Bloom in Tech

Mindy Kaling made a splash as an actress in The Office and The Mindy Project and just released Late Night, an Amazon Studios feature that she wrote, directed, produced and stars in. Nancy Meyers started as the writer of such films as Private Benjamin and Irreconcilable Differences, then became a director and producer, known for iconic rom-coms such as Something's Got to Give and It's  Complicated. The two sat down together at the recent Produced By conference to talk about being multi-hyphenate female creators in Hollywood, with all the challenges, experiences and opportunities that have unfolded since. 

This weekend's Produced By conference, hosted by the Producers Guild of America, was a good chance to sit down with Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher, the presidents of the organization, to talk about creating TV shows, films and streaming programming in a Hollywood that's been turned upside down by technological change. Berman, who headed both Fox TV's entertainment division and Paramount Pictures, and FIsher, former vice  chairman of Sony's Columbia Pictures Group, are among the most prominent producers out there, each working on projects for traditional outlets, new streamers, even a movie based on podcasts. And the conference they're presiding over will touch on many of these changes and much else. You can also read my Forbes piece about the interview. 

The announcements were coming fast and furious at Monday's opening session of Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, but the stuff that caught my attention was perhaps a little more subtle: Apple is trying to get us old-school computer-wielding types to move away from the increasingly problematic World Wide Web, with its trackers and data violations, to an app-based universe that looks a lot more like its iOS mobile universe. Give a listen, then take advantage of Anchor's audio comment button to let me know what you think, and what you thought was most interesting from Monday's presentations. There was lots to chew on, especially that smoking hot Mac Pro, which ought to have Hollywood's video editors, visual-effects specialists, VR creators and others really excited. But trust me, for everyone else, an app-y place can be a happy place. Give a listen. 

Plenty of people have heard about crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which make it easy for fans to back f creative and technology projects, among others. And more recently, we’ve seen companies tap the SEC’s newer Regulation A process to sell shares of stock to, particularly, fans of smaller ventures that aren't yet on the major stock exchanges. 

CrowdStreet uses some of the familiar crowdfunding tools and approaches, but targets a much higher level of backers, namely so-called  "accredited investors" who might want a piece of one of the biggest asset classes out there, commercial real estate. I sat down with CrowdStreet CEO Tore C. Steen to talk about how the six-year-old company is using an online process and crowdfunding to streamline and open up investing in commercial real estate. The segue from KickStarter to CrowdStreet isn’t an obvious one, but the opportunities are just as big, the beneficiaries just as unexpected. Give it a listen. 

This week, I moderated a panel on work and mental health for Soul Pancake's "Four Conversations About One Thing," a series of discussions tied to  Mental Health Awareness Month. My panelists included actor Romany Malco (A Million Little Things, Weeds), Internet and radio star Shira Lazar, Quibi head of people operations Denise Jackson and Dr. Habib Sadeghi. This podcast, I talk about dealing with burnout, a huge issue for online influencers especially, and a discussion that comes just as the World Health Organization has officially added work-related "burn-out" to its handbook of recognized illnesses and conditions. Separately, I speak with Dr. Sadeghi about some of his prescriptions for building a more balanced and centered life amid all the challenges we face out there in this fractured digital age. If you're in tech or entertainment, or really any high-pressure business, there's lots here worth checking out. Give it a listen. 

This week, I spent a day at the semi-annual Digital Hollywood conference, in part reconnecting with friends and business associates. After moderating a truly great panel of thoughtful people in  influencer marketing (you can watch the panel here; scroll to about the 1-hour mark in the day-long video to get to my panel),

I also got a chance to watch a panel featuring the Italian astrophysicist and musician Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, then I sat down separately with her to talk about "Let's Get Astrophysical,"  the class she teaches at Florida International University and at California State University - Channel Islands. 

