If you are an actor on an audition for an off-Broadway play with a lot of buzz, and your award-winning director asks you to perform a scene standing on one leg, chances are if you really want the gig you might ask which leg he would prefer you to stand on. Or imagine you are a young writer who has just been contacted  by the producers of America’s favorite sit-com to write a sample episode on spec so that you could be evaluated for their writing staff, I seriously doubt you would decide to deliver a spec script for “CSI: Miami.”

So why, young bizzlers, when Janey and the crew invites you to “tell us your story” in the intimate, confessional, and humorous /ironic style of our show…so that we can evaluate your performance and consider paying you $$ to be featured on our Digital Showcase, why would upload a video of you riding skateboards?  or singing in a talent show? or posting a trailer for a web-series you performed in two year ago?

Not to quibble or complain — we love that you have creative aspirations and really appreciate those of you who have taken the plunge by posting links to your past efforts — but for us to evaluate your work we need you to live in the present tense, not the past .

This doesn’t mean that we didn’t dig the smart, hipster poetry from Caroline, or the funny comedy reels from Julia that were featured on EOnline, but we are still hoping that the style of our main show would inspire you to use our format for self-expression to create some original videos for showbizzle — not for us to own, btw; our tos makes it very clear that you own whatever you submit  to our Community Channel — but to give us a better sense of your range and sensibilities as we look for the next round of actor/writers trying to jumpstart their careers…

So… channel your inner improv actor by grabbing a face cam, creating an original character/persona that may or may not be like you, and then share that story/performance with Janey and the rest of TeamBizzle…

…nothing might ever come out it, but hopefully you’ll have some fun challenging yourself to come up with something original — and when all is said and done,  it will confirm that you have that one crucial personality trait which all actors need to have if they are going to survive in this town and this business — which is the ability to take direction.

Virtually every time I venture out to attend local theater here in town I am almost always enthralled by at least one of the performances by a cast member — and this weekend was no exception.

I didn’t particularly love the direction of “Search and Destroy”, a revival of Howard Korder’s 1992 darkly satiric take on the meaning of success  in a desperate culture full of self-help gurus, drug dealers, and would be filmmakers all chasing a twisted American Dream . But my qualms about the show faded once Thom Guillou stepped onto the stage near the end of the play for one memorable scene as the coke sniffing campaign manager for a conservative candidate who is running for a US senate seat from New Jersey.

The next night, a lot of us went to “One Night Stand”, the musical improv show whose triumphant LA run recently added new shows to keep up for the demand for tickets. Yep, it’s that good –usually. But last night’s show had some, uh,  creative issues, but what still resonates this morning is the inventive way that cast member Jonah Platt morphed into a guru/seer called Know-ie (spelled No-ey?) which effectively brought all the loose strands together — and made for another satisfying show…

What Thom and Jonah have in common is that both of them play characters on showbizzle, the digital showcase and destination website for emerging talent I created with daughter Lindsey.  Thom plays Luke, the hot  young writer/director filmmaker whose autobiographical film is, in fact, about somebody else… while Jonah plays alongside fellow “One Night Stand” cast member Quinn Beswick as fledgling web series producers, David and Zak.

Now here’s something to consider: Jonah just finished a stint as a lowly office  assistant for a TV show while Thom works as a waiter when he’s not being a counselor at a local day camp.  That’s right — here are two incredibly talented young men doing whatever they can to pursue their artistic ambitions while dealing with the challenges and realities in life in the big city during the worst economic downturn in ages.  Sound familiar? If so, read on.

We like to say that showbizzle was created to “put a little fun back into the business”, but it’s prime value for the emerging artist is to provide a performance space away from the immediate pressures of the marketplace so that our members can post original characters and original material on the site.  And if we and other members like what we see, chances are so will the young agents and managers who are increasingly visiting our site.  And once we start up with some contests next month, you might even get paid to perform of our Digital Showcase.

