MY SO-CALLED DVD, PART II

By Derek Miner

October 24, 2002

To read Part I of MY SO-CALLED DVD, please click here.

The year of 2002 brought a windfall of television shows to the DVD format. Fans of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION were promised all seven seasons by the end of the year. Warner Bros. reconsidered their release strategies for FRIENDS and SOUTH PARK and began releasing the shows in season sets. Fox Video bucked the syndication trend and took the first seasons of 24 and MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE straight to DVD. But before all these sets hit stores, there was the announcement of MY SO-CALLED LIFE coming to DVD.

Although BMG didnšt initially see a market for the series on DVD, former employee Jason Rosenfeld convinced Ross Rojek of online retailer Another Universe to take a chance on the show. Enlisting the aid of the team at MSCL.com, a limited edition lunchbox and bonus disc were planned, and Another Universe began taking pre-orders in February, 2002.

Once the project was underway, however, those involved with the DVD began to find traps hidden in their path. Traps which would test the patience of those behind the scenes as well as the customers who hoped to have MY SO-CALLED LIFE on DVD less than four months after they preordered.

MY SO-CALLED SITE

Though MSCL.com was essential to proving the viability of MY SO-CALLED LIFE on DVD, the site's founder, Steve Joyner hadn't been following the project. "I'd gotten busy with my own life and own career and I sort of decided I was just gonna become a Founder Emeritus and wouldn't have a daily operational role," he says. Consequently, Joyner didn't know the DVD was being sold until Another Universe was taking pre-orders. "Shortly after that, I immediately got involved and up to speed," he recalls. "I have a personal interest in the customer," he insists. "These aren't just people who are buying a Madonna CD or something. These are people who, through a site that I developed and founded, found this opportunity to buy this. So I feel a certain responsibility to make sure that their interests are watched over."

"I was originally very concerned, very skeptical, of both Jason and Another Universe," Joyner confesses. "I wanted to make sure that everyone understood, as best as I understood, the downside. In my view, everything was always half empty, because I thought there [were] plenty of great things to make the whole idea half full," Joyner points out. "I wanted to be the skeptic. Because I thought there needed to be a skeptical voice to counter all the 'rah rah.'"

"One of the first things I told Ross is, 'You know, I'm concerned that all it takes is one person, or a couple people writing a letter to the postal inspector, or the FTC or state attorney general, and you've got investigation and potentially a class-action suit,'" Joyner says. "'I think you're getting too worried about these things,' was the gist of the message I was getting back from Ross."

Dan Fowlkes, a member of the core MSCL.com team, was also concerned about the direction of the project. "In the beginning I was thinking, we at MSCL.com, we're not having a lot of control over this. I'm personally feeling like I don't have any control over this, so I'm going to try to get [Another Universe] to actually hire my company to do work on this thing. Just try to regain some measure of control over it," Fowlkes says. He succeeded in convincing Rojek to let him participate in the creation of bonus materials. Initially, Joyner took up the task of obtaining subjects for interviews. "Steve, because he was involved in the effort to keep the show on the air back in the early 90s, actually had met with a lot of the crew and the cast from MY SO-CALLED LIFE, had kept in touch with some of them," Fowlkes says. "So he was kind of point man for actually contacting all of them and trying to set up something, for interviews."

Meanwhile, photographs had to be obtained for the lunchbox. "Basically, Jason went over to BMG, on foot, and said, 'give me all your images,'" Fowlkes remembers. "He had to talk them into letting him take some of the images with him, and was only allowed to take 30 of the 120 images that they had."

Fowlkes was given the task of choosing which images would be turned over to Fivesided Design (www.fivesided.com) for the lunchbox. "Oh, my gosh, were they great images," Fowlkes sighs. "Of those 30 sent to me, maybe eight were the shots that were already out there online that had now become very recognizable, because there are only very few number of MY SO-CALLED LIFE promotional photos available online. The other 22 were stuff I'd never seen, and some of them were just really, really nice, gorgeous photos. And so I tried to use as many of those as I could on the lunchbox while still using the very recognizable two group shots on the front and the back. And ever since then, I've been pestering Jason and Ross to get the other 90 images from BMG and have like a 120-image 'image gallery' on the bonus disc."

