Revolutions ferment for a while before they reach fruition. They’re seldom taken seriously at first, seen as they are by the powers that be as the rantings of malcontents and crackpots. It’s only when they build a groundswell of support that they’re taken seriously.
What I’m going to call the Media Revolution has been quietly brewing for years now, quietly infiltrating the once hallowed domains of the print, music, and film industries. It’s only recently that the Old Guard of media have taken notice and have seriously begun to draw up their countermeasures. At one extreme of the spectrum is the music industry, particularly the RIAA, who insist on fighting tooth and nail against digital delivery of music. It’s a battle they will inevitably lose, bent as they are on anything less than a stranglehold on artists and consumers alike. At the other end is the print media, who have all but conceded the death of paper, and are increasingly making their product available online only. Economically and environmentally it makes sense, given that publications live or die by advertising dollars.
Somewhere between the contempt of the dying music industry and the outright concession of the print media lies a quiet alliance between the traditional and the digital. It’s a revolution within the revolution, and it may well herald the future of entertainment. The film industry, and the television industry in particular, recognize the simple fact that the Media Revolution has begun in earnest. And rather than wage futile warfare against an irresistible force, TV networks and studios have embraced the revolution with open arms — to an extent.
Television is the youngest of the old media, so it should come as no surprise that it’s allying itself more readily with upstarts carving niches for themselves via the Internet, and through small independent films. Archer House, a short by writer/director Dina Gachman, is a prime example of the latter. It sounds like the perfect setup for the latest teen horror film: eighteen-year-old Sam Archer, an aspiring investigative journalist, goes undercover to unearth the secrets of an upscale college sorority. She soon finds herself embroiled in a strangely alluring world of teacups and sisterhood from which there is no escape. Fortunately, Gachman’s short film veers away from such clichés, opting instead to tell a story about weighing the need to rebel against the desire to conform. It’s a wonderfully nuanced story, tightly told in just over fifteen minutes, that’s never preachy or maudlin. After airing at the AFI Film Festival in Dallas earlier this year, Archer House caught the attention of Slamdance Media Group, and as a result, is being pitched to NBC as a possible series.
This would have been unheard of in the old Hollywood system of catch 22s (to sell a script, you need an agent—to acquire an agent, you need to sell a script), but those were the days before the emergence of cable, and certainly the days before the Internet made it economically feasible for anybody with talent to circumvent the established rules.
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