So the first step is to grab a face cam and tell Janey what has happened to “you” in the process of trying to jump start your career.  And although not everyone reading this post is endowed with the same degree of creative talent — the dreaded “t-word” that  ultimately impacts one’s chances for success and makes a Jonah Platt and Thom Guillou stand out during a weekend of local theater  –we appreciate anyone willing to a take a creative risk and invite you and your chums to become valued member of our community and be treated with respect and compassion.

Art Imitates Life …and Vice Versa

Like virtually every other self-respecting writer in Hollywood, I got ripped off  early on in my career.  In my case, a story editor of a prestigious TV series rejected my spec story outline for his show because he said it dealt with a subject that neither the producers, nor the  network was looking for.  One year later,  I watched this writer, who I never met, stand at a podium to accept his Emmy award for a script that had virtually the exact same story line.  (And the script I submitted was sent to the show by an agent, no less!)

I bring up the story not to relive old war wounds but as a way to acknowledge the funny monologue on showbizzle’s Digital Showcase this week that stops being funny once our aspiring young writer who works as a PA on a network sit com,  played by contest winner David Love, reveals that the story ideas he shared over beers with a prospective mentor/working writer, apparently found their way into a writer’s room without the young scribe getting any recognition.

Gabe Uhr, who wrote David Love’s material, purposely ended the video by asking Janey, our resident authority on all things showbiz, what he should do? Should he risk getting fired by confronting the staff writer who pilfered his stories? Should he relinquish his claims on the material in hopes that a solid relationship will develop somewhere down the line? Should he report the matter to the Writer’s Guild? Should he bend over and accept that this is how the real world functions in Hollywood?

One of the reasons we encouraged Gabe and David to give their story an open ending was so that we could invite you, our favorite bizzlers,  to share your take on this all too common situation by either sending us an e-mail, or posting a video on the subject.  And depending on what you advise,  we will continue the story of the befuddled scribe in future weeks…

Oh, and in case you are wondering,  the way I chose to deal with the guy who stole my idea was to move on and hope that someday kharma would intercede on my behalf.  That someday happened ten years later when that same Emmy winning writer became unemployed and had his agent contact me about getting a staff job on Beverly Hills, 90210.  As you might imagine, it was a very brief conversation.

Question: What is The Best Definition of a Producer?

Answer: someone who knows a writer

All right. I know this all makes me sound like a shill for The Writer’s Guild of America, and while I am a long time, dues paying member, believe me, union loyalty is not what inspired me to post one of my favorite Hollywood truisms this week. Besides, if I wanted to voice the party line, this post would be titled “It All Starts With The Word.”  No,  my reason to remind you guys of the value of the writer is much more practical than that — and, as you might expect, has mostly to do with showbizzle, the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey.

One of the perks of being a member of our showbizzle community is that only members have the right to upload links to our new Community Channel where they have the chance to be paid $$ to perform original material on our Digital Showcase.  So far some of the submissions have been worth a second look (see Favorites on our Community Channel and see if you agree), but that is mostly because the personality and sense of humor of the performer, not because the words or concept are off the charts (Caroline’s Rothstein’s fiery poem to Bernie Madoff being a huge exception).

Either way, those of us here in the bizzle thought that we might be getting more submissions on a daily basis at this point — especially from the enthusiastic crew that has come over from our showbizzle on MySpace group.  Our irrepressible community manager, Miss Tina, wonders if part of the problem lies in the fact that the ordinary young actor/performer who might like to be involved with us might be just a little, well,  intimidated by the quality of the videos in the main show because they are actors, not writers.

So for anyone who is gung ho to become a character/or persona but lacks a little confidence in their ability to tell Janey a story about what they are doing to jumpstart their career ambitions, my suggestion is to…find a writer to work with. That way you can become your own producer — which is kinda what showbizzle (and this business) is all about, right?

