Episode 156: The Exit Interview
In Episode 156, “The Exit Interview,” Fansplaining marks the end of Flourish’s time in the entertainment industry (!) with a conversation about what they’ve observed over thirteen years working on fan-related projects in Hollywood. Topics covered include the rise of streaming services, the fall of transmedia storytelling, executives’ attitudes towards fans of their properties, and why, after more than a decade, fandom’s vibes often seem worse than ever—and whether the entertainment industry is responsible for that.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:26] Episode 155, “Happy Anniversary #6.”
[00:11:30] Episode 146, “If You Give a Fan a Cookie.”
[00:15:56] Our interstitial music is “Evening Glow” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Look how tiny and cute!
[00:26:52] If you do not remember (and we cannot blame you), Niobe is Jada Pinkett-Smith.
[00:30:24] OK, David Lynch’s daughter was actually 22 when she wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. STILL!! She accesses the teen psyche!!
[00:31:56] There haven’t actually been THAT many Hollywood strikes, but they have been memorable!
[00:33:58]
[00:47:22] We discussed SDCC in Episode 79, “Who Is Comic-Con For?”
[01:05:17]
@flourishklink shoutout to @davidwpeters whose biretta definitely inspired me to pick the higher church #seminary despite my low low roots #seminarystudent
♬ Gonna Fly Now - From "Rocky" - M.S. Art
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #156, “The Exit Interview.”
FK: Now, to be clear, it is my exit interview, but it is not my exit interview from the podcast. The podcast is continuing. Don’t worry about that. Just to head that off at the pass.
ELM: OK, it’s not technically your exit inter—I mean, it’s not your real exit interview. Do you even get an exit interview?
FK: [laughs] Not really. I mean, I’m a partner, so it’s not…we had a lot of meetings about what we were doing…
ELM: OK, let’s explain. So Flourish is leaving their job.
FK: Yes!
ELM: After how many years?
FK: Um, I mean…
ELM: In the grand scheme of things, this has been your whole career.
FK: Yeah. Like, 13 years in the industry, not all of them at this job. But.
ELM: Most of them. In the same general company, working with the same people.
FK: Yeah, with the same group of—yeah, like, whether it was the same company or not, like, connected people.
ELM: OK anyways, so for your entire adult life you’ve worked in this specific kind of band of the entertainment industry.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And now you’re leaving it all behind.
FK: Yes.
ELM: To go tie-dye with Jesus.
FK: To go to seminary and likely become an Episcopal priest. That’s what’s happening. Although I will still be doing some, like, consulting and so forth for awhile, so it’s not like I’m, you know, absolutely going—I don’t know, “fuck you” and running the other way from the entertainment industry.
ELM: That would be a bad way to leave any industry, but.
FK: Can you imagine? [laughing]
ELM: I actually can imagine it, but.
FK: Like—like that guy, the flight attendant who, like, opened…
ELM: The slide? And went down?
FK: The exit slide! And was just like, “Bye!”
ELM: [laughing] Oh, I forgot about that guy!
FK: That’s not me. A hero for our time.
ELM: Truly, truly. So I suggested this topic because I think that the entertainment industry in general, but also the space that you have focused on, has in my view as an outsider changed an extraordinary amount in the last decade-plus. So I wanted to talk about that change, those shifts, and I don’t know, what you learned! How you grew. What you’re gonna take away.
FK: Things have changed a lot. Well, before, at the top of this, I feel like I should say: I am not a big on-set person, so there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t really know that much about? So it’s all just really gonna be my viewpoint on those things that…
ELM: Oh, on, space, set.
FK: On-set. Like—
ELM: Like on the set.
FK: As a person I have not really been super involved in day-to-day production stuff of most of the stuff I’ve worked on. Like, I have rarely been on a set. Things like that. Obviously everybody has their own slice of the industry that they’re in that they see, right? I just feel like it’s important to say that because I think a lot of people who listen may not, A, know what my job is, but also B, not know all of the different parts…
ELM: OK, OK, don’t jump the gun, we’re gonna talk about that.
FK: All right!
ELM: Calm down! I’m the interviewer here.
FK: All right! Fine, fine! I’ll, I will withdraw into the interviewed position. But first, before I do that, we have other stuff to talk about!
ELM: Yes. So we got a couple of responses to our last episode, our sixth anniversary episode, and we thought it would be better to play them now rather than save them for an AMA or something like that.
FK: Yeah. Strictly speaking we’re only playing one of them. The first one, I will read, because one of them was a voicemail. The first one was an email.
ELM: Strictly speaking. Yes. So we got one voicemail and one email.
FK: All right. Shall I read the first email?
ELM: Sure!
FK: All right.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, I was listening to your anniversary episode, where you mention how when things got into lockdown, new official content wasn’t being made, and it got me thinking.
“This is pretty tangential to your conversation, but it's my personal experience. I am currently in a state where I don’t WANT new official content. I’m in a 20+ year old fandom, and we recently got some new songs for the anniversary (since COVID kind of ruined the actual 20th anniversary), and I felt anxiety about the content and what it would bring. I feel hypocritical in my disgust for new content, because I obviously also consume it, and end up enjoying it, and a new movie is what reminded me of my love for the series in the first place in February 2020 just before the pandemic hit and got me back into the fandom just in time for it to be my lifeline through lockdown. But new content seems to just bring in more drama, and I joke that I refuse to interact with any fans who aren’t as old as my ship (21). I just don’t want new official ‘canon’ dumping in on my sandbox.
“Which brings me to a contradiction I’ve found in my own behavior. You’ve talked sometimes about canon and the caring about it therein. And I don’t care about canon, I pretty much throw out whatever I don’t like and substitute my own. But I also DEEPLY care about the canon, its why I’m writing fanfic instead of something original. The only kind of AU I write is Canon Divergence, and I don’t CARE about more heavily AU AUs, like coffee shop, royalty, etc. I clearly care deeply about canon even as I call it ‘dead’ in my mind.
“It’s just so strange to me that I am in a space that cares deeply about exploring canon, but not at all about the strict events in it. I can’t help but compare to the worse side of fandom that cares so deeply about what happens in canon they harass showrunners, and thinking about how that side often has AUs that don’t even touch the canon. That feels contradictory too.” And that’s from Oki.
ELM: Very interesting. OK, well, should we play the voicemail which I think is in a similar vein, and maybe talk about both of them at the same time?
FK: Let’s do it.
Madison: Hi! My name is Madison. I was just listening to the new anniversary episode, and the thing that Elizabeth said at the very end about feelings around X-Men fandom actually I think are very common to comic book fandoms in general, in the relationship to the canonical material where you get to a certain point where you feel like you have your own ideas of what the characters are and from that point you can essentially just ignore anything that’s going on in canon if you don’t want to bother with that, because within comic books you get so many new authors and artists and you get new interpretations for TV or film that you essentially can pick and choose what you think are the definitive versions of the character, and then just keep working with those and iterating on those ideas forever. And you can find, essentially, pockets in fandom that align with those particular views on character and work on from there.
I just thought I’d share my thoughts! That has been my experience, particularly with kind of the Batfamily and DC Extended Universe fandom. I don’t engage with the films at all. It’s mostly based on the ’90s cartoon series as well as to some extent the comic books. But there are going to be other fandoms, or other pockets of DC fandom, that are about the movies. I thought I’d share. Thanks for the show!
ELM: Very interesting. Thank you so much Madison, and so much Oki, for both of these messages—I was gonna say “letters.” Missives? No. That’s…
FK: Missives!
ELM: Missives.
