If there’s a keeper image from this year’s SXSW interactive festival, it may be Mark Cuban and Michael Eisner agreeing to pose for an on-stage photo with a Flat Eric (ask your six-year-old niece, she’ll be able to explain it.)
It was a little bit of a double-act, and they knew what the crowd can be like (Cuban: “We’ve learned a lot from the Mark Zuckerberg interview.” Eisner: “I’ll just be saying yes and no.” Cuban: “And I’ll be talking about myself a lot.”) The former Disney CEO was there nominally to talk about his new project, Tornante, but everyone really wanted to know the one thing that he knows better than most: how to make money off content. Which is good, because he admits he knows little about the tech (he even forget to turn off his Blackberry and had to be told nicely by the staff that he was causing the blbvlvlvlvlvlvlvl noise on the PA.)
But seriously. About that money.
Eisner admitted that the traditional cash isn’t there yet for the indie film maker on the web, but, he said, never underestimate product placement to monetize. Plus, don’t try to tool your content for the web, just concentrate on telling the story you want to tell. He recalled working at Paramount and passing on a script for a drama called Kramer versus Kramer because it read like a TV movie, “$100 million later …”
On the other side, he said, internet content will not kill off every other medium, but could help it. The current paranoia among the big firms, Eisner added, harks back to the days when Walt Disney was running ads telling movie-goers to not watch tv. It didn’t work, and it didn’t help. Like when video came along, and everyone thought it would kill cinema: “One and one will add up to three” (or, as Cuban put it, “There’s no cure for cabin fever, no matter what options the internet provides.”)
This article appears in March 7 • 2008.
