Fancast: Inside TV

Our conversation went a little something like this:

The TV commercial was incredible. Congratulations, first of all.

Well, thank you. It was a labor of love, and of course getting Brad [Beyer] to do the voiceover was just the icing on the cake. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to bring everything together.

What was your goal for the commercial? What specifically did you want to accomplish with it? Find the show a new home, or…?

We wanted to get people’s attention, especially people who kind of vaguely knew Jericho’s story or had heard something about it but thought, “Wow, I thought this was over. What’s this about?” The goal then was to draw you into this website, where you could get all this information about how you could write in and help. It was kind of a recruiting effort, a bit. To both grab people who were originally fans of the show, and people who maybe knew the story but thought it was over.

The last part of it, probably the most important part - it wasn’t necessarily directed this way - but we wanted to get the attention of the executives who are making the decisions about Jericho’s future.

The premise of Jericho is strong enough – that I wanted anyone flipping through channels, and they saw the beginning of this commercial to think it was maybe a new movie or something – 23 U.S. cities being attacked by nuclear bombs is a premise that really makes you sit up and say, “Whoa – when am I going to see this movie?” I didn’t want to set it up in the beginning as a television commercial for Jericho as much as I wanted it to feel like a trailer for an upcoming film. It was almost bait and switch.

Tell me about the blood, sweat and tears that went into the commercial. How long did it take, what kind of resources did you have to pull together?

For me, every piece I do starts first conceptually – I probably spent a good six hours or so just brainstorming what I wanted to say and writing the script. I always feel like if you have a bad script, it doesn’t matter what you do with the visuals.

Probably the biggest sources of pressure was that I was representing everyone in the fandom and had a lot of other people’s money behind what I was doing – so I was just looking for the right way to capture what the fans had done up to that point. I wanted to tell the story of the show – however you do that in thirty seconds, but I wanted to make sure it’s representative of all the fandom.

So the development of the script was the starting point. I posted it on the CBS boards for the fans to react to, got some good feedback, and then did a final draft. At that point, I wasn’t even really sure if the team was going to raise the money. I said it’s probably going to take about 30 hours to put this thing together. In the end, it wound up taking me about 80 hours to put together!

I have a production company, a small one, it’s just me and a business partner – our primary business is we create media for churches that use screens and projectors. Our company is called Midnight Oil Productions. That’s my bread and butter. This has just been a fun hobby on the side.

So how did things proceed after the money was in place?

Next was music. I kinda wanted a piece of music or two that would follow the drama of how the spot was going. I probably then spent 4-5 hours just working on the musical part of it.

So then with the script in hand, I thought “How am I going to capture 23 U.S. cities being annihilated by nuclear bombs?” I don’t know why I dug that hole for myself, but I did for some reason. First off, knowing the spot was going to run in L.A., I thought people in L.A. would recognize their own city better than people from other parts of the country. I thought if you’re going to have to blow a city up, it would make sense to blow up the city the ad is running in, just for that shock value.

It started out as a stock photo, and I just cut the stock photo up into pieces and used this technique called 2 ½ D animation – where you can just take a photo and cut it up into pieces and freeze it – it’s not actually 3-D animation. It’s kind of an interesting little process. That first shot actually took me about 25 or so hours. That was the most important thing. People are going to decide whether they want to watch any farther or not based on that one moment. I spent almost as much time on that one shot as I thought I was going to spend on the whole commercial.

I got it to one of the producers, Dan. I just had that one shot done. He said “What am I looking at?” I told him. He said, “You did that?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “That was better than the one we had on the show!” I said, Well, that’s very kind…I don’t know if that’s true, but…thank you for the compliment.”

That’s a huge compliment.

Yeah. That was really nice to offer that feedback. The second shot was also that 2 ½ D animation. What I was trying to do with the second shot was represent what we’ve done as a fandom. I did it more for the fans to recognize than the other people who would see the commercial. I tried to base that second shot with the road and the cloud off in the distance on what was happening with a fan-led Hollywood billboard campaign. And in the midst of all of this, I had no idea in the beginning that we were going to have any kind of voiceover.

Yeah – how did the voiceover, and Brad’s participation, come about?