And if there are any emerging writers out there, here’s a thought: one of the most fun things you can do without breaking the law is writing material for an actor friend,  literally putting words in their mouth.  This is the what good buds Gabe Uhr and David Love did this past spring — and they (along with Jon Ray) were paid to perform on our showcase by virtue of winning our first contest.   More about that next week.  Until then…keep on bizzlin’

Welcome Bizzlers –

Here’s a shameless confession.  The real reason I started blogging back in October ‘08 was not to give my readers a sense of what it was like to run Beverly Hills, 90210 when we were  the most popular show in the world, or even to share my thoughts about the current (woeful) state of prime time, but to do whatever I could to draw attention to showbizzle.  Not that every week, but, trust me, everyone ended with a plug for the bizzle.

Anyway, to celebrate the launch of our first newsletter, and to say thanks for giving us a chance to become whatever you’d like us to be — a diversion/an obsession/a launching pad — I’d like to re-published some of my favorite posts   – with an update, of course.

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“Putting The Show Back in The Bizzle” was my mission statement, my Jerry Maquire moment.  An affirmation of why we made all these videos in the first place…

Putting the Show back in the Bizzle

December 18, 2008

What I like about producing original content for the digital world is that if it doesn’t work out you get to throw up your hands and insist that your website/start-up/show was in Beta mode the whole time — and then, with one click of a mouse, poof, all is forgiven, and you get to start over again. Not cancelled, demeaned, and quickly forgotten which mostly happens when the network/studio/money guys pull the plug on a prime time endeavor. No. Showbizzle gets to have a second chance - a Beta-induced relaunch in the spring of ‘09. Early March. Our videos have been remixed, revoiced, repurposed, and broken down into 23 weekly 10-15 minutes segments. That’s a lot of ff****ing segments. That’s a full season. That a show. No wonder we have been asked to be featured as part of the Beta launch for Zillion TV this February. There’s that Beta word again. What a concept!

For months I have been describing showbizzle to anyone who would listen as “scripted entertainment that could pass as a reality show, in the form of a fictitious daily video blog - for the purposes of creating a social network.” We swapped out social network for community back in October once we figured out that providing services and opportunities for members were of more value than introducing them to their next bff.

To this end showbizzle ‘09 will have cool contests where members get paid to perform as well as an outreach to university theater and drama programs where cash prizes will be given to students performing our monologues in addition to performing their own material. But at the end of the day showbizzle is a show - not scripted entertainment — and I think we lost sight of that as we grappled with malfunctioning technology, unprofessional behavior from our techies from texas, and our own feeble marketing and publicity efforts.

Hopefully, in ‘09 showbizzle can hook up with a brand, and that we generate more traffic and that members start reading Janey’s blog and respond all her new voice-overs — but no matter what happens it’ll still be about the show.

showbizzle…not quite showbusiness…and a lot more fun…

Have a happy, merry, happy - and we will be back in January.

Summer has to be the least favorite season for showrunners — especially those hired to shepherd the transition from recently ordered pilot to weekly TV show.For unlike the rest of America, a meaningful summer vacation with the kiddles is totally out of the question. Showrunners don’t have time for lazy days by the pool or the beach, baseball games, family reunions,  etc. — especially during this era of squeezed budgets and creative torpor.

Not that it was any easier when I was running Beverly Hills, 90210. I distinctly remember a particularly truculent 90 minute phone call the night of July 3rd before a single frame of footage for the series was shot, in which two network execs criticized every single story beat contained in our first six outlines.  These guys even hated our typeface!  Fortunately, because of a misunderstanding on my part, the next day I called every writer (on July 4th!!!) and authorized them to begin writing their teleplays — which saved us for being shut down two weeks later for “script problems” like Fox’s other two (long forgotten) new dramas “DEA” and “Against The Law”.

