SALON

Susan Kuchinskas

Monday, Dec 6, 1999 5:00 PM UTC

Prime time online

Jim Moloshok just launched the multimillion-dollar Entertaindom portal. Can he create the successor to network TV?

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Jim Moloshok sits comfortably astride what may be the Web’s next big thing — or what could be the latest in its history of costly entertainment bombs. Entertaindom, Time Warner’s multimillion-dollar entertainment hub launched last week, is the culmination of two years’ hard work by the 50-year-old president of Warner Bros. Online and a crew of 100.

Moloshok’s easy-going manner and affable story-telling ways evidence no fear of failure; instead, he conveys a contagious excitement about the project at hand. Moloshok wants to be the first to use the Web to give prime-time TV a run for its money. So, in addition to the usual entertainment portal fare — a jukebox, movie clips and news from Entertainment Weekly — he has commissioned original animated “Webisodes” for Entertaindom. Probably the edgiest of the original content is The God & Devil Show, an animated talk show hosted by that eponymous couple, created by Mondo Media. It features caricatures of celebrities — starting with Keith Richards; after an interview, fans can send the celeb to heaven or hell; they can also listen to the Devil’s answering machine message or ask God a question. The site also streams shorts of cartoon classics like “Marvin the Martian” and full-length original Looney Tunes cartoons that have been digitized.

Of course, creating original entertainment for the Web is a concept that’s had more than one high-profile failure (both MSN and America Online pulled the plug on their attempts at original programming several years ago), but Moloshok believes he’s the guy to make it work. These days a number of competitors, including Macromedia’s Rob Burgess, are singing the same tune. But Moloshok’s got a track record in the entertainment world; he started as a camera operator in high school and worked his way up to television director and then studio executive. If he succeeds with the latest venture, it will be because his marketing chops are as strong as his creative ones.

The movie bug caught Moloshok early — he produced and directed his first short film when he was 15. After several stints in television production, he moved to the marketing side. In an industry noted for job-hopping, he stayed in one place and let his employer grow up around him; and when TV distributor Telepictures, where he worked in marketing, merged with Lorimar, he became vice president of marketing — then stuck around until Warner Bros. acquired Lorimar in 1989.

The kind of guy who always has a computer stashed in the corner of the bedroom, Moloshok persuaded Warner Bros. to let him promote some of its shows online. As senior vice-president of marketing, he helped launch the Warner Bros. Studio Store online, the official “Friends” fan community, and “The People’s Court” site, which was the first TV show Web site to stream live episodes. To combat content piracy and the unauthorized use online of studio assets, he helped create AcmeCity, a community site that lets fans decorate their personal home pages with images of their favorite WB characters and personalities; it boasts 750,000 registered users.

Despite his gee-whiz attitude toward the Web, Moloshok is careful to back up techno tricks with a solid business plan. Banner ads on AcmeCity sell for as much as $65 per thousand impressions, while the industry average lurks down around $10.

Still a geek and fan himself, Moloshok eats in his own restaurant, as the saying goes. “I work here, then go home and surf the Internet.”

Original entertainment on the Web has been many people’s dream since the Web began. But it has failed over and over. What makes you think it will work this time?

People who are coming on now are buying computers because they see it not as an information retrieval device but as an entertaining experience. A lot of analysts say, “This is what’s always worked, therefore something else won’t work.” No one said, “We need a music video” [yet look at the success of MTV]. It may be that the “experts” don’t recognize that there’s already a marketplace.

Most of the content on Entertaindom requires plug-ins — not only the fairly ubiquitous Flash but the Digital Projector from Brilliant Digital Entertainment and the Player by Pulse. Consumer confusion and distrust of plug-ins from little-known companies has killed other creative Web plays, for example, VRML. Why do you think users will be willing to do the downloads this time?

Even the Pulse Player is only 240K; a 56K modem can download that in a minute to a minute and a half. Brilliant’s Projector is only 100k, a third the size of Real Networks’ smallest player. Besides, I think the fear is going away, just like the fear of credit card [payments online] is going away. People already love “Superman” or “Loony Tunes.” To watch “Superman” in 3D you have to make an effort. There are enough people who are loyal to [such shows] who will do it.

What are the stakes for you with Entertaindom? Does Time Warner look at this as R&D, or do you have traffic and revenue goals you need to meet?

Anytime anybody sets up a business on the Internet, a little percentage of it has to be R&D. However, from day one, Entertaindom was set up as a business on the Web. We have a large collection of advertisers, we already have 25 or 30 percent of our first year’s ad inventory sold, signed and collectible. That’s a nice nut to start with. The decision to greenlight the project was based on it being a good business for Time Warner.

The launch of Entertaindom has been put off several times; the most recent delay had to do with Time Warner’s decision to move Entertaindom out of the Warner Bros. Online purview directly into its aegis. How did that change things?

[Time Warner, Inc. chairman and CEO] Gerry Levin asked me, “What if you had access to the whole world of Time Warner?” So we stopped, retooled using other programming and content that became available to us, and spent the next couple of months building the infrastructure that would allow us to auto-publish Entertainment Weekly into Entertaindom.

