The Tao of Dow

by Melissa Roth

A bit of a legend in the YouTube world, Mike Dow and his film school buddy, Ari Eisner, ended up in TIME and Rolling Stone for their early viral mashups “Must Love Jaws” and “10 Things I Hate about Commandments.” Now the former scourge of the studios (Paramount once ordered YouTube to pull his video) has parlayed parodies into a studio gig with T180 Studios, a subsidiary of Disney, and their latest spoof “Ugly Yeti” just hit the viral jackpot. eGuiders interviews Mike Dow to get the inside scoop on how to go viral, knowing your “rights,” and joining the videocracy movement.

First, how did you end up creating those early viral hits?

In film school, Ari and I used to love to make up movie parodies and joke about our friends, casting them in "Star Wars," laughing about who would play who. Around ’05 and ‘06, the technology was catching up – you could rip a DVD and edit it. We saw the Shining trailer, which was the granddaddy of the mashups, and Ari and I decided to do one for the fun of it, something to send to our friends. We decided to turn “Jaws” into “Free Willy,” and that’s how we came up with “Must Love Jaws.” I got my friend to do the voiceover, and we sent it to five people; one of them was a tech guy who knew about YouTube. I was like, "What's that?" I had never heard of it. I posted it anyway and didn't get much of a response, so I sent it to some video sites and some entertainment bloggers, and next thing you know, we're getting calls from HBO and MTV.

Did you end up getting any work from it?

After our second mashup, "10 Things I Hate About Commandments," we ended up getting a deal with MTV to do some spoofs on their reality shows. We actually took a lot of meetings with different studios around that time, people who said they loved what we did and wanted us to do it for them. But most studios had all these complex rights issues with their properties and couldn’t figure out how to make it legally feasible. And after a while I’d be sitting in a meeting, listening to some nice executive praise our stuff thinking, "I know your lawyers will never allow you to do this."

Your trailers actually got pulled from YouTube at some point?

When “10 Things” reached about 2 million hits, YouTube pulled it saying it was, I think, "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Paramount Pictures." I was bummed and pretty freaked out, but then a friend got me in touch with a man named Fred von Lohmann from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works for the public interest on issues affecting digital rights. He had actually used our “10 Things” video in a presentation on fair use law to the American Bar Association, so he said he owed us one and he took us on pro bono. He told me about some hotline that Viacom, which owns Paramount, had established to actually self-police its own over-aggressive rights claims. I guess a company that big makes mistakes sometimes and they are actually pretty dedicated to not pulling stuff that's protected under fair use laws. One quick e-mail and the video was back up two days later. I was so psyched, it was like a last-second death penalty pardon. Fred's the man.

Now you get paid by a studio to make spoofs – sometimes of their very own shows. Can you tell us about T180?

T180 Studios is a digital video studio dedicated to participatory entertainment. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney, and Take180.com is our flagship site. We ask the audience to submit their ideas – which can be text or artwork or videos -- and we incorporate their participation into our professional produced content. So one of our shows is “My Date,” where users tell us their worst or best date stories, and we have a professional staff of actors and writers and directors who re-imagine them in a 3-minute (180 second) short.

 

 

You also have an “Electric Spoofaloo” show that plays into your background, and your spoof “Ugly Yeti” just hit Entertainment Weekly’s “Bullseye” and TV Guide’s “Hot List.” Is it harder now to get attention for a video than when you first started?

We use so many marketing techniques now – that’s the hard part, the puzzle of it all. Back then it wasn’t quite as hard. I learned a little something from “Jaws,” which sites and blogs make it go ape shit. But it’s definitely harder now. It certainly helps to have the power and prestige of a company like Disney behind you, but you still have to be creative and have really smart, really resourceful people marketing your stuff.

 

 

It’s an interesting mix – you also have a Webby award honoree show, “Juice Box,” which at first glance looks like it might be for a younger Disney audience, but is actually kind of…juicier. I watched a funny episode about a pervy yoga guy and a frisky grandmother. Who’s the target audience for take180.com?