FK: They’re missives. Yeah. I think very insightful.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: You know, both of these missives felt really insightful to me particularly about long-running fandoms. And I think there is something specific to long-running fandoms about this, because when I think about all of the long-running fandoms that I’m in—X-files and Star Trek, right, the two big ones—that’s, it rings so true to me, and it feels very different than a shorter-term fandom where the canon is something that’s still being, like, how can I put this?
When something is shorter-term it’s like everything is so much more freighted with weight, right? The first two seasons of a television show is determining what that show is. But by the time you’re on season 14, you’re like “Yeah, y’know,” [laughs] it could be a good one, it could be a bad one, we know what this thing is; this may be one that we like or not. I imagine that that must be part of what’s going on.
ELM: I don’t know! I can immediately think of really big examples that don’t exactly align with what you’re saying.
FK: Oh no!
ELM: First of all, Star Trek is interesting to me as an example because I think you’re conceptually interested in the world and it’s not like you’re waiting for new versions of the same characters. Like, there are some characters you’re attached to, right, and characters in the new shows have relationships to the characters you like, or maybe are—some of them are there, right? But they’re also introducing wholly new characters that you, you personally, might be getting invested in.
FK: Sure.
ELM: That were just invented by someone’s mind.
FK: Yeah, they’re doing both. There’s some that are coming back and there’s some that are new.
ELM: Right. Whereas like, when you wind up in a space that it kinda sounds like both Madison, Oki, and I are all in, you know, we are sticking with the same characters, and it’s a little bit character-driven rather than world-driven—and I don’t necessarily think those two things are like, a binary, because I think the characters also make up the world, and I totally get Oki’s sentiments about like not actually wanting those characters to be in AUs. Being invested in that world, that contextual world, as well, right? So like, there’s that.
But I’m also thinking of some long-running fandoms that are seeing new adaptations of things that have never been on-screen before and a lot of investment in that, right? And, or like, the Star Wars fandom: you could say “yeah, there’s been how many of those movies,” but the Star Wars fandom still manages to make every new installment feel like a life-or-death experience for [FK laughs] for thousands of people involved for some reason. I don’t know why it has to be that way. You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, well, that is true, but I do feel like—I feel like there are chunks of Star Wars fandom where people are taking or leaving it. And it’s funny that you say that, because I feel like that’s been the place that I’ve seen the most people talking about, like, “No, guys! Star Wars has always been a buffet!”
ELM: Interesting.
FK: “Take the stuff that you like, leave the stuff you don’t like!” Not to say that I think that’s shared by everybody, because obviously it is not or else we wouldn’t have these, you know. But I’ve seen that sentiment from a lot of people that I know within the sort of Star Wars space.
And you know, I mean, I think part of the thing within Star Wars fandom is, you’ve got the sort of big movies and those are like, very consistent—it’s like, “Here’s the Skywalker family doing their thing.” But then you’ve got all of the other stuff, right? You’ve got, there’s so much other cartoons, there’s so many other books, there’s so much other—and not to say that doesn’t spawn conflict sometimes, but I really very rarely see like, you know, someone being like “Star Wars: Rebels destroyed the fabric of Star Wars for me” or something like that, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I feel like in those spaces, people who are that deep into it tend to have more the “take it or leave it” view, whereas people—ironically—who are like “only the films are for me” tend to have more of the “NO, you’re going to destroy it” take.
ELM: That’s interesting.
FK: I mean, this is all hearsay, right? I’m not really in Star Wars fandom. I’m just seeing it from the outside—
ELM: You say that.
FK: —so someone’s surely gonna come in and be like…
ELM: Ah, that’s a little weird because I think that you have historically been in Star Wars fandom and I don’t know why you’re gatekeeping yourself right now, but.
FK: Well, I mean, it’s one thing…well…OK. Maybe I have historically been in Star Wars fandom a little bit. [laughs]
ELM: Potentially still kind of in it! But you know, it also makes me think of, too, both of these messages made me think about this, but mostly Madison’s—our episode a few months back where we talked about, I think it was the “If You Give A Fan A Cookie” episode, and this kind of disconnect between my external view—my adjacent view of comics fandom, because I’m in a comic characters fandom, but you know, a film fandom.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Of just watching it all fly by and being like, “Oh this is bad. Oh this is great. Oh, interesting interpret—oh my God, there’s another one!” Right? You know, and like… [FK laughs] And not getting super hung up on like, what happened in like 1987 as some kind of canonical marker, because that’s not how comics work, right?
Like…you know, the conversations that I observe happening in comics fandom, versus the worst parts of comic book adaptation, you know, film fandoms in both DC and Marvel. You know, this kind of extremely rigid desire to see direct adaptations, direct markers, the specific things that they are looking for to be considered canon, et cetera, and what that disconnect is when ostensibly it should include some of the same people in both groups. You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah! Well, I mean, I think that— [laughs] Possibly what we’re pointing to is that fandom is not just one thing, and maybe all of these fandoms have these elements of, you know.
ELM: I don’t believe it, Flourish! I just don’t believe it!
FK: I mean, you know, you were talking about fandoms where it’s sort of more conceptual and about the world versus fandoms about particular characters. X-Files fandom, still about particular characters. Like, definitely don’t know what that is without David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson having chemistry at each other.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And it’s interesting to me because, like, that’s something about which I feel very strongly! Someone I know who works in publishing was coming out with an X-Files book that was just about Mulder and Scully, and it was like, I was like “I don’t know that that’s Mulder and Scully. I don’t feel good about this.” It wasn’t because it was a bad book or anything, it was just because I was looking at it and I was like, “This cover has these cartoon versions of them and it doesn’t feel like them to me and I don’t know!” Right? So like…
ELM: I, hold on!
FK: Maybe we all have, like, these different…
ELM: I love this, I’m sorry. You, just like me—
FK: I know.
ELM: —just like everyone I know, is guilty of reblogging or sharing fanart that truly looks like nothing like the actors, right?
FK: I know!!
ELM: And you’re like, “My guys!” Right? “You two!” [laughs]
FK: [laughing] I know. It’s true, it’s true. But then when I look at it on the canon thing, I’m like “NO. That’s not them!” I’m just saying, maybe not only is fandom full of all these things, maybe we can all sometimes, you know, inhabit these positions about different things—
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: —at different points in our fannish lives, right?
ELM: Yeah, that’s fair. I will say one thing, too, slightly different path from this too that I wanted to say, is I feel like Oki’s letter in particular kind of called back to some of our anniversary responses about protecting yourself, basically. And in the anniversary episode, those respondents were more talking about other fans, but what Oki’s talking about is something I have a ton of experience with and something that gets to me I think more than it gets to you, where new stuff comes in—I’m kind of bracing myself, cause I’m like, “What if it’s awful? And I have to, it’s gonna, then I have to process that and slot it in, and even if I already think the stuff that came out before was bad, I can’t take more new bad stuff!” You know what I mean? Like…that’s just too much, right? And this has happened to me in multiple fandoms. Then, being interested in absorbing like 8 million people’s opinions and getting mad at things people who also didn’t like it, but didn’t like it in a different way…
FK: [laughing] For different reasons.
ELM: You know? And this is just so, oh, it’s exhausting. And so there’s something kind of, in my personal fandom right now—maybe mostly in Oki’s as well, and it sounds like Madison’s—the things that we’re into happened, and they’re decided, and there’s shitty parts, and there’s parts we like, and that’s not going to change. And maybe your interpretation will change over time, and maybe something you once liked you’ll sour on, or vice versa. But for the most part, it’s not just like, this weird barrage of things that could come in at any time and just utterly alter your experience, you know what I mean? So I get it.
