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By Scott Rosenberg
Barry Diller fidgets uncomfortably in his seat. The scene is a computer trade show last year, and the once-and-future Hollywood mogul -- who, having left the Fox network to head up QVC, the cable shopping channel, has since launched a war to take over Paramount -- shares the stage with some equally notable corporate captains: cable baron John Malone of Tele-Communications Inc., Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and then-CEO of Apple, John Sculley.
They have gathered to talk about the "convergence" of their industries in the age of the information highway --the digital hybrid of telephone, television and computer that's expected to transform the communications landscape over the next decade.
Gates, Scully and to a lesser extent Malone are gabbing about technical stuff: digital video compression, asynchronous transfer mode, LANs, standards and servers. Diller's eyes are glazing -- this is evidently not his turf.
The moderator finally fires a question his way. As Diller repeats it, he sounds incredulous: "Is there a reason for broadcast to exist at all?" Then -- with the manner of a teacher patiently explaining to some bright students that, no, they can't be excused from gym class to finish their science-fair projects -- he says that broadcasting is just another term for the people who provide programs. "As long as networks can get a sufficient number of eyes to pay their bills," he says, confidently, "they'll do fine."
Later, Diller makes fun of the word "interactive" and suggests that no one will be interested in buying "$800 boxes to interact with this whole new world." Finally, when Scully paints a particularly utopian vision of a high-tech educational future with a terminal on every desk, Diller can't contain himself.
"You don't think the schoolroom as we know it will end?" he brusquely interjects. "There'll still be humans, right? I mean, you'll still be taught by humans interacting in a room with other people, and having social experiences that form you. It couldn't be any other way, could it?"
When the audience laughs, it's impossible to tell whether they're laughing along with the sarcastic jab or at Diller's backwardness -- his inability to get with the digital program. Which is funny in itself, since among Hollywood execs Diller is considered to be relatively open to thinking about technological change.
That testy panel was an early instance of an increasingly common sight along the road to the information highway: the cultural collision between Hollywood's stretch limos and Silicon Valley's motley Volvos and speedsters. More and more, it's beginning to look like a demolition derby out there.
The technologists know how to engineer the highways. The entertainment industry knows how to produce the traffic. Can they work together, or are they doomed to crash? As Vice President Gore unveils the Clinton Administration's policy for promoting a "National Information Infrastructure" at the so-called Superhighway Summit in Los Angeles Tuesday, a lot hangs on the answer.
What's at stake is not just a geographical issue along the lines of "Will the 'New Hollywood' be located in Southern California or the Bay Area?" Nor is it just a clash between incompatible corporate cultures that will someday be fodder for business-school case studies. What happens in this encounter, and whose vision prevails, is likely to have a formative impact on the nature of information and entertainment in the digital age -- not only on how we get it but on what's available and whether it's any good.
Each group believes it needs the other, but they don't talk the same languages and -- people in both agree --they each view the other with condescension. Hollywood execs try out the prototype interactive products from the computer industry and declare them to be boring and difficult to use. Computer people look at Hollywood's ideas for how to use the new technology and declare them to be mired in the thinking of the past.
Sadly, both groups may be right.
John Voland, an independent consultant based in Los Angeles who works with both industries, says, "Each party has similar ideas of what they want to do, but they come from such different social and technological cultures that it's extremely difficult for them to find common ground. And there's this built-in technophobia in Hollywood which is going to make the courtship more and more problematic." Voland likens the collision to "the British Empire meeting the Zulu warriors" -- though he won't say which represents which. (Is Hollywood the more powerful because of its financial clout and prominence? Or is the empire the computer industry, because of its technological prowess?)
Silicon Valley is corporate at the core, but it also has countercultural roots and millenarian visions around its fringes. When many computer people talk about the information highway, they speak in terms of individual empowerment, experiments in interactive art, and a digital cultural renaissance. Television as it exists today is something they try to ignore -- Gates has said he doesn't even have a TV set in his home -- and tend to imagine will wither away.
While the computer visionaries imagine "paradigm shifts," the Hollywood programmers are much more likely to talk about pay-per- view. "Hollywood for the most part is a town where you are judged by box office," says Tom Zito, president of Digital Pictures in Palo Alto, which produces interactive games and movies for Sega CD systems. "A lot of guys don't want to go off and do experimental things that divert them from the singleminded question of how do I make a movie that's going to make $100 million?"
On the other hand, just about every Hollywood studio has recently started up an "interactive" division. "In the past, when I'd tell people what I was doing, their eyes would cross," says Allee Willis, a Hollywood- based artist, songwriter and filmmaker who has recently begun working in multimedia. "It's scary now -- everyone and their mother is doing it. It used to be people here were all screenwriters; now they're all doing CD- ROMs."
