics like the upcoming election. “This place is like a big family,” writes another contributor.

User-generated content is not only an integral part of the history of the Internet, but it is increasingly a movement that draws power from widespread discontent with how content is packaged by the entertainment industry. “There’s a big reaction among consumers against packaged, slick and promoted content targeted at an audience,” Packet Video Networks president Rob Tercek observed in a Salon interview last December. Tercek, who has worked in every new medium from cable to the Internet to wireless, believes that user-generated content will become an issue for major media companies. Individuals may spend less time consuming professionally produced product “because they’re busy making and exchanging their own content.”

The breakthrough for the user-generated content approach may not come in entertainment but in news. I’ve heard more than one savvy content entrepreneur say there’s money to be made in developing a news program where ordinary citizens contribute the stories, photos and videos. Tercek sees the day when millions own video-enabled cell phones and everyone has the potential to be an “electronic news gatherer. Episodes like the Rodney King incident will be ubiquitous,” he says. “The eyes of the world will be everywhere all the time.”

Whether that’s a good thing or not isn’t exactly clear. But there seems to be little question that, in the age of the Net, the user — not the content — is king.

Parsons is the captivating subject of a new biography called “Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons,” published by quirky Feral House, which bills itself as the “publisher that refuses to be domesticated.” (The author is listed as John Carter, although Feral says Carter is the pseudonym of a writer who has withheld his name so as not to jeopardize his job.) It’s not the most artfully written book, but the story is so fascinating it transcends the author’s rather pedestrian style. And, unlike the many accounts of Parsons’ life you can find online, “Sex and Rockets” provides a fairly objective telling of the story that seems to have intrigued many an occultist writer.

The stuff of myth since his death in a mysterious laboratory explosion in 1952, the darkly handsome Parsons is sometimes referred to as the “James Dean” of American rocketry. His innovations in solid and liquid rocket fuel during the 1930s and ’40s responded to the challenges of the era: developing a fuel source that would burn long enough and with sufficient thrust to reach outer space. And his successes propelled rocketry forward; America’s space program owes much to Parsons’ rocket design and innovations — and in 1972 the International Astronomical Union honored him by naming Parson’s Crater on the dark side of the moon. After co-founding the JPL — which his admirers referred to as “Jack Parsons’ Laboratory” — Parsons started Aerojet Corp., now the world’s largest rocket producer and manufacturer of solid-fuel boosters for space shuttles.

But while his peers considered him one of the top rocket scientists, “Carter’s” biography suggests that Parsons’ contribution to American rocketry was overshadowed by the professionally questionable intrigues of Parsons’ life: He messed with the Enochian Tablets (a magical alphabet) and took part in bizarre rituals involving menstrual blood and masturbation. Not surprisingly, Carter implies in his plain but serviceable prose, Parsons’ professional reputation suffered — and yet, he was something of a failure as a worshipper of the occult. After joining a young L. Ron Hubbard in an exotic attempt to communicate with the whore of Babylon and being hand-picked to succeed Crowley as a leader of the quasi-Masonic organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis, Parsons never managed to engage his own group of followers.

Carter makes a laudable effort to assess Parsons and his contribution to the worlds of technology and Gnosticism as he addresses the question: Was Jack Parsons a New Age revolutionary and prophet or simply a Southern California crackpot?

Parsons, born in 1914, grew up on Orange Grove Avenue, known as Millionaire’s Row in Pasadena, Calif. His father deserted the family early on and Parsons had a lonely childhood, during which Carter says he nurtured an Oedipal attachment to his mother Ruth. He grew up abhorring all forms of authority and developed an early hatred of Christianity. He claimed that he invoked Satan at the age of 13, only to cower in fear when the big red guy appeared.

Carter rightly devotes much of the 229-page book to Parsons’ career as a rocket scientist. Parsons attended Pasadena City College in the early ’30s with his friend Ed Forman, although he never graduated. The two young men shared a fascination with rocketry and shared test results with American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Parsons and Forman soon joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. GALCIT, as it was known, was under the direction of Hungarian-born scientist and rocketry giant Theodore von Karman (1881-1963). Von Karman would later write that Parsons was one of the three most important figures in American rocketry.