"It probably took about a week for [Fivesided] to turn around a couple of comps, to show us the [lunchbox] design," Rosenfeld remembers. "And in fact, [they] had two designs. One I thought was more aesthetically pleasing than the other, but the one that was more aesthetically pleasing actually left out a few of the cast members. And just understanding the audience that we had and the people that were buying the product, to me it was better to maybe have the one that didn't look quite as artistic."

MY SO-CALLED INTERVIEWS

Fowlkes next turned his attention to the bonus disc. "After like a month and a half of waiting for Steve to tell us anything, or just to email us, we kind of gave up on that," Fowlkes remembers. "And after talking with Jason quite a bit, I just started cold-calling the crew of the show, and trying to dig up the various representatives for the actors, and ended up getting a hold of all the various people at Bedford Falls [the production company that created MY SO-CALLED LIFE], Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz and Winnie Holzman."

On April 23, Fowlkes posted to the MSCL.com "So-Called Forum" that he would be going to Los Angeles to interview the creators of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. "There are many questions which all of us, as fans, would like to ask them! So we're giving you the chance to post you questions here for them," Fowlkes wrote. That Friday, armed with video equipment and messages from the MSCL.com forum, Fowlkes arrived in Los Angeles and met Ross Rojek.

"It was kind of funny watching him do the interview because he was involved," Rojek says of the Bedford Falls visit. "It wasn't just a matter of question and answer for him. They finished talking, and he's just sitting there, absorbing it all."

With about 70 minutes of footage "in the can," further interviews were proposed. "Steve, when he reappeared, took back up the reins, to a degree, with calling back cast members and whatnot. So he organized some cast members to get together and me to interview them," Fowlkes says.

Fowlkes headed to Los Angeles for a second time on May 10th. "I showed up at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, after my trans-continental flight. And there was just a message at the desk saying, 'Call Steve,'" Fowlkes recalls. "Steve's like, 'You're gonna kill me, but I ended up canceling the whole interview session.' Turned out various people Steve had said were going to show up were not going to show up. And so he decided it wasn't worth it to get the room, to get the suite at the Four Seasons and do the interview with so few people showing up."

"I was talking about getting all the actors together, the principal actors, for what I called a 'gab fest,' and we were going to go down and interview them," Joyner says. "And I just found myself again, a hundred percent of my time and energy was going into this." When the cast interviews fell through, Joyner decided to take a less prominent role in the project. "Occasionally, I find myself slipping and I find myself obsessing again," he says. "There's a permanent part in my being that is MY SO-CALLED LIFE. I've spent a couple years, full-time pretty much, on this show. And that's why I really wanted no involvement."

"But that second trip to LA ended up bearing some slight fruit," Fowlkes is quick to add. "I wandered around Beverly Hills most of the weekend, [and] ended up going to the Museum of Television and Radio."

"They'd had an event there with the entire cast, all the crew. Many more crew members than I'd been able to interview," Fowlkes says. "They introduced them all in the beginning, then they showed the pilot, then they had a question and answer session at the end, which I thought was great. And I told Ross that 'If we don't end up getting our own cast interviews, you really have to try to get this footage. I don't know what the Museum of TV and Radio would want, but, they seem like good people, and a really good cause, so you should give them money, and get this footage, because it's really good stuff.'"

Fowlkes had also been looking into one further interview for the bonus disc. "Snuffy Walden, the guy who did the music, I contacted him and he said he was totally willing to submit a DAT tape of him answering questions we sent him," he says. "I figured, [to] make a little short question and answer featurette on the bonus disc, we'll just throw up some stills of publicity shots of him at work while we played the tape, or frames from MY SOCALLED LIFE."

As he did for the other interviews, Fowlkes solicited questions from the MSCL.com forum. "There were questions, and questions that I submitted to him, but at that point, it was right in the middle of his hell month, just because it was time to score basically all the pilots for the coming season," Fowlkes says. "And because the caliber of the questions was just kind of lacking, in my opinion, I haven't followed up on that since."

MY SO-CALLED ORDERS

At the end of March, an e-mail arrived in many inboxes titled, "Important MSCL DVD Update." The message from Jason Rosenfeld provided updates on several aspects of the project. Another Universe had signed a deal with GWhiz Enterprises to manufacture the lunchboxes, which were estimated to be completed by late May. The DVDs were expected from BMG by early June, so a tentative release date of June 18 was given.

