4,717,368.
That’s how many views (including mine) have been tallied for director/actor/producer Freddie Wong’s short fan film “Modern Warfare: Frozen Crossing Part 1” on his YouTube channel, so far his sole distribution platform.
I first read about Wong’s work last week in an article on TheWrap.com which reports that Wong and his partner, Brandon Laatsch, have so far uploaded over 120 largely fan-funded, gunshot-riddled videos to their two channels, FreddieW and FreddieW2, which have more than 3.5 million subscribers between them.
For the record I despise violent video games like “Modern Warfare” and I have a hard time lauding their spawn, but I am really impressed with what Wong and company have done with such limited resources. Hollywood has apparently approached the prolific duo looking to make a deal, but who knows whether that move was simply prescient or made in self-defense… or perhaps both?
Either way it seems Wong et al. couldn’t care less. ”Making a feature film or making a TV show [as] a definition of success, that’s out of date,” Wong scoffed to TheWrap. “We’re looking at where online content is going, where technology is going — that’s an exciting new frontier. We have this chance to carve out what the online world and digital-distribution world could look like, and that’s infinitely more interesting.”
Deja vu… As a journalist I watched some of my colleagues first dismiss the Internet – especially those from the old guard – then cower in private over its might, and finally scramble to catch up with those who embraced it early.
Case in point: when I was in graduate school in 2003 I got a C on a paper I wrote for my Media Law & Ethics class (taught by the venerable former NPR and ABC Newsman Bob Zelnick) in which I portended the significant influence of blogs on both the coming presidential election and the archaic media landscape. When I appealed the low grade, Zelnick attributed it to my “implausible” thesis.
I’m still new to making movies but I see a similar trend of such fatal skepticism at work in the film business as has crippled and culled the print media, especially, during the last decade.
One example was the countrywide boycott that theater owners threatened last fall when Universal Pictures announced that it would release its Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy action comedy “Tower Heist” on video on demand (VOD) at a premium price in some markets only three weeks after it opened in theaters.
In a perfect world the two sides might have worked together in this experiment to share the risk, come up with a compromise and investigate this new distribution model. Instead the theaters’ balked and Universal ditched the idea. At least the controversy started a dialogue that will hopefully drive change for the better.
Wong says he’s open to collaboration, telling TheWrap that ”it’s a matter of finding a project that takes advantage of the audience we’ve been building. We really like being able to directly communicate with our audience.”
(Apparently the feeling is mutual… The view counter on Wong’s FreddieW channel is up to 496,764,780.)
Still, one can hear the proverbial teeth chattering as old guard producers across Hollywood furtively watch Freddie Wong’s latest short, wondering whether to try and beat him or join him. In my corner of Hollywood East, I’ll be watching and learning.
If you’re interested, too, check out the fascinating making-of video he and his cohorts posted for Frozen Crossing Part 1.