Parsons, Forman and their GALCIT colleagues Frank Malina, Rudolph Schott and Arno Smith conducted a famous test firing on Halloween 1936 in the nearby Arroyo Seco Canyon that marked the birth of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A photograph showing the men in a sandy pit preparing for the liquid fuel rocket test was used to construct a “nativity scene” — a reconstruction of the scene using figurines in the likeness of the scientists — for the JPL’s 50th anniversary.

Just a few years later Parsons was instrumental in developing jet-assisted take-off (JATO) rockets for military aircraft. In the early years of World War II, these rockets were used to reduce by more than 30 percent the distance required to get military aircraft off the ground. Parsons and other GALCIT team members used the JATO breakthrough and the ensuing military contracts to start AeroJet Corp. — where Parsons came to regularly invoke the spirit of Pan before test-firings. By the end of the war, Parsons sold his interest in AeroJet to General Tire.

Flush with funds, he immersed himself in the philosophy of his mentor, English occultist Crowley –the bald guy in the back row on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. The latter chapters of Carter’s book jump back and forth from the arcana of solid propellants and rocketry design to the esoterica of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the “quasi-Masonic” organization that Crowley headed, and the infamous 1946 ritual known as the “Babalon [sic] Working.”

Parsons’ partners in the metaphysical “Babalon” adventure were his ex-wife’s sister, Betty, and a pre-Dianetics Hubbard. Hubbard, later discharged from the Navy on medical grounds, assisted Parsons as a “scribe” during a “sex magick” ceremony in which the “whore of Babylon” was invoked to attract an “elemental” with whom Parsons could conceive a “moonchild” to usher in a new age.

Carter’s description is based on incomplete records, but it seems that the ceremony involved annointing objects with menstrual blood, invoking spells and incantations, and Parsons’ act of masturbating (using his “magic wand”). The “elemental” arrived soon after in the form of a woman named Marjorie Cameron, who would later become Parsons’ second wife and an underground figure in her own right.

Parsons and Cameron were unable to conceive a “moonchild” — or any children at all, and Parsons’ remaining years were a rapid descent into chaos and failure. Hubbard, who later founded the Church of Scientology, absconded to Miami with Betty and most of Parsons’ money, which they apparently used to buy a boat. Parsons pursued the pair only to find that Hubbard had already set sail.

Here Carter’s narrative slips into high comedy. Parsons returned to his hotel room and “consecrated a circle.” As he described it in a letter to Crowley: “Hubbard attempted to escape me by sailing at 5 p.m., and I performed a full invocation to Bartzabel [a form of Mars] within the Circle at 8 p.m. At the same time … his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port …”

Flat broke, tormented by what he saw as his failure as a magus, Parsons’ occult activities caught up with him in the late ’40s. He was investigated by the FBI and local authorities for establishing a “sex cult” and lost his government security clearance as a consequence. At one point the co-founder of JPL was reduced to working in a gas station. Eventually, he found work as a consultant on explosives projects.

On June 17, 1952, Parsons was preparing for a trip to Mexico when he was killed in a powerful explosion in his laboratory in Pasadena — also on Orange Grove Avenue, not far from where he grew up. He was known as being a very meticulous chemist and yet there were some very unstable chemicals found in a trash can at his lab. His fiery death is fuel for conspiracy theorists to this day, though the generally sympathetic Carter concludes the explosion was probably accidental.

Carter does report the unconfirmed rumor that investigators later discovered films of Parsons “exteriorizing” his Oedipal fixation — having sex with his mother. But no one has been able to resolve the question, as Parsons’ mother committed suicide within hours of hearing of her son’s death.

