MY SO-CALLED DVD, PART I

By Derek Miner

October 22, 2002

When exactly did "teen angst" turn into a complete joke? There was a time when it seemed urgent and essential, like when John Hughes made good movies. Or for that brief, fondly recalled moment when a TV show called MY SO-CALLED LIFE captured something truthful. For those who are looking to rediscover the show, or for those who just want to see what the hype was all about, MY SO-CALLED LIFE is coming to DVD. Interestingly enough, the struggle to bring the beloved series to disc has already gone on longer than the five months the show lasted on network television.

THE SO-CALLED BEGINNINGS

MY SO-CALLED LIFE was developed by the team that originated the critically-acclaimed THIRTYSOMETHING and attempted to shine the same honest light on being a teenager. The So-Called Life of the title belonged to 15-year-old Angela Chase, as portrayed by Claire Danes. The stories involved Angela's shifting relationships with friends and family, particularly her longing for bad boy Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) and wavering between friends Sharon (Devon Odessa) and Rayanne (A.J. Langer). Significant subplots were given to Angela's parents, Patty (Bess Armstrong) and Graham (Tom Irwin).

"A lot of people think of it as a teen show, but it was massively generational and universal," says Steve Joyner, founder of both an organization that attempted to save the series and a website which sustains its legacy today. "My first experience with the show was so primal and so typical," he remembers. "There's so many important issues that this show raises, from homophobia to parental/teen rebellion, I mean that's as old as anything," Joyner insists. "A lot of good television does that ­ that's not unique ­ but there's not a lot of good television."

Critics agreed, lavishing praise upon MY SOCALLED LIFE. Viewers for Quality Televison also pledged their support. In early 1995, Danes won a Golden Globe award for her portrayal of Angela. Despite all of this, low ratings led ABC to cancel the series.

Ironically, the show's following actually grew after cancellation. In April, 1995, MTV began repeating the series (and continued to do so for three years). In 1999, MY SO-CALLED LIFE placed at #1 on a list of the Top 10 Aborted TV Shows at E! Online.

Part of the reason MY SO-CALLED LIFE retains such a following can be attributed to the MSCL.com website, launched four years after the show's debut by Steve Joyner. "Every month, someone is EXPERIENCING MY SOCALLED LIFE for the first time, and having that same reaction that I first had," Joyner says. "And there's a yearning to share that experience with other people. And that's what our site provides, one of many things, a virtual gathering place where people can share their experiences or read about other experiences."

"I always like to point back to the show. It really has nothing to do with any external force, including anything that I've done," Joyner insists. "I've just helped funnel energies in a certain direction."

Joyner says the MSCL.com team was often asked where to get videotapes of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. BMG Video released some episodes on home video back in the late 1990s, but bankruptcy prevented an entire collection from reaching stores. BMG Special Products inherited the rights to the show and attempted a single disc DVD in June of 2000.

"The MSCL.com team had been trying to figure out, 'How can we get this show released on DVD?'" remembers Dan Fowlkes, a member of the creative team at MSCL.com. "And we said, at that point, the only way people are going to buy it is if it's released all of it at once, in a box set. Because BMG already defaulted on putting out the third VHS box set, and nobody wanted to start buying the discs not being sure that they're all going to be released in that format."

"We had already organized an online petition and had 4,700 signatures of people saying they'd buy it, and that sort of thing," Fowlkes says. This effort soon came to the attention of Jason Rosenfeld at BMG Special Products.

Rosenfeld had already given up on law school and thought a business degree might help him pursue more creative interests, which led him to BMG. "Here I was," Rosenfeld recalls, "some MBA guy who, when they gave me a goal of trying to sell $2 million worth of stuff online, I said, 'okay, sure!'"

"It's sort of looking at your untapped content that you might have and try to find things that would work online. So my theory back then was, let me look through our catalog, see what we have of value, and then try to find just groups of networked fans online," Rosenfeld explains. "I was looking through all our shows to see if there was any online interest at all. And I found the MY SO CALLED LIFE fansite."

"The thing I was telling BMG was, 'I honestly think we could sell several million dollars worth of the show,'" Rosenfeld recalls. "I would go into every meeting and just get laughed at. It was almost like, 'Alright, Jason's got a crush on Claire Danes.'"

Rosenfeld eventually left BMG in September of 2001. "At which point, most of us kind of gave up on seeing something happen with it," Fowlkes remembers. "We sort of figured, you know, BMG really doesn't want to put this out. They really don't see the market for it."

Unbeknownst to the MSCL.com team, Rosenfeld had decided to take his pitch direct to dot com retailers. "If I [found] a retailer to take it, then at least BMG would say, 'Alright, there's no risk for us to put it out, we'll have a guaranteed number sold.'" Armed with his research on potential pricing and bonus materials, Rosenfeld decided the best approach was to make a series box set exclusive to one outlet. "So I went from retailer to retailer, and they really all just shot down the idea," Rosenfeld remembers. Even CDNow and BarnesAndNoble.com, both owned BMG's parent company, Bertelsmann, turned Rosenfeld down. "To them, it had never been done."

"I had one name left in my Rolodex,," which happened to be AnotherUniverse.com, Rosenfeld recalls. "It's not saying that AU is my last choice," he points out, "but they're less obvious, because they're not a general retailer."