FK: Yeah, I get it too.
ELM: It sucks though! When new things come in. New things are bad. Just like old things.
FK: [laughs] Sometimes new things are good!
ELM: Nope.
FK: And sometimes old things are good!
ELM: Yeah, that’s so true.
FK: Sometimes… [laughing] The world is… All right, you know what, we’re off. We’re off. Thank you very much, Madison and Oki, this is great.
ELM: Yes. Thank you, thank you for those responses. OK, do you wanna take a quick break and then you can get your serious face on, cause it’s an important exit interview?
FK: All right, I don’t know if it’s possible but I’m gonna try. [ELM laughs]
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back and I’m gettin’ ready to be interrogated.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: But probably before that we need to talk about Patreon.
ELM: We do. Patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: That’s how we make this podcast and we’ve gotten a lot of new supporters recently. Thank you so much to everybody who’s pledged. Part of that’s probably because we just released a brand-new Tiny Zine for $10-a-month-and-up Patreon supporters. Almost all of those have gone out, there’s just a couple that had a snafu with the post office, so they should be going out within 24 hours of our recording this episode, and you probably will even have them by the time this airs. So you know, if you haven’t gotten it yet, be a little patient, and then if you haven’t gotten it within a couple of days, send us an email. So that Tiny Zine is an incredibly cute collaboration with Destination Toast!
ELM: Yeah! Toast pulled out some extremely cute small stats. I won’t say anything about the content of them because that would spoil it. And I did some little visualizations. And they are very charming! So I think we have a couple extra, we printed out a few extras, if you know, suddenly 20 new pledges came in for this we could also do another print run if need be.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: So don’t let that stop you! And obviously if you are already a Patreon supporter, but not at the $10 level, to get this all you need to do is bump up. So I don’t know, that seems worth it.
FK: Yes indeed.
ELM: So yeah!
FK: We also released a new special episode.
ELM: We did. So this was the latest in our Tropefest series, it was about modern AUs, and I don’t know, I really enjoyed that conversation and I really like writing modern AUs, so. Ironic turn of events.
FK: Yeah, I felt like we kinda got deep into like—we got kinda deep into what makes modern AUs good to us, and what’s interesting about them. I thought it was really good, and it was also nice because we’ve talked about AUs on the podcast before, and I felt like we didn’t—it was a good conversation, but we didn’t hit the nail on the head the way that I wanted it to. Like, I don’t think I knew what I was saying, and you didn’t either at that point, and I feel like this really brought us to the right spot.
ELM: Interesting. A very interesting critical moment, here, we’re having.
FK: I don’t know! I just feel like we really thought about stuff and it was a good episode, so you know.
ELM: The way I would summarize it is I think that both of our feelings about AUs have changed somewhat because we have spent the last few years in fandoms that have AUs that work for us better than in previous fandoms that we’ve been in, that kind of stuff didn’t really work for us.
FK: Very true, very true. I don’t need Mulder and Scully to be put into a semi-medieval setting, but I am into that in other fandoms.
ELM: Modern AUs! Also, I don’t believe you. If there was like an arranged marriage…
FK: No, I’ve tried it.
ELM: Really?
FK: I’ve tried it. It does not work for me at all.
ELM: That’s so funny.
FK: Trust me, I’ve tried, because there’s a bunch of them that people are like “It’s the best!!” and I’m like, “I can’t do it, guys!”
ELM: Anyway, that’s the opposite of this! This is modern AUs.
FK: [laughs] Yes. It’s true.
ELM: Of course, if you are a new pledger at $3 a month or more, you also get access to the entire series, which also included an episode “Enemies to Lovers,” “Trapped Together,” we did “Canon-Divergent AU”...
FK: “Found Family.”
ELM: “Found Family,” A/B/O, “Hurt/Comfort”...
FK: Lots of good stuff.
ELM: I’m sure I’m forgetting something.
FK: We’re not gonna rack our brains, though. You’ve said appealing things.
ELM: A series that will continue! So if you pledge at that level, then you’ll continue to get more great extra content.
FK: Yes! So that’s at the $3-a-month level, and there’s lots of different levels of donation down to $1 a month. So we just love having people support. Thank you so much for doing that. And when we say we love having your support, we don’t just mean monetarily. There’s also ways you can support us if you don’t have money or don’t feel like donating money, mostly by telling other people about this podcast, but also by doing a couple of other things. What are they, Elizabeth Minkel?
ELM: Wow. That’s so much. Uh, well, like Madison, you could leave us a voicemail. I’ll start with that one. 1-401-526-FANS. Your voice could also be on this podcast. Or, like Oki, you could send us an email: fansplaining at gmail dot com. Obviously if you wanna be anonymous in any of these, just say so. You can also use our submissions form on our website, fansplaining.com, and the other main place you can leave us questions or comments is on Tumblr. Our askbox is open, anon is on. Sometimes we answer those directly on Tumblr, sometimes we read them on the podcast. And then finally, not great for asking questions, but you can also find us and follow us for updates: fansplaining on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
FK: Awesome. All right. Are you ready to interrogate me now?
ELM: Are you trying to take charge of this interview? I’m the interviewer! [FK laughs] Wow.
FK: All right, all right.
ELM: OK. What would you say is your biggest weakness?
FK: Oh man, there’s so many, Elizabeth!
ELM: OK, so this is not actually going to be like an interview. Or an exit interview. That would not be a question on an exit interview, obviously.
FK: No it wouldn’t! I was wondering, I was like “Where is this coming from?!”
ELM: Oh my God, I just went on vacation at this place which had a lot of icebreaker games available, and there was one—I cannot remember the title of it—but it asked questions like, you know, I don’t know. How many monkeys could you fit in a barrel or whatever. That’s not a realistic one. But you know what I mean.
FK: How big are the monkeys, is one question? How small is the barrel? [laughing]
ELM: How many marbles could you fit in this specific sized barrel or whatever. Like, how many—it was just like numbers, basically, and who’s the best at estimating and making an educated guess. And at one point one of my friends was like, “I feel like I’m being interviewed for a management consultant job,” and I was like “This is exactly what we’re doing right now.” So.
FK: Well, I’m about to experience lots of icebreakers, because I’m going to go to effectively college, you know, college orientation.
ELM: You think that priest school has a lot of icebreakers?
FK: I am sure there’s going to be icebreakers. Dude, do you know how cheesy all like, religious persons are?
ELM: That’s fair.
FK: All presbyters, priests, ministers, at least—at least in the Protestant and Catholic spaces. I guess I can’t speak too much outside that. I’ve met plenty of rabbis who are into cheesy icebreakers too, so like…
ELM: Interesting. I gotta say, I don’t think we did any icebreakers in my grad school orientation, so. Anyway.
FK: We had to give presentations about ourselves the last time I was in grad school.
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I’m also glad we didn’t have to do that. I don’t think that’s a good icebreaker either. Anyway, this is an exit interview, this is not about your next chapter, it’s about your last chapter. So!
FK: OK.
ELM: What I want to know first is, I know this, but I don’t know if our listeners know. Do you wanna talk about how you started working in the entertainment industry? I know that…here’s what I know: you went to college, you graduated into the middle of the recession, and you decided rather than working you’d go straight to grad school.
FK: Yep.
ELM: You applied to Media Studies at MIT.
FK: Yep.
ELM: After majoring in religion.
FK: Yep.
ELM: At Reed College, Oregon, west coast USA.
FK: That’s true. [laughs] All that’s true facts.
