originally appeared in USA Today:
At Urban Outfitters, the choice of being naughty or nice in its 2012 Christmas holiday catalog was easy: naughty wins.
The edgy apparel seller has shipped out a holiday catalog that's chock-full of naughtiness, including a $16 "It was f---ing awesome" photo album and a block candle that boldly spells out the f-word in wax. There's even an $18 "Let's f---ing reminisce" book.
Just a few years ago, Urban Outfitters might have received some serious, verbal raps on the knuckles from parents and protesters angered by the ultra-spicy language. But in today's social-media environment, along with those verbal raps, it's also receiving some surprising kudos from brand and marketing gurus.
It's brilliant, explosive, short-term marketing that generates buzz, it's the right voice for the teen markets according to the CEO of Havas PR and national trend-spotter.
Over the years, many of the most successful fashion brands -- from Calvin Klein to Benetton to Abercrombie & Fitch -- have relied upon racy imagery in their ads and catalogs to generate buzz, PR and sales. In a social-media age, however, such efforts appear to be emboldened.
Shocking imagery sells according to a senior fashion editor at Women's Wear Daily. On Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, this is a way to get buzz.
Not everyone is impressed.
According to a leading brand guru it's all about getting up on Instagram or someone's Facebook page. This kind of marketing really isn't so rebellious. It's just kind of stupid.
Worse than that, says the director of the activist Christian group One Million Moms, it's tasteless and vulgar. Her organization, which is affiliated with the American Family Association, isn't calling for a boycott but is asking its members to think hard before purchasing any Urban Outfitter products, she feels they'll be losing business from conservative families.
Executives from Urban Outfitters declined to return phone calls or respond to e-mails for this story. But one catalog guru says the company clearly knows its audience.
According to the president of Direct Marketing Insights, a catalog consulting firm, good marketing requires that you communicate with your customers on their same wavelength, they're speaking the language of their customers.
Specifically, to today's teens, the f-word doesn't even mean what it means to most adults, it no longer even has sexual connotations. It's almost a synonym for 'give me a break.'
14 December 2012
Zimmerman sues NBC and reporters
George Zimmerman sued NBC on Thursday, claiming he was defamed when
the network edited his 911 call to police after the shooting of Trayvon
Martin to make it sound like he was racist.
The former neighborhood watch volunteer filed the lawsuit seeking an undisclosed amount of money in Seminole County, outside Orlando. Also named in the complaint were three reporters covering the story for NBC or an NBC-owned television station.
The complaint said the airing of the edited call has inflicted emotional distress on Zimmerman, making him fear for his life and causing him to suffer nausea, insomnia and anxiety.
The lawsuit claims NBC edited his phone call to a dispatcher last February. In the call, Zimmerman describes following Martin in the gated community where he lived, just moments before he fatally shot the 17-year-old teen during a confrontation.
The lawsuit claims NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create a myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain.
An NBC spokeswoman said the network strongly disagreed with the accusations made in the complaint.
There was no intent to portray Mr. Zimmerman unfairly," the network said. NBC intends to vigorously defend their position in court.
Three employees of the network or its Miami affiliate lost their jobs because of the changes.
Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder but has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense under Florida's "stand your ground law."
The call viewers heard was trimmed to suggest that Zimmerman volunteered to police, with no prompting, that Martin was black, according to what NBC broadcast, he said [Martin] looks like he's up to no good. He looks black.
But the portion of the tape that was deleted had the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person who had raised his suspicion was black, white or Hispanic, to which Zimmerman responded that he looks black.
The former neighborhood watch volunteer filed the lawsuit seeking an undisclosed amount of money in Seminole County, outside Orlando. Also named in the complaint were three reporters covering the story for NBC or an NBC-owned television station.
The complaint said the airing of the edited call has inflicted emotional distress on Zimmerman, making him fear for his life and causing him to suffer nausea, insomnia and anxiety.
