Studio 650, Digital Screening & Digital Distribution - 1998

Stu­dio 650 — The Country’s first inde­pen­dent dig­i­tal cin­ema and “You Tube.”

Wash­ing­ton DC was the country’s first real wired city.  Broad­band.  Not just dial up.

It was the home of DARPANET, the orig­i­nal inter­net, and dig­i­tal film­mak­ing was of course by now finally tak­ing off.  In the world I lived in, it was finally being used by peo­ple like polit­i­cal ad mak­ers (see pre­vi­ous tab) or basi­cally broad­band, between the pro­duc­tion stu­dios and the major news­rooms, to get their cam­paign spots out when Fedex absolutely pos­i­tively couldn’t make it on time.

See­ing the writ­ing on the wall, I approached the largest pro­duc­tion facil­ity in DC which had its own stu­dio, and pro­posed the cre­ation of the first inde­pen­dent dig­i­tal movie the­atre, along with the First You Tube, about ten years ahead of its time.

AOL didn’t see any­thing of value in it, and never funded it, nor did any­one else. Of course being a woman never helps in the VC world.  Just like being in pol­i­tics.  Or busi­ness for that mat­ter.  I won­der why the Pres­i­dent “for­got” to nom­i­nate a white woman in her for­ties to any high rank­ing posi­tion in the White House or a cab­i­net position?

Maybe he wasn’t in the room.

Obvi­ously the con­ver­gence of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing and the orga­ni­za­tion of the web were no brain­ers to some­one like me who used them to good effect way before the main­stream caught on.

While it is hard to read, it does note in this arti­cle shown below, that the web­site for a film, thanks to these efforts, shown in a later tab about ANOTHER one of my ground­break­ing projects (aren’t you excited), gar­nered 50,000 hits in its first week alone due to a fully exe­cuted viral mar­ket­ing strat­egy.  This is in 1999.

But shows how much I had already moved the dis­course ahead, as in light years. Par­tic­u­larly in our lit­tle neck of the woods.

And of course our efforts not only made this an overnight, line out the door, be-there-or-be-square, hip monthly event, but got instant national press cov­er­age.  Like this lit­tle baby below from The Wall Street Jour­nal, who didn’t men­tion our online efforts because well, they were just TOO FUTURISTIC for him to under­stand and accept.  Even though a server is a server, after all.  And what do you think the con­cept of say Net­flix or even You Tube is ulti­mately based on?  Which also shows his tech­no­log­i­cal incom­pe­tence and how he was going to show how much more he knew about IT than a girl.

How­ever he was impressed enough both to cover us, and notice who’s com­pany WE are listed in.  And com­pared to.  I’d say that beats the socks off of ANYTHING anyone’s done in say 1600 Penn.

And who runs Net­flix?  And who bought out, much less started You Tube (much less owns both).  White guys who got fund­ing when I never could.  Wel­come to dis­crim­i­na­tion in America.

Even though we beat Via­com for mar­ket share in the same mar­ket, The Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val for adop­tion of the medium by two years, and this was the most suc­cess­ful venue for inde­pen­dent film EVER in Wash­ing­ton.   Not to men­tion an overnight hit which changed the face of indie film­mak­ing in DC as you can hear on this inter­view on PBS.

At least while I was still liv­ing there.

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