ELM: And at some point at MIT, you started collaborating with people who were involved in the entertainment industry, possibly because you were working with Henry Jenkins, who people in this podcast would be familiar with, an academic—the only academic people in Hollywood are familiar with.
FK: Yes. That’s also more or less true.
ELM: OK.
FK: You want me to go into more detail?
ELM: Yeah, did I get it right so far? Flesh out the story.
FK: You did, you did. Yeah. So OK. So when I graduated college, so when I went to college I thought “I need to go be a serious person,” right, because I’d been really involved in fandom in high school, and I was like “I’m gonna go be a serious person. I’m gonna do Classics and Religion.” I actually did all of the, like, all of the requirements for both degrees. I was really like, that’s what I’m gonna do.
But then by the end of college it was very clear that like, I was not going to be a classicist or any kind of an academic, that wasn’t gonna be my path, and I was like, “what am I doing,” and it was a recession, and I was like “what’s happening,” so I called up the only academic that I wasn’t related to or taking a class from that I really knew, which was Henry Jenkins. And I knew him because I had previously been one of his informants from in his books. He had interviewed me for research.
And he was like, “Why don’t you, like, apply to M.I.T. and come to grad school there?” And I was like “Is that how this works?” [ELM laughs] So I did, and it turns out sometimes that’s how that works.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Totally serendipitous. My backup plan was that I was gonna be a Taekwondo instructor in Vancouver, Washington. That was literally my backup plan.
ELM: Sure. Very specific.
FK: So. I mean, [laughs] yes! It was a plan, a real plan! So I did that, and at that time Henry was like, I mean, he still is someone who a lot of people in Hollywood know, but his research was very very in vogue in the film and TV industry. This was like when he was like, hanging out with Guillermo Del Toro and like, he was just, everybody was talking about his book Convergence Culture. And the term “transmedia” was super super trendy.
And so he introduced me to, I think knowing that I was probably not going to continue on the academic path, right, just because of who I am as a person, he did me a really, really great turn and introduced me to a bunch of people in the entertainment industry. And in the process of meeting these people, I met some folks who became my collaborators in my first company, which was The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. Long title.
And that was like at this peak transmedia moment. So yeah, so that was what I was doing towards the middle of grad school, I started doing this, and then after grad school I continued to work with those folks and at that company for awhile, and that’s how I got into it.
ELM: So this company, were studios asking you to create transmedia projects? Let’s define “transmedia” as, I think there’s like a real definition and then there’s like, you know, it’s like, now over the last five years people using the term “A.I.” in completely nonsensical ways.
FK: Yeah yeah. People use that term in totally bananas ways. So the original idea, the idea of transmedia that we would talk about would be that we wanted to tell a story across multiple mediums that you could, you could enjoy the story if you just picked it up on one medium, like say if you just watched the TV show you could just enjoy this TV show. But if you also went and played the video game, or did the ARG, or you know, read the books, then you would have additional elements of it, and so you would get a total view of the whole story—and it was centrally planned—if you consumed all of those different media.
So The Matrix was an early attempt at doing this, actually. Everybody makes fun of the way that the Matrix video game introduced all these characters, and so you watched The Matrix 2 and you were like, “Who are these people and why do we care about them?” The intention was that they wanted it to work so that you could see that movie and just not have played the video game and went “OK.” But if you played the video game, then you knew all about these characters and this other piece of the story.
ELM: Right, right. OK, but the cynical read on this is like, ideally they would like you to also buy the video game.
FK: Oh absolutely! That’s the, that’s the—
ELM: That’s the business, not just you know.
FK: That’s the business reason people were excited about it, was the idea that this was something that would get people to migrate across to different media, and you could take advantage of that fact and sell lots of different kinds of things to people.
And also, like, from a production standpoint, it makes it possible—and this is something that I still stand behind—it makes it possible to have, like, you can’t actually have television coming out all the time. Right? Like, one show can’t constantly be in production forever. You have to have breaks. So you want to create stuff so that when that show goes off the air, then there’s something else for people to be excited about—
ELM: Sure.
FK: —so that you never sort of lose them. And actually, people are doing this now, like that’s what’s happening in Star Trek right now, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: They’ve got a slate of shows and the idea is that someday we’re gonna get to a point where 52 weeks of the year we have something on—
ELM: Constant Star Trek.
FK: Yeah. Constant Star Trek. So I mean, that’s obviously within one medium, but part of the idea is like well, OK, maybe the TV show’s off, but we would like to make a comic book, which is less costly than a TV show, but for people who are really into this word, they can enjoy the comic book while the TV show’s off the air and then come back and they’ll connect to each other.
ELM: Right.
FK: And it won’t feel shitty.
ELM: So, the transmedia part, though, not just the constant media part—I, my view of this, not from within this industry but as a consumer, is, mm, very little of this worked. And very little of this is working now, in continued attempts.
FK: I mean, I think it really varies. I’ve seen really really great versions of it, and there’s a lot of them that aren’t really great, because 99% of everything is crap, right?
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: I do think that it works really well in certain contexts. I think that actually Star Wars is doing a really good job of it right now, having stuff that’s happening across mediums. Not always, not everything’s successful, but there’s a lot of pieces of it that are super-successful.
ELM: But do you think that really, it really only works in these massive fandoms, right? Where there’s a huge pool of people and ostensibly you can then catch the center of that Venn diagram of people who are invested enough, have the means, have the desire, right? In a smaller fandom the odds of you getting people who want to come and jump across, and are going to be able to afford to and have time to, is gonna be much smaller.
FK: Well, there’s three things I’ll say about this. The first one is, yes, I think one of the ways is to have a massive fandom, right.
Two, the other thing that it can work in—which is sort of the other direction, argument from the quality of the product—is it can be a tiny thing that the creators can just be really obsessed with making it and making it cool. And there are definitely passion projects like that where people are like, “No, I really want there to also be a fully voiced audiobook and I’m going to make it awesome because this is my dream as the showrunner. I’m sorry, we’re doing it!” You know what I mean? And then like, even if there’s not that many people who listen to the audiobook, it still produces something really cool. And this is just an example, by the way, I don’t have an audiobook in mind as an example of this. But that still can produce something that’s really beautiful and cool, right?
A very early version of this was Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer’s secret diary, which David Lynch had his daughter like, and it was just a total—his daughter was a teenager and he had her write the secret diary, and it sounds like a teenager, and it’s really beautiful and great. It’s one of my favorite pieces of something like this. And it was definitely not—I’m sure that the reason that it got published was because people…but Twin Peaks was not like a giant TV show compared to other TV shows at the time.
ELM: It was surprisingly large for what it was, though.
FK: It was, it was, there was like a peak of it, so I’m sure that helped him get it made.
ELM: A peak of it?
FK: Ah-ha. The third thing I will say is, one of the reasons that everybody got really into transmedia was the writers’ strike, which happened prior to my going into grad school, but also there have been other strikes since which have impacted this. So for instance in Battlestar Galactica, why do you have so many webisodes? It’s because of the rules the union has for what you’re allowed to write on and what you’re allowed to do. Why do we have—actually, this goes as far back as Star Trek: The Animated Series. Why do you have Star Trek: The Animated Series? It’s because there was a strike! And so everyone goes “OK, how can we make something? We can’t make our usual TV show right now. How do we make something else to keep as much of our staff on board and like…”
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Give fans something to see. And so there is also that piece of it, and that can suddenly change the financial picture enough that you know, it just changes all of the weightings, basically, right.
ELM: You know, it’s interesting. I feel like a lot of the narrative around the pandemic disrupting film and TV has, like, leaned on it being somewhat unprecedented but it’s true, the writers’ strike…what year was that? 2007? 8? Around there?