The lawsuit claims NBC edited his phone call to a dispatcher last February. In the call, Zimmerman describes following Martin in the gated community where he lived, just moments before he fatally shot the 17-year-old teen during a confrontation.
The lawsuit claims NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create a myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain.
An NBC spokeswoman said the network strongly disagreed with the accusations made in the complaint.
There was no intent to portray Mr. Zimmerman unfairly," the network said. NBC intends to vigorously defend their position in court.
Three employees of the network or its Miami affiliate lost their jobs because of the changes.
Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder but has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense under Florida's "stand your ground law."
The call viewers heard was trimmed to suggest that Zimmerman volunteered to police, with no prompting, that Martin was black, according to what NBC broadcast, he said [Martin] looks like he's up to no good. He looks black.
But the portion of the tape that was deleted had the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person who had raised his suspicion was black, white or Hispanic, to which Zimmerman responded that he looks black.
13 December 2012
The More Pandora Sells, the More It Loses
originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal:
Pandora Media Inc.'s 18% stock drop Wednesday is a sobering reminder that fractions add up, a tenth of a cent might not sound like a lot of money, except when advertising sales don't keep pace.
Pandora projected slower revenue growth and red ink in the current quarter, triggering a 19% plunge in the shares of the Internet radio company.
Pandora's music royalty costs, typically paid in tenths of a cent, are skyrocketing. At the same time, the more people who listen to Pandora via mobile devices, such as on smartphones, tablets or through car dashboards, the less advertisers pay to reach those listeners, compared to the ones listening on desktop or laptop computers.
In other words, the more successful Pandora becomes, the more it loses. And those through-the-looking-glass economics of Internet radio set off the drop in Pandora shares.
Pandora's audience statistics would be the envy of many media companies: In the most recent quarter, it had 59.2 million active users who listened to nearly 3.6 billion hours of music. And they appear highly loyal: its giant 47% uptick in active users was outpaced by a 67% increase in the amount of music served, meaning more people are using the service to listen to more music than ever.
Yet because Pandora must pay record companies and music publishers for every one of those "listens," its "content acquisition" costs—the price it pays the owners of all that music—rose nearly 75%. At $65.7 million, those costs ate up nearly 55% of Pandora's revenue for the three months ended Oct. 31.
Pandora's ad revenue totaled $106.3 million in the quarter, up 61%. It also brought in $13.7 million in subscription fees from users who pay $3 a month to listen without ads.
They are in many ways a victim of their own success according to Triton Research LLC, which analyzes startup companies for investors. (The firm is unrelated to Triton Digital, which audits Pandora's usage.)
While the company's audience and related costs have ballooned, 77% of its listening hours now take place on mobile devices, which generate less ad-sales revenue for the company than laptop and desktop listening.
The company sold $21.56 worth of ads per 1,000 hours of mobile listening in the past year—a slight uptick but less than half what it made from the same amount of desktop listening. The company made $55.18 in ad sales per thousand hours of desktop listening in the same period.
According to Pandora's CFO, if a TV network had to pay the production house more for every viewer of 'Breaking Bad'—and they didn't have a real ad-sales force in place—they would hate it if they had a big audience.
After their fall Wednesday, Pandora shares now trade at $7.80, close to their 52-week lows. The stock debuted in June, 2011 at $16 per share.
The company is making efforts to turn the situation around. Pandora's advertising sales force is 75% larger than a year earlier.
Pandora's CEO said they've demonstrated in Q3 that in mobile we can grow revenue faster than listener hours. We think we can continue that trend and that is what defines our success.
But the big issue facing the company is the cost of the music it plays, which is dictated by a blanket agreement between online radio companies and record labels, represented by an arm of their lobbying group called SoundExchange.
Under that agreement, which lasts through 2015, the rate goes up gradually each year. The rate paid per song will rise to 0.14 cent in 2015 from 0.11 cent this year. The rate schedule was negotiated in 2009, when Pandora was not the behemoth it is today.