Time Warner had a spectacular failure with its early Web play, Pathfinder. Has it learned from its mistakes? Does it get the Web now?

There are few comparisons you can make between Pathfinder and us. For one thing, Pathfinder was Time, Inc., not Time Warner. Also, Pathfinder had great brands but from a marketing standpoint they weren’t using their strongest asset, People magazine. In marketing Entertaindom, we have brands people will come for.

You had been your own little fiefdom within Warner Bros. Has Richard Bressler, chairman and CEO of Time Warner Digital Media, been more hands-on?

The whole team, Bressler and Levin and Rob Marcus, [vice president of mergers and acquisitions), and Michael Pepe, [president and CEO of Time Digital Media], have been very involved. They’ve helped us by putting us in contact with the right people at a very high level, which we could never have done when we were just a division of Warner Bros. They haven’t been telling us what the content should be.

How did Time Warner feel about some of the edgier content, like “Ask God”?

They’re very supportive of the creative process. They have never ever asked us to change one bit of content, because they know we’re not putting things on for shock value but because it’s different, breakthrough and creative.

You’ve said you want to create a studio system on the Web. How would that work?

Entertaindom gives us new brands and assets — it creates a new funnel into the Time Warner distribution system. On the Web, we can create brand new franchises that we can then bring up through the distribution chain, turning them into animated TV shows or movies, or making licensing deals.

What’s your creative budget for next year?

Millions, in the seven figures. The budget is for programming that is being acquired, produced internally and produced with third-party producers. Of course, we also are spending significantly for advertising and promotion, and technology and development of new technologies, many of which have not yet premiered.

What kind of deals do you make with content providers?

Deals with content providers range from creating a concept ourselves and hiring them to produce it, to somebody who has a very creative idea coming to us and us financing it. Everybody wants to produce for us — independent producers, Hollywood directors and producers, agencies that represent some of the biggest stars. People don’t expect to be paid the same as they are in Hollywood. They understand that where we are now is like television in the 1940s and ’50s. The smart creative people realize there is going to be a big marketplace down the line.

Warner Bros. rival, Walt Disney Company, has not done well with its portal, Go Network. What mistakes of theirs will you avoid?

I can’t point to their mistakes, but to what we’re doing differently. Disney was a hugely successful company, then when they acquired ABC, they had some problems. Then they expanded elsewhere, expanded even more with the Web. It’s important for companies to focus on their core competencies. With Entertaindom, we’re not trying to be everything to everybody, not trying to be stock quotes, sports scores and whatever else comes along, we’re just focusing on what we know best, entertaining the mainstream.

What are your favorite things about Entertaindom?

Everyone always talks about how to use the Internet to place the correct ads in front of the consumer. We’re using the same personalization techniques to create a better experience for the consumer. If we find out, either through a cookie or site registration, what someone’s interests are, we’ve designed our infrastructure so we can percolate content up. We’re able to go in and custom publish the site for them.

You’ve accomplished a lot in the past two years. What’s next?

Building Entertaindom into the largest, most successful site that we can. We’re not here because we’re executives who have been hired to run a division, we’re here because we love the medium. When I was in high school, I used to watch old movies about the early days of radio and television and I always felt sad that I couldn’t have been a pioneer of the era of entertainment. Now, we have the opportunity of doing that in the online community, creating what could be the NBC or CBS or ABC of the future.

Monday, Nov 17, 1997 7:29 PM UTC

That's Ms. hippie chick to you

Women of the counterculture say that the real revolution wasn't in the streets, but in the bedroom.

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The Summer of Love was over, and for some, it was good riddance to
something that kept people’s attention off the real problem — ending the war
in Vietnam. The movement had kicked off 1967 with the nationwide
mobilization against the war and ushered in the fall with Stop the Draft
Week in Oakland. By winter, movement leaders were committed to
using whatever means necessary to stop the fighting.

To hear the male activists tell it today, the anti-war movement also brought
about women’s liberation. But the women tell a very different story.
They say that as radical politics tore up the streets, sexual politics heated up the kitchen.

Jahanara Romney remembers sitting in her converted school bus in front of
the Bureau of Land Management headquarters in Washington, D.C., that winter
while a posse of Native American protesters, led by Russell Means, was barricaded inside.

The Romneys had come to D.C. in a convoy with their communal family, the
Hog Farm, to take part in the demonstration. Every able-bodied Hog Farm man
was inside the B.L.M. Romney held her newborn baby in her arms. Beside her
lay her husband, Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy, immobilized
in a full-body cast after back surgery. When word went down that the
police were going to tear gas, Romney had to get them out of there. But she
didn’t know how to drive the bus.

When the Hog Farm went on the road, it was the men who tinkered with the
aging engines. The line was, “If you can’t repair ‘em, you can’t drive
‘em.”

“I had to go in through the barricades, convince Russell Means that I had a
life-threatening emergency, so he’d let me in to find a member of our
family who was in there, and get him to come out and start up the bus and drive it two blocks down the road,” recalls Romney, now co-director of a children’s performing arts camp in Northern California.

