Post by milowent on Apr 16, 2007 13:58:22 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/arts/television/16heff.html?ref=arts
at best, i'd say its a neutral view, but VH's perspectives are always interesting regardless.
Who Is the Player King Behind ‘Prom Queen’?
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 16, 2007
People aiming to sell “Prom Queen,” the latest strange bird in the online-video aviary, invariably refer to the Web series as “Michael Eisner’s ‘Prom Queen.’ ”
You can see why. The name of Mr. Eisner, the august former Disney chief, ought to confer legitimacy on the video project, which might otherwise seem unmoored and fly-by-night. And when Mr. Eisner stumps for “Prom Queen,” rhapsodizing about this high-school murder mystery as if it were “The 400 Blows,” he emphasizes that, even as he lights out into new media, his studio-honcho values are intact. “Content is king,” he likes to say.
With this phrase Hollywood war horses typically mean that stories are stories, and you can tell them on maxiscreens, miniscreens or fragments of screens fitted to the retina. To succeed, a narrative just has to thrill, touch or amuse. (For examples of kingly content released on Mr. Eisner’s executive watch at Paramount and then Disney, see “Saturday Night Fever,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Lion King.”)
But story fanatics also believe that the medium is not the message; the message is. And that’s where things get interesting with “Prom Queen,” which is as much an experiment in form, a showcase for integrated advertising and a gateway to a new embedded video player as it is autonomous entertainment. Maybe Mr. Eisner ought to have left his name off it, and let the content speak for itself, if he believed so strongly in it.
The “Prom Queen” series — 14 90-second videos as of yesterday, with new episodes coming daily for an eventual total of 90 — spins a yarn of teenagers hurtling toward what promises to be a dreadful prom night. It uses familiar online-video camerawork, including so-called video diaries, sparse establishing or wide shots and diverse visual points-of-view that ostensibly come from hand-held cameras wield by the characters.
By turns these Pom-juice-drinking adolescents (Pom’s a sponsor) obsess over sex and sports, and get caught in worrisome proximity to scary briefcases and portentous text messages. “Someone is trying to kill the prom queen” would almost definitely have been the basso profundo trailer for a “Charlie’s Angels” episode with this plot.
This being a teenage murder mystery, the cast is little more than a stand of trees in which to set an entry-level whodunit. “Prom Queen” features a jock, a trust-funder, an anarchist and an unfunny class clown, among other standby archetypes. No less clichéd are a blond twit named Lauren (Haley Mancini) who is nearly indistinguishable from a blond twit named Nikki (Alexandra French). One is meant to be a flirt, while the other is a shopaholic with a boyfriend, Chad (David Loren).
According to her fake MySpace page — the “Prom Queen” producers have set these up for all the characters — Lauren’s favorite television shows include “One Tree Hill.” Nikki’s favorite drink is a Pomtini. Both are usually drunk. Both have bios that say they’re 18.
Our Miss Marple here is Danica Ashby (Laura Howard), a British nonblonde who keeps stumbling into American mysteries, including the overhyping of the prom, the unique frivolity of California girls and the hypocrisy of the soccer coach who resolves to show his opponents no mercy just before kneeling to pray. She also discovers Chad cheating on Nikki (or is it Lauren?) and a host of other incongruities that addle her during the long nights she spends with insomnia and a camera in her own face. She is presented as the voice of reason of “Prom Queen”.
The MySpace page of Nolan, the rich kid, is splattered with Lexus logos. As for music, the character writes, it all sounds like garbage “when you’re sober.” He’s also 18. Ben (Sean Hankinson) is a very actory-looking guy who has been tapped (via text-message) to kill the prom queen. This is presumably unsettling since he’s the class president. A colder-eyed killer would be the gorgeous Josh (Jake Schideler), a bronzed drifter who has access to a love shack and the fearsome steel case.
But there has to be some misdirection, and signs in the second week of this series point to Courtney (Sheila Vand), the charismatic school-play actress whose minimal but high-impact airtime suggests a screen felon. And there’s also Danica, the Op herself, who might yet decide she wants in on the prom action and turn “Carrie” on us.
Why, though? Why follow this rote mystery? The mind-numbing “interaction” it offers (clicking and playing and pausing) is not only not gratifying, it is also surprisingly time-consuming for such small morsels of video. What’s more, broadband technology ought to be milk and honey by now. Why tune in to “Prom Queen” only to find no fast-forward or rewind, and no option to skip the innumerable and jarring ads for “Hairspray,” the movie?