Pandora has aggressively lobbied Congress for a law that would significantly cut those royalties. The Internet Radio Fairness Act, as the proposed legislation is known, may be the company's only chance at robust profits, says Triton's chief research officer.
He feels that from a strategy perspective it's the best single thing they could do for their business, without that, if they run their business perfectly, they are a low-margin business.
Pandora argues it has been paying disproportionate fees to artists, and that the legislation would put it on an equal footing with rivals. It also says whatever artists lose in the short term will be made up for in the future, because more attractive royalty rates would create a boom in Internet radio.
The Internet Radio Fairness Act would establish the same criteria for setting Internet radio royalty rates that is now applied to satellite radio company Sirius XM Radio Inc., SIRI +1.08% which pays significantly less than Pandora and other webcasters.
Not surprisingly, many artists, who stand to have their royalties cut sharply, object to the legislation, especially as Internet radio promises to catch on.
Jonatha Brooke, a singer with several albums released both on major labels and independently, estimates that one million plays of her work on Pandora nets her a bit less than $500. If the legislation passes, she believes proceeds from the same number of plays could be less than $100.
She says that these streams are becoming more and more important. The idea of Pandora crying the blues and wanting an 85% cut in what they have to pay me is just galling.
Ms. Brooke's name appeared with hundreds of other artists in an ad in Billboard magazine last month, criticizing Pandora's efforts on behalf of the bill.
Pandora's CEO will pay about $250 million in royalties to SoundExchange this year. He declined to speculate on how that amount may change in the future should the Internet Radio Fairness Act pass.
Pandora's founder says he has been trying to make personal contact with musicians about the issue. His hope and belief is that after this wave of rhetoric and mercenary type of PR, there will be a discussion based on the facts.
Pandora Media Inc.'s 18% stock drop Wednesday is a sobering reminder that fractions add up, a tenth of a cent might not sound like a lot of money, except when advertising sales don't keep pace.
Pandora projected slower revenue growth and red ink in the current quarter, triggering a 19% plunge in the shares of the Internet radio company.
Pandora's music royalty costs, typically paid in tenths of a cent, are skyrocketing. At the same time, the more people who listen to Pandora via mobile devices, such as on smartphones, tablets or through car dashboards, the less advertisers pay to reach those listeners, compared to the ones listening on desktop or laptop computers.
In other words, the more successful Pandora becomes, the more it loses. And those through-the-looking-glass economics of Internet radio set off the drop in Pandora shares.
Pandora's audience statistics would be the envy of many media companies: In the most recent quarter, it had 59.2 million active users who listened to nearly 3.6 billion hours of music. And they appear highly loyal: its giant 47% uptick in active users was outpaced by a 67% increase in the amount of music served, meaning more people are using the service to listen to more music than ever.
Yet because Pandora must pay record companies and music publishers for every one of those "listens," its "content acquisition" costs—the price it pays the owners of all that music—rose nearly 75%. At $65.7 million, those costs ate up nearly 55% of Pandora's revenue for the three months ended Oct. 31.
Pandora's ad revenue totaled $106.3 million in the quarter, up 61%. It also brought in $13.7 million in subscription fees from users who pay $3 a month to listen without ads.
They are in many ways a victim of their own success according to Triton Research LLC, which analyzes startup companies for investors. (The firm is unrelated to Triton Digital, which audits Pandora's usage.)
While the company's audience and related costs have ballooned, 77% of its listening hours now take place on mobile devices, which generate less ad-sales revenue for the company than laptop and desktop listening.
The company sold $21.56 worth of ads per 1,000 hours of mobile listening in the past year—a slight uptick but less than half what it made from the same amount of desktop listening. The company made $55.18 in ad sales per thousand hours of desktop listening in the same period.
According to Pandora's CFO, if a TV network had to pay the production house more for every viewer of 'Breaking Bad'—and they didn't have a real ad-sales force in place—they would hate it if they had a big audience.
After their fall Wednesday, Pandora shares now trade at $7.80, close to their 52-week lows. The stock debuted in June, 2011 at $16 per share.
