MEDIA ROOTS — Jason Forrest‘s name used to be synonymous with the electronic music genre breakcore and with expert remixing and plunderphonics under his own name as well as the alias, “Donna Summer” (possibly to confuse unsuspecting Donna Summer fans in record stores).  For the last decade, Forrest has run his own record label ‘Cock Rock Disco.’  He now resides in Germany and has founded, and now maintains, with the help of many volunteer workers, the net’s best curated internet video repository, Network Awesome. 

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Media Roots:  “What is Network Awesome?” 

Jason Forrest:  “Network Awesome is a website that broadcasts six video programs a day.  These programs can be collections of music based on a theme, or whole movies, or documentaries, or anything else.  All the shows then go into an archive that’s organized by theme, type, style, etcetera.  Or, in other words, we’re like a TV station, but online, free, and damn good.”

MR:  “I heard of you in the form of ‘Donna Summer’ when I first visited New York.  I asked the store clerk at Kim’s Video if they carried any really good local electronic music and she handed me a copy of your CD—”This Needs To Be Your Style.”

Jason Forrest:  “Wow!  That’s so cool to hear!  I don’t think I ever really got any love from those guys before, so that feels nice!”

MR:  “Since then you’ve been running a record label, Cock Rock Disco, and continuing with your own musical projects.

“Most recently, I have been seeing a lot about Network Awesome and watching it myself, without realizing it was ran by none other than Jason Forrest.

“How did Network Awesome start?  Was it a gradual build or was there a lot of pre-planning involved?”

Jason Forrest:  “I started thinking about what was to become Network Awesome back in the summer of 2010.  After doing a lot of research on both broadcast TV Networks and also investigating a lot of online video sites (especially what works and what doesn’t work), I reached out to a friend, Greg Sadetsky, to develop the idea.  Then, in a mad flurry, we built the basic version of the site in about five weeks and launched it on January 1st, 2011.  For the first few months we were both doing a lot of other stuff, but around May of last year we started to really focus on the site.  And since then it’s been one exciting thing after another!”

MR:  “At first glance Network Awesome seems like a really sophisticated Youtube playlist; what makes it different than a playlist?”

Jason Forrest:  “It’s more like a library filled with books and each book is made of lists.  We currently have over 4,200 shows that extend in pretty much all areas of culture and entertainment.”

MR:  “Was your history as a crate-digger/sample-sleuth valuable for scouring the internet for obscure content?”

Jason Forrest:  “Great question, it actually didn’t dawn on me until a few months into the project that Network Awesome acts very much in the same way that my previous music did.  But while we do play a lot of lesser-known media, I know that it is not our agenda at Network Awesome to be obscure.”

MR:  “You have great video categories like ‘jazz drumming’ and even entire playlists for mostly unheard of sketch comedy shows like ‘The Dana Carvey Show.’  Were these your ideas originally?”

Jason Forrest:  “Some were, like the Awesome Drummers show.  But Network Awesome actually has something like 148 volunteers who work on the site.  So, there’s so many ideas flying around that I can’t claim them all!  Haha!”

MR:  “You just answered one of my next questions.  I imagine if you would do it yourself it would be a full-time job to find constant content.  Any obstacles when having that much content coming in?”

Jason Forrest:  “Network Awesome is getting to the point where we have so much great content that it’s become a problem to organize and present it efficiently to the viewer.  We just made a major design update, which has made the site so much better to stumble upon great stuff, but it’s possible to improve still.”

MR:  “With the introduction of high end consumer multimedia, Blueray and other media players and Apple TV that have access to Netflix, Vudu, Amazon, do you think there is a place for Network Awesome in this arena?  A lot of these players come with Youtube built in, but the navigation to different videos is cumbersome.”

Jason Forrest:  “‘Cumbersome‘ – haha! I think of Youtube as an unbelievable public database, and while their search functions are very good, it’s not an enjoyable experience.  I think Network Awesome can be both compatible and competition to the sites you mentioned.  And, if we continue to grow at this rate, we’ll also become a force for a better quality of content as well.”

MR:  “By cumbersome, I was referring to the way wireless network-capable TVs and DVD players now commonly have a Youtube feature that requires a numerical remote control to search through it. 

“It feels ‘half-hearted’ because it’s far easier to just search for a video on your computer with a alphabetical keyboard.  If someone just simply had a ‘Network Awesome‘ button on this interface it would make the experience 100 times more enjoyable.  

“Do you ever ponder the idea that Network Awesome is such a good concept, a big company may base a commercial product off of it?”

Jason Forrest:  “That’s what we’re actively working towards, but we also have the belief that it’s possible to make a profitable company that also supports interesting content.  I think the idea that advertisers are only interested in the broadest definition of the mass market is not really true anymore.  We’re already starting to produce original content in collaboration with sponsors, so we feel there’s a lot of potential there!”