But an unforeseen problem had also come up. "We learned that the [credit card] authorization cannot remain open for 3-4 months without becoming invalid," Rosenfeld wrote. Customers would have to decide whether to prepay the full price of the set or cancel their orders and have their deposit refunded.

Discussions about this issue began to surface at MSCL.com forum. Rosenfeld and Fowlkes frequented the message board, trying to answer any questions about the project. On some occasions, Ross Rojek also posted to the forum. "Things change. Particularly when working with a company like BMG," Rojek wrote on March 27. "Our pricing has already gone up from what BMG first told us, and we're going to eat those fees. But all BMG's costs we have to pay. Plus the stuff we're doing in addition." Rojek pointed out later that Another Universe also had to absorb the costs of the second Los Angeles trip where the interviews for the bonus disc were cancelled. Rosenfeld further commented, "Instead of maybe ordering 1,000 (by August) sets of 3-4 discs, it is now comprised of 6 discs per set (for video quality reasons) and there are nearly 3,000 orders."

"We've had to build systems to be able to handle this," Rojek says. "The company was not set up for this when we got into this. And it definitely wasn't set up to last this long under this process. And it's a headache. And the problem is, there's only so many people to handle it. And we brought in one person for like three weeks, just to organize all the customer information. I mean, literally, by hand, printing it out, going through it, one by one by one."

Meanwhile, the MY SO-CALLED LIFE project continued to attract more attention and more orders, thanks to some major media coverage. The May 3rd issue of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY included an article about TV Shows going to DVD, and specifically mentioned MY SO-CALLED LIFE and the preorder situation, including a call in to executive producer Marshall Herskovitz. The May 20th issue of US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT wrote a story around the DVD project, calling it "the first show pushed onto DVD by fans."

MY SO-CALLED LAWYERS

"The real challenge to this project for every step of the way has been the attorneys," muses Jason Rosenfeld. "The second that the lawyers start looking over the paperwork, looking at the deal, that's when everything comes out of the woodwork."

The first legal issue on the MY SO-CALLED LIFE project became known around May of 2002. "Because BMG Video had only put out episodes one through twelve on VHS, that was the only music they'd ever cleared. They never cleared episodes 13 through 19," explains Rosenfeld. In the business of entertainment, "cleared" means those who hold the rights to a piece of music have agreed to its use and have been properly compensated. Even though music may have been cleared for broadcast on television, a new deal is required for any other medium, such as VHS or DVD.

"The biggest problem with DVDs right now is that there's no statutory rate that's set for publishing royalties," Rosenfeld laments. " So what happens is you have a publisher out there who can ask for any amount they want."

"That all of the sudden became an issue because there were some songs that were by artists that were not so well-known that might be very hard to track down," Rosenfeld adds. "And at that time, BMG was telling me that they might have to cut out scenes, and I didn't think that would really fly very well."

Another entirely non-legal factor compounded the delays for music clearances. "Seems that someone at Buena Vista was actually out for like six weeks," Rosenfeld says. "So BMG tried to contact them over and over again, and basically left voice mail after voice mail ­ and I can vouch for them, because I tried calling myself ­ and just couldn't get anybody. And finally, she came back and was like, 'okay, everything's clear!' So because someone was gone for six weeks, it really delayed the project. We got nothing done in that time, because BMG couldn't even start the authoring until they got the okay."

At the same time music clearances were being finalized, Rosenfeld was attempting to get BMG to issue a press release to prove that the MY SOCALLED LIFE project was legitimate. "Some people said I was wasting my time going after BMG for a press release," Rosenfeld says. "But to me, it was like I just won a marathon to get that press release, it was the greatest thing ever. Because to me, to be able to post that press release, to actually link to it on the BMG site, would really calm a lot of people down." On July 1st, Rosenfeld finally received the press release from BMG and was allowed to post it online the next day. Rosenfeld was concerned, however, that BMG was not posting the release on their own site. "I think that loyal fans and customers deserve something official on the BMG site," Rosenfeld posted at the MSCL forum. After about 35 calls, BMG finally posted the release at BMG.com on July 18th.