The company is making efforts to turn the situation around. Pandora's advertising sales force is 75% larger than a year earlier.
Pandora's CEO said they've demonstrated in Q3 that in mobile we can grow revenue faster than listener hours. We think we can continue that trend and that is what defines our success.
But the big issue facing the company is the cost of the music it plays, which is dictated by a blanket agreement between online radio companies and record labels, represented by an arm of their lobbying group called SoundExchange.
Under that agreement, which lasts through 2015, the rate goes up gradually each year. The rate paid per song will rise to 0.14 cent in 2015 from 0.11 cent this year. The rate schedule was negotiated in 2009, when Pandora was not the behemoth it is today.
Pandora has aggressively lobbied Congress for a law that would significantly cut those royalties. The Internet Radio Fairness Act, as the proposed legislation is known, may be the company's only chance at robust profits, says Triton's chief research officer.
He feels that from a strategy perspective it's the best single thing they could do for their business, without that, if they run their business perfectly, they are a low-margin business.
Pandora argues it has been paying disproportionate fees to artists, and that the legislation would put it on an equal footing with rivals. It also says whatever artists lose in the short term will be made up for in the future, because more attractive royalty rates would create a boom in Internet radio.
The Internet Radio Fairness Act would establish the same criteria for setting Internet radio royalty rates that is now applied to satellite radio company Sirius XM Radio Inc., SIRI +1.08% which pays significantly less than Pandora and other webcasters.
Not surprisingly, many artists, who stand to have their royalties cut sharply, object to the legislation, especially as Internet radio promises to catch on.
Jonatha Brooke, a singer with several albums released both on major labels and independently, estimates that one million plays of her work on Pandora nets her a bit less than $500. If the legislation passes, she believes proceeds from the same number of plays could be less than $100.
She says that these streams are becoming more and more important. The idea of Pandora crying the blues and wanting an 85% cut in what they have to pay me is just galling.
Ms. Brooke's name appeared with hundreds of other artists in an ad in Billboard magazine last month, criticizing Pandora's efforts on behalf of the bill.
Pandora's CEO will pay about $250 million in royalties to SoundExchange this year. He declined to speculate on how that amount may change in the future should the Internet Radio Fairness Act pass.
Pandora's founder says he has been trying to make personal contact with musicians about the issue. His hope and belief is that after this wave of rhetoric and mercenary type of PR, there will be a discussion based on the facts.
06 January 2012
New York Times Sells Papers
First appeared on Yahoo! News
The New York Times Co said it will sell 16 regional newspapers spread across the U.S. Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings for $143 million in cash as it looks to cut costs and focus on its most important papers and their websites.
Regional newspapers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the economy's broader travails.
The company said it will record an after-tax gain of $150 million on the sale -- expected to close in a few weeks -- in the first quarter of 2012.
"I think that it's toward the low end of what we expected. I was expecting $150-$200 million," Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur told Reuters.
"What it implies is that margins on regional newspapers were not as high as we thought, but the underlying profitability of the main New York Times is higher."
The analyst, however, said pension obligation will stay with the company and that could be one of the uses of the proceeds.
The group to be hived off has a weekday circulation of about 430,000, with newspapers such as Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Ledger, in Florida; Herald-Journal in South Carolina; and The Press Democrat in California in its stable.
Last week, the Times Co said it will sell its regional newspapers days after Chief Executive Janet Robinson announced her sudden retirement.
The group's revenue -- more than a tenth of Times Co's overall sales -- fell about 7 percent to $190 million in the first nine months of this year.
"These newspapers have been a drag on overall results due to heavier reliance on local advertising which lags national advertising growth," Morningstar's Joscelyn Mackay said.
"Without these papers, the firm will be able to focus on its flagship The New York Times and monetize its digital content."
Halifax Media owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, among other papers and media businesses across the south.