"It was a situation where I gave Ross Rojek, the CEO of Another Universe, a pitch, and I said, 'There's a property that BMG has that they have no intention of doing anything with. It's going to be a challenge because it's going to involve not only selling it, but actual certain production elements of the project.' I showed him the show, I showed him the fan site."

"It was interesting, but everybody's got an interesting idea, you know?" says Rojek. "And part of it was, if this is so good, why didn't BMG do it? And then, why doesn't some other, actual, larger mass-market retailer like Amazon or Buy.com do this? And then we dug around and realized that it is very much a niche product, it's not mass-market."

Rojek began by taking a look at the reactions to BMG's existing three-episode DVD. "I went to the Amazon website, looked up the MY SO-CALLED LIFE page for them, and three people in a row said, 'This is a great series, but don't buy the DVD unless they agree to put out the full set!' Which was an interesting concept. Then we went to eBay and saw the number of people bootlegging the video set."

"We hit the fan sites looking for how much traffic is coming through, how many people are actually interested in this, and that's partially where we ended up going to make the decisions. It didn't look like it was going to be huge," Rojek adds. "But we could sell three or four thousand, and that covered pretty much all the costs that BMG wanted, all of our costs, and left us with money in the bank. So that's what our goal was."

Once Rojek decided to go ahead with MY SO-CALLED LIFE, it was time to bring BMG back into the picture. "When I actually sent [Another Universe] to negotiate with them, I was kind of like Cyrano DeBergerac sitting in the bushes," Rosenfeld reveals. "My main concern was that they thought I was loony when I was there, so all of the sudden, I thought that they might discount Ross coming to them if they thought that I sent him."

On February 10th, 2002, an announcement went out to those who had signed the petition to get MY SO-CALLED LIFE released on DVD. "You'll be amazed to learn that you can actually place a pre-order now and reserve a copy with a $20 deposit. BMG has agreed to license the DVD to AnotherUniverse.com as the exclusive source," Rosenfeld wrote in the email. "Within about the first month, we exceeded the 2,000 order mark," Rosenfeld marvels. "So we blew past that 1,000 that we wanted by August immediately. And I think we actually were at a quarter of a million dollars in pre-orders within that first month."

THE SO-CALLED BONUS

Another Universe had already gotten the attention of MY SO-CALLED LIFE devotees by offering all nineteen episodes in one package. They also offered a discounted version without the first three episodes for anyone who had purchased the single DVD already available from BMG. "But Ross wanted to push it even further toward 'collectible,' because any die-hard fan has got VHS tapes of all the episodes, bought off of eBay, or taped off MTV," remembers Fowlkes.

Another Universe had already accepted Rosenfeld's idea of offering the first 2,500 sets in a limited edition packaging. "Jason was saying, 'Yeah, we need some packaging, what about a lunchbox?' to the MSCL.com people, and we were all, 'Yeah, a lunchbox, that's a great idea!'" remembers Fowlkes. "I don't know quite why I thought of a lunchbox," Rosenfeld admits. "You see, lunchbox and high school don't necessarily mesh togetherŠ that's what worked about it for me, that there's something about not fitting in, or something about the geekiness of a lunchbox, that appeals to me."

"These things become sort of like our own little way of identifying our interests," Rosenfeld muses. "And I think that a lot of the things that I'm gonna be working on in the future are gonna have that element of a popart type thing that you can take to your cubicle at work."

The lure of the lunchbox ended up more intense than expected. "People were emailing me after the deadline, 'I will do anything if I can get that lunchbox!' I was getting propositioned by men and women," Rosenfeld recalls. "There was actually one person [who] wrote to me, 'I will do anything you want. I will send you your favorite kind of porn, if you will only ensure that I get this lunchbox.'"

Fowlkes continues the story. "So the packaging having already been proposed, [Ross] wanted to provide even more video content. That's where the bonus disc came in."

"One of my employees, who is heavily into DVD has got the software to do it, and the first thing he wanted to do was, 'Hey, can we do some original material for this and make our own DVD for it?'" Rojek says.

"We had a whole lot of ideas for the bonus disc," Fowlkes recalls, "and an interview with the cast, and an interview with the crew were pretty much at the top of our list, in terms of the holy grail of bonus disc," but there were other ideas investigated.

"We wanted to put bonus commentary tracks on the discs," Rosenfeld remembers. "To do that probably would have delayed us another half a year in clearances. So, talking about the kind of constraints there are, we had to say, 'Alright, we'll do interviews on a bonus disc instead.'"

The bonus disc was originally planned to be limited, like the lunchbox, but Rojek decided it might be best to change this. "Maybe a month, month and a half in," Fowlkes says, "Ross decided, 'Ah, we'll give the bonus disc to everybody. You know, we don't want them to miss out on content.'"

So with a special package and bonus materials planned, and turnaround time estimated at three months, work began on the MY SO-CALLED LIFE DVDs. But unforseen circumstances were about to force the long-suffering supporters of the show to wait a little longer for the finished product.

PART II of MY SO-CALLED DVD will run on Thursday, October 24.
Part III will finish up the story on Monday, October 28.

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