Carter leaves the gossipmongers to make what they will of Parsons’ life; his own conclusions are neatly summed up: “Historians of rocketry and the space program seem to have underestimated [Parsons'] contributions to the field [of rocketry],” Carter writes, “while writers on the occult have romanticized him as some sort of great sorcerer.” Carter has spent a good half of the book detailing Parsons’ pioneering years as a rocket scientist and seems to be intent on bringing some balance to Parsons’ sometimes overlooked contributions to American rocketry. So it is not surprising to read his assessment of Parsons’ occult practices: “As a magician,” Carter writes, Parsons “was essentially a failure.”

Regardless of where your sympathies lie, however, the book — thanks to its fantastically esoteric protagonist — is a success.

PacketVideo was formed last year by James Carol and James Brailean with investments from Siemens and Intel. The plan is to market technologies that allow content providers to stream video and other rich media to cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless mobile devices. The San Diego startup, which holds six video-compression patents, recently collaborated with Sony to deliver movie trailers to cell phones at 14.4 kbps wireless network speeds.

Tercek’s move to PacketVideo is in keeping with a career that has evolved with the technology. He has toiled in a succession of emerging digital platforms in the ’90s. He began the decade in cable as director of on-air promotions for MTV, then rode the CD-ROM wave as a founder of a company called 7th Level. (“Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time” was a hit title.) By the mid-’90s, Tercek had migrated to the Web, creating the webisodic “Candidate 96″ for TCI and later guiding the development of online games as vice president of online programming at Columbia Tri-Star Interactive.

Elevated to senior vice president for Digital Media last year, the peripatetic and perpetually jetlagged Tercek has logged tens of thousands of miles keeping up with ITV developments in Europe and Asia. Tercek assumed the daunting task of setting up Sony’s interactive TV production unit and formulating the studio’s broadband strategy. He introduced ITV versions of “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” for WebTV this September.

Tall, angular and cerebral, Tercek has a reputation as a provocateur at industry forums. In a now infamous sting before an industry crowd last September, he told Digital Entertainment Network CEO David Neuman that his company’s business model was the equivalent of “burning hundred dollar bills on the corner of Fairfax and Sunset.”

With the move to PacketVideo, Tercek enters the undefined world of wireless content delivery. “Mobility,” he says, employing his favorite epithet, will be “huge.”

Why are you leaving your studio job to get into the wireless video business?

Choice and convenience have been a part of all the programming I’ve worked on. In my career I went from cable to satellite to the Internet, and more recently broadband and interactive television. Network television gave you three choices — CBS, NBC and ABC. For a price, cable gave you more choice. For more complicated pricing, satellite gave you even more choice. With the Internet, you don’t just get unlimited choice but convenience. Wireless will give you not just the choices of the Internet — and eventually cable and satellite — but the ability to decide when, where and how to consume all this content. To me, this is what this progression of platforms has been leading up to.

Your cell phone will become a player for all sorts of streaming media. A cell phone should be an MP3 player, a radio, a PC. It’ll be a super-flexible device that can do everything. The telephony sphere is growing geometrically. The population of cell phones to PCs is about even now, but the growth curve for cell phones is much faster.

I don’t want to sound hopelessly optimistic. I look at this as taking a couple years to roll out, not a couple months.

What are the obstacles to rolling all this out?

Wireless networks have to be upgraded. That gets solved over time. The upgrades are underway in Europe and Japan already, and that’s going to put pressure on the U.S. to upgrade their networks as well. The U.S. is the big beneficiary here. Because our cellular infrastructure is not as advanced as in some other countries, we’ll get the stuff that has been tested and proven in other markets.

Another obstacle is convincing content providers that there is a future in wireless multimedia. The challenge is getting those providers to sign up with us before there are huge numbers of subscribers for those services.

What are the attributes of the cell phone as a content medium?

The key attribute of mobile wireless is that you can take it with you. It’s that old Marshall McLuhan saw — the medium is the message. How we communicate affects what we communicate. When video becomes mobile, it’s going to be a lot more active, highly under the control of users and purposeful. It’s going to be the opposite of the sitting-in-the-living-room experience. If you’re going to program for people with the mobile mindset, you’ve got to think interactive.

