Showtime breaks barrier in twittertainment

Showtime is doing what renegade Mad Men on Twitter could only dream of: pushing television into another dimension by having characters officially live tweet from screen. When hospital series "Nurse Jackie" returns for its second season next month, Dr. Cooper will be sending out thoughts, observations, even photos in tweets that post in real-time as the show unfolds. (Unfortunately for MST and PST fans, tweets will be timed to East Coast viewings.)

This isn't the first time that characters have tweeted from fictional worlds, of course. Fans of Mad Men ignited the movement to extend television to twitter by launching accounts for characters and have been tweeting unofficially, sometimes during episodes, since August 2008. (In a particularly meta-moment the actor behind Trudy tweeted that her 1960s character had discovered twitter before she did.) Last summer, the Broadway play "Next to Normal" had characters (ostensibly) tweet during pauses in onstage dialogue, as a marketing ploy which proved extremely successful. More and more TV shows--Trueblood, Heroes, Glee, The Good Wife-- have established official twitter feeds, some in the voice of characters, but tweets exist parallel to shows, not incorporated into them. Interestingly, The Good Wife did an episode that revolved around twitter, but the twitter feed involved wasn't from a character, and subsequent postings have been sporadic.

“We want the story to extend beyond the hour that it lives on air," Robert Hayes, Showtime’s GM for digital media told NY Times reporter Brian Stelter. No doubt, Hayes has tuned in to the fact that 1/3 men and 1/4 women viewers multitask regularly by watching TV while using the Web.

But how far will he go to extend the story? Will he be the first to officially recognize the potential that twitter represents in extending a drama? Providing platform for not only extending the story as written, but expanding plots and subplots, creating parallel dramas contiguous with story, developing characters in ways they can't be developed on screen, even testing out new characters with a twitter "focus group" audience?

The @DoctorCoop account is already live, giving writers a chance to develop a twitter voice for him, the hardest thing to achieve when setting up an account for a character.

Why isn't there a feed for Nurse Jackie, I wonder? @Nurse_Jackie and @NurseJackie are live accounts, with no posts. Perhaps they're building the twitter cast slowly. The fun (and success) of @DoctorCoop will be watching him interact in real-time not only with followers (ahem, more of this, please) but with fellow cast members.

Or, perhaps the project is on hold as they trawl for writers well-versed in the medium. If so, let them know @BettyDraper is available ;)

@BettyDraper goes Hollywood

At the kind invitation of Writers Guild West, I spent the week in Santa Monica, at Digital Hollywood, a four day thinklab exploring all that's erupting on the frenzied frontier of digital entertainment. Which is to say, entertainment.

I sat on a panel about Transmedia Storytelling with a distinguished lineup of fellow panelists that included Flint Dille, Dungeons and Dragons, Adam Armus, Heroes, Chris Ord and Matt Corman, Covert Affairs, and Jay Bushman, Orson Wells Sells His Soul to the Devil.

It was fascinating to hear how Flint is turning toys into TV shows. How Adam is working with Heroes writers to extend the show impressively across multiple platforms. How Jay is turning Halloween into Tweetplays. And Matt and Chris are turning Betty Draper's best friend into a spy for Covert Affairs.

I spoke as a Mad (Wo)Man on Twitter, about how to free TV characters from ordinary contraints of the medium, and how doing so can result in benefits for a show. I hate dealing with reading glasses on stage, so I used slides as talking points. Which I'm sharing here for anyone interested.

Future of Entertainment: Outside the Box

View more presentations from Helen Klein Ross.

no falsetto notes at first twitter opera

The world's first Twitter Opera, "Twitterdammerung", premiered at London's Royal Opera House hours ago. The libretto was "written" by 900 tweeters who sent posts to @youropera. The 140 character lyrics were set to original music and mixed with familiar opera tunes. The opera can be read in full here.

As with all things twitter, it was produced under enormous time pressure. The production was allotted just three days for rehearsal and not much more for composition. Still, what unfolded on stage proved enough to impress even curmudgeonly opera critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic who gave it a grudging thumbs up:

What unfolded before me was actually not bad at all. The format lent itself to gags and...the gags were some of the best I'd ever heard on the opera floor, proving that it's not the art form that's unfunny, merely the minds of our ageing composers and librettists.