Willis says she's excited by the chance to "define the new mass pop- culture medium of the 21st century," but worries that too much of what Hollywood will produce in the new media will just be "linear people taking their linear things into this completely different, non-linear form."
It was the broadcast industry, and specifically Malone of TCI, who popularized the notion of "500 channels" --a figure arrived at by a simple multiplication of today's 50 channels with the ten-times-more-information capacity of digital compression. But people in both TV and the computer industry agree that that's already become a useless concept.
"Channels, stations, dials -- it's all out the window pretty soon," Diller told his trade-show audience. "Channels is completely the wrong metaphor," says Doug Millison, the editor of Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier, a new magazine for multimedia developers. "What we're talking about is 5 million servers" -- computers providing digital products, information and services over the network.
In Millison's view, "it'll be like dialing the phone. Hollywood will provide some of those experiences at the other end of the line, but so will people like you and me, who come up with a great idea and have access to these relatively cheap tools, too. What's emerging is an infrastructure that will allow a million Hollywoods to bloom out there."
But the specter of an information highway that leads to a more-of-the- same future -- a vaster version of the "vast wasteland" FCC chairman Newton Minow famously saw on network TV in the 1960s -- remains potent. It's on display in "Box Conspiracy," the multimedia-theater hit that's been playing for months at George Coates Performance Works. In Coates' nightmare, a 5000-channel network of the future offers infinite variations on the banality of today's cable TV.
The nightmare is shared by Mitch Kapor, who founded the Lotus software company and now heads the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor described it to the Digital World conference in Beverly Hills last summer: "500 channels with the same crap that's now on 50. The same movies starting every 15 minutes across dozens of channels. The 'Hair Club for Men' channel. The Thighmaster channel. And everything in this nightmare looks like a music video."
Kapor's foundation lobbies for a highway with an open structure modeled on the non-profit Internet, which would not just expand viewer's choices but open up a whole new era of "many-to-many" communications. Such a network would have room not only for mass entertainment but for what Kapor calls "the garage bands of cyberspace"; it would provide "a migration path for the weirdos and the outsiders to get into the system, mature and blossom."
Today, Kapor says, it looks like telephone companies will have at least as much to say about the design of the information highway as the cable TV industry -- thanks to mergers like the Bell Atlantic-TCI deal. "Phone companies have deeply institutionalized values of universal service and common carriage," he explains, and that, combined with the Clinton administration's endorsement of an open network, makes the nightmare less likely.
Lewis Lapham, in an essay in the current Harper's, disapprovingly likens today's media moguls, particularly Malone, to the robber-baron industrialists of the late 19th-century who built the railroads. But that kind of comparison can offer hope, too, to those who think that neither Hollywood nor the cable industry will wind up in the information- highway driver's seat.
"A lot of the talk today reminds me of the argument that took place earlier this century between the steamship companies and the railroads over which would own the airline industry," says Tim Boyle, the acting executive director of the San Francisco Multimedia Development Group.
Boyle predicts that a "disproportionate amount" of the new interactive media will be Bay Area-produced because of the concentration of developers, publishing houses and other skilled artisans here. Others say that more of the work will be done in Los Angeles as the business moves from inventing tools and technologies to telling stories and making products. There's already an enormous amount of traffic in both directions.
The Bay Area has the multimedia software industry amd most of the videogame industry -- as well as brash young companies like Colossal Pictures that are in a good position to take advantage of whatever opportunities the information highway offers. The region also has a tradition as an alternative film production center built by George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Saul Zaentz and peopled by directors and screenwriters seeking escape from Hollywood's suffocating mediocrity.
Hollywood has new partnerships like the Seventh Level company, which has announced a multimedia CD-ROM to be produced by the Monty Python troupe, and Digital Domain, a high-tech production shop established by director James Cameron and special-effects maestros Stan Winston and Scott Ross. Of course, it also has almost a century of experience manufacturing saleable fantasies.
But Hollywood and the Bay Area aren't the only communities involved in this competition; there are also concentrations of new media talent in the Northwest, in Colorado and in New England.
Voyager is a multimedia company known for its higher-brow, high- quality products -- and for modeling itself more on the publishing house than the movie studio. Bob Stein recently relocated the Santa Monica- based company to New York.
He says it was a "fabulous" move. "What they do in Hollywood is make movies, and I don't make movies. The intellectual environment is much richer in New York. The people we get to work with are much higher quality."