Of course, the chances of a new show of any era surviving its summer gauntlet on the way to syndication has always been an iffy proposition…but my heart goes out to the folks behind “Beautiful”, a new CW show about fashion models produced by Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst productions, who is clearly dealing with stuff that ruins summers (not to mention fall, winter, and spring) as reported on hollywoodreporter.com:

The production start on CW’s new drama “The Beautiful Life” has been pushed back by a week, from July 22 to July 31. And despite the widely publicized recent meltdown and hospitalization of co-star Mischa Barton, sources close to the show say the reason for the delay is far more mundane: Some of the sets for the show were not completed on time. Still, given her medical issues, Barton’s situation on the show remains unclear.

What a relief to learn that it was not Mischa Barton’s illness that caused the delay — or script troubles, or clashing egos, or money woes, or any of the usual perils of production. It was those pesky sets! They get you every time! Oddly enough, the interior high school hallway for Beverly Hills, 90210 was not finished the week we went into production either, but we adjusted our shooting schedule and changed the locale of certain scenes to make it work. Hmmmmmmmm? Why didn’t these showrunners do that? What’s really going on here?

Well, what’s going on folks is a favorite bloodsport of the Hollywood entertainment press in which they try to predict which new show will be shut down or cancelled first by chronically whatever setbacks/misery a production company/showrunner is facing.  It’s gotcha journalism with lots of Schadenfreude thrown in to satisfy a very cynical and beaten down creative community waiting for time slots to open up.

Look, I’m a fan of Katalyst Productions so I hope they have a nice long run.  I also have a soft spot for Mischa Barton, whose fictional shopping spree makes for a wonderful three-part vignette by James Robinson, who plays Carver, a beleaguered salesman on showbizzle.com, our digital showcase and destination website.  But mostly, I’m a fan of catching waves in the morning when the surf is glassy and the dolphins check in on their daily up to Malibu to bask in the warm water of summer.

I first knew Beverly Hills 90210 was going to be a mega hit when I got a call from someone I hadn’t spoken to since high school (or maybe since junior high school) asking me if I could get Ian Ziering to make an appearance at her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.  I remember telling her that I couldn’t ask Ian to do something like that on his day off, and confessed that the only reason I could get him and all the other cast members to show up on the set during was because they were under contract to Mr. Spelling.

It was during these heady but turbulent  first years of dealing with the off camera antics of certain 90210 cast members that I developed the mantra that would mostly define my relationship to actors during my career as a showrunner.   All I really wanted from them (with very few exceptions — hello, Jay) was to know their lines, hit their marks, and go home. 

Not that I was anti-social by nature, but running an hour TV show is ridiculously time consuming, and virtually every free moment I had in those prime time days was spent with my wife and young kids.

Well , the kiddles are all grown up now, and I find myself working  in the over-crowded and under-capitalized  digital entertainment space with my eldest daughter Lindsey trying to find an audience and a sponsor for showbizzle.com, the digital showcase and destination website we created together and recently re-launched.

We worked with more than 35 very talented and very unknown young actors on the show. Many were recent college graduates, most had no professional credits, and some were still in college.  You think that most of them might be appreciative that they were given an opportunity to perform on our unique web series — especially since we made a point of paying everyone of them a fair wage immediately upon finishing their monologues.  No deferred payment here. No self-serving bull shit about working for free ’cause the exposure that will help them down the line.  No Hollywood hustle.  Our goal wasn’t just to make  a fun show, but to transform the way that business should be conducted on the internet.

All we asked from our cast in return was to help us promote showbizzle among their friends, especially their facebook friends, and let us know what they think of the new site.  We’ve been up for three weeks now (with 20 more weeks to go) and I can count the cast members who contacted us  or posted our link on their facebook page on one hand.  Nothing from the acting student from USC who has only one credit on IMDB because I wrote a part specifically for him. Nothing from the recent graduate from the UCLA drama school who worked as a paid PA during the production, but hasn’t found a moment to tell her zillion facebook friends to check us out.  Or the young man from– ah, you get the picture. Energy is put out and zippo tends to come back.

