S2E53: It’s FAN APPRECIATION Day!!!

Here at The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, we really and truly appreciate our fans. But, also, we appreciate how the fan experience has changed since we started making movies and TV shows back in the stone age. There used to be a lot more distance between us – what we now call “content creators” and “content consumers”. We knew “Tales From The Crypt” had fans but it was much harder for our fans to connect with us – and for us to connect with them.

Then V Now

Back then, we’d go hire a publicist if we wanted to actively reach out to our audience. They’d approach the entertainment news media (like our friends at EW who very kindly called us the Best Film Podcast of 2022!) with a story angle and then (hopefully), the press would put us “out there” for our audience to find. Sure, a purposeful fan could find our production address and reach out to us there, but we were only ever in production six months at a time – and always in different locations. Other than that, if you wanted to reach Crypt – pre-internet – you’d have to go through HBO.

And they weren’t our gatekeepers.

Content Creators & Consumers

These days, because of the internet – and social media especially – there are no gatekeepers. There’s no gate, really. Everyone’s an open book one way or another. Content creators must, first, learn how to correctly brand ourselves – with all the right hash tags – so that we and our audience can quickly find each other.

That’s a big, big difference between then and now. Another big difference? These days, content creators and content consumers are frequently the same people. The technology became such that everyone could produce music and then video and then websites and then podcasts and then TV series and little, independent movies and pretty much everything.

It’s All Napster’s Fault!

In a very real sense, this is all Napster’s fault. Napster started something that – we’ll all understand in hindsight – irreparably broke the entertainment distribution system. They started the whole “peer to peer” way of thinking. What started with music files became everything. In the end, Napster came for the fan experience, too.

That’s something we really and truly appreciate.

Roger Nygard

So does our friend ROGER NYGARD. He sat in with us earlier in Season Two. Roger’s an editor (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), a documentarian (“The Nature Of Existence”), an author (“Cut To The Monkey“) – and a content creator not afraid of deep diving into difficult subject matter. Why are we here? Does marriage really matter? And why are Star Trek fans such huge fans of Star Trek?

Roger was one of the first people to see the fan experience as something not just weird – and there ain’t anything wrong with being weird – but compellingly empowering.

That’s the bottom line for fan appreciation day! To be fanatical about something (that’s where the word “fan” comes from) is to be passionate about it. Where Crypt and all the other creative work we’ve done is concerned – except for “Bordello Of Blood”, every last bit of it was created out of passion.

It’s in the work where we all find common bond.