The class combines traditional astronomy with creative expressions such as music, art, fashion and dance, along with some wisdom on being entrepreneurial, and even some Internet etiquette. As part of the class, the students create what Terenzi calls a space opera, "Tommy" for the spheres. Terenzi has been crossing between hard sciences and the humanities for decades, dating back to a 1987 album for Island Records that used radio frequencies generated by stars and galaxies to create music. Now, besides her teaching, Terenzi is working on a new virtual-reality project that incorporates all five senses. Guess what Mars smells like? 

I caught up with Brian Solis, the long-time "digital anthropologist" and speaker on influencer marketing, at this week's Open Influence Summit in Los Angeles (where I also moderated a panel featuring Open Influence CEO Eric Dahan, Casting Influence CEO Tanya Bershadsky and Ensemble Digital Studios Founder Larry Shapiro). The summit was focused on influencer marketing, and that dominated Solis'  keynote conversation with Dahan. But he also talked with me about his new book, Life Scale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, and Happy Life. It's the result of Solis' own journey over the past year or so, dealing with a loss of focus, productivity and ease, thanks to his frenetic relationship with digital technology that he's been studying since the mid-1990s. The conference was good, my panel better and my conversation with Solis most interesting of all. Give it a listen. 

Actor and activist Edward James Olmos has created a string of iconic roles over the past 45 years, including in 'Battlestar Galactica,' 'Zoot Suit,' 'Bladerunner,' 'Miami Vice,' and 'Stand and Deliver.' My partner Andrea Vaucher and I caught up with Olmos last month at the Panama International Film Festival, at festival headquarters in the Central Hotel in the Casco Viejo, the oldest area of 500-year-old Panama City, Panama. 

Olmos at the festival for a 30th anniversary screening of 'Stand and Deliver,' the biopic about East Los Angeles high school math teacher Jaime Escalante. His portrayal of Escalante brought Olmos his first Academy Award nomination, though, as Olmos tells it, cobbling together the funds to get "Stand" made was one of the more unusual film finance stories ever. Olmos also introduced the festival's closing-night film, 'The Sentence,' a documentary about controversial drug-conspiracy laws in the United States. 

He also talked about why 'Battlestar Galactica' remains important, a decade after its last episode, as it dealt with some of the most meaningful issues ever in a television show. Other topics include what it was like growing up in wildly diverse East L.A. after WWII,  how Olmos tried, repeatedly, to turn down the role of Lt. Castillo in 'Miami Vice.'  and why he takes on roles to make a difference in his own growth and that of his community. Give a listen. 

In the category of good riddance, Instagram is experimenting with getting rid of one of its least useful metrics, the Like. I talk with Beca Alexander, President of long-time influencer-management and brand consultant Socialyte to understand more about what it means. But as far as I'm concerned, losing the like gives us a chance to move beyond the high school era of social media. In this episode, I also promise to link you to a great Medium piece on the downside of all those millions of dollars that investors put into online-media companies, and how it suckered them into giving away expensive content for free. The story can be found here, I recommend it for those who care about why hot online outlets such as Buzzfeed and Vice keep having to lay off people even amid all their perceived, well, buzz. You can read my Tubefilter column on Instagram and likes here. Perhaps less surprisingly, I recommend that too. But give this podcast a listen. My conversation with Beca covers a lot of the changes in what matters to brands in dealing with influencers on the red-hot Instagram platform. If you're in business, or advising businesses, that are on Instagram, you should take in the wisdom here. 

The  movie 'Alien' turned 40 last week, and to celebrate, Fox partnered with the creator platform Tongal to find six young filmmakers to create short video projects around the iconic film franchise. The results have been popping up the last few weeks, and on May 3, arrive on AlienUniverse.com and social media (under the handle @AlienAnthology) for further viewing. I talked with Tongal founder and CEO James DeJulio about how his decade-old Santa Monica-based company surfaced hundreds of proposals for the six Alien films through a community of 170,000 creators. In all, he said,  more than 1,000 of those creators had a part in creating one or another of the shorts. Tongal and platforms like it are  one way brands and agencies are tapping into new creators and creative ideas at a time when the demand for content and options for marketing and distribution is ever-accelerating.