It's the end of another year, almost the end of another millenium, and time
for
alt.screenwriters to look at the digital crystal ball to see what
we might expect in the future, when it has to do with screenwriters, New
Media and the Industry:
- Having just switched to all-digital archiving, NBC is
struck by a tragic Y2K (that's Year 2000, representing the
problems many computers will have when we enter the new millenium)
glitch: all episodes of Friends, Seinfeld and Cheers
being deleted from the digital "vault". Fortunately, all episodes of
Manimal and ALF survive, and NBC instantly orders these
stripped for immediate syndication -- with post-production
underway to combine scenes from disparate episodes into new
"recombinant" episodes, thus readying full 13-week strips for
MSNBC-at-Nite...
- Broderbund announces that Where on Sepulveda Boulevard is
Carmen Sandiego? will be the last in the series.
- Motion capture actors, now comprising 65% of SAG, rename
their union the Virtual Actors Guild, aka VAG.
- The last copy shop in L.A. closes its doors, lamenting the
passing of actors' headshots and two-brad screenplays -- the end
of an era, they say. Kinko's Holograms, however, opens
storefronts in Silverlake and Studio City.
- Microsoft completes its acquisition of every major movie
studio and decides to merge them all -- putting out one movie a
year which movie "end-users" around the world will have no choice
but to see (because there are no other studio movies).
Independent movies will be derided by Microsoft as "buggy" and
"non-compliant" -- and print and TV media will understand that
advertising the indies will cost them Microsoft advertising. The
Department of Justice will begin an anti-trust investigation, but
Microsoft will invest in Lichtensteinian and Lesothan movies and
DOJ will be satisfied that the company is not stifling competition.
- In the wake of ER, all television programs shoot their
premiere episodes "live". Actors, director and crew work 24 hours
straight -- as live episodes are done for East Coast, West Coast,
Tokyo, Moscow, Tel Aviv, London and Havana.
- Because of a national policy that made arcade and Sony
Playstation entertainment cost-free for girls, "twitch" games are
now played almost entirely by women. Teenage boys have fallen back
on pinball and skeeball for entertainment.
- After Microsoft's successful takeover of the US Government,
the long-rumored merger with Apple Computers & Coffee Company
becomes a reality. Free hardware, now called the MSUSPC, is
distributed to all Microsoft customers using Windows 20/20,
effectively putting IBM & The House of Blue Brothers out of the
computer hardware business. Ready to hit-the-ground running,
their very first product is hailed as the single most important
invention in computing history. Combining the best of both worlds,
the company, renamed SoftApples, and affectionately referred to in
the industry as "Mushy," offers up a simple program that has the
benefits of user-friendly icons, software that actually works, and
an installed base of the entire planet, the lunar surface, and our
orange neighbor, Mars. Called PictureWindows, the program costs
$666, and comes bundled with a coupon good for free MSUSPC upgrades
for the next 15 years.
- Screenwriters still using manual typewriters must now
register for a permit (and pay a stiff permit fee) in the City of
Los Angeles.
- Combining multimedia, creative content, and capitalistic
commerce, producers market the first new web show based on two of
the most beloved children's characters of the late 1990's. Updated
for their now 20-somewhat aged fans, the grown-up version of
Where's Waldo? meets Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
becomes the first smash hit on the Internet, proving that it is
possible to make money on the Web if professional writers are used
and the content is there. This historic event is marked by their
flagship webisodes for the NC17 internet-active adventure entitled,
Where's It Feel Good? and Where in the World Did You Learn
That?
- After barely surviving another two decades of dismal
progress on fixing the Internet band-width problem, Microsoft
launches its global software/serverware solution - a gold disk the
company sends to all of its clients via snailmail, which holds
vasts amount of graphics and audio and requires no downloading off
the net to run. Many historians believe this is a retro-drive by
the company, who they accuse of using technology that suspiciously
resembles the old CD-ROMs of the late twentieth century.
- The World-Wide Writers Guild Interactive Writers threaten
to strike for the first time in history, a move that could bring
the Web to its virtual knees. Within nano-seconds of the news,
world leaders, and Bill Gates, are called into on-line-closed-camera
sessions with 200,000 of the world's top writers, and a
settlement is reached, granting writers back-residuals on all
interactive projects written from January 1988 to date.
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