MR:  “Network Awesome caused me to have a paradigm shift where I first saw the ideal use of  ‘on demand’ content; in the right hands, it can be an extremely powerful cultural tool.  Do you agree that Network Awesome, even though it doesn’t host new mainstream reality TV episodes (why would it), is one of the best curated and most complete ‘niche’ streaming video databases on the entire internet?

If you are too humble about the word ‘best,’ how would you describe it yourself?”

Jason Forrest:  “It’s funny; even though I started Network Awesome, I don’t see it as an extension of my ego.  So, I’m happy to tell people how great we are!  Haha!  If you take a look at the quality of what we show every day – and you compare it to the absolutely horrible state of much of broadcast TV and the many sites that focus exclusively on viral videos, then you might say we’re the best thing on the internet.  I mean, I like it.  Haha.”

Go to Network Awesome and check out the six new programs they curate daily.

Interview Conducted By Robbie Martin of Media Roots

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Photo of Jason Forrest from Network Awesome

While you wait for Breaking Bad to come back on the air, you try to fill the ‘TV-show void’ with things like Enlightened, The Walking Dead, Californication, or even Dexter (this is one I’m embarrassed to say I did).  In modern TV show canon, Breaking Bad is unparalleled in its caliber of acting, characters, and writing.  Dare we say it, perhaps the greatest TV show ever (besides The Wire)?  The genius behind Breaking Bad is Vince Gilligan.  Vince grew up in Richmond, Virginia, bringing his southern charm to the medium.  He tells dark tales that remind one of the Coen brothers (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) and Joe Dante (Gremlins, The ‘Burbs), effortlessly mixing together comedy, horror, and thriller while not seeming like a trite mixture of the three.  

A perfect example of these sensibilities is when in Episode 2 of Breaking Bad, Jesse and Walt have to dispose of a body.  Walt suggests using acid that eats through flesh and bone but not a particular kind of plastic barrel, he sends Jesse to the store, but Jesse gives up after a cursory search for said barrel. While in the midst of a meth bender, Jesse decides to use the upstairs aluminum bathtub instead; and you can probably guess the rest.  Before Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan was responsible for some of the more strange, gory, and borderline-funny episodes of The X-Files, which if you look closely contain some of the kernels that would later be used as the groundwork for Bad.

Vince Gilligan’s X-Files Work

Pusher
Season 3’s “Pusher” pitted Mulder and Scully against a ‘mentalist’ who could convince another person to commit suicide simply by whispering in his ear.  This killer is tracked down via a classified advertisement he places in a mercenary magazine offering his services.  Gilligan showed his affinity here for the expert criminal mastermind ‘hiding in plain sight,’ much like Gus in Breaking Bad.  One notable scene involves a SWAT team going after the Pusher, only to find one SWAT member returning covered in gasoline and holding a lighter, mumbling incomprehensibly before setting himself ablaze.

Leonard Betts
Even before ‘Bad you can see that Gilligan was interested in pushing the censorship boundaries. Season 4’s ‘Leonard Betts’ that singlehandedly pushed the limits of what you could show on network television.  The episode opens up with a pair of paramedics on an ambulance helping a man who’s dying of an unknown illness (Leonard knows simply by touching the man that he has cancer).  The ambulance crashes in a high speed collision.  At the scene of the accident you see Leonard’s severed head lying on the street.  Later you find out that he can ‘grow’ another head (which they show you with no cut away) because you see he is part Lizard, oh and eats cancer to survive.



Bad Blood
“Bad Blood” from Season 5 (where Vince Gilligan and the show itself really hit it’s stride), follows the team to a remote trailer park in the south where a vampire is drugging people unconscious and sucking their blood.  The episode starts with Mulder using a piece of a broken wooden chair to kill what appears to be a child; Mulder in fervor thinks he just killed a vampire.  He pulls out of the kids mouth a pair of fake sharpened vampire teeth and exclaims, ‘Oh, … Shiii’ interrupted by the X-files theme.  Again, the hiding in plain sight theme is present with vampires sleeping in coffins inside their RVs.  Could this scenario have been inspired by Vince’s affinity for the trailer park meth underworld?



Folie A Deux
Using the background of a cold call in center for an employee going postal, but not because he’s depressed, but because his boss is a insect hybrid who creates human zombies out of his own employees by injecting them through the neck with poison fangs.  In the episode, Mulder finds the clue ‘hiding in the light’ linking back to an old case about a shape-shifter who appears normal until seen in the dark. We don’t want to be redundant, but Vince seems to really like this theme.

Hungry
Alan Moore likes to deconstruct and flip upside-down super-hero tropes with Watchmen, where super heroes are portrayed as flawed destructive human beings.  Vince takes the X-files trope of ‘monster of the week’ and shows us the inverse effect.  What if you were a cannibal mutant working at a shitty fast food restaurant but were also a nice guy?  The entire episode revolves around the monster this time instead of Mulder and Scully.

Other Notable Gilligan Episodes
“Field Trip,” Season 6
“Dreamland,” Season 6



Vince Gilligan’s Film