Michael Nesmith: The Interactive Monkey In 1985 I had a regular video column in the L.A. Weekly. I was literally the first video critic in America who focused entirely on "made for video" releases, which were a brand new phenomenon at the time. Michael Nesmith's Elephant Parts was the very first ever. I wrote about it and Nesmith became a fan of my writing just as I was a fan of his videos, and he ended up using me as a critic in his home video magazette, Overview. One day the phone rang and it was Nesmith asking what I was doing that afternoon. I said "nothing" and he invited me to his office. Once there, he drove me to the Burbank airport where we got into his private Lear jet and flew to Silicon Valley where we were taken to Hasbro's private research laboratory in the middle of nowhere. We each had to sign a 15 page letter of non-disclosure before we were led into a room and shown the very first mock-up of the very first interactive video device. This was before CD-I or CD-ROM or DVD or any other interactive technology had reared its head. It was a black box with a joystick that went in-between your VCR and your TV, making any ordinary VHS or Beta tape interactive. They called it skipframe technology, reading alternate frames on the tape, 30 frames, 60 fields per second, divided by four tracks, giving four separate 15 field per second videos running simultaneously and collated, ABCDABCDABCDABCD, with the joystick choosing which path to follow, A, B, C, or D, as the tape played in real time. Want to switch to only two tracks? No problem ABABABAB at 30 fields per second. Ten tracks? No problem ABCDEFGHIJABCDEFGHIJ at six fields per second. Wanna put four Star Treks on a one-hour tape playing simultaneously with the ability to switch back and forth between them like the old eight-tracks? No problem. As a marketing scheme it made sense since video was booming, PCs hadn't quite made it yet, and everyone was buying one of these new fangled VCRs. Hasbro figured the best way to introduce interactivity to the home market was with a device compatible with any VCR and any TV. Soon computers co-opted the entire interactive market and Hasbro was left making toys. I played with the demo, which was simply footage of a car going down a street. With a joystick, I could decide at each intersection which direction to continue. That was it. They asked me what I would do with it. I don't remember what I said but they apparently liked it because they immediately hired me to write the world's first interactive movie called So You Wanna be a Rock 'n' Roll Star, to be starring Nesmith. They must have been impressed by my humorous flowcharts (Guide to a Screenwriter's Life, The Comic's Career Track, Guide to film Criticism) which had been printed in the LA Weekly and National Lampoon, and my insistence that this new art form would have to be created with some new combination of flowchart and script. Nesmith put together a co-production deal with Paramount Pictures and I moved into his offices. Working with Peter Kleiner, I put together a flowchart that circled the room, with each box on the chart corresponding to a scene in a 227 page script, pretty long for a film only 30 minutes long. I also combined the two into a unique creation called a flowscript. One month before we were to go into production on So You Wanna be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?, Wall Street crashed and the whole project was put on hold, just long enough for the technology to be superseded by other technology that came out first. I also developed several other interactive projects that went nowhere, including Taking the World by Storm, The Interactive Comic, The Parenting License, and Being There Interactive. In fact, the technology we were working with never emerged, none of the projects we were developing ever happened, including an interactive Star Trek, but my flowchart that circled the room made the rounds in Hollywood and the computer industry, becoming the blueprint for many interactive films. I'm told it was seen on the walls at MSN as the standard for their interactive writers to follow.   Which didn't put a penny in my pocket. I missed THAT wave, even though I obviously influenced a lot of people. Being a pioneer ain't all it's cracked up to be. Years later, when it became clear that CD-ROM technology was the winner, I wrote Nesmith and asked him why we didn't go ahead with the project with different technology. He had just won millions in a case against PBS so I figure he could afford to just produce it himself. He never got back to me.

 

 

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