Times Co shares, which have lost a fifth of their value this year, closed at $7.76 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
The New York Times Co said it will sell 16 regional newspapers spread across the U.S. Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings for $143 million in cash as it looks to cut costs and focus on its most important papers and their websites.
Regional newspapers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the economy's broader travails.
The company said it will record an after-tax gain of $150 million on the sale -- expected to close in a few weeks -- in the first quarter of 2012.
"I think that it's toward the low end of what we expected. I was expecting $150-$200 million," Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur told Reuters.
"What it implies is that margins on regional newspapers were not as high as we thought, but the underlying profitability of the main New York Times is higher."
The analyst, however, said pension obligation will stay with the company and that could be one of the uses of the proceeds.
The group to be hived off has a weekday circulation of about 430,000, with newspapers such as Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Ledger, in Florida; Herald-Journal in South Carolina; and The Press Democrat in California in its stable.
Last week, the Times Co said it will sell its regional newspapers days after Chief Executive Janet Robinson announced her sudden retirement.
The group's revenue -- more than a tenth of Times Co's overall sales -- fell about 7 percent to $190 million in the first nine months of this year.
"These newspapers have been a drag on overall results due to heavier reliance on local advertising which lags national advertising growth," Morningstar's Joscelyn Mackay said.
"Without these papers, the firm will be able to focus on its flagship The New York Times and monetize its digital content."
Halifax Media owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, among other papers and media businesses across the south.
Times Co shares, which have lost a fifth of their value this year, closed at $7.76 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
29 November 2011
New Western Has Big Hopes To Reach Audiences
Story first appeared in USA TODAY.
A few miles down a dirt road from a tribal casino, a lush green valley dotted with dandelions has been transformed into 1865 Nebraska.
Caked with inches-deep mud from spring rains, a tent city has sprung, populated with horse-drawn wagons, chickens, several hundred feet of railroad track to nowhere and a locomotive made from steel, Styrofoam and wood.
It's the world of AMC's Hell on Wheels, a story of greed, corruption and revenge framed by the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Premiering Sunday (10 ET/PT), the 10-episode drama is the cable network's latest twist on Westerns, after earlier success with 2006 miniseries Broken Trail. And coupled with a comeback in critically acclaimed films (True Grit, There Will Be Blood) it marks the latest chapter in an effort to revive the timeworn genre, which dominated the early days of television but has been seen only sporadically since. But old-time Westerns were both literally and figuratively black and white: Good guys against evildoers. The new model focuses on flawed antiheroes with impure motives.
Wheels spins around Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), a former slave owner who, just after the Civil War, finds work on a railroad crew purely to seek revenge on the former members of Gen. Sherman's army responsible for murdering his wife. Rap singer Common plays Elam Ferguson, a former slave who forms an uneasy bond with Bohannon on the prairie.
Construction of the railroad, touted as healing the rift between north and south by linking east to west, hasn't been explored much in fiction, says Tony Gayton (Faster), who created the show with his brother Joe. Their idea is to have 'hell on wheels' — that's the movable tent city — to feel like an urban development, and to juxtapose that with the big wide-open western vistas (and) the Native Americans.
Mount, a Tennessee native, says, it's not a show about the creation of a railroad, it's a show about the building of a nation. It's a group of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, who have a shared dream of creating something that's seemingly impossible.
Connecting the coasts was like saying we're going to put a man on the moon, and it's not a pretty story: There's a lot of graft, a lot of corruption, a lot of hatred. Cullen is a guy who's hellbent on revenge, and he keeps losing that battle because he gets distracted by a sense of obligation and duty elsewhere.
Distinctly American themes
At the set on the grounds of the Tsuu T'ina Nation (ironic, given the scalpings in Sunday's premiere), extras clad in mud-caked canvas mingle with crew members incongruously dressed in jeans and rubber boots. One actor, dressed as a hobo, rolls a cigarette off camera. And plenty of old-timey slurs slip off tongues, from "copperheads" and "graybacks" to "darkies" and "bogtrotters." Irish, Germans and a Swede or two are part of the melting pot.
