A Tangled Web We Weave

It’s all about Eve. She’s a neurotic 24-year-old editor and aspiring celebrity whose daily triumphs and torments are the centerpiece of the sexy new soap “The East Village.” Like most of her soap counterparts, Eve struggles with the problems of the day, like whether to go to a supercool party or stay home and worry about a drug-using friend. (She opts for the party.)

Eve’s stylish pals would make the cast of “Melrose Place” envious, but you won’t find this bunch on television--not even on the Fox network. To see this hyper-hip East Coast sudser, you’ll need a computer and modem. “The East Village” (on the World Wide Web at https://www.theeastvillage.com) is one of the hottest cybersoaps on the Internet.

It’s a partnership of unlikely bedfellows.

Soap operas, one of the most traditional forms of television, have been adapted to the Internet, potentially the most progressive forum for a diversity of entertainment. And the cybersoaps are proving to be among the most successful marriages of entertainment and the Net.

It’s not hard to see why.

The World Wide Web offers a level of freedom of content that doesn’t exist on television, and the purveyors of these new soaps have been quick to take advantage of this frontier playground.

Bad acting is not a concern, because the majority of cyberdramas are played out through text and still photographs. Yet cybersoaps offer a strangely intimate experience. Unlike television, they are highly interactive, in many cases allowing the audience to e-mail questions and comments to the show’s cast of characters, send “private” messages and even talk in live chat rooms. Many of the soaps provide each character’s in-depth biography, detailing everything from astrological signs to everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets. Some even allow fans to download steamy photos of the cyberstars. And they are accessible 24 hours a day--no need for fans to program a VCR.

This genre, which only turned up on the Web during the last year, is bubbling up all over cyberspace. The list is long and growing.

For example, there’s “MelrosEast” (at https://www.inx.net/ ~mvo/melroseast.html), a tongue-in-cheek soap that features mad cow barbecues amid heaping dollops of twentysomething yearning.

“Union2” (https://www.totalny.com/city/union/) is an urban photo-novella about “love, lust and libations in the big city,” following Carla and Joe in their search for true ecstasy.

At “101 Hollywood Blvd.” (https://home.navisoft.com/brewpubclub/101.htm), fans watch the antics of “a six-pack of young filmmakers in and out of movies and love.”

And for those who miss their dazed-and-confused college years, there’s “T@P Virtual Dorm” (https://www.taponline.com/tap/voyeur/vdorm/).

The Net also offers a gay and lesbian soap titled “Gay Daze” (https://www.gaydaze.com/).

And those are the more traditional cybersoaps.

Because anybody with an idea, the right software and enough time can create his or her own cybersoap, specialized subjects and settings continue to emerge.

Serials deal with topics ranging from alien abductions to complex government conspiracies and from exploding pigs to the search for the lost journals of Elvis.

If psychological maladies appeal to you, there’s the odd satirical soap “Ferndale” (https://www.ferndale.com/), set in a mental facility.

Others include the slacker soap “Chiphead Harry” (https://exp1.mobius.net/baudeville/html/chiphead.html), the cyberpunk futuristic “Generation War” (https://www.webmovie.com/ffwd.htm) and the adventures in corporate incompetence of “Cretins, Inc” (https://www.nembley.com/).

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The incredible proliferation of cybersuds can be tracked to June 5, 1995, in Marina del Rey.Russell Collins of the advertising agency Fattal & Collins came up with “The Spot” (https://www.thespot.com/), which follows the life and times of five young and tanned people living in a funky Santa Monica beach house. During its first 24 hours, “The Spot” received more than 17,000 hits. Today, that’s not a staggering number, but it was back then. Collins knew he was on to something.

“The Internet community recognized that this was a very good formula and copied it,” says Collins, executive producer of “The Spot.” “Obviously, it was the first and the biggest of the cybersoaps.”

Others soon joined in.

“We’ve tried to create a community around ‘The East Village,’ ” says Charles Stuart Platkin, executive producer of the soap, which provides e-mail, chat rooms and “The East Village” radio station for Web surfers to listen to as they view the soap. “We’ve developed cliques [that] audience members can join. It’s analogous to becoming a friend of one of the characters.”

In addition, Platkin says, he is working an “East Village” clothing line and plans an alternative music CD.