What kind of applications do you see in the next couple years? Will people be watching movies and TV shows on their cell phones and PDAs?

That may not be the first thing we do. The story of the Web has been utility and convenience. There’s nothing more convenient than a mobile phone. What are the kinds of video that would help when you are on the go? Imagine a device that is smart enough to know when you are in a new city, so it gives you a video city tour to orient you to the place.

Another example: I’m at the San Jose airport where my flight is delayed. What am I missing on television tonight? I click “What’s on TV tonight” on my wireless PDA and start getting promos for the evening lineup of TV shows. Let’s say there’s an episode of “Dawson’s Creek” I really want to record. I click the TiVo button at the bottom of the screen. It sends a message back through the network to my TiVo box at home and instructs it to record that episode. That’s a huge application.

Let’s say you’re driving around town with some friends. One says, “Let’s see a movie. What’s on?” You click on “movies” and a full color movie trailer pops up for a film like “The Cider House Rules.” You click on “Show me a theater.” Because it’s wireless, we kind of know where you are by triangulating between towers. We can give you the local theaters and even a map that shows you where the theaters are located — and a button that allows you to purchase a ticket.

It’s bundles of tightly integrated services like that that could be incredibly useful to people. That’s the way life should be.

What is the “secret sauce” in PacketVideo’s core technology?

The whole trick to PacketVideo’s technology is that it’s scalable mpeg 4. It happens to be optimized for delivery over wireless networks, but you could deliver it over terrestrial networks as well. What “scalable mpeg 4″ means is you’re encoding once. That’s very different from the way video is encoded today, where you have to code separately for 14.4, 28.8 and on up to super broadband speeds. When consumers go to a video site today they have to click on their connection speed. It’s kind of crazy to expect people to know what their connection speed is. PacketVideo removes the need to do that.

Why should the cell phone be an all-purpose device? Are people really going to be able to use all that functionality on the run?

Data storage is an issue for PDAs today. Even with miniaturization, storage takes up space. People worry about losing their PDAs and the data they contain. Well, the right thing to do is leave all that data on a server. You don’t need to carry the data, just access to the data.

Blue Tooth is a wireless protocol for devices to talk to each other in a localized area without plugs. Imagine I’m coming to your office to do a Power Point presentation. I don’t bring my computer. Instead I bring a Blue Tooth-enabled cell phone. Let’s say I need to make a change in the presentation. My Blue Tooth-enabled phone talks to the Blue Tooth-enabled keyboard in your office and brings up my presentation on your Blue Tooth-enabled monitor. I can use that keyboard to make changes, which are keyed to my phone and delivered to the server where the data is stored. That means you have all the functionality of a computer without having to carry all that crap around. What you’re going to have is a world where you don’t need to have a personal computer anymore.

You’ve worked in Hollywood for years. Has the entertainment industry really come to terms with the Internet?

The Internet disrupts a lot of old businesses. It doesn’t do away with them, but it changes them. MP3 has changed the way the recording industry works. Amazon has changed the way books are bought and sold. A lot of people in the TV business think they’re immune to that trend. Not only is it crazy to think you are immune, but to survive you’ve got to embrace the inevitability that the Internet will overwhelm the TV business.

What the Web does is call into question the need for programming for mass audiences. It’s going to put that notion, which has been the bedrock assumption of TV for the last 50 years, under question.

There’s a big reaction among consumers against packaged, slick and promoted content targeted at an audience. People have an instinctive reaction against that stuff now. They are looking for something raw, unadorned, original and not as slickly produced.

What the Web is really great at is self-expression and connecting like-minded people. So the issue for media companies is that a multitude of individuals are springing up who don’t necessarily need to consume those old products because they’re busy making and exchanging their own content.

You talk a lot about turning the cell phone into a “video walkie-talkie.” But that sounds a lot like the picture phone. People have been talking about picture phones for over 35 years but the idea has never caught on with the public.