All right, so I know what you are thinking. It’s either: “Hey, CR, these people don’t really love the bizzle the way you do so they would rather avoid having a conversation then express their ambivalence”; or, maybe it’s an “Excuse me,  these young actors did what you paid them to do and moved on — which is what a real professional does, right?”; or finally, there’s the  “hey, dude, everybody’s overloaded  just trying to get through the day, so give them a break.”

Okay.  Fine. You are absolutely right. I’ll give them a break.  In fact, I’ll give any young actor with a modicum of talent the chance to get their break, or at least get some good footage for their reel.  All they have to do is become a member of showbizzle.com, and put a link on their profile page to a short performance piece they have posted on YouTube or blip.tv that they would like us to evaluate — preferably some original material  in the style of the show in which they tell Janey, our unseen blogger, what they are doing to jumpstart their careers in Hollywood, or wherever they may be.  We will post our faves on our Community Channel — and let our members votes on their favorites — and have the “winners” be paid to perform some original material on our Digital Showcase.

So if you know any young actor types just starting out, tell them about showbizzle — and I promise that if we ever get the chance to work with them,  all they will have to do is know their lines, hit their marks,  and stick around and have a beer or a cup of coffee on us.

July 4th is this week — and between the fireworks, the 5K’s, and the grilled hot dogs (or, if you are in health conscious, LA, the grilled mushrooms and tofu) I would like to take a moment  of silence for a long forgotten patriot who fought for our right to be self-supporting and independent years before anyone even thought there could ever be such a thing as Twitter, or a Google or a Simon Cowell. 

No, not Ben Franklin! Come on, think. No, not Crispus Atticus.  I’m talking about Len Hill, a Lt. Col. in the War on Indpendents who put himself and his livelihood at risk when he went to Washington D.C. in the early 90’s to testify against the implementation of The Repeal of the Financial and Syndication Rule, which prohibited networks from owning the entertainment programming they air.

But unlike the unruly mob that gathered in front of Faneuil Hall to protest the inherent unfairness of the Stamp Act, Len braved the fight against the behemoths of programming all by his lonesome — think of Paul Revere riding in the dead of night to warn his compatriots that ‘The British are Coming, the British are Coming’ only to realize once he finally reaches Concord that all the other soldiers have made a side deal with King George, or in Len’s case, with Les Moonves, the then President of Warner Brother’s Television and one of President Bill Clinton’s favorite Hollywood golfing buddies .

Len warned us that the Repeal of The Fin Syn, as it was known  back then, would doom a generation of independent purveyors to a life of indentured servitude, serving at the whim of the corporate royalists while battling for creative freedom and a shrinking percentage of the pie.

That Len Hill had an outstanding career as a network executive (who gave me one of my first jobs) and a prolific independent producer of TV movies (including one on the Beach Boys which I wrote) is all but forgotten during this woeful , culturally impoverished, era of Jon and Kate and TMZ.

Please join me now for a moment of silence as we read the roll call of the fallen production companies who went to their final resting place as part of a larger conglomerate  thanks to the scourge of network hegemony: Carsey Werner, Stephen Cannel, Lorimar, MTM, Spelling- Goldberg, and Tandem Productions, which was the name of Norman Lear’s main production  company for all you who have no recollection of what life was like before there was Fox Television…

Ah, but I remember Len. He gave great script note, he smoked a pipe, and he screamed a lot, and as soon as it was clear that networks would no longer buy projects from him when they could do them for a bigger profit margin by themselves, he left show business to develop real estate and play golf.  And in his honor, I pledge to name a future character on showbizzle ( the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey) after  Len.  Happy holiday, everybody

Oh, one other thing — did you honestly think I could write a blog without a mention of the bizzle?

