Marshall Herskovitz talks about the evolution of "quarterlife"
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The essentials:
Name: Marshall Herskovitz Writer, producer and director Marshall Herskovitz talks to WEG about his ground breaking web series "quarterlife." |
Marshall Heskovitz has garnered significant success as a producer in Hollywood. His tv series “thirtysomething” was a ground breaking show that changed the landscape of television forever. And his most recent big screen productions have starred Leonardo DiCaprio ("Blood Diamond") and Daniel Craig ("Defiance"). Herskovitz also serves as the president of the Producers Guild of America (PGA).
Last year, Herskovitz broke new ground with his original web series "quarterlife." The series quickly gained a large following online and became the first web-originated program to get broadcast on a major television network (NBC). We talked with Herskovitz about his decision to embrace this new medium and what he learned from the experience.
WEG: First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to talk to us.
MH: Sure. My pleasure.
WEG: Before quarterlife (qL), the internet was largely perceived as a medium for amateur and independent filmmakers, not big Hollywood producers. What was it that prompted you to produce an original series for the web?
MH: Well, it’s funny because I think that there are many of us in the so-called old media world who have been watching the internet for some years now, being quite envious of the independence and freedom that was available on the internet. And I think a lot more of us would have been working in that space if the economics were, you know, positive. So, I think, it came at a moment when I was particularly frustrated with the business of television and how difficult it is to do what you want and in the way you want to do it. And, I think, at a moment when it seemed like there was a possibility to create a business model for content on the internet that would make it possible to create programs with a higher technical quality. I’m not talking about the filmmaking quality or the storytelling quality… just technically it seemed like there was a model for advertising that would pay more. It turns out I was wrong, but it was a possibility.
WEG: Maybe for now, but who knows what will happen in the future?
MH: That’s right. We were premature. Put it that way.
WEG: You were writing mostly hour-long drama series. However, most qL episodes run seven or eight minutes in length. How did the condensed format affect your writing and/or producing of the series?
MH: You know what’s funny is it didn’t affect it at all because we wrote these as hour-long stories. And we did that on purpose. In other words, we felt that… one of the problems I had seen in some of the internet productions I had watched was that it’s very hard to create emotion in three or four minutes. You know, it’s very hard to tell a comprehensive story in a short amount of time. So, we just made a guess. And we said... what if we told hour-long stories, because that’s a form we know and we believe works, and just broke it up into pieces? Would people hang around for those pieces? And the answer was yes.
WEG: You brought in some notable names to collaborate with on the series. For instance, Eric Stoltz, who’s better-known for his work in front of the camera, directed an episode. What was it that made you want to reach out to Stoltz and others... to give them an opportunity to direct a web series?
MH: Actually, this is something we’ve been doing all through our years in television. When we did “thirysomething,” we had something like 40 first-time directors in the course of doing that series. We always believed in bringing in directors from other areas who had their own expertise, whether it was the theatre, or movies… that sort of thing. So in this case, I just said “who are the people I want to work with?” I mean, Eric was someone we had worked with on “Once and Again,” a series we did for NBC about seven years ago. And besides being an incredibly talented actor, he’s a very talented director. So I thought of him immediately. So the question was could I convince him to do it considering there was very little money in it? And the answer was yes because he was interested in seeing what the space was like. And the same with John Sacret Young who was doing “China Beach” when I was doing “thirtysomething” and was also somebody who was interested in doing something in a different way. So it was actually, you know, fun for me and stimulating to bring in these other voices and these other sensibilities like we’ve always done.
WEG: qL was originally conceived as an hour-long tv drama before being reimagined as a web series. The story centers on Dylan, played by Bitsie Tullock of “lonelygirl15,” who is a vlogger on a website called “quarterlife.com” You actually created a collaborative quarterlife.com website where people could interact with the show’s fictional characters online. Was this interactive element a part of the original tv series pilot or was it something you added to the story when you decided to take the series to the web?
MH: I tell you, the development of this series was a little more complex than you described. It was more of an evolution. We made a pilot for ABC called "quarterlife" that was just not creatively successful. And that was painful because I loved the people in it, I loved the cast and we wanted it to work. For many reasons, it just didn’t work. And I felt at the time that the problems in it were inherent to the basic situation we had created, the basic story. So, still thinking of it as a television pilot, I entirely reimagined it… threw out all the characters and started from scratch with a whole new story. And in the development of that story, it became more and more clear to me that what I was creating was better-suited to the internet than to a television show. Part of the reason I felt that was that the story itself was so much about the internet. It was about a website and about a girl blogging. And as we sort of got deeper into this process, you know, it came to me that we should be doing this as an internet series and that we should create a social network to go along with it and that this would become very much a singular production unlike anything else anyone had done. So it was not like we had a pilot that didn’t work on television so we said, let’s just take it to the internet. It was actually a much more evolutionary process.
WEG: The website has really become a phenomenon in its own right. There’s a whole community of young creatives logging on to share their work, exchange ideas and network with each other. So, like you said, the series has spawned this online social network. I know there’s been at least two or three creative collaborations that have occurred between the members. What are some of the benefits of joining the quarterlife.com community if you’re an aspiring artist?