Time moves quickly on the Web. “The Spot” had been up and running only a matter of weeks before it became the inspiration for “The Squat” (https://www.thesquat.com/), which follows the trials and tribulations of four not-terribly-hip young people who live in a run-down trailer park somewhere in the South. They are faced with such problems as deciding whether to marry a cousin or who’s going to make the next beer run. The femme fatale is Valvoline. She’s been married five times, yet no one suspects that all of her husbands’ untimely deaths are connected to her. As Valvoline explains, “Thet same thing happens to mah goldfish!”

Another cybersudser that’s caught the attention of Internet surfers is “Candidate 96” (https://www.candidate96.com/), the brainchild of Sally DeSipio and Robert Tercek. This political thriller follows Republican presidential contender John “Jack” Parrish. His campaign sizzles with espionage, sabotage and plenty of decolletage.

“The idea is that if ‘Candidate 96’ is successful, then Jack will actually be elected into office and we’d end up doing a sort of ‘Dallas’ in Washington,” executive producer DeSipio says.

“Candidate 96” is off to a strong start. It won three Envision Awards, sort of the Emmys of the Internet, at the recent Comdex convention in Chicago.

DeSipio and Tercek cut their teeth at MTV, she as head of special projects at VH1, he as director of on-air promotions. They have plunged into the world of cybersoaps believing that the future holds incredible potential.

“Our design is to create a cybernetwork where you are targeting a specific demo with a specific attitude,” DeSipio explains, “much the way MTV did in the early ‘80s.”

Collins, though, has beaten them to the punch. He launched American Cybercast, a burgeoning Internet network in Marina del Rey, on Jan. 1. Collins said his network should have at least five shows up by the end of 1997, including “The Spot” and the new sci-fi thriller “Eon-4” (https://www.eon4.com/). “Eon-4,” about the Earth’s first contact with an alien race, launchedMay 15 and had 100,000 hits a day by the end of the first week.

Says Collins: “American Cybercast is exactly like a network. It will be the ABC or NBC of the Internet, except there will only be prime time.

“We came to the conclusion that the Internet has become a vast wasteland. It’s a trackless wilderness with a lot of dead-end streets and aimless wandering. We don’t think people are willing to do that. They want to have places to go on the Internet, and that’s what American Cybercast is.”

Los Angeles isn’t the only place producing serials. In Chicago, Gordon Lake, president of Lake & Unicorn Media Group, produces several sudsers, including a daily soap called “Lake Shore Drive” (https://www.chiweb.com/chicago/lsd/), the sci-fi serial “Above the Unicorn” (https://www.chiweb.com/entertainment/unicorn/) and “Affairs of the Net” (https://www.chiweb.com/entertainment/affairs/), which was created by his vice president, Sandra Kelley, and is a series of lovelorn e-mails sent by two star-crossed lovers.

So hot is this genre, Lake says, that 25 video production companies in Chicago want to make the Windy City into the Hollywood of the Internet and are forming eight Internet studios. This morning in Chicago, these players are scheduled to demo 50 soaps for venture capitalists and content buyers.

The business potential of cybersoaps has the entertainment industry foaming at the mouth. While some of the soaps are labors of love, many are beginning to incorporate advertising. “The East Village” home page has ads from Saturn and Apple Computer. American Cybercast incorporates product placement into “The Spot.”

The potential audience is the 0 million-plus U.S. households with personal computers and modems. (That figure is expected to jump to 50 million during the next 10 years.)

American Cybercast is spending about $1.2 million a year to produce each show. Part of the tab is covered by advertisers like Honda, Kodak and Apple, the exclusive sponsor of “Eon-4.” Collins isn’t ready to discuss revenue at this point.

Creative Artists Agency, Tele-Communications Inc., Intel and Fattal & Collins are equity partners in American Cybercast.

The broadcast networks and other media giants have entered the online fray as well, among them Time Warner, which runs Pathfinder (https://www.pathfinder.com/, home of “The East Village”), a massive collection of Net sites that cover just about all of the company’s divisions, ranging from Sports Illustrated to the Elektra Entertainment music label.

“Despite that fact that we’re Time Inc. and our bread and butter is this strong base in news and information, we’ve been testing the waters of what entertainment means on the Web in a variety of ways,” says Jack Mason, entertainment producer for Pathfinder.