I’ve done a lot of voiceover work and knew it would add about $750 to the budget. I just didn’t feel like it was going to be possible to pull that off. So initially I put the entire spot together so that you saw text instead of hear the voice, and although it was still pretty good, it was a lot to read. I was fearful that people wouldn’t really be able to keep up with it.

A contact of mine said, “Well, have you thought about Brad Beyer?” I hadn’t thought about anyone. So he said, “Let me see what I can do.” One day I picked up my phone and there’s a text message on it saying, “Brad said he’d do it.” Brad was out of town at the time, but I was told when he was back, he’d help out.

Quite a coup…..

Yeah. Then we had to deal with, “Well, how are we going to record it?” So we found another member of the Jericho family, the production sound mixer, a guy named Phil Palmer. Brad came back into town, we got Phil to do it - they were also working on Swingtown, which is filmed where Jericho used to be shot. Phil and Brad met up there on a lunch break, and they recorded it on a sound stage in a backroom which used to be Gracie’s Market. It was one of those kinds of things – it wasn’t done in some studio, it was done in downtown Jericho! He told me in an email, “You’d laugh if you knew where we recorded that.” And he posted that story in his blog. The fans got a real kick out of it.

I got to talk to Brad before they recorded and kind of walked through the script with him, told him what I was thinking with the various parts and what I was looking for from him on various things. The neatest thing about everyone involved is there is such a family atmosphere. Brad said, “Thank you – whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. I’m honored to be able to do this.” And I’m on the other end of the phone thinking, “It’s my honor to have you do anything associated with MY work!” – these are incredible people.

They recorded it, I got five different takes, they emailed them to me, I cut them up, mixed it, put it together, and that night – which I think was the 11th of June - we premiered it on the website….. with its bumps here and there.

And how’d that go? Big response from the fans, or…?

I think for that premiere based on the tracking stuff on the site, there were about 1700 people on the site to watch the premiere, and it’s kind of funny…I installed a chat room on the site, and there were so many people on it, it kept crashing the server where that chat software was hosted.

That’s a good problem to have though – so much interest. So the website was a companion to the spot?

In the beginning, the idea was just to run a TV spot. But soon the question was, “Where are we going to send people after that?” We can’t just say, “Jericho is great!” and that’d be it…. there had to be a point of entry.

There are various [groups and sites] within the fandom – I wasn’t comfortable sending people to one place over another. So I decided to create a central website that has links to everyone everywhere. We could host the postcards and those kinds of things there too. So I set out to create an accompanying website for the spot, which was also a much bigger project than I ever could have imagined. I don't really do web authoring, so I begged, borrowed and stole from my friends who weren’t really Jericho fans but were willing to help me get that up and running.

What I’ve tried to do with the website is produce new content on an ongoing basis and provide interaction with those behind the show - Brad just posted something the other day. The goal is that when somebody influential comes to the site, when they get to the site, they’ll see there’s all this activity around the show. I just really wanted to create an environment where people can have all the information about Jericho right there at their fingertips and if they dig a little bit deeper they’ll see all the excitement [over the show] is still there burning amongst the fans. So if someone does decide to pick it up and run with it, be it in television or a movie or whatever they’re going to do, there’s a kickstart – they’ll know they have an audience ready and waiting to support them.

Have you done this sort of thing before? Get involved with a TV show to this degree, been involved with a campaign…?

I was pretty involved in the writers strike, with supporting the writers….there was a site called www.unitedhollywood.com . I did some writing for them and I produced some video pieces, one to support the Jericho writers and one was more general. Which got picked up by Wired…..

Carol Barbee emailed me directly after I did that video - I was bringing some attention to the show, and so I think that’s how some of those relationships got started. But in general, I’m not a boycotter – I’ve never been involved in something like this before. I didn’t really set out to make videos and do a campaign – I just wanted the show back.

Do you think that this can have an impact on Nielsen and the television industry?

Part of why I got involved a year ago in the campaign to save Jericho the first time was that I felt like we had been screwed over by the system. For one, CBS just made a lot of mistakes.

The show was a hit, it was going well, and then they did the big hiatus thing. The thing was, nothing was said about Jericho over the course of that hiatus. None of us were the fans we are now. I thought the show was over. When it came back on, the first episode or two, I didn’t even watch because I thought the show was over. And then I got interested again. But the viewership dropped from 10 or 11 million viewers to like 8 million viewers. When it got cancelled, I thought, “I want to hear the rest of the story. It’s such a great story.”