Our demographic is 13-24, mostly girls and young women. We're pretty much PG13, but we also know you have to be edgy and flexible. One of our biggest successes so far was the pilot episode of Electric Spoofaloo, ‘‘Two and a Half Watchmen,' which combines... big surprise...’Watchmen’ and ‘Two and a Half Men.’ Not exactly aimed at teen girls, but ‘Watchmen’ was opening that weekend and we knew we had to strike while it was hot. You aim for a certain demo, but you don't want to be a total slave to it. Sometimes you just have to go for it as long as you're not ridiculously far off. It did great, more than a million views across the web, so it was totally worth it, and after that we geared back a little bit towards our original target.

You also have a show about vampires, a whole demographic unto itself.

Yeah, we have a new series called “I <3 Vampires,” a show about obsessed vampire fans, so there’s a couple of us 35-year-olds reading “Twilight” and getting a whole new education. It really is the bible for teen girl relationships. Of course, you can’t just say there’s just one type of teen girl. And it’s like anything – you have to make stuff that you like and you feel is good, but feels young and has some energy, and I think that applies to anything on the internet.

 

 

So T180 Studios is owned by a major studio - is this the first participatory “mini major,” like a Miramax?

There have been other online participation models, but it is pretty unique, and we may be the first to implement it on wide scale. The founders of T180 studios co-developed “In the Motherhood.”

Are you “incubating” future network TV shows?

We are really getting serious about TV and it's definitely a goal to incubate properties that can migrate over and also discover up and coming talent. Zack Abel, one of the stars of our pilot show "My Alibi," started with us, went on to get a recurring role in "Secret Life of the American Teenager" on ABC Family and now has the lead in one of their new shows for the fall. It's definitely an awesome crossover success story and hopefully the first of many of them. But still, we’re trying to create a fun, new form of entertainment that’s more community driven. I think it would be amazing if one of our shows got picked up for TV, but that isn’t the only thing we’re concentrating on.

The sets and productions are pretty sophisticated, definitely TV quality, which is rare for web video – it looks like you used the actual Ugly Betty set for Ugly Yeti.

We definitely strive for high production values. People expect more of it now, especially with Hulu funneling high-quality content. We’re constantly trying to balance how much production value we need to be successful. We shoot on a RED Camera and we have a fully digital studio that’s pretty advanced, but we try not to put it ahead of storytelling. You also want to keep it intimate, a little bit of a home grown feeling, not too made-in-Hollywood.

We also have an amazing group of people; we’re really lucky there. I oversee the creative staff, and everybody I work with is committed to making something great. They get super excited for turning the audience's submissions into something great. Our production designer Theresa Avram was hoping for "Ugly Yeti" to win and was already designing it before it was a final pick.

There’ve been a lot of viral hits, but not many of their creators go on to get Executive Producer gigs with studio properties – so you may become a kind of patron saint for online producers. How did you end up getting the gig?

I was actually working in sitcoms before I made the mashups, dating back to 1995. I’ve pretty much done everything you can do in sitcoms, from crew guy to A.D. to writer’s assistant to developing and selling scripts. When the writer’s strike hit, my sitcom jobs on ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and ‘Til Death’ were put on hold. I had no idea when they'd come back, if ever. It was a scary and very frustrating time. I started working for T180's co-founder, Chris M. Williams, before they became a part of Disney. Those little mashups helped me again, believe it or not; he loved what I was doing and invited me to join full-time. I stayed with them when Disney came calling.

What’s been most surprising about Take180?

We have a core audience of really loyal fans that really enjoy what we’re doing. And the submissions are really high quality – some people craft complete stories. Others will submit a simple, cute idea, like "turn Ugly Betty into Ugly Yeti." Sometimes that’s all you need.

Here's a first look at some behind the scenes photos from Take180's upcoming parody "Fierce Factor".

  

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