There are all kinds of reasons why a picture phone doesn’t make sense. Like video conferencing — you have to go over to a part of your house that is set up for it. There’s nothing convenient about that. What we’re talking about here is a mobile device with a video option.

According to Bloomberg News, there may be a billion cell phones on the planet by 2003. What would be the implications if everyone had a “video walkie-talkie”?

If everyone gets a video walkie-talkie, then everyone will be a potential electronic news gatherer. Episodes like the Rodney King incident will be ubiquitous. The eyes of the world will be everywhere all the time. We didn’t have a good picture of what was happening in East Timor recently because there wasn’t a good way for people to get the images out.

It sounds like there may be geopolitical implications if this kind of technology actually catches on.

There’s an old phrase — out of sight, out of mind. There’s no question that improving communications has a geopolitical impact. This is a deeply empowering technology for people. Instead of getting the processed, programmed point of view, you’ll be able to upload your own point of view.

Getting back to Hollywood, what other ways will digital networked technology change the entertainment industry?

TV content is dumb — not as content, but as data. It’s not self-aware, interactive, indexed, searchable or dynamic. Once a program is on tape it becomes fixed media, like shrink-wrapped games for computers. The problem with products like that in a networked economy is that they become commoditized. Video libraries are destined for commodization. What every program provider needs to work on is how to add layers of service, content and information on top of that fixed linear programming.

Let’s imagine a world where sports programming is encoded live and indexed for all key plays. One index may be how loud the audience cheers. Let’s say that PacketVideo has a deal with a video provider to deliver sports highlights to mobile wireless customers. Imagine a busy traveling businessman who loves sports and signs up for this program. He doesn’t have a lot of free time and he’s stuck at the airport. He wants sports video but only wants to see the big plays. He says “Sports. Football highlights” into his cell phone — I’m convinced we’ll have speech to text recognition on these things. The command goes back through the server and scans all the indexed sports footage for the past weekend and brings up the big plays. That service is one way to take linear video content, repackage it and make it valuable enough for someone to pay a subscription for it.

What is the ultimate wireless vision?

Imagine a world where processors are embedded in everything, wireless bandwidth is abundant and flat and flexible screens are available. That will be a world where video images are as ubiquitous as paper is today. Everywhere you see a poster, sign or ad, imagine a video screen in its place. It will be a world aglow in constant activity and fabulous images, communicating relevant information. Take a billboard on a bus. As a bus moves through different parts of town, the ads will change depending on the time of day, the part of town and traffic conditions. During rush hour that ad space will be more valuable to advertisers than at other times.

Aren’t people already suffering from information and sensory overload?

We haven’t seen anything yet. The fun thing about traveling overseas is coming home and realizing how saturated we are with media in the U.S. You begin to think you’ve reached your limit and can’t absorb another video image. Well, you can always absorb another video image. We’re going to be awash in a rich media stew.

Last July, Burgess’ company launched Shockwave.com, a Web entertainment hub featuring animated games and cartoons like Comedy Central’s “South Park,” Showtime’s “WhirlGirl,” and — in an exclusive deal signed last week — Spiderman creator Stan Lee’s Seventh Portal. Shockwave.com has quickly become one of the most popular game and animation sites around; it averages 2.1 million page views per day and registered over 5 million visitors in its first three months.

Burgess took on the CEO role at Macromedia in late 1996, after a stint as a senior executive at Silicon Graphics. He quickly laid off 10 percent of the workforce, revamped Macromedia Director for the Web, and introduced new Web products like Flash, a vector-graphics based tool that delivers high quality animation over slow Web connections. Flash and the company’s popular Shockwave plug-in are key to the current explosion in online entertainment of which Shockwave.com is a part.

Burgess races through long work days as if he were born with an extra set of adrenal glands. A star track and field athlete (he ran a 5-minute, 30-second mile at age 11) and life-long hockey fanatic, he wooed his wife by offering to take her to the Galapagos islands — on their second date. He once stole the show at Silicon Graphics’ annual lip-sync contest by dressing like Annie Lennox in black leather pants, red bra and a spikey blonde wig — belting out “Would I Lie To You” to much applause. Shockwave.com’s interim CEO, Burgess may have a bit of Hollywood in his blood after all.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley have had a terrible track record for working together, suffering one “convergence collision” after another. Why?