Once you started seeing the amount of interest out there on the web for the show, and the way it was being viewed and downloaded – plus the fact that the fans raised the money to send nuts and that sort of thing - to me told a story that said that CBS hasn’t really stepped into the new world yet. Nielsen obviously doesn’t tell the whole story. With the technology that we have in our homes now, with DVR and – if I have a problem with my cable, I call Time Warner, they flip a switch and my box goes off and on again. They’re in all our homes….

But Nielsen isn’t…..

Right, and from what I understand, there are like 5,000 Nielsen boxes that determine what every person in this country gets to watch and that just seems grossly unfair. It’s not a true representation of how we view television now.

Even more than that, the thing about when Jericho returned, every week that Jericho was on, for that week, Jericho would have the number one spot on iTunes. It would usually be in the top five on Amazon.com, and we were watching the Tivo numbers - it was always in the top 15 shows on television……….yet Nielsen was indicating we were a failure.

Why do we have to go by numbers from a system that was devised before the internet was even a thought in someone’s mind? I think that’s why we’re fighting. Some are fighting just to get Jericho back. But I think some of us – and I fall into this group – are fighting to change how decisions are made in the television industry.

And where did CBS stand in all of this?

The funny thing about is that Jericho was a successful failure for CBS. They said in the beginning they wanted to experiment with online content and they wanted to experiment with community building. It worked, they built a community, but then they wanted to cut the thing’s head off, and the community said, “No way.” Had it not been cancelled and had the hiatus not then happened, I think they would be touting the success of the Jericho and the online experience in ways that they will never see, I think.

So many of the original Jericho team, on the production side – the producers, writers, cast – are still on board if Jericho is resurrected, as far as you know?

Carol [Barbee] is so incredible. What amazes me is all these people are so talented - talented enough to move on and never think about Jericho again. Carol is the show runner for Swingtown. And the writers and cast - they all have other things going but they’re all still having meetings about Jericho and trying to get Jericho back on the air. There’s just something about this that connected people.

I don’t know if you saw [producer] Job Turteltaub’s comments on the boards after he saw the spot. He said ‘ We’re a cynical business out here, but this is unlike anything we’ve done in our careers and that’s why we want to keep fighting for it - as a result of what’s happened.”

How do you find time to do anything in your spare time besides breathe? You’ve got a fulltime job, you’ve got a family, and then to have put all this time into the commercial and website….

So many people are behind this campaign. Not just me. What’s so great about Julie Horton, for example – as part of this Save Jericho Again ad team, she’s handled a lot of the details that I don’t have time to mess with. Julie has been out there getting the press releases out, dealing with requests for interviews and other web related administrative stuff. In addition to her, Barney Murphree (who came up with the idea for a TV ad in the first place) did an amazing job getting Time Warner to give us unbelievable rates on the ad time. They were so good, we weren’t allowed to publish them! Chris Witman, who initially approached me about being a part of this, has kind of been our go to guy heading up fan relations. He’s kept the troops rallied and that has helped from morale boosting to fundraising and beyond. And finally Steve Wood gave us our first home when we were trying to get this thing off the ground. He’s been a really great support in general.

Of course, none of this would have happened without the many, many donors who gave (some multiple times) to this ad and other important projects. In the last year, these amazing people have funded a billboard, multiple ads in Variety and the Hollywood reporter, gave toward tornado ravaged Greensburg, KS, sent thousands of dollars worth of DVDs to the troops, stocked food banks with peanut butter, and have worked to change the way Nielsen effects this industry.

For all of us, it has been a time consuming thing, but at the same time we feel like we’re really making a difference, not just for one television show but hopefully in the long run for the television industry in general. For that it’s worth it.

--------------------------------

Fancast and Sci Fi Tracker will continue to bring you the story behind the Save Jericho Again campaign from a wide array of perspectives….watch this space for future updates, where Jericho writer Matt Federman and cast member Brad Beyer will weigh in on what it was like to work on the show, and what the future may bring.

As for the fight to save Jericho overall, let’s just hope that the third time’s a charm.