FK: Yeah, something like that. Yeah.
ELM: Had like, a profound impact, right? On a lot of different parts of TV. It’s one of the big reasons why reality TV was allowed to like, literally explode. There’s a lot—it’s not just writers, so much of Hollywood is unionized and there are a lot of creative decisions that are driven by labor reasons that are often not super visible to the public, but like, it seems like it’s an industry that has actually had to face like, severe disruptions in the past, and it also sort of seemed like the pandemic—they were adjusting! A lot of people started to do a lot of animated stuff, right? You know what I mean? And so it was just like, just because outsiders were startled by it doesn’t mean that this industry isn’t used to kind of pivoting and trying to have a lot of contingencies, right?
FK: People are definitely used to pivoting. And you know, it made careers! So my, one of the guys I worked on The Alchemists with, Mark Warshaw, who now has a very successful career as a showrunner for children’s shows, but Mark got his start because of the Writer’s—I mean, got his start. He had been doing other stuff, right? But he really got into the transmedia stuff because of Heroes, because of the writers’ strike, he was directing these you know, these webisodes and organizing their online presence during that time.
ELM: Interesting. OK. So how long did you have this company?
FK: I wanna say five years?
ELM: OK.
FK: And then it basically—you know, during that time we worked on a lot of television stuff, because that was where people had their connections. We did a lot of commercial stuff, there was a lot of advertising work, people wanting to get in on the transmedia thing. Like, I did work for Coca-Cola, I did work for a bunch of other people cause you need to pay the bills, basically, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: And sometimes that was interesting also. Coke has a lot of money and they are excited to do things that are not just about selling you soda, because they want to have cultural cachet, right? We did a lot of work about those things, worked on like I said television shows. Towards the end of my time with that company worked on a couple of film projects. And then we made this show East Los High. And that was something where we partnered with another company that had developed it and shot the first season, and I worked with people on doing a complete website and sort of—basically East Los High was an English-language telenovela, effectively, and the idea that we had was…
At that point, people talked about transmedia as something that was only, and also just fan culture in general, as being something that was only for sci-fi and fantasy fans, right? They would be like, “Why would you ever do anything that was for people who are not, why. Why would you?” You know? And the idea behind this was actually, maybe people will be into webisodes about, you know, Latina characters going through high school in East L.A.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Maybe they’ll be into that. Maybe they’ll be into those things. And it worked really well. And then around that time the company, everybody was going different ways. So Mark wanted to go off and do children’s TV, Mauricio, my other partner, was going to go, you know, continue to work with his wife’s company and make things like East Los High, and then I met my current—still current, for the next like, two days!—business partner Luke and we went off to continue work in sort of the…well, for me mostly fan culture side of things. For him, there’s a bunch of other stuff that we do. But in larger franchises. So larger film, larger TV franchises.
ELM: OK, so you weren’t just pitching transmedia stuff at this point when you started your next venture.
FK: No. You know, at that point transmedia was sort of…not on its way out, but it was less of a trendy term. And I think, I still stand by a lot of the ideas that are in transmedia, maybe just not all of the ways it was packaged and the way it became, like…you know when sometimes you’re like, “This is a good idea, but all of a sudden it’s really trendy and everybody’s talking about it in these ways, and it’s kind of losing track of why bits of it were good,” you know what I mean?
ELM: Sure. Yeah.
FK: So still taking a lot of that philosophy, we’ve…since then I’ve moved into doing a lot more sort of, working with people to help them understand their fans and their fan culture, just doing studies of fan cultures. So for instance people being like “We have three books we have optioned. Which one of them has the most dedicated audience.” And maybe not most dedicated even, but which ones have the most potential to attract a larger audience, which ones have people who are really obsessed but maybe are actually going to be a detriment to making this—you know what I mean? Because they are so obsessed with it being a particular way. Those kinds of reporting.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And then also doing a lot of work with social media and working with social media teams to try and understand what the, you know, what the things people are caring about online, and what’s going to spark a big reaction, what people will think is cool.
ELM: Right. So it’s always been my understanding of your job, the process is in three parts, right, of making something? There’s the development before, then there’s production in the middle, and then there’s like, release and marketing and…
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And from what I understand from you, sometimes that last step can have very limited resources because, or very time-boxed to be very short, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But also it seems like now with people understanding that fandoms can be very long-running and in franchises, that’s also something that’s turned into more of an ongoing, perennial sort of thing. And it seems like you guys are involved in the beginning and also the end, but you’re not involved in the actual making of the thing, usually.
FK: Yeah. It really depends. But I would say more frequently, you know, things go off into production and then they’re in production, and that is the land of the person—the people who are actually creating it. And there is a lot of, you know, for all we talk about people getting notes from the studio and this and that and the other, I do think there’s a lot of respect for that, that at that point…there’s interaction happening, but it’s not, you know.
Now, sometimes you—sometimes my company might be hired by a showrunner or a director or something like that and in that case that would be a closer relationship to the production, but even then it’s not like, I don’t know. It’s, I always cringe when people are like “Oh yeah, so you’re going to be telling people change the color of this costume because fans won’t like the red one?” I’m like, that’s such a simplistic way of thinking about it, right? That’s such a flattening and like a—and also inaccurate way of thinking about it. But like, it’s such a flattening of what the deal is.
ELM: OK, so what’s a more accurate and less flat way of framing that then?
FK: Well so like, on the development end, right, if you’re a person who’s a writer you aren’t necessarily well-placed to be assessing a community of people and reading and analyzing their discourse. I mean, their discourse! Really! And understanding what that means in terms of both the community of hardcore people who are attached to the thing, and putting that in context of: well, how big of a community is this compared to the whole world? How much weight to put on this when you—you know, realistically say you’re adapting a book series, right?
So there’s a 200-person Facebook group that’s really obsessed with this book series: how important is it that you are cleaving close to what they want? Is it really important because they understand what the appeal of the book series is the most, and that’s like, the best way to do it? Or is it actually not that important, because there’s only like 200 of them and there’s going to be 200 million people who potentially can see the film, you know, and none of those people have read the book, so they’re actually going to be approaching this as a completely new thing and so the only thing you need to do is to be true to yourself as an artist, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Most of the time, the answer is somewhere in between those two, right.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: And so when you’re a writer it can be really hard to look at communities and sort of have a perspective on that, and one of the things that my colleagues and I have done is to provide that perspective. To be able to say, “OK. You’ve read the book and paid attention to it, we read every GoodReads review.” [ELM laughs] “Here are the things that, you know, people are saying that we think are real. Here are the things that were bullshit because there was a harassment campaign. Here are the things that, you know, you should consider. Here’s the thing that we think is not negotiable, because that is at the heart of what everybody who responds positively to the book likes,” right.
ELM: Mm-hmm. Sure.
FK: So then they can go and take that information and do what they will. Cause they’re the artist. So that’s one way. But then later on, you might get to like, “OK we’ve made the thing and here are five different promo photos. All right, team, which of those promo photos is going to be the most exciting to fans? Which of them is going to be the most broad audience appeal? And are any of them wrong?” Because you may get a situation where you’ve just got some actors and they’re mugging for the camera and they’ve produced a picture that doesn’t show the relationship between the characters, right? And it’s a great picture, but you don’t wanna use that one.
ELM: Sure.
FK: So that’s also like the other side, right? That’s the point at which you might go “Actually, are they wearing red?” You know? [laughs] “Or did you just pick this because it made it look nice for the picture, because you may not know what that implies in the larger backstory of this story,” right.
