As we got to the end of February 1994, could we deliver pilots that would match our pitch? It is much harder to produce what seemed like a small amount of television than Halsey, Bettina or I could imagine. Kevin and his team were asked to create compelling content in what at the time was not the most interesting subject matter. Additionally, this idea of connecting TV and Online was a great big picture idea but it was not that obvious on how you actually execute. Finally, you needed to be credible and therefore your talent needed to be actually smart on the subjects. Finding talent that could be both smart yet good on camera would be a challenge. Most of those challenges would fall to Kevin.
The pilots were scheduled to be shot on Friday February 25th and Saturday February 26th. To me that seemed like a long time to shoot a couple of hours of programming. Boy, was I wrong.
Kevin put in Rick Brown as Senior Producer on all the shows. There were four shows: CNET Central, The New Edge, CNET Insiders and Double Click on Multimedia. Rick would oversee CNET Central directly and Willy Harper was Producer on The New Edge. Willy was from Santa Barbara and worked pretty independently. You might notice mysteriously The Web turned into Double Click in previous posts. My bad or rather my bad memory and lack of a pilot reel.
Kevin had put together a really good initial slate of talent for the shows. The person pulling the most duty was Adam Curry. With all his years on MTV, he was the consummate professional. He also knew a ton about the subject matter, so in many ways he was perfect. The co-host with him for CNET Central was Dr. Mae Jemison. She had been an astronaut on the Space Shuttle and had a resume that wreaked authenticity in broader technology subject matter. TV didn’t come naturally for her and you always got the sense that as the hours dragged on that she was thinking “what have I gotten myself into?” This is a photo of Adam, Dr. Mae and Jim Louderback.
Justin Gunn who had worked with Rick on Channel One would be the host of Double Click. This was a show that focused on CD-ROMs, games and other multimedia products.
The CNET set design would be a critical to this working. We wanted CNET to be a place, so it felt a bit like a clubhouse. Cyberspace and most tech seemed so impersonal and abstract. We would be the opposite — physical, human and warm with people bustling around. Some of the TV folks didn’t have total confidence that Fred could do this, so both Bob Bibb and Howard Bolter were getting alternative plans and quotes.
That said with such a little budget, there weren’t a lot of outside folks beating down the door to do the job. Fred moved forward and really delivered. As you see the colors were really bright (red, yellow and green). First person to see it was Howard who thought it looked terrible. He described it as a “Romper Room feel”. Fred flew up from LA and thought it was perfect. Then Halsey visited and he blew a gasket. He said it looked like a “kindergarten classroom”. He said we would be a “joke” and no self-respecting technology person would take us seriously. Kevin and Fred kept saying it would look different through a camera, but Halsey did not stand down easily. Thankfully, the creative team held tight.
I fly out from NY with Bettina and the first thing you noticed was that Fred had performed magic with the space. On almost no budget, he had made a place that was human and cool. As the CFO, I really appreciated the set making process because it was cheap. Fred used doors on painted cardboard tubes for the desks, fake brick walls, fake equipment, large grey plastic tubes to the ceiling and lots and lots of paint.
Looking at CNET Central opening sequence, you see the logo design transition underway. In the above image from the open, CNET is represented as Pentagram had originally created it. But in the below image you see that Fred has created the iconic “red ball”. We will spend more time on and with Fred in a later post, but I will say that through 1994 Fred would create a whole design manual and philosophy that would be one of the most important aspects of our success. I will also point out that as you look at these photos and videos you will see no blue other than screens.
As mentioned last time, we believed one of the most important innovations was the on screen icons. You will notice that in the pilot for CNET Central they are blacked out with a “FOR VIEWING PURPOSES ONLY” image. This was intentional. All sorts of people wanted to see the pilots including folks on our Wall of Shame or potential candidates for the Wall of Shame. We didn’t want to give away what we were planning on doing. God forbid, they would steal it.
Since we are still relying on AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe for the CNET Online portion, it was not trivial trying to create working prototypes for use in the show. God bless Frank and Fred for doing their best with terrible tools.
The process of shooting the pilots seemed to go on forever. Take, re-take, re-take, re-take and on and on. Rick Brown, as Senior Producer, was doing his best to try to keep us on time, but they were dealing with a lot of first time talent and literally inventing how to shoot things. One of the big challenges was shooting computer screens with existing cameras — you got a weird scrolling line. Even with Rick pushing hard, it just kept going and since we were renting a lot of the equipment like cameras, booms, and lights, it created stress around potential cost overruns.
The New Edge was maybe the trickiest to get done. We had some wonderful folks that came as guests for the show Denise Caruso, John Perry Barlow, and Mark Cantor. Now, for those of you who don’t know, John Perry Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. On Saturday night with all the stress to get finished, Adam, Mark and John disappeared to head to a Dead show in SF. Hours later, they would return not surprisingly inebriated. Adam was still able to deliver liens on cue, but Mark disappeared. We looked everywhere. Someone finally figured out he was asleep in a stall of the bathroom sitting on the stool. As something only the Director of Innovation could handle, Matthew was asked to go in and wake him up. Probably, not the proudest moment of his life.
Willy ran a kind of loose schedule and with the detour for the Dead show, we would not finish until 4am. Maybe partially connected, Mark Cantor’s segment was left on the cutting room floor.
It is worth looking at some of the material from the pilots. Here is a segment from CNET Central put together by Amory Gable and Jim Louderback. Amory was a producer on the segment. She had gone to Georgia Tech, was whip smart and good in both in front of and behind the camera. Thankfully, she would stick around for close to four years. Jim would go on to make a name for himself at Ziff Davis, Revision3 and VidCon.
This is a clip from CNET Insiders. Two things about the clip. First, it is pretty clear that this show will be interesting to about ten people in the entire country. Second, if you watch the clip it is a fascinating discussion about the Apple Newton and its effect on computing. Remember this is the beginning of 1994. I hope Fred Davis loaded up on Apple stock, he certainly saw the world clearer than 99.999% of people.
Thomas Dolby who was a famous musician was nice enough to come to the taping to talk about a video game he was developing. We would fake like we were doing a video conference. They would put them in two rooms and connect them with traditional TV ear pieces (IFBs). Here are two pictures: one he is on screen as if he was at a remote location and the second chatting with Adam before the shooting began. He was a really good sport.
After what seemed like a week, we finished.
Here are the full pilots for three of the shows. I am missing the pilot for Double Click on Multimedia. If anyone has it, send me a note. The history seems incomplete without it.
Again, I am doing my best with putting this together. If there are things to correct or additions to the story. Please send them on.
These are great posts, the only history of CNET ever written and more's the pity. Watching these pilots reminds me of the genius of bringing in Dave Ross, still the best at what he does, and Tim Truman for his score that was to CNET as John Barry's was to the Bond films: Just right and elevating the whole thing.