In addition to waiting for a press release from BMG, Rosenfeld was also waiting on an entertainment lawyer to provide the last touch before the lunchboxes could be manufactured. "All that we needed from Buena Vista and BMG was [a] one line disclaimer under the lunchbox, to print on the bottom of it, to say like, 'this lunchbox is not for individual retail sale,'" Rosenfeld says. "We honestly waited six weeks."

"And then on the MSCL forum," Rosenfeld adds, "I started a contest where I wanted people to come up with the most restrictive kind of disclaimer that they could ever possibly think of. For example, try to write a two or three paragraph kind of legalese disclaimer to put on the lunchbox. Kind of like, just picking fun at the lawyers." When the final disclaimer arrived in mid-July, Rosenfeld was stunned how basic it turned out to be. "I'm like, 'It took six weeks for this? What the hell?'"

MY SO-CALLED CHARGES

While most customers had reluctantly accepted an up-front charge for a DVD set that hadn't been manufactured yet, another issue with the orders was threatening to become a problem.

In early July, complaints started surfacing about customers being charged twice for their DVDs by Another Universe. On July 5th at the MSCL.com forum, Ross Rojek posted, "If you were double charged, we'll fix it. We're trying to change our credit card processor due to constant problems like this from them. They took authorizations (which should have just been a hold) and charged. They took declined charges that we were able to hand run and automatically charged them again."

Another round of double charges was reported at the end of July, prompting Jason Rosenfeld to post, "I am totally fed up with this whole entire process. I am waiting for a more thorough explanation, because if they cannot stop this from happening it could threaten everything. It is an embarrassment. You deserve better."

With a wedding pending at the beginning of August, Rosenfeld became more active in trying to allay the concerns of irritated customers who still did not have a firm release date. "A lot of people were starting to say, 'This is never going to happen, someone should make sure that the funds are still there.' You start hearing crazy, crazy stuff. Finally I said to [Ross], 'You know what, just let me sleep easy at night, show me proof.' Basically, I knew I had no right for the proof that the funds existed, he certainly had no obligation to show me," Rosenfeld says. "But he ended up showing me the documentation, and quite honestly, that's all I needed."

After this, Rosenfeld posted at the MSCL.com forum, "The fact that the errors seem happening to the same orders tells me that there is probably something wrong with AU's shopping cart system (which has never been used for this type of pre-order before). When people report the errors, they are being corrected on the spot, so I'll defend them as long as they continue to do this. They have not interfered with the production of the set at all. They have not caused a single delay to the project."

Rosenfeld added, "AU.com has asked me to get a customer service page up and running that will speed up response time and reduce reliance on emails, which can get lost." On August 8th, Rosenfeld unveiled a customer service form on his own company website, www.drygrass.com. Gord Lacey, Rosenfeld's partner, designed the form, which accepted customer complaints and generated a response when a representative of Another Universe checked and cleared the complaints from the site.

MY SO-CALLED CALM

With all clearances obtained, the video materials were delivered to AIX Media in Los Angeles for "authoring," the process where the episodes and other content (such as menus and subtitles) were digitally prepared for manufacturing. Rosenfeld visited AIX in late June as they worked on the material, reporting on MSCL.com, "It is moving along well and the estimated completion for authoring is about 5 weeks." Based on this timetable, Another Universe issued an official release date of September 17th.

On September 4th, Justin Martin from Another Universe posted at the Home Theater Forum that BMG would be sending the MY SO-CALLED LIFE discs for duplication within the week. Upon hearing this, Jason Rosenfeld contacted BMG to see if it would be possible to check the discs for problems before they were replicated.

On September 8th, Jason Rosenfeld became the first person to watch all 19 episodes of MY SO-CALLED LIFE on DVD, thanks to check discs overnighted by BMG. Through the technology of the internet, Rosenfeld invited online fans to join him through ivisit.com.

As September 17th approached, some fans shared their excitement over the imminent DVD release at MSCL.com. Others continued to report double charges, and a few even reported triple charges. But even though the announced shipping date was right around the corner, the story was far from over.

MY SO-CALLED DVD Part III will run on Monday, October 28.

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