Silicon Valley and Hollywood are totally different in the ways that their businesses are structured, deals put together, language, values — everything. In Silicon Valley, the venture capitalists are creating this new economy. Down in Hollywood, it’s the lawyers and the [talent] managers. In Silicon Valley, the talent is the engineers, while in Hollywood it’s the actors. In the valley, if you have an idea for a business, you put a business plan together. In Hollywood, you put together scripts, actors and combinations of people for a show, then see how much you can sell the package for. I think that’s the reason why there are so few deals between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both sides come together, and each side knows they are making sense in their respective worlds. But they aren’t making sense to each other.

Brad Grey of [the Hollywood management/production company] Brillstein/Grey said something very interesting to me recently. We were talking about the huge differences in culture and language between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Toward the end of the meeting he looked at me with a big smile on his face and in good humor said, “You know Rob, you can’t imagine the rage among the members of the Hollywood community.” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “we [in Hollywood] are used to being the overpaid guys. Now you Silicon Valley types are the ones who are ridiculously overpaid.”

We are in the midst of the Web’s second great flirtation with entertainment. The first involved industry players like AOL and Microsoft, who were unable to aggregate large enough audiences or make enough money to make their Web entertainment efforts worthwhile for them. Why has entertainment been such a tough business on the Web? What’s different this time?

The Internet has not had the kind of playback capabilities needed to create a rich entertainment experience. Everybody wants music, but nobody wants shitty sounding music. Everyone wants to see cartoons or games, but nobody wants to wait a week to get them. Nobody wants video that looks like a cheesy little security video. What’s different now is that new technologies like Flash and MP3 can deliver a broadband experience over today’s Web. The fidelity of a Flash cartoon now rivals cartoons you might see on television. Add the fact that — according to NPD, the parent company of Media Metrix — there are now 190 million Flash players and 100 million Shockwave players out there.

So now we’ve got the reach in terms of audience. The technology allows artists to express themselves effectively. Now we’re galvanizing the writing — getting the best storytellers of our day to focus on this new medium. We’ve just done a huge deal with StanLee Media. Seventh Portal and a bunch of other Stan Lee series are going to be coming out exclusively on Shockwave.com. We’ve made an investment in StanLee Media as well. There’ll be a lot more deals like that happening.

The main selling point for Flash is that it allows you to download richer animation through slow Internet connections. But isn’t Flash just an interim technology? What happens to Flash when broadband is more ubiquitous?

Oh, Flash can use as much bandwidth as becomes available. What we can do today with current slow connections is more simple animation — the kind of stuff you see on Saturday morning cartoons on television. But we can’t do “The Lion King.” That requires so much more fidelity and bandwidth. I often say there are just two uses of broadband: Transferring big files and multimedia. So with greater bandwidth the programming will get richer and richer.

What is Macromedia’s broadband strategy? What kind of tools will we need in a broadband environment?

We’re always looking two or three years out, speculating about what kinds of connections people will have, and building tools in anticipation of that. There’ll be much more video, much better audio, and you won’t have to be so concerned about the initial download time. When you watch Ted Koppel, you don’t want to download ABC. There’ll be passive delivery techniques so that you won’t be so burdened by the weight of a piece of software. It’ll all happen silently, so you’ll only be concerned about the programming instead of doing back flips to see it.

Last month Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, Ron Howard’s Imagine Media and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures announced formation of Pop.com, a Web entertainment company that will offer short films, animation, games and other interactive fare. What are the implications for the online entertainment space — and Shockwave.com?

I was down in L.A. when Pop.com happened. Everybody is looking for a dance partner. I think there’s going to be a whole bunch of companies like Pop.com. Anyone who is doing animation and games will be using our products — Shockwave and Flash. It’s been building and building. Pop.com was one of those announcements where people say, “Jesus, online entertainment is not going to happen — it is happening!”