ELM: So it’s interesting hearing you talk about this because I feel like it’s a common thread in fandom spaces that I spend time in and you spend time in as well, as a fan, that Hollywood has no fucking idea about any of this stuff. [FK laughs] And that they’re all brainless men who don’t understand that women own televisions or whatever, you know what I mean? And they’re like “If you just hire one fan we could explain to you what’s actually good about your character!” Right?
It also makes me think of like the 200 people on that Facebook group. I do think that the media often, and maybe even people in the entertainment industry sometimes, frame really passionate fans as like, weird hostage-takers or whatever, when also there’s a space within fan conversations to actually find the most robust, interesting interpretations. And I would not say that is like, standard in fan conversations [FK laughs] but like…you know, you have enough combinations of fans having enough conversations, and you can probably get more insight.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: If you are reading across all these different fannish voices, than you might get from a few critics, or a few of your peers giving notes, right?
FK: I agree with that, and I think that that’s been probably the biggest shift that I have personally seen in the entertainment industry, since I started doing this like 12, 13 years ago, is I’ve seen a lot more…obviously there’s still a bunch of people who have a kneejerk reaction of “I don’t care what the fans think, there are 12 of them.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And you know, frankly, sometimes they’re right? Like, I mean…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m just saying, sometimes they’re right. Sometimes, like, I don’t know. Battlestar Galactica—something I never worked on—there were like 200 hardcore Battlestar Galactica fans, fans of the ’70s stuff—OK. There’s more than 200. Don’t yell at me, Battlestar Galactica fans. But there were a really a relatively small number, and a lot of them didn’t like what new BSG did, BSG 2003. And the answer was pretty much “OK. Sorry.”
ELM: Yeah, sure.
FK: You know? And that was the right answer. Right? You know? I mean, that was the right answer. No one wanted to be a jerk to them, I don’t think, but sometimes you can’t make everybody happy.
But I do think people have come around to the idea that audiences, especially when it comes to adaptations, know a lot about what’s appealing about the core thing. That’s not to say that you’re never going to have an adaptation that really radically changes it, but I do think that people, when they make those changes, are much more likely now to at least try to be conscious of that.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Not, trust me, people are right: not everyone is operating with the world’s largest understanding of this. But there has been a shift in people’s like, desire to know.
ELM: Right. That’s interesting. I mean at what point does that come into the creative process? Is that coming in at development as people think about approaching this intellectual property?
FK: Yeah, it is. Because part of the thing is like, if you’re acquiring stuff for development—I don’t know how much you know about the process of this, but because of the way that things get greenlit, it makes it a lot easier to get a project off the ground if you have a proved audience. If people are interested in it, if whatever. If you can say “This was a book and it had no marketing money behind it, but it still has a passionate audience of people who love it, and so if we made it into a TV show and put marketing money behind it then we would definitely get a huge audience from that,” right? And that’s also one of the appeals of comic books, things like that, right? Like, it’s not that the comic book needs to sell a bajillion copies, it’s that the story needs to be good enough that it sells a lot of copies for a comic book, right.
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: And then you feel some confidence that the story was good and that people liked it and move forward. So all of a sudden people are acquiring way more than they used to. People have always acquired a lot of stuff like this, right, but I do think that that has also accelerated in the past 12 years. Just from what I hear, not from any scientific anything.
ELM: Well, but hang on: how much of that is actually related to like, now you’re seeing—it’s like fundamentally reshaping the book industry, for example. People are optioning things before the book is published, right? Or like…
FK: Yep.
ELM: It’s happening in magazine journalism too, right? And that’s a part of your…and so that’s not about a proven audience in any way, right?
FK: Well, it kind of is because it’s like you’re buying—it’s like you’re buying into it early, before anybody else has the chance to, right? The deal is you’re trying to get in early—
ELM: No, I just said a proven audience, right? If it’s someone’s debut, I get it, you’re investing, right?
FK: Yeah. But they’re never gonna make it. So what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna buy that option and they’re gonna sit on it.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And then when it proves out to have an audience, if it does, then they move forward and try and make it.
ELM: Right, right. So they’re claiming it.
FK: Yeah. It’s pushing it a step back, right.
ELM: Right.
FK: So. And hopefully it means that you get a better deal, because if you didn’t option it before it came out and then it had a proven audience, then that is worth more money.
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: So this is how it’s been pushed back further and further.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So that’s the point at which people start thinking about it, is they go “OK, we’ve got these options maybe even before they came out. Now we have them here, you know, Book A seems really appealing and we have a director who’s completely obsessed with it, and thinks it’s the greatest book since sliced bread, but it didn’t actually sell that well. Book B sold like hotcakes but it’s kind of old, we’re not sure whether anybody still cares about it and it seems like maybe it was a flash in the pan. And then Book C we hear that people love it but we don’t get why it’s cool. So which of these three, if I’ve got only one slot, which one of these three do I want to go with?” Right? And that’s the point at which people start looking at “OK, well what is the audience response to these, what does it really mean about them.”
ELM: Right right. OK. So you think this is the biggest shift that you’ve seen. What are the other big shifts that you’ve seen? And I will say in my view of only the last like five years, more like six or seven years now, you know, Comic-Con feels completely different now than when, you know, when we met compared to now.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And I heard when we were there that it felt very different from in 2010, and it felt like most of that was being driven by very rapidly shifting understandings, perceptions, interest in those audiences by Hollywood.
FK: Absolutely. I think that the mainstreaming of nerd culture is something that has been huge. Right? That has totally shifted. That’s what that is, comic book movies being the biggest thing, that happened since I started working in this industry. That was not the case prior to that.
ELM: I mean, there were huge comic book hits in the 2000s, right?
FK: Sure, there were, but it wasn’t like, the same level of domination. And that’s also partially—part of the reason that’s all dominating is because of the shifting way that everything is changing in the industry with streaming services, and the fact that we no longer really have standard television, it’s really all just streaming now, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: So the shift from—that’s then another huge shift from the classic network TV like, 20-episode season and the pilot process and all of these things…many of which things still exist, I’m not saying they’re gone forever, but now you’ve got the competitor of: what about doing a Netflix thing which is going to be a total of 30 episodes, because you’re really only gonna get three seasons of 10 episodes max out of Netflix, right? But they’re going to have a higher production value and you’re gonna have more time to make it and like, maybe it’ll all drop on one day, right?
East Los High, midway through my career, was an early—I mean, it was one of the first Hulu Original shows. So Hulu bought it from us and made it one of the first Hulu Originals and dropped it all at once for people with a fancy Hulu plan. And that was like, whoa! You know? What’s happening!
ELM: That’s funny to think about.
FK: An entire season dropping all at once? Man, it screwed up my plans! Like, it screwed up our whole rollout for everything so badly.
ELM: It’s funny to think about, when you started in this industry, Netflix was DVDs in the mail.
FK: It was, it really was.
ELM: That’s weird to think about.
FK: It was not that long ago!
ELM: I mean, it was kind of a while ago.
FK: Well, it was awhile ago, but not that long ago.
ELM: Yeah. So…
FK: So that’s all really reshaped everything.
ELM: Bring it to fans. Like, what do you think—I mean, that’s a huge question, right. But these shifts, like, do you have stances on, I don’t know if I actually know if you have stances on this. There’s kind of perennial debate about what’s better for fans: dropping constant content or serialization.
FK: I am a strong serialization fan for this.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Serialization is clearly better in terms of creating a long-tail discussion, and that is clearly better in creating investment in serious ways. I mean, the one—the thing that people always bring out as a counterpoint to this is Stranger Things.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I’m not saying it’s not possible to have some deep investment in stuff like that, but the exception proves the rule in a lot of ways, you know.