If you want to solve the mystery and need a second look at anything, you have to rewatch a whole episode, including ads. For viewers who have grown up on YouTube, in the last 16 months anyway, this is a drag.
One way or another, you get too much exposure to the opening sequence, which is like a tightly compressed, high-camp version of the “Nip/Tuck” credit sequence, without any pretense of art. More than anything, the opening clarifies that “Prom Queen” is a B-minus slasher film. If you haven’t seen one of these on Netflix in a while, there’s no reason to hang around and watch one here. And certainly don’t watch just so you can say you saw a slasher flick online.
Still, it’s worth trying something — another small whodunit, if you like — before you exit promqueen.tv. Click “about” along the top of the homepage. You’ll see that Mr. Eisner’s name is missing from the credits. Big Fantasic, the production company responsible for the respectably viral “Sam Has 7 Friends” video podcast, appears to have created the show. And Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb and Ryan Wise (all of Big Fantastic) seem to have written and directed it. The producer is Laura Boersma. No Eisner.
The sponsors — listed under “thanks,” in the stylized click-on menu, which looks as if it’s been scribbled on notebook paper — include boosters of Web fun like Zappos and Elle Girl. But the thankable sponsors also include Veoh, a video-distribution network that is one of Mr. Eisner’s post-Disney acquisitions. (Veoh.com also shows the “Prom Queen” videos.) Follow the money, and it seems that the Tornante Company, Mr. Eisner’s investment firm, also has a new media studio, Vuguru (with, naturally, a video-curator site of its own, vuguru.com), that produces “Prom Queen.”
Aha. To this extent, then, “Prom Queen” can be said to be “Michael Eisner’s ‘Prom Queen.’ ”
Perhaps “Prom Queen” really is meant to be an independent work of art. But it is also being used as bait: the hope is that fans will be impatient with streaming the video into a graham-cracker-size screen and will rush to download the videos, and a new player, from Veoh.com. Surely that was the PowerPoint presentation that got Mr. Eisner excited: something about owning the player, Gates style. If evidence of interest in “Prom Queen” on the show’s own site is scanty (the forums hit their highest traffic on April 2, with 18 users), however, it was almost nonexistent on Veoh: There were six comments total. [Milo adds: VH must have missed myspace, where most of the views and comments show up.]
For Mr. Eisner, who is used to box office on a slightly higher order, this online-video business is going to be very, very intriguing.
at best, i'd say its a neutral view, but VH's perspectives are always interesting regardless.
Who Is the Player King Behind ‘Prom Queen’?
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 16, 2007
People aiming to sell “Prom Queen,” the latest strange bird in the online-video aviary, invariably refer to the Web series as “Michael Eisner’s ‘Prom Queen.’ ”
You can see why. The name of Mr. Eisner, the august former Disney chief, ought to confer legitimacy on the video project, which might otherwise seem unmoored and fly-by-night. And when Mr. Eisner stumps for “Prom Queen,” rhapsodizing about this high-school murder mystery as if it were “The 400 Blows,” he emphasizes that, even as he lights out into new media, his studio-honcho values are intact. “Content is king,” he likes to say.
With this phrase Hollywood war horses typically mean that stories are stories, and you can tell them on maxiscreens, miniscreens or fragments of screens fitted to the retina. To succeed, a narrative just has to thrill, touch or amuse. (For examples of kingly content released on Mr. Eisner’s executive watch at Paramount and then Disney, see “Saturday Night Fever,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Lion King.”)
But story fanatics also believe that the medium is not the message; the message is. And that’s where things get interesting with “Prom Queen,” which is as much an experiment in form, a showcase for integrated advertising and a gateway to a new embedded video player as it is autonomous entertainment. Maybe Mr. Eisner ought to have left his name off it, and let the content speak for itself, if he believed so strongly in it.
The “Prom Queen” series — 14 90-second videos as of yesterday, with new episodes coming daily for an eventual total of 90 — spins a yarn of teenagers hurtling toward what promises to be a dreadful prom night. It uses familiar online-video camerawork, including so-called video diaries, sparse establishing or wide shots and diverse visual points-of-view that ostensibly come from hand-held cameras wield by the characters.
By turns these Pom-juice-drinking adolescents (Pom’s a sponsor) obsess over sex and sports, and get caught in worrisome proximity to scary briefcases and portentous text messages. “Someone is trying to kill the prom queen” would almost definitely have been the basso profundo trailer for a “Charlie’s Angels” episode with this plot.