Thomas "Doc" Durant (Colm Meaney) is the only character based on a historic figure, simply because "he was too good not to use. A corrupt railroad promoter who stood to profit from government subsidies, he manipulated the stock market by misleading investors about which railroad he planned to connect with. And though desperate to build the first 40 miles of track so he could begin claiming a $16,000-a-mile subsidy, he insisted on a snake-like path to make more money.
Dominique McElligott plays Lily Bell, widowed by the murder of her surveyor husband, who spends early episodes trying to survive in the wilderness. But she's not a damsel in distress. She's sort of badass. (McElligott struggled too, having spent an entire day lying in the rain and submerged in mud. The mosquitoes would come later.)
For some scenes shot at night or in bad weather, cameras roll in a former airplane hangar a few miles away, using replicas of tents and other props.
For AMC, Hell is the latest move in its strategy to develop companion series for its top movie draws: Fans of horror films marched to its biggest hit, The Walking Dead. Despite its recent success with original series.
Original programming chief Joel Stillerman says the search yielded a lot of traditional Westerns, but none had the scope and emotional intensity of Hell on Wheels. These stories have great universal themes that are distinctly American.
Executive producer Jeremy Gold says the cost of progress is very much an ongoing theme of the show, (and) the brutality of imposing civilization where it shouldn't be.
Producers and actors cite There Will Be Blood, Unforgiven and True Grit as inspirations.
Old genre, new 'flavor'
Though scarce on TV in recent years, the notion of frontier justice has been appealing to TV programmers almost since the medium started.
In the 1960s, modernism was much more in vogue, and current generations wanted to see themselves reflected on TV, and they weren't on horses. And newly available demographic data revealed that Western fans were an older crowd that was less appealing to advertisers.
And though Gunsmoke and Bonanza endured until the '70s, subsequent efforts to revive the genre were met with disdain. Brooks recalls working as a researcher for legendary NBC programmer Brandon Tartikoff, who — exasperated by relentless pitches — printed up T-shirts picturing a horse covered with an X. "They were really run out of TV," he says.
And yet struggling NBC — in a quest for something original, says the network's entertainment president Jennifer Salke — is now developing three Western-themed projects, including a drama about Dust Bowl pioneers in which a couple goes missing, and another reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a strong female character added in. (ABC also has one in the works.)
Salke, who's looking for a postmodern version in which the setting provides a specific kind of flavor. NBC passed last spring on Reconstruction, a pilot also set just after the Civil War. But the difficulty of launching new dramas, not just at NBC, has pushed programmers to the frontier.
Writers are incredibly challenged in drama to come up with something unique that's going to excite people, Salke says. Fans of the genre will be interested, but it's her job to come up with something that's more modern and accessible and has appeal to a broader audience. If it's a doctor and family on the range, she is already asleep in her chair.
Of course, cable has the luxury of appealing to a specific niche audience. HBO's acclaimed Deadwood had a loyal following and a three-year run. And though Elmore Leonard stopped writing Westerns, his Fire in the Hole, adapted for FX's Justified, embodies the Western tradition, and they don't shy away from it, says executive producer Graham Yost. He is a marshal and he's got a star and he gets bad guys, but it's complicated because it's 2011, not 1952. Our heroes have more dimensions, flaws and foibles.
The modern-day allegory is unavoidable: Brooks says Westerns mark a pushback on the urbanization of TV" and gives voice to a populist focus on the "other America." The symbolism, says AMC's Stillerman, is almost too good to be true.
A few miles down a dirt road from a tribal casino, a lush green valley dotted with dandelions has been transformed into 1865 Nebraska.
Caked with inches-deep mud from spring rains, a tent city has sprung, populated with horse-drawn wagons, chickens, several hundred feet of railroad track to nowhere and a locomotive made from steel, Styrofoam and wood.