ELM: Yeah, I also think Stranger Things, given the audience size—which was extraordinarily large—it’s not a very large fandom on any platform, right? Like, proportionally.
FK: Which also brings up the point of, what does audience size mean in the context of Netflix?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because they don’t show you anything and when you look at what they actually mean, sometimes it’s like “This person watched up to 10 seconds of it before clicking away,” you know what I mean.
ELM: I strongly agree with you, but I also think in the case of Stranger Things…
FK: Oh, no, it genuinely does have a…
ELM: When I tell any normie that I haven’t seen it they’re like “What?!” And I’m like, “I don’t really care. Like, what?” You know.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So.
FK: But you’re right. You’re right. I think that it could have built a larger conversation around it. Now, I mean, did Netflix want to do that, you know, that also has to do with Netflix’s goals, right, because if Netflix just wants to build new signups to the platform…
ELM: And do insider trading. [FK laughs] Topical!
FK: Thank you. I mean, I think that’s, you know, this is something that I know sometimes gets annoying when I always go “But it always goes back to business concerns,” right, but it really does always go back to business concerns. What do, you know, not just “what is the company’s overall moneymaking goal,” but also “how are the executives being rewarded.” What is a win for them?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Right? Cause what a win is for an individual person in the industry is not the same thing as what a win is for your show overall or even for the company overall.
ELM: Right.
FK: You know?
ELM: But fans though.
FK: Fans though.
ELM: Thinking about the industry that you entered and thinking about the industry that you’re leaving.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Where does that leave fans? Because I think that the…every time we introduce some kind of summation of the previous 6-to-12 months of fandom, broad fandom experiences, we’re like, pretty down and we’re like, “This feels worse than ever!” “This year, I didn’t think it would be as bad as last year, but the vibes are worse than ever,” right? And like—I don’t think that Hollywood is disconnected from these dynamics. Obviously the tech industry has a huge role to play here in terms of these platforms, but there are decisions being made that affect fans’ experiences directly.
FK: Look, I will say this…
ELM: Yes?
FK: It didn’t make things better as an experience as a fan, but I do feel like—like, if you had asked me 12 years ago “what’s my goal in getting into this industry,” I would have said: I want to help foster better understanding between people in the entertainment industry and fans. I want people in the entertainment industry to take fans seriously as a force. I want them to care about what fans think and say. You know? And I want them to take fans seriously and stop doing some of the most exploitative things that they used to do.
All of those things have actually pretty much been achieved.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Not like, by me. You know. I’m not saying I am Atlas holding this up. I think that I probably played a little role in that. But all of those changes happened. Did it make it feel better to be a fan? [ELM laughs] Fuck no! It did not!
ELM: Right, right.
FK: But I do actually think that there have been some positive things. I don’t see nearly as much really exploitative shit happening. You know? I mean, directly exploitative, trying to, “give us this thing and you will get nothing.” You know? Kind of attitude, right?
I don’t hear—I mean, when someone says “forget about the fans,” whenever I hear that it’s always in a very economic attitude. Maybe once or twice, but very rarely anymore, do I hear it in a “fuck those nerds” kind of way. Right? You know what I mean? Maybe once or twice. I’m not saying no one feels this way, but it’s pretty rare, I would say, that you encounter that. People at least have gotten that far, as far as respect goes.
So I don’t know. That’s not like the world’s greatest ringing endorsement of the entertainment industry. But I do think that things have gotten better in those ways. And I do think that, you know, a lot of stuff that makes things feel worse for fans has not been…it’s not like people in the entertainment industry are going like, “Heh heh heh. Ha-ha! I will do this thing that make everyone worse, and ha, ha ha!”
ELM: You’re doing so many finger wiggles there. What is that called? Steepling.
FK: Oh yeah. It’s steepling. Steepling my fingers and smoothing my goatee, you know, my long mustaches.
ELM: All right. I don’t think that, I think that then the argument—and I obviously, I know your answer already, so this is a little leading. But like, the argument is, you know, 15-20 years ago, for the most part—and this isn’t universal, but for the most part, fans were somewhat under the radar. At least fan cultures were under the radar.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And obviously Warner Brothers giving you the ol’ cease-and-desist, like, that wasn’t under the radar. But that was like, also Boomers didn’t know what the internet was too, right? You know? And congrats to lawyers for figuring out how things worked since then. That’s good. [FK laughs] But you know, I think a lot of old-timers in fandom draw upon those years as a time when like, studio executives wouldn’t be thinking about the fans at all, because they’re an invisible group doing their own thing, and all these points of fan-creator interaction that we talk about so often over the course of this podcast are the results of this like, exposure.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I’m gonna guess that your answer is like, well, it was exposed, so I’m doing harm reduction here to make sure that, you know, as fans are exposed—there’s no unexposing these groups.
FK: Yeah. I mean, it felt clear to me like: after receiving cease and desist letters as a preteen Harry Potter fan, I felt fairly exposed!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It was clear to me that—when you literally have Warner Brothers lawyers talking to you and your friends about your porny fanfic, like…
ELM: You weren’t writing porny fanfic when you were 12, Flourish!
FK: I wasn’t, but that was one of the major like—
ELM: Sure.
FK: —points of conversation, was like…
ELM: Wasn’t your problem that you’d called your website “Alohomora”?
FK: That did happen.
ELM: That wasn’t you?
FK: That was me. Yeah. That did happen.
ELM: That’s what it was, wasn’t it? You used a word that they—
FK: I owned alohomora.com and they wanted alohomora.
ELM: [laughs] Did “alohomora” speak to you as a spell?
FK: No, I think it was just that it was available.
ELM: Your favorite, something about unlocking…
FK: I think that I looked at what was available and I picked the one that I felt like I could bullshit into, you know, some reason why it was that.
ELM: I love it. No, look, that’s a very valuable spell and it’s very metaphorical, if you want to unlock things.
FK: Great, yeah, that’s right. Anyway. So I mean, to me I think it did feel like it was already exposed. Because people did know about, I mean, you know what I mean? That was the conversation, that was part of what was behind the cease and desist letters is that somebody twigged to the fact that there was gay porn fanfic and was like “Oh God.” You know?
So that felt to me like it was already exposed and that the wheel was rolling. I don’t know. The boulder was rolling down the hill and going to crush people, unless you did something. So you know, was that right or wrong? I don’t know. I mean, I do think that it would’ve happened regardless of my personal decision to go into the entertainment industry, you know?
ELM: No, I’m not pinning this all on you here!
FK: Oh no, I know, but I’ve thought about it a lot, you know? Like, there was more than once when I’ve been like, you know—I am telling people about a fan community.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That even though it’s all public online, may or may not wish to have that be exposed to somebody.
ELM: Right.
FK: But on the other hand, like, this person knew that fans existed and wanted to know about what they were saying and doing. And they were gonna find someone to tell them about it. You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah, and not to say that like—you know, I think it can sound a little egotistical to be like “Well, aren’t you glad it’s me?” But like, maybe people should be glad it’s you, a person who is in fandom, and not someone who’s just Googling and is like “I don’t know. I’m seeing these words. I don’t really know what they mean, but I’m gonna put them in a report.”
FK: Yep! Absolutely. And that is something that, I have to say, I’ve seen a lot of that. A lot of that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, I will give you—a lot of it. For example, I worked on one, I think I’ve said this before on the podcast, but I worked on a fannish property that many people here have probably written fanfic about—not you and I, but people listening to us have probably written fanfic about—that people were convinced was mostly a male fandom, which seemed to track with the story and the director and all that stuff, but when you dug a little deeper into why they were convinced about that, it was because they’d used Twitter’s auto gender determiner to look at who was talking about it online. And they had used this algorithmic thing that determined gender.
