A New Vision For Online Entertainment

Television and movie writer-director Joss Whedon wants to change the way Hollywood does business.
 
TV and movie writer-director Joss Whedon wants to shake up what he calls the "homogenized, globalized, monopolized entertainment system." That means blazing a trail on the Internet for creating and monetizing independently produced content.

One of Whedon's recent projects is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, an online musical comedy starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, written by Whedon, his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed's fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen. Conceived during the 100-day Writers Guild of America strike in late 2007 and early 2008, Dr. Horrible was, in part, intended as an experiment to explore options for creative content. The subject of revenues for online content was a timely one, since a major point of contention that spurred the strike involved payment to writers for content distributed online.

Dr. Horrible was released on the Web in three parts last July, and Whedon's plan was to remove the free online versions and sell all three episodes as video downloads through Apple's Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iTunes store. A week after the series moved to iTunes, it reappeared online on advertising-based sites such as Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ). In December, a DVD version became available on Amazon.com. With these various distribution channels (and the absence of a traditional advertising budget), "Dr. Horrible" serves as something of a case study for marketing independently produced content.

Joseph Hill ("Joss") Whedon is a third-generation television writer. His grandfather, John Whedon, wrote episodes of such late 1950s and 1960s standbys as Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Read Show and The Andy Griffith Show. His father, Tom Whedon, wrote installments of Alice, Benson and The Golden Girls. As Whedon said to Knowledge@Wharton, "I was raised by a tribe of funny people."

After graduating from Wesleyan University with a degree in film studies, Whedon moved to Los Angeles and found early work writing for television programs such as Roseanne and editing scripts for feature films. His screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer achieved modest success, and Whedon received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay work on Toy Story.

Whedon's science fiction series Firefly, produced for Fox television, debuted in 2002. But he tussled with Fox over aspects of the show: The network insisted on a new pilot episode and aired several episodes out of sequence. The show was canceled after 11 of its 14 episodes aired, and Whedon and Fox parted ways. Whedon told Knowledge@Wharton he was "heartbroken" by the show's demise. Driven by his desire to keep the characters alive--and brisk DVD sales of the original series--Whedon wrote and directed Serenity for Universal Studios, a feature film based on Firefly's characters and storyline.

Despite the contentious issues with Fox over the network's handling of Firefly, Whedon's next television series, Dollhouse, a science-fiction thriller starring Eliza Dushku, debuts on Fox television Feb. 13.
 
Knowledge@Wharton recently spoke with Whedon about the lessons learned from Dr. Horrible and what he believes needs to happen for the Internet to serve as a platform that can sustain original creative content. An edited version of that conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: To what extent was the original impetus behind Dr. Horrible to serve as an experiment for how Web-based content can generate revenue?

Whedon: It was equal parts that and the love of the silly. The concept originated as an audio podcast that I would do myself, because I was hungry to write some songs, and I liked the idea of the character.

And then the Writer's Guild went on strike. I tried to make some deals with Silicon Valley companies and song studios to create jobs and put out product. But it took so long trying to make a deal with these companies up north that I missed my window. So I said, "I'll just do it myself--if that's OK with my wife." And because I could not afford to do a huge, lavish production, we did it with a ton of favors.

We were, at the time, very much in the spirit of the strike. By the time we finished writing [Dr. Horrible] and had everyone lined up, the strike was over and we all had shows to scramble to do. But we found a window to shoot it. It became us goofing around and just having a great time making a piece of art that we all enjoyed.

Once we finished ... it was equal parts ethos and capricious glee. We said we were going to roll it out for free and then put it on iTunes. We just steamrolled past everybody's idea of how you market and of how long it takes to do these things. We had people [drawing up] contracts in days that usually take months, because we were tired of people sitting around.

Ultimately, though, we were still in the mind of, "This is a bit of a lark." The strike was over, and so we wanted to do right by everybody, but we weren't thinking it would be a grand statement. We thought it was going to be cool.

Knowledge@Wharton: Several numbers have been quoted regarding the overall cost of Dr. Horrible--"low six-figures," "around $200,000"--can you set the record straight?

Whedon: We got so much of this done through people doing us favors--department heads and people who have access to things. But you've got to pay your day-to-day crew. The actors all did it for nothing. And we all did it for nothing. So the production costs alone--the basic costs of filming the thing, and getting the locations, props and everything--ran a little over $200,000.

We had a secondary budget drawn up in case of a profit, wherein we were trying to find rates for Internet materials. In some cases, they didn't exist. We used models that had been created by the guild for repurposed or reused material that we used for original [content], because this had never come up before.

We didn't want to leave a sour taste and say, "Well, we made some money off of you guys being kind." It was like: No, everybody has to benefit from what they've done, obviously not enormously--it's Internet money we're talking about--but as soon as we got in the black, we paid everybody off.

So that budget was probably about twice what the original budget was.

Knowledge@Wharton: You've now earned more than twice the original cost?

Whedon: Yes.

Knowledge@Wharton: Which members of the production shared in the profits on the back end?

Whedon: The crew that got paid, got paid. [Those] who didn't get paid [included people like] department heads who had jobs and could afford to do this as a lark.

As we go forward into profit, there are also residual schedules and payment schedules for all of the creative people. We're trying to figure out how that works.

From the start, I also laid down a gross participation scheme for my three key actors and the other three writers. While the guild was negotiating for one-tenth of a yen, I said, "How about we just get into some percentages." It was an opportunity to say to the guilds, "Guess how much better we can do"--which, in the case of the Internet, is the only way for the guilds to survive.

We can't accept anything remotely like [our current situation] with the studios.

When the studios talk about the difficulty of monetizing the Internet, they're not lying. There are a lot of paradigms wherein you aren't making that much money. But it's all pure money for them because they have these libraries they can just put on. They're really not interested in putting on original stuff because they can just throw the libraries on and make free money off of that. None of us is in that position.

For [the studios] not to offer the creative community a percentage of what they make--they say, "oh, it's too difficult" and "we're not going to make any money"--is disingenuous to the point of criminality. What they're making is pure profit. For them to shut out the people who actually created the content is something that should be looked into by a federal investigatory committee.

Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like you want what you've done with Dr. Horrible to serve as a model for similar original content.

Whedon: I do.

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think the likelihood of that is?

Whedon: That largely depends on a number of people--one of whom, sadly, is me. This could just stand out as Camelot and disappear. Or it can be a model that is built on. And I'm one of the people who needs to be building on it. That's something I'm looking into right now.

I'm not a business man. I'm also not a techie. My ideas on how to monetize the Internet for independent productions are ideas that other people have already had. But I am in a position to try to take advantage of them in such a way that we get a toehold in this medium and [establish] a system of creating some original content before the giant companies sweep in and fence it all off.

The movies, TV--everything is melding, everything is shifting. If you saw it on a movie screen, it's going to be on your phone. That territory is moving ... now in a destructive way, because we're losing residuals. But eventually it's just going to be an inevitability that ... the studios are going to have to rethink how they monetize [content]. Obviously TiVo makes [its] relationship with advertisers different. And that's going to become more and more the case. A lot of it can't be predicted--at least not by me.

But if somebody isn't out there creating a system wherein independent production can thrive, it will wither.