It's the world of AMC's Hell on Wheels, a story of greed, corruption and revenge framed by the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Premiering Sunday (10 ET/PT), the 10-episode drama is the cable network's latest twist on Westerns, after earlier success with 2006 miniseries Broken Trail. And coupled with a comeback in critically acclaimed films (True Grit, There Will Be Blood) it marks the latest chapter in an effort to revive the timeworn genre, which dominated the early days of television but has been seen only sporadically since. But old-time Westerns were both literally and figuratively black and white: Good guys against evildoers. The new model focuses on flawed antiheroes with impure motives.
Wheels spins around Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), a former slave owner who, just after the Civil War, finds work on a railroad crew purely to seek revenge on the former members of Gen. Sherman's army responsible for murdering his wife. Rap singer Common plays Elam Ferguson, a former slave who forms an uneasy bond with Bohannon on the prairie.
Construction of the railroad, touted as healing the rift between north and south by linking east to west, hasn't been explored much in fiction, says Tony Gayton (Faster), who created the show with his brother Joe. Their idea is to have 'hell on wheels' — that's the movable tent city — to feel like an urban development, and to juxtapose that with the big wide-open western vistas (and) the Native Americans.
Mount, a Tennessee native, says, it's not a show about the creation of a railroad, it's a show about the building of a nation. It's a group of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, who have a shared dream of creating something that's seemingly impossible.
Connecting the coasts was like saying we're going to put a man on the moon, and it's not a pretty story: There's a lot of graft, a lot of corruption, a lot of hatred. Cullen is a guy who's hellbent on revenge, and he keeps losing that battle because he gets distracted by a sense of obligation and duty elsewhere.
Distinctly American themes
At the set on the grounds of the Tsuu T'ina Nation (ironic, given the scalpings in Sunday's premiere), extras clad in mud-caked canvas mingle with crew members incongruously dressed in jeans and rubber boots. One actor, dressed as a hobo, rolls a cigarette off camera. And plenty of old-timey slurs slip off tongues, from "copperheads" and "graybacks" to "darkies" and "bogtrotters." Irish, Germans and a Swede or two are part of the melting pot.
Thomas "Doc" Durant (Colm Meaney) is the only character based on a historic figure, simply because "he was too good not to use. A corrupt railroad promoter who stood to profit from government subsidies, he manipulated the stock market by misleading investors about which railroad he planned to connect with. And though desperate to build the first 40 miles of track so he could begin claiming a $16,000-a-mile subsidy, he insisted on a snake-like path to make more money.
Dominique McElligott plays Lily Bell, widowed by the murder of her surveyor husband, who spends early episodes trying to survive in the wilderness. But she's not a damsel in distress. She's sort of badass. (McElligott struggled too, having spent an entire day lying in the rain and submerged in mud. The mosquitoes would come later.)
For some scenes shot at night or in bad weather, cameras roll in a former airplane hangar a few miles away, using replicas of tents and other props.
For AMC, Hell is the latest move in its strategy to develop companion series for its top movie draws: Fans of horror films marched to its biggest hit, The Walking Dead. Despite its recent success with original series.
Original programming chief Joel Stillerman says the search yielded a lot of traditional Westerns, but none had the scope and emotional intensity of Hell on Wheels. These stories have great universal themes that are distinctly American.
Executive producer Jeremy Gold says the cost of progress is very much an ongoing theme of the show, (and) the brutality of imposing civilization where it shouldn't be.
Producers and actors cite There Will Be Blood, Unforgiven and True Grit as inspirations.
Old genre, new 'flavor'
Though scarce on TV in recent years, the notion of frontier justice has been appealing to TV programmers almost since the medium started.
In the 1960s, modernism was much more in vogue, and current generations wanted to see themselves reflected on TV, and they weren't on horses. And newly available demographic data revealed that Western fans were an older crowd that was less appealing to advertisers.
And though Gunsmoke and Bonanza endured until the '70s, subsequent efforts to revive the genre were met with disdain. Brooks recalls working as a researcher for legendary NBC programmer Brandon Tartikoff, who — exasperated by relentless pitches — printed up T-shirts picturing a horse covered with an X. "They were really run out of TV," he says.