Says “East Village” executive producer Platkin: “Time Warner’s Pathfinder is one of the most ONLINE popular sites on the World Wide Web, which is pretty self-evident, and ‘The East Village’ is one of the most popular entertainment sites on Pathfinder.”

Paramount Digital Entertainment, a division of Paramount Television Group, is also exploring the Net. President David Wertheimer says it is launching its first shows, two of which are devoted to the popular Paramount series “Entertainment Tonight” and “Star Trek.”

20th Century Fox recently stepped into the cybersud business with a six-week run of “Polaroid Place,” a promotion done with the camera maker. The episodes are still available on Fox’s Web site, https://foxnetwork.com.

“Our goal is still to drive people to our network,” says Cindy Hauser, senior vice president, print advertising, special projects and online entertainment at Fox. “So we’re not all that interested in designing something that’s going to take people away from the television--but enhance it. The smart companies are investing in the Internet to make sure they are at the forefront if something big develops and it becomes a real competitor to television, but I don’t see that happening.”

“Most people are taking their ideas out of television and regurgitating that content onto the Web,” Wertheimer says. “I talk to my counterparts at other studios and they say that they are sticking their toes into the water as far as online entertainment is concerned and researching it so that they’ll be there when the Internet really takes off. We believe that the medium won’t develop unless people invest in it and treat it as a legitimate place to put original content products.”

But how long will people invest before they see a return for their money?

“Virtually no one is making money on the Internet--yet,” Collins says. “The smart money is on the Internet for profits in the year 1999 and 2000, when the business on the Internet is 20 or 50 times larger than it is today. . . .

“Being on the Internet today means having a piece of a rapidly expanding territory. You expand as it expands; you want to own market share.”

With profits a long way off, some Web soaps, such as “The East Village” and “Candidate 96,” are hoping to make money more immediately by moving their soaps to television.

One Web drama has just made that leap. Blue Pearl Entertainment, which produces a drama called “Techno3” at https://www.bluepearl.com, recently signed a deal with HBO Independent Productions to turn the cyber-thriller into cable fare.

“Once you’ve created the characters, the environment and a strong story, you can spin them off into any medium,” DeSipio says. Cyberfame can boost a career. The lead principal in “The East Village,” Hope Adams, signed a film deal and has an agent with William Morris.

Some soaps use professional writers to distinguish themselves from the growing pack in cyberspace. “East Village” executive story consultant is Fred Mustard Stewart, the author of several novels (“The Mephisto Waltz,” “Six Weeks”) and a veteran of television serials who wrote the bibles for the daytime TV soaps “As the World Turns” and “Loving.” Donna Swajeski, along with her husband, Michael Opelka, create “MelrosEast” in their home. As the onetime head writer for TV’s “Another World,” Swajeski finds working in this new and constantly changing medium invigorating.

“It’s been a freeing experience to have a chance to write without being edited, worrying about it being politically incorrect. When you work for a long time at the networks, you get a lot of that,” she says.

That freedom has promoted possibilities that do not exist on television or cable. The campy gay drama “Gay Daze” is set in Los Angeles and follows the lives of a group of friends who are “good ‘n’ bad and good in bed.”

“It’s been a wild ride,” says “Gay Daze” director and creator Helen Mendoza. “There’s been a lot of interest because we’re the only gay soap, and it’s been a learning experience because the Internet has changed so much in just the last six months.

“What I love about the Net is that there’s a lot of creative freedom in terms of content,” Mendoza says. “But you’re also working with the Net’s limitations. It’s a text-based environment--it’s not a movie or a TV show. When you’re shooting still photos versus film, you must consider how do you dress up the photo to make it evoke a particular emotion.”

Many observers believe that given how rapidly technology is developing and the billions of dollars that are being invested to make connecting to the Internet quicker and easier, hundreds of online soaps will one day crowd cyberspace. It’s an excellent place for people with scripts and ideas to post them inexpensively and receive feedback from readers. But no one knows exactly what the future will look like given the dizzying speed with which things are evolving.

“Trying to discuss what entertainment is going to look like in the future is like trying to explain ‘Seinfeld’ to Moses,” Collins says. “The truth is, this is a very rich and very deep entertainment medium. What will happen over the next few years is limited only by the imagination of the creators.”

So tune in tomorrow.