MH: It’s been surprising to me how the community has not only held-on, but grown during this period when Facebook has basically trounced everyone in its path. And, in many ways, there’s no need for another social network. And yet, people have continued to join. In fact, we have increased our membership by 50% in the last two months. There’s been just a huge surge of new members… just in the last two months. And I have to believe it’s because there’s just something in the sensibilities on our site that attracts creative people. First of all, it’s a very, very constructive and supportive community. It’s remarkably absent of any meanness. You know that sort of standard kind of denunciation people do on other websites just does not exist on quarterlife. It’s remarkable. Comments from people are either positive or is constructive criticism. There’s just never any of that meanness. Perhaps that’s why it has persisted.
WEG: I noticed you now have two new series listed on the site, “I Believe” and “Film School.” Tell me a little bit about those.
MH: “Film School” is something we’re still trying to figure out how to do just because we don’t have the time or the resources to do it. I mean, I want to do it, and we’ll see how that goes. “I Believe” is very special for us and we are now trying to find backers for it so we can do it as a series. It’s an attempt to realize more where America is with regard to religion today. We have this wonderful producer and host named Rachel Gray(sp?) who majored in Religion at Princeton and sort of will be our guide, going around the country and looking into different religious communities and religious groups and families and asking where is faith? What do people believe in and why do they believe it? The response to this has been so positive. It’s something we’re very excited about and I think it will find a place outside of our site – not to say it won’t be on our site – but it will find wider distribution besides just on quarterlife within the next few months. I feel very hopeful about it.
WEG: Sounds like it will be great.
MH: Yeah.
WEG: Back to quarterlife. I know the series has been on hiatus a while. Any plans to produce new episodes?
MH: It’s been difficult call. We had a… how should I put this? We had a very educational experience you could say when we went to tv with the series. It was picked up by NBC as a television series and they were going to broadcast all six hours. The first night on NBC was pretty disastrous for them. There were only 3.7 million viewers. Here’s the thing… the media world is so fragmented today that 3.7 million viewers on a cable network would be a huge home run – an immense hit. But on NBC, it’s a disaster. So the natural thing to have done after that would be to segue the show from NBC to a cable network where it could exist with a smaller audience and still be successful. And for a lot of reasons that I don’t think would be politic for me to go into now, that didn’t happen. And I think that, you know, it’s hard to explain. I think when you show you can deliver over three and a half million people to a first episode, that should have some meaning to programmers at other networks. I think the reasons why it was not picked up by other networks was that… most of it was fear. Because the sense was that it had failed on NBC, and if it had failed somewhere else then an executive would look pretty silly for having picked it up. So I guess it was not meant to be even though I’m sitting on a program that for a long time was the most successful internet series ever with over 350 thousand views per episode, which was higher than anyone else had ever done. And a show that had delivered quite a lot of people on television and yet was perceived as having failed. So, you know, I think there are realities you have to contend with in this business. And one of them is the perceptions, which is more important than reality. So there you are.
WEG: At the Produced By conference in June, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about monetizing new media. With more and more people turning to the web and even their cell phones and mobil devices to consume media, at what point do you think advertisers will be more willing to sponsor web originated series like “quarterlife?”
MH: I’ve obviously done a lot of research in this area. I think the advertisers are getting a bad rap in this way. I’ll explain why. When advertisers buy time on television, they don’t compute their sales in terms of CPMs (cost per thousand). But you can compute it… you just do the math. You can actually compare the rates that advertisers pay for television versus the rates they pay for internet. And it turns out CPMs on television are exactly the same as those on the internet. Basically for all forms of video, CPMs that advertisers pay are between $10 - $20 whether it’s television or the internet. The difference is that the audience for any particular given piece of video content on television is much higher than on the internet. And they have the ability to insert many more commercials into a television show than they can on an internet video. So the result is that advertisers get a lot more bang for their buck on television. So now I realize that it is incumbent upon us, the producers, to find a way to increase our audience. I actually believe that the magic number – the mad magic number – is a million views per episode average. Just to give you an example… “Mad Men” on AMC has an average of 900,000 viewers per episode. That’s a television show. But because it is so well thought of, is such an award-winning show, that it does a lot for AMC that it’s good business for them even if they’re breaking even or even losing a little bit of money. The point is, even the economics of creating content… you could create professional content and make money at it at a million views per episode. That’s on television or the internet. The question is how are we ever going to make a series on the internet that’s going to get a million views when the best anyone’s ever done is between two and three hundred thousand? That’s the thing I think we need to crack. I do think it’s crackable. I think it will be solved pretty soon, as a matter of fact. Then you’re going to find that it’s actually easier to find advertisers and easy to create the same kind of revenues that will provide the quality budget for internet programming.
WEG: We really hope our website will help with that cracking.
MH: I wish your website had been around a year ago. It's going to be a huge help. I think this is a huge piece of the puzzle. I really wish you the best with this. I really do. I think it’s great.
WEG: I really appreciate you taking the time to discuss this new exciting world of web series. I look forward to seeing more of you online, as well as on the big screen.