And yet struggling NBC — in a quest for something original, says the network's entertainment president Jennifer Salke — is now developing three Western-themed projects, including a drama about Dust Bowl pioneers in which a couple goes missing, and another reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a strong female character added in. (ABC also has one in the works.)
Salke, who's looking for a postmodern version in which the setting provides a specific kind of flavor. NBC passed last spring on Reconstruction, a pilot also set just after the Civil War. But the difficulty of launching new dramas, not just at NBC, has pushed programmers to the frontier.
Writers are incredibly challenged in drama to come up with something unique that's going to excite people, Salke says. Fans of the genre will be interested, but it's her job to come up with something that's more modern and accessible and has appeal to a broader audience. If it's a doctor and family on the range, she is already asleep in her chair.
Of course, cable has the luxury of appealing to a specific niche audience. HBO's acclaimed Deadwood had a loyal following and a three-year run. And though Elmore Leonard stopped writing Westerns, his Fire in the Hole, adapted for FX's Justified, embodies the Western tradition, and they don't shy away from it, says executive producer Graham Yost. He is a marshal and he's got a star and he gets bad guys, but it's complicated because it's 2011, not 1952. Our heroes have more dimensions, flaws and foibles.
The modern-day allegory is unavoidable: Brooks says Westerns mark a pushback on the urbanization of TV" and gives voice to a populist focus on the "other America." The symbolism, says AMC's Stillerman, is almost too good to be true.
23 November 2011
CBS Fined for Janet Jackson Exposure
Story first appeared in USA TODAY.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld its finding that the Federal Communications Commissions acted improperly in fining CBS over the fleeting exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.
A three-judge panel from 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that the FCC improperly assessed a $550,000 fine against the network for the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that lasted just over half a second.
During the Super Bowl performance in Houston, Justin Timberlake ripped off Jackson's bustier, briefly exposing her breast and a silver sunburst "shield" covering her nipple. In arguments last year, the FCC argued that CBS should have been aware the performers might add shock value to the act.
CBS had a duty to investigate, FCC lawyer Jack Lewis argued.
The network countered that regulators were now trying to apply different standards to words and images despite previously excusing fleeting instances of both.
The Supreme Court last year ordered the appeals panel to reconsider its 2008 decision, citing a ruling in a Fox television-led challenge, when it said the FCC could threaten fines over the use of a single curse word on live TV.
In the majority opinion, 3rd Circuit Judge Marjorie Rendell wrote that the Fox opinion did nothing to undermine the earlier decision on the CBS fine and, in fact, confirms the appeals panel's ruling.
The FCC "arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy excepting fleeting broadcast material" in assessing the fine, Rendell wrote.
The same panel initially sided with the network in 2008.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld its finding that the Federal Communications Commissions acted improperly in fining CBS over the fleeting exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.
A three-judge panel from 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that the FCC improperly assessed a $550,000 fine against the network for the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that lasted just over half a second.
During the Super Bowl performance in Houston, Justin Timberlake ripped off Jackson's bustier, briefly exposing her breast and a silver sunburst "shield" covering her nipple. In arguments last year, the FCC argued that CBS should have been aware the performers might add shock value to the act.
CBS had a duty to investigate, FCC lawyer Jack Lewis argued.
The network countered that regulators were now trying to apply different standards to words and images despite previously excusing fleeting instances of both.
The Supreme Court last year ordered the appeals panel to reconsider its 2008 decision, citing a ruling in a Fox television-led challenge, when it said the FCC could threaten fines over the use of a single curse word on live TV.
In the majority opinion, 3rd Circuit Judge Marjorie Rendell wrote that the Fox opinion did nothing to undermine the earlier decision on the CBS fine and, in fact, confirms the appeals panel's ruling.
The FCC "arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy excepting fleeting broadcast material" in assessing the fine, Rendell wrote.
The same panel initially sided with the network in 2008.
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