David Wallace - Oblivion

4.

In New York it starts out as a puzzling marginal entry, 411 on Dish, 105 on Metro Cable. Viewers find it difficult to tell whether it’s supposed to be commercial or Community Access or what. At first it’s just montages of well known photos involving anguish or pain: a caved in Jackie next to LBJ as he’s sworn in on the plane, that agonized Vietcong with the pistol to his head, the naked kids running from napalm. There’s something about seeing them one right after another. A woman trying to bathe her thalidomide baby, faces through the wire at Belsen, Oswald crumpled around Ruby’s fist, a noosed man as the mob begins to hoist, Brazilians on the ledge of a burning highrise. A loop of 1,200 of these, four seconds per, running 5:00 PM-1:00 AM EST; no sound; no evident ads.

A venture capital subsidiary of Televisio Brasilia underwrites The Suffering Channel’s startup, but you cannot tell that, watching, at first. The only credits are photo ©s and a complicated glyph for O Verily Productions. After a few weeks, stage one TSC also streams on the Web at OVP.com\suff.~vide. The legalities of the video are more tortuous, and it takes almost twice as long as projected for TSC stage two, in which the still photo series is gradually replaced by video clips in a complex loop that expands by four to five new segments per day, depending. Still in the planning phase, TSC stage three is tentatively scheduled for experimental insertion during autumn ’01 Sweeps, although, as is SOP with creative enterprises everywhere, there’s always flexibility and room to maneuver built in.

Like nearly all members of the paid press, Skip Atwater watched a good deal of satellite TV, much of it marginal or late night, and knew the O Verily glyph quite well. He still had contacts among R. Vaughn Corliss’s support staff because of the All Ads All The Time Channel piece, which O Verily had ended up regarding as a fortuitous part of its second wave marketing. The AAATC was still up and pulling in a solid cable share, although response to the insertion of real paid ads within the stream of artifact ads had not had the dynamic impact on revenues that O Verily’s prospectus had promised it very well might. Like many viewers, Atwater had been able to tell almost immediately which ads in the loops were paid spots and which were aesthetic objects, and regarded them accordingly, sometimes zapping out the paid ads altogether. And while the differences between an ad as entertainment and an ad that really tried to sell something were fascinating to academics, and had helped to galvanize the whole field of Media Studies in the late 1990s, they did little for the All Ads Channel’s profitability. This was one reason why O Verily had had to outsource capitalization for The Suffering Channel, which was in turn why TSC had almost immediately begun positioning itself for acquisition by a major corporation — the Brazilian VCs had required a 24 percent return on a two year window, meaning that O Verily Productions would retain only nominal creative control if its revenues did not reach a certain floor, which R. Vaughn Corliss had never, from the very start, had any intention of allowing to occur.

In Chicago, O Verily Productions operated out of north side facilities just a few blocks down Addison from WGN’s great uplink tower, past which landmark Skip Atwater’s rented Cavalier yawed and squeaked — pulling severely to the right from a bent transaxle that had worn one tire nearly bald on the trip up Interstate 65, and with the driver’s side door bowed dramatically out from inside as if from some horrific series of impacts, about which neither Hertz Inc. nor Style ’s Accounting staff would be pleased at all — on 2 July at 10:10 AM, nearly two hours late, because it had turned out that any highway speed over 45 mph produced a sound like a great deal of loose change rattling around inside the vehicle’s engine.

As of June ’01, The Suffering Channel was in the late stages of acquisition by AOL Time Warner, which was itself in Wall Street freefall and involved in talks with Eckleschafft-Böd over a putative merger that would in reality constitute E-Böd white knighting AOL TW against hostile takeover from a consortium of interests led by MCI Premium. The Suffering Channel’s specs were thus already in the Eckleschafft-Böd pipeline, and it had required less than an hour of email finagling for Laurel Manderley to acquire certain variably relevant portions of them on behalf of her salaryman.

Subj: Re: CondidentialDate: 6/24/01 10:31:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time Content-Type: text/html; charset = us-ascii From: k_böttger@ecklbdus.com To: l_manderle@stylebsgmag.com Totalp CT: 6 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Descramble-Content Reference: 122-XXX-idvM32XX

< title> Condidential Product: The Suffering Channel Type: Reality/Gaper Desc. of Product: Real life still and moving images of most intense available moments of human anguish Production Lic.: O Verily Productions, Chicago and Waukegan, Ill FCC Lic. Var. Status: [see Attachments, below] Current Distribution: Regional/test through Dish (Chic., NYC), Dillard Cable (NE, SE grid), Video Sodalvo (Braz), Webstream at OVP.com\suff.~vd Proposed Distribution: National via TWC Premium Options package (est. 2002), TWC and AOL key = SUFFERCH Proposed Carryable Rate: Subsc. = $0.95 monthly stack on TWC Premium Options (= 1.2 % increase) w/ prorate 22.5 % per subscr. mo. 1-12. Variable projected prorate from Arbitron/Hale subsc Sweeps thereafter (standard) (Note: tracks MCI Premium’s Adult Film Channel rate variance per prorate — see attached AFC spreadsheet from MCI source SS2-B4, below) Bkg on O Verily Prod: CEO & Creative Executive, V. Corliss, 41, b. Gurnee, Ill, BA, Emerson College, MBA & JD, Pepperdine Univ. 3 yrs assoc producer, Dick Clark Prod./NBC, TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes. 3 yrs line producer, Television Program Enterprises, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Runaway with the Rich and Famous. 3 yrs exec prod., O.V.P., Surprise Wedding! I–III, Shocking Moments in Couples Counseling! I–II, 2.5 years exec producer, All Ads All The Time Channel [see Attachments, below] Current O.V.P. Assets, Including Capital Equipment and Receivables: [See Attached LLC filing and spreadsheets, below] (Note: At counsel re photo and video permissions, releases [see USCC/F § 212, vi-xlii in Attachments]: Reudenthal and Voss, P.C., Chicago and NY [see Attachments] Precis of Sample Tape, 2-21-01 [Enclosure, acquisition specs Attached], Contents:

(1) Low light security video, mothers of two children, aged 7 and 9, with late stage cancer, Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, Independence, Mo.

(2) High light security video, 10 year old male owner (dog), elderly male owner (dog), adult female owner (cats) on Free Euthanasia Day, Maddox Co. Humane Society, Maddox, Ga.

(3) High light instructional video, 50 year old male coming abruptly awake on table during abdominal surgery, requires physical restraint. Audio quality very high. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass.

(4a) Handheld video, electroshock interrogation of adolescent male subject, Chambre d’Interrogation, Cloutier Prison, Cameroon (subtitles).

(4b) Appended low light video (quality poor), video clip (4a) is shown to subject’s relatives (pres. parents?), one of whom is revealed as real subject of the interrogation (subtitles, facial closeups digitally enhanced).

(5) Covert (?) low light video, Catholic Outreach Services support group for families of victims of murder/violent crime, San Luis Obispo, Cal [rights pending, see Attachments].

(6) High light legal liability video, stage 4 root canal and crown procedure for 46 year old female allergic to all anesthetics, Off. Dahood Chaterjee DDS, East Stroudsburg, Penn.

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