In either 2002 or 2003, I wrote a story for Salon.com about a blogger, Helen Jane (now Helen Jane Hearn) who was hired as the official blogger on set for a film being made by Adam Goldberg called I Love Your Work. For the story, I interviewed a bunch of pioneering bloggers, including Meg Hourihan and J.D. Lasica, about what they thought of the tentative melding of Hollywood movie making and blogging. Now, knowing what a phenomenon (force to be reckoned with? fact of life?) that blogging has become and the starring role it plays in the business world, it’s funny to look back and see what these bloggers had to say about the possible migration of blogging from the realm of the personal to the professional. Meg Hourihan’s advice–transparency first–has become one of the tenets of blogging. And the idea that great bloggers would one day be paid for their work is certainly true in 2008. In any case, I pulled this post off of J.D. Lasica’s (old?) blog and thought this was a fun read, so a very belated thanks J.D., for this thoughtful wrap up of a story that I loved writing. It is not only cool to have your story discussed, but even more cool to be able to look back at that discussion five years later and see how far blogging has come since I visited Helen Jane on the L.A. set of that movie. The movie came out, by the way, distributed by ThinkFilm, but not until years later.
Room for movie bloggers in the blogosphere?
Alisa Weinstein has a new piece in Salon: Hollyblog — Are movie bloggers part of weblogging’s natural evolution, or just a sign that another cool Net thing has been co-opted?
I was one of four bloggers Alisa interviewed for her Salon piece. My comments didn’t make it into the final cut – Meg Hourihan’s views and mine were pretty similar — so I’ll post them here.
Alisa initially wrote:
I’m writing a story for Salon.com about a blogger who was hired by a film production company to be the official blogger on the set of their latest project, a movie called I Like Your Work, directed by Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan) and starring Christina Ricci, Jason Lee, Joshua Jackson, Elvis Costello and Franke Potenta, among others. The blogger, Helen Jane, keeps her own web log, called helenjane.com. One of the film’s young executive producers (also a blogger) knew of her site, liked her writing style, and offered her the job via an email message. The only ground rules were, no talking to the actors between takes and stay out of the way.
I am curious to know what you, as a part of the Blogging community, think of all of this. Will it be successful? Is it a good thing?
Sure, it’s a terrific thing. Most bloggers aren’t just sending bits off into the void — they want some reaction, they want to set off a spark. And if someone will pay us for our random thoughts and random observations, so much the better. Say, do you have that producer’s business card handy?
Is the commercialization of blogs inevitable?
No, the end of unpaid, doing-it-for-the-love-of-it bogging is not at hand. Unfortunatley. For Helen Jane, this seems like a great confluence of talent and luck. But it goes to show that if you’re a decent writer, you should put your stuff out there on the Web. You never know how someone’s going to trip across your work.
Is Helen Jane compromising her integrity by doing a Hollywood web log
that is being edited?
Not at all. Plenty of bloggers, such as newspaper bloggers, have editors and layers of approval. What’s important is full disclosure: Let the Web community know up front what the deal is and who has final say. That’s important information.
Is this going to be well-received by other bloggers?
It depends. The trick is simple: Keep it honest. The more free form, unscripted and unsanitized it reads, the more likely we’ll accept it as a blogger’s glimpse of movie set doings, rather than as an official version stamped with the seal of corporate approval, which would be far less interesting.
Will bloggers be hired out like this in the future? In other words, will they be able to market themselves as expert bloggers for hire to corporations and Hollywood?
Don’t look for a tidal wave of bloggers as film consultants or official chroniclers of life on a Hollywood set. But if lightning strikes, make the most of it.
They’re not sure if they’re going to reveal that the blog is not in real time. What do you think about that?
That would be a major mistake. You can’t withhold information like that. When I was an editor at BabyCenter, we didn’t mention the fact that a mother’s journal of her pregnancy was not taking place in real time, and got crucified for it.
Also, they’re not going to allow people to post comments right away, only send emails. They want to see what kinds of emails come in first and make sure they’re not getting emails from angry crew members or various other scandalous messages.
That’s another mistake. If you don’t trust your readers, what does that say? All they need to do is set up terms and conditions for posting right at the outset, and they can remove any comments that violate those precepts.
JD Lasica is senior editor of the Online Journalism Review and a daily blogger.
And of course, here is a link to the story that I wrote for Salon.com. By the way, I would probably have written it differently if I knew then what I know now about writing. Way too much flowy explanatory crap. Hey, we all go through phases.