“I said, ‘This is never happening to me again.’ I decided to make this my
personal revolution.” Romney and some of the other women got books and taught
themselves to fix the buses. Then, they taught themselves to drive them.

Things got dicey when the hippie chicks became discontented with the freedoms assigned to them by their male counterparts. They wanted the kinds of freedoms that looked
like male privilege. The men loved the sexual equality part. After all, the more
women who felt free to have sex, the more sex there was for men.

“In the ’50s, it was, ‘Nice girls don’t screw,’” says Trina Robbins, a
San Francisco writer and illustrator. “In the ’60s, it was ‘Nice girls
don’t say no.’ If you said no, it meant you were frigid and, if the guy
wasn’t white, it meant you were prejudiced.”

“The ideal chick just had a good time. Whatever he did, she went along with
it. If he moved in, you took care of him, but you got nothing in return. If
he wanted to dump you, it was, ‘Well, babe, the road calls.’”

And while women were expected to comfort their men in bed, the favor was
frequently not returned.

“One of the myths [about the '60s] was that people were doing it all
the time,” says Margo Adler author of “Heretic’s Heart”
(Beacon Press, 1997), a book that recounts ’60s sexual experiences that were less than transcendental. “They weren’t — and when they did, they definitely weren’t doing it
well.”

Adler, who was a Berkeley student from 1964 to 1968, and an anti-war
activist, is now New York bureau chief for National Public Radio. She
writes, “In the Berkeley of the mid-sixties there was an extraordinary
amount of experimentation with sex and drugs, but that doesn’t mean that
love filled the streets. There was as much sadness, tension and anger as
there was love. Many of us were simply too young to love well.”

There was a similar ineptness about dealing with gender roles. Although
women were comrades in theory, in fact they usually were expected to handle
all the homemaking, just like their mothers. It was the women who cooked
the brown rice, tended the garden, made the candles, took care of the kids.

For two or three years, the Hog Farm lived in the hills outside Los
Angeles. Romney says, “We had a dart board with an arrow in the center.
Each day we’d spin it to see who would be in charge. We called it
‘Dancemaster of the Day.’ We all thought it was very far out.”

“But it was only the men’s names on the board. So another woman and I got
together, and — this is telling — our big deal was that we made a separate
one for Dancemistress. But it was for being in charge of the lesser chores,
cooking, taking phone messages. It wasn’t for quite a while that we decided
we were going to have one wheel.”

As a seamstress of such hip and outrageous clothes as jackets made from
American flags, Trina Robbins was “the ideal hippie chick.” Yet she found she
had to stop designing clothing, a traditionally feminine occupation, in order to get respect as a cartoonist. But when she entered the field, she got a rude awakening.

“I found myself in a field that was all guys and me,” Robbins says, “and I
discovered I wasn’t welcome. As long as I made clothes everything was cool,
but when I tried to do what they the men were doing, suddenly I was persona non
grata.”

Robbins was shut out of a major cartoon art show in New York, and
couldn’t penetrate the underground cartoonists’ network.

“They’d call each other up and say, ‘I’m doing a comic, do you want to be
in it?’ But they wouldn’t call me. At parties, they’d still introduce me as
a seamstress. I finally had to stop making clothes, so I could insist they
call me a cartoonist.”

Robbins retaliated by publishing the first all-women’s comic book, “It Ain’t
Me, Babe,” then helping to found the Wimmen’s Comix Collective.

Adler, too, was determined to emphasize her intellectual and political roles
instead of her sex, becoming “a left-wing nun in the Summer of Love.” Today, she
believes that the women’s liberation movement was not a part of, but rather
a reaction to, the radical politics of the ’60s.

“A lot of the women’s movement came specifically from how women were
treated in Students for a Democratic Society,” she insists.

As a reporter for the Boston Globe and a freelance journalist covering
counterculture for magazines such as Harper’s, Sara Davidson says she
saw herself as “a spy between the lines.” Now an author and television
producer in Santa Monica, Davidson agrees that “there was tremendous
hostility to women in the movement. [At political rallies], if a woman got
up to the microphone, people would yell, ‘Take her off the stage and fuck
her.’”

Davidson’s 1977 book, “Loose Change,” was reissued by University of
California Press this year. It’s a personal chronicle of the impact of the
anti-war movement and the counterculture on Davidson and two of her friends
who arrived at UC-Berkeley in 1960.

“The notion of women’s freedom was the last frontier,” Davidson says. “It
was resisted from top to bottom in society, by the straight world and just
as vigorously and adamantly by the counterculture.”

She believes, however, that it was the idealism and utopian goals of the
counterculture that allowed the women’s movement to flower.

“It was out of that spirit,” she says, “that women began looking at their
own lives. The ideal was a society where every human being would have
value, worth and equality, where every human being would have a voice. So
it was a natural outgrowth of that to ask, ‘Well, what about women?’”

Despite the fight, none of these women has the least regret for their
participation in the counterculture.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t have a lot of fun,” Davidson reminds us, “because
we did. There was a lot of dancing and playing and frolicking in the
woods — they were wonderful, heady and giddy days. A good time was had by
most.”

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