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This past Monday showbizzle.com, the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey, finally re-launched.  I knew that mPRm, the Hollywood-based PR firm headed by industry veteran Rachel McCallister, had put together a fairly tight press release being sent out to various bloggers in the ‘trade press’ — many whom chose to ignore my direct attempts to contact them last Fall during our mostly abortive launch, which we ultimately scuttled.  My only hope this time around was that we would be treated fairly and not slammed for being  too Hollywood, too indy, too ambitious, take your pick. What I did not expect to find was this love-letter posted on Cynopsis Digital .

~ WEBSITE OF THE DAY ~

” Father and daughter team Charles and Lindsey Rosin go public with Showbizzle.com today, an intimate little site that documents Lindsey’s efforts to break into the entertainment biz. It’s the home for a breezy twentysomething cinema verite web series about Lindsey and her cohorts’ struggles to break into screenwriting, acting and directing. The show (think Swingers with a feminine point-of-view, a larger cast and a lower budget) looks entertaining and should be required viewing for kids thinking of moving out to LA LA land to chase their dreams of stardom as it delves into the frustrations of being on the outside looking in. But the show is meant to be the sugar coating for the site’s more practical features designed to provide resources to struggling amateur actors and filmmakers. For instance Lindsey’s Dad Charles, a veteran writer/producer whose credits include Northern Exposure and Beverly Hills 90210, will tap friends such as TV director David Semel to provide video primers featuring no nonsense advice about how to position the camera, run a set and direct actors. There’s also a requisite social networking component, encouraging users to form a community and share their stories. Too many of the entertainment-themed web series are nothing more than exercises in celebrity navel gazing. Showbizzle is refreshing in its honesty, its wary-but-not-jaded tone and its genuine desire to help others to succeed.”

Yay for the home team. I immediately forwarded this review via e-mail to our inner-circle. I heard back from almost everyone almost immediately, but my longtime agent did not reply until that evening with under the heading “FYI Let’s Discuss.”

After 35 years as an agent, Elliot Webb has elected to leave ICM to explore other opportunities in entertainment.  He will remain at ICM through August.  Webb began his career at ICM in 1974 and left the agency in 1983, joining Bob Broder and Norman Kurland to form the agency Broder Kurland Webb.  That successful television and feature literary agency, known in 2006 as Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann, was acquired by ICM.   Webb has worked with a very successful group of writers and directors, including Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Anna Hamilton Phelan, Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, Barry Kemp, and other very talented individuals, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, and Chris Carter, the creator of the enormously successful X-FILES franchise.

Elliot started being my agent in January 1981 and has, in effect, represented my interests ever since.  During that first year, Elliot would invite me to his office at the old ICM building on Beverly Blvd. to discuss my career options — but for most of the hour I would watch this aggressively confident dynamo from the lower east side work the phones, three calls at a time. It was the best show in town. See, unlike today’s crop of agents with their multiple agendas and corporate approach, Elliot constantly put himself on the line for his clients. He seemed to know when to scream, when to cajole, when to ask for a favor — and as an added bonus, when asked he was surprisingly adept at giving script notes. 

We became very good friends in those years. We’d hang out, go to ball games, go to dinner. My wife Karen and I were invited to his first  wedding and his memorable 40th and 50th birthday bashes. In those early ICM years, he and fellow agent Beth Uffner would have these wonderfully low-key swim parties in the Valley for their mostly young clients — Glenn Caron, Josh Brand, John Falsey, Karen Hall — which gave us a sense of fellowship and community that can so often be lacking in Hollywood.  So it wasn’t all that surprising when virtually all of his clients followed Elliot out the door when he opted to leave ICM to join Bob Broder and Norman Kurland in a cramped one room office above the classy restaurant Scandia on the Sunset Strip.

Unlike Mike Ovitz or other “star agents” of that prosperous era, these guys shunned publicity and never put themselves ahead of their client’s best interests. They were considered to be tough and opportunistic, but also honorable and fair. Elliot negotiated a lot of rich deals over the years — and he knows better than anyone else that the terms he carved out on my behalf during my tenure at Beverly Hills, 90210 has given me and my family years of financial security and peace of mind.