What does this mean for the future of entertainment? That Hollywood and Broadway will come to rely on productions that spring from creative crowdsourcing? Somehow I doubt it. As probably does anyone who's taken part in creative gangbangs. But I add my applause to that of the Royal Opera House audience. While the production may not have rivalled Candida, it ingeniously accomplished the Opera House's presumed goal of getting more people interested and involved in opera. "It's the perfect way for everyone to become involved with the inventiveness of opera as the ultimate form of storytelling," said Alison Duthie, head of ROH2 who was no doubt gratified to observe that the audience last night skewed decades younger than is typical for opera.

Random note: Coincidentally, I received news of this while touring Sydney's Opera House in Australia, site of other operatic twitter excitement. Remember? The tweeter for @RealHughJackman was outed as fake by a post that mistakenly referred to the Sydney Opera Center. Caused quite a tempest in the teapot called twitter.

Heard about this on twitter, of course. Thanks to @Single_Shot for the tip.

tweeting from the pulpit

Turns out Broadway's Next to Normal isn't the only play that's been turned into twittertainment. Wall Street's historic Trinity Church broke digital ground using Twitter to perform the Passion Play. From 12 to 3 on Good Friday, a church worker posted tweets from @twspassionplay, telling the story via retweets from congregationers who had adopted names such as @_Peter_of_, @Pontius_Pilate, @Mary_Mother_Of and @_JesusChrist.

@ServingGirl is so tired. Caiaphas and the priests have been up all night questioning a man who claims to be the Messiah. And I wait on them.

@_Jesus Christ It is as the prophets have written: I tell my tale of misery while they look on and gloat.

@romanguard1 I've got dibs on his robe, but if you guys want to cast lots for the rest of his clothes I'm cool with that.

See the entire performance here. Before twittertainment began, the Passion Play had less than 100 followers. When it ended three hours later, it had over 1700. Brand evangelists.

Found this news in an epistle by Diane Mapes.

dispatch from the twittertainment frontier

Being a Mad Man on Twitter provides unique opportunities to explore the frontiers of twittertainment. So while AMC was whipping up impressive frenzy for the premiere of Mad Men's Season Three last week, some of us Mad Men on Twitter got together to prepare a "tweaser": a fan-produced event in a parallel universe: a twitter show in which Mad Worlds Collide.

Mad Worlds Collide was a first in twittertainment. A dramatic improv produced, created and aired completely on twitter, it bridged the divide between dimensions by offering tickets and real-world Mad Men-era prizes.

The concept was this: in the hour before the long-awaited Mad Men premiere, our new twitter character Radio City hosted a virtual premiere for 1963 film "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", preceded by a variety show in which @Jimmy_Barrett appeared "on stage" with stars of the film, @_EthelMerman and @EdieAdams. It was a scenario that allowed for the participation of all Mad Men on Twitter as well any fans game to get in on the fun.

We issued tickets. Prepared the venue. Sent out the word via tweets and Betty's blog. Even lined up some snazzy door prizes.

As showtime got closer, we drew up a timeline so that we could synchronize our (winding) watches:

9:00- 9:10 People hurrying to Radio City, waiting for show to begin or schmoozing in the lobby or backstage. Theater always gets started late.

9:10 Curtain goes up and Rockettes open the show. Lots of opps for tweeted thoughts from the crowd.

9:19 Curtain goes down.

9:20 Curtain comes up. A variety show is "supposed" to feature a lot of actors from the film. But @Jimmy_Barrett (pissed that Stanley Kramer didn't cast him) takes over the show.

9:30 Curtain goes down.

9:30 - 9:45 Intermission. People mingle in lobby. Door prizes are announced.

9:45 People go back to their seats, anxious for the screening to start .

9:50 Lights go out, in preparation for screening. Everyone posts scrowler which turns viewer screen black.

We crafted posts from RadioCity to act as MC to provide narrative structure, carefully timed and pre-posted to a third-party application which would send out the tweets at just the right moments. What we'd overestimated was distance between 1963 and 2009 technology. Pre-posted tweets from @_RadioCity didn't post. Why isn't my speaker system working tonite? (If we were IRL actors, perhaps we'd have known better than to put all our faith in the production crew.)

Without an MC, the "stage" turned into a free-for-all, truly experimental "theater": not only marvelous improv from @Jimmy_Barrett (see it here) but also fun, fast-paced, unscripted, completely organic and sometimes hilarious entertainment from the crowd. Which you can see here. Appropriate, we decided, to a madcap heist film. And to ground-breaking television drama. The audience certainly seemed to enjoy it.