And you know what those things do when you have as your name on Twitter the name of a hot male celebrity? It thinks you’re a dude!
ELM: Amazing.
FK: So it was like, you know, this was basically like “Dylan O’Brien Lover.”
ELM: Wow, what fandom is this, Flourish?
FK: I am actually not—it was not the one that you think of with Dylan O’Brien, don’t worry. Not that one. Technically speaking I’m not under NDA for this anymore, but I’m still not gonna say which one it was.
ELM: Don’t worry about it.
FK: But it wasn’t that one. Anyway. So yeah, like, just funny stuff about this. Right? That was a person who I’m sure is pretty online, but just applied some tools and moved forward, you know?
ELM: Right, right. It’s a little troubling to think about how many decisions are being made based on the quote-unquote “research” of that kind of person. In life, not just in the entertainment industry. [laughs]
FK: Well, and also: how many decisions are being made because people want certain kinds of data.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Right? And so like, people really want to know gender distribution and age distribution, even if the available evidence is incredibly slim.
ELM: Sure, yeah.
FK: Right? They don’t wanna pay for real research that will tell you the answer to this. They want to have it, whatever they see they’re gonna take on as the thing. Same with anything that you can auto-detect from Twitter. And that’s really sad to me. People will use keyword analysis and will analyze the keywords in your bio on Twitter to determine if it thinks you’re a student or an artist or an executive. You know what I mean?
ELM: Oh, I should put “executive” in my bio. “Business!”
FK: Business, right? And people will then make decisions based on this.
ELM: Right.
FK: Because you know, if you have no information and then you have a little bit of bad information, it’s very tempting as a human to be like “well, the information’s probably wrong, but it’s something as opposed to nothing.” You know? So. I don’t know. This is all depressing. This is part of why I am—although I’ve enjoyed doing this or 12 years—I’m ready to move forward and do new things.
ELM: Sure! OK, well then let’s ask one final wrapping-up question, like: how was it, Flourish? How was it working in the entertainment industry on fan cultures? Just, you know, maybe do it in three, four words? No, you can have sentences. You can have paragraphs. [laughing] The look on your face! Yeah, do it in three words! Just three catchy words.
FK: It was, it has been…
ELM: Done. That’s three.
FK: Shut up. I hate you.
ELM: [laughs] Please tell me, I’d like to know.
FK: It has been extremely rewarding in that I felt like I’ve really made a difference, in a positive way, to things that people really care about. It has also been really exciting and it’s been cool to sort of, like, you know, kind of go behind—peek behind the curtain, and sometimes things feel really glamorous, you know? Like, every time I go to a meeting on the backlot somewhere…
ELM: Fancy, yeah.
FK: Yeah. It’s like “Oh! Hollywood! There’s a bunch of people in a fake airplane getting shaken around and there’s a guy in there shooting a picture and that’s gonna be a movie soon!” Like… [ELM laughs] So it feels really cool in that way.
Also extremely frustrating. Because a lot of times, it’s easy from the outside to say “if you just had one fan in the room you could tell them what-for.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There’s so many structural reasons and so many individual-people reasons, but not even individual—it’s not just like “here’s this dumb guy that won’t listen,” it’s also there’s like 500 things around every project. And so that’s very frustrating and makes it feel very…sometimes you feel helpless because you’re like, “I can’t fix this. I see where it’s going. I see what’s happening. I can’t turn the Titanic. Here I am.” You know? And all I can do is try and do my best in the meantime, and know that if anybody ever heard that I worked on this property, they would be like “Ugh!!!” [ELM laughs] “I think way less of you!” But they don’t know! You know what I mean? They don’t know anything about what was happening behind the scenes or like, what constraints people were under. So that’s been tough.
And then finally I will say also like, it has taken—it has taken some fannishness away from me. I’m really, one of the reasons I am glad to be moving into a different phase of my life is that I feel like at this point I need to rinse out my brain. I need to forget all of the things that I know too much about in order to be able to really approach things in a pure fannish way again. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to detox from that.
ELM: That’s a little hard though, because you say that, but also you never had an adult life that wasn’t a part of this world. And so some of what you’re saying may just be what it was like to be a teen fan, you know?
FK: I don’t know yet! Yeah, I don’t know yet. I really don’t know. But I do think, I do think that I have noticed since I started working on really big franchises I have felt a difference in my life. Because since I’ve started working on franchises that I might conceivably, myself, really be a fan of, you know what I mean? And things that I feel personally emotionally invested in the outcome of. Which I have done frequently recently, in the past four or five years, like—I have really felt like that has changed my relationship to those things. And I don’t want, as much as I am going to miss all of the people I work with and the kind of work I’m doing and all of this stuff, I’m really grateful that I will not run through everything that I might be a fan of. Which is totally, if I kept doing this for the rest of my adult life I would.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean? I would get to the end and I would be like “OK, well, I killed all of it. I’ve worked on all the things, I know where all the bodies are buried and I hate it all.”
ELM: Cool.
FK: You know? So I’m excited to no longer be in that position. I’m really excited, going back to—as much as it’s sad to go back to not knowing things, I’m excited to go back to not knowing things. [both laugh]
ELM: All right. OK, that’s a pretty positive spin in the end!
FK: Sure!
ELM: Congratulations, Flourish!
FK: Thank you!
ELM: It’s exciting!
FK: I am very excited. I’m feelin’ like a kid on their first day of school, which is what I’m gonna be in like nine days.
ELM: It’s true. Breakin’ that ice.
FK: Breakin’ that ice! I got my cassock. It fits me. I look like Professor Snape in it. Except not at all because I don’t look like Professor Snape.
ELM: Shakin’ my head. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, amongst all humans, you look more like Professor Snape than a lot of people I know.
FK: That’s true. Very true. There we go. [laughs]
ELM: Yep, great. Good takeaway. Good takeaway. OK.
FK: That’s my takeaway.
ELM: Well, I am excited.
FK: Thank you for letting me talk about this and process it all.
ELM: Look, I—it wasn’t just for you, it was also for me. I’m interested.
FK: And for our listeners, theoretically!
ELM: For all of us, really.
FK: They’ve all turned it off already. They’re like “Ugh, I don’t wanna hear an hour of Flourish pontificating about this shit.”
ELM: But yeah, no, thank you very much for sitting down for this exit interview. [FK laughs] Please fill out the survey.
FK: Uh-huh? Uh-huh?
ELM: And if you have any questions for us here at HR, you have my card.
FK: Uh, yeah, I just wanna know about my health insurance? How long that’s gonna go on and do I really have to…no. OK, I’m done.
ELM: Yeah, you can go in the portal before it kicks you out and you’ll have access to COBRA.
FK: Uh huh? Thank you. Thanks.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Thanks for that.
ELM: But once your login expires, you’re on your own. Get out!
FK: [laughing] I really do feel like I just had the corporate experience. Thank you, Elizabeth, I needed that.
ELM: I’m not representing any corporation or imitating anyone who’s worked for any corporation I’ve worked for.
FK: Great. Glad we got that legal information out of the way. [both laugh]
ELM: OK, well, next time I talk to you you will be a trainee priest!
FK: I guess that’s true!
ELM: Exciting!
FK: All right. Well, I’ll talk to you later Elizabeth!
ELM: OK, good luck at orientation Flourish!
FK: Thank you! Bye!
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]