This being a teenage murder mystery, the cast is little more than a stand of trees in which to set an entry-level whodunit. “Prom Queen” features a jock, a trust-funder, an anarchist and an unfunny class clown, among other standby archetypes. No less clichéd are a blond twit named Lauren (Haley Mancini) who is nearly indistinguishable from a blond twit named Nikki (Alexandra French). One is meant to be a flirt, while the other is a shopaholic with a boyfriend, Chad (David Loren).
According to her fake MySpace page — the “Prom Queen” producers have set these up for all the characters — Lauren’s favorite television shows include “One Tree Hill.” Nikki’s favorite drink is a Pomtini. Both are usually drunk. Both have bios that say they’re 18.
Our Miss Marple here is Danica Ashby (Laura Howard), a British nonblonde who keeps stumbling into American mysteries, including the overhyping of the prom, the unique frivolity of California girls and the hypocrisy of the soccer coach who resolves to show his opponents no mercy just before kneeling to pray. She also discovers Chad cheating on Nikki (or is it Lauren?) and a host of other incongruities that addle her during the long nights she spends with insomnia and a camera in her own face. She is presented as the voice of reason of “Prom Queen”.
The MySpace page of Nolan, the rich kid, is splattered with Lexus logos. As for music, the character writes, it all sounds like garbage “when you’re sober.” He’s also 18. Ben (Sean Hankinson) is a very actory-looking guy who has been tapped (via text-message) to kill the prom queen. This is presumably unsettling since he’s the class president. A colder-eyed killer would be the gorgeous Josh (Jake Schideler), a bronzed drifter who has access to a love shack and the fearsome steel case.
But there has to be some misdirection, and signs in the second week of this series point to Courtney (Sheila Vand), the charismatic school-play actress whose minimal but high-impact airtime suggests a screen felon. And there’s also Danica, the Op herself, who might yet decide she wants in on the prom action and turn “Carrie” on us.
Why, though? Why follow this rote mystery? The mind-numbing “interaction” it offers (clicking and playing and pausing) is not only not gratifying, it is also surprisingly time-consuming for such small morsels of video. What’s more, broadband technology ought to be milk and honey by now. Why tune in to “Prom Queen” only to find no fast-forward or rewind, and no option to skip the innumerable and jarring ads for “Hairspray,” the movie?
If you want to solve the mystery and need a second look at anything, you have to rewatch a whole episode, including ads. For viewers who have grown up on YouTube, in the last 16 months anyway, this is a drag.
One way or another, you get too much exposure to the opening sequence, which is like a tightly compressed, high-camp version of the “Nip/Tuck” credit sequence, without any pretense of art. More than anything, the opening clarifies that “Prom Queen” is a B-minus slasher film. If you haven’t seen one of these on Netflix in a while, there’s no reason to hang around and watch one here. And certainly don’t watch just so you can say you saw a slasher flick online.
Still, it’s worth trying something — another small whodunit, if you like — before you exit promqueen.tv. Click “about” along the top of the homepage. You’ll see that Mr. Eisner’s name is missing from the credits. Big Fantasic, the production company responsible for the respectably viral “Sam Has 7 Friends” video podcast, appears to have created the show. And Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb and Ryan Wise (all of Big Fantastic) seem to have written and directed it. The producer is Laura Boersma. No Eisner.
The sponsors — listed under “thanks,” in the stylized click-on menu, which looks as if it’s been scribbled on notebook paper — include boosters of Web fun like Zappos and Elle Girl. But the thankable sponsors also include Veoh, a video-distribution network that is one of Mr. Eisner’s post-Disney acquisitions. (Veoh.com also shows the “Prom Queen” videos.) Follow the money, and it seems that the Tornante Company, Mr. Eisner’s investment firm, also has a new media studio, Vuguru (with, naturally, a video-curator site of its own, vuguru.com), that produces “Prom Queen.”
Aha. To this extent, then, “Prom Queen” can be said to be “Michael Eisner’s ‘Prom Queen.’ ”
Perhaps “Prom Queen” really is meant to be an independent work of art. But it is also being used as bait: the hope is that fans will be impatient with streaming the video into a graham-cracker-size screen and will rush to download the videos, and a new player, from Veoh.com. Surely that was the PowerPoint presentation that got Mr. Eisner excited: something about owning the player, Gates style. If evidence of interest in “Prom Queen” on the show’s own site is scanty (the forums hit their highest traffic on April 2, with 18 users), however, it was almost nonexistent on Veoh: There were six comments total. [Milo adds: VH must have missed myspace, where most of the views and comments show up.]
For Mr. Eisner, who is used to box office on a slightly higher order, this online-video business is going to be very, very intriguing.