What will be the role of the Hollywood studios in the online entertainment space? Are they your main competitors?

The studios are masters at figuring out how to entertain people. It’ll be “co-opetition” with those folks. I see a lot of things we’re doing technologically as being of a lot of value to the studios. They’re going to want to harness some of the technology we’re building. There are lots of opportunities for both collaboration and lots of places where we’ll be competing — for the artists and the audiences.

It used to be that the networks and studios were the only companies with the capital and the eyeballs. That’s not true anymore. What we’re creating here at Shockwave.com is the United Artists of the Web. We provide artists with eyeballs, capital, promotion and an e-commerce infrastructure. We have a business model that allows them to keep creative control and have long term financial participation in their creations.

Why did you set up Shockwave.com as a separate company apart from Macromedia?

Macromedia and Shockwave.com are completely different businesses that have different cultures and customers, and require staffs with different skill sets. A software company like Macromedia sells software to developers, while an entertainment company like Shockwave.com tries to entertain consumers. The two are also at different stages in their respective development. Macromedia is a functioning, public company that is on a steep growth curve and spitting out lots of profits. Shockwave.com is an Internet entertainment startup, so we anticipate several quarters of losses as we invest for the future. Macromedia’s operating income last quarter was 19 percent, but if you separate the two businesses, operating income for Macromedia rises to 27 percent. Separating the businesses makes the performance of each company clearer. Macromedia is even more profitable than people think, and the split gives more visibility to Shockwave.com’s business model, which is more like that of MP3.com.

Spinning off Internet businesses seems to be a popular strategy these days. We’ve heard about the advantages — Internet-style valuations, using equity to attract and keep talent. What are the pitfalls?

It’s very difficult for companies to actually spin off their Web sites if those Web sites are fundamentally in the same business as the parent company. If you look at a brick-and-mortar company that sells toys and the Web business that is spinning off also sells toys, it’s really hard. There are channel conflicts and both businesses are chasing after the same customers. With media companies you’ve got cannibalization issues, cultural issues — a lot of issues. Hats off to them for trying, but it’s a much more difficult corporate re-engineering.

In our case, the spin-off is easy and natural. Macromedia sells software. Our objective was to populate all the browsers with Shockwave and Flash content so we could sell more software. Those products just happened to really take off. Shockwave.com became an outstanding business opportunity that could not be overlooked. We’re an accidental entertainment company.

Macromedia’s Director still commands market share as a Web animation suite. But Director was originally designed for CD-ROM and video games, not for the Web. Some believe that Director may be vulnerable to a competitor coming in with a better product and that Macromedia needs to come up with a new high-end multi-media studio for the Web. What do you say to that?

While Director wasn’t originally designed for the Web, it has been substantially updated. Usually when you ship a new version of software, sales are large in the first and second quarters. By the third quarter a lot of people have the product and sales start to drop off. The third quarter for the current version of Director, on the other hand, has been the biggest quarter in the whole cycle. Director has been the market leader for many years. The barriers to entry for a competitor are very high. There are 100 million copies of Shockwave running out there on Windows, Apple, I/E, Netscape, all these different environments — and getting them all to run is no small feat. Our developer community is now over a million strong. There may be some product that comes along to compete with Director, but there are none now.

Have you ever visited Tom Winkler’s scatological Flash animated cult site, Doodie.com?

I haven’t really … [turns to his PC and types in the URL] … At a Macromedia/Shockwave.com all-hands meeting recently one of the engineers asked where we would draw the line on content. I asked people to put up their hands if they had seen the “South Park” movie. Almost every hand went up. “We’re not going to do porno,” I said, “and we’re not going to do gambling. But we are probably going to do filthy humor.” The place erupted into applause. [A Flash cartoon called "Shit n' Spin" downloads on Burgess' screen. A defecating naked man wearing ice skates spins like a top, poop flying in all directions.] Holy Mackerel! … Well, you know, people love Joe Cartoon’s “Frog In A Blender”!