But the business changed — and changed again — so by the time ICM brought BWCS under its fold in 2006, my name (and I presume the names of many of his clients) could no longer be found on the Hot Must Have Lists…but by that time Elliot had remarried, started his family, and adapted to the role of being a consigliere to the next generation of agents. He and I had stopped hanging out long before the merger, and after awhile had fewer and fewer career oriented conversations — especially after it became clear to both of us that what passes for ICM’s ‘New Media’ Department had no interest in helping me get showbizzle off the ground.

And now that he’s leaving the big agency to “pursue other options”, I want to wish Elliot all the best and truly thank him for never losing faith in my talent and for encouraging me to “reinvent myself”…which ultimately inspired to find a way to put the show back in the bizzle where it belongs.

Once Upon a Time - well, back in the mid 1970’s actually -Lew Wasserman, the legendary chairman of MCA/Universal and widely considered to be the most powerful Hollywood executive of his or any other era, chose Senator John Tunney, a one-term lightweight Democrat from California, to make sure that Congress closes all tax breaks for anyone investing in independently produced movies. So under the guise of closing the proverbial ‘tax loophole for the rich’, an emerging low budget film industry that was beginning to mount a serious challenge to the way the major Hollywood studios do business suddenly vanished into thin air. Poof!30 years later, I bet Mr. Wasserman is smiling down on today’s current crop of Hollywood moguls as they pull the plug on their company’s online ventures, effectively causing the dreams and ambitions of the newbies to go Poof!

Already NBC Universal, Turner, and HBO have all shut down innovative platforms after ridiculously short runs.  And the retreat from digital production only accelerated this spring with 60 Frames, the web studio tied to United Talent Agency, going belly up after blowing through 3.5 mil on 30 series in less than two years.

But it ‘s when I read that Stage 9, Disney’s digital studio, was shutting down its production unit after only airing the first of the 20 original series it produced during its initial launch in February ‘08 that I began to get curious.  I mean, even for a critical snob like me, it’s hard to believe that every one of the other 19 shows that Disney left on the shelf is unwatchable? I mean, even “The Squeegees”, a benign gang comedy built around four window washers that always seemed more  network tryout film then groundbreaking digi stuff (and which the critics sadly trashed), had moments and charm and laughs.

So what gives? Well, at first blush it is fairly obvious. There’s no market for digital entertainment. No brands vying to sponsor new shows. No way for Disney to recoup its investment. Not even close. Blah. Blah. Blah. But given that Disney has bought a stake in Hulu, and that Hulu is considering charging users for premium content, my prediction is Disney will roll out its digital inventory on Hulu with a splashy ad campaign and its own designated channel sometime in the near future…

…unless, of course, all those other Stage 9 shows really do suck - and they might.  I happen to be a big fan of the four man Handsome Donkey comedy troupe behind the unfairly maligned Squeegees,  and knowing how funny, and fresh and inventive their indy videos are (check out Funny or Die), it’s not that tough to envision digital Disney stifling creativity on all levels in the good ‘ol, kiss my ass, “Team Disney” tradition.

But what really stinks is that by keeping those 19 shows on the shelf, the young talent behind the projects can’t generate any buzz to further their careers and ambitions.

That’s why I am happy we got the chance to work with three of our Handsome Donkeys friends - Aaron Greenberg, Brendan Countee, and Adam Countee  - on a very funny three-part sketch they wrote/improvised for showbizzle, the digital showcase and destination website that re-launches Monday, June 22^nd.  Part of showbizzle’s mandate is to spot light emerging talent - and these guys are the real deal and they are worth your time. They’ll be featured @showbizzle.com on the Digital Showcase starting the week of July 6^th. And I’m here to tell you that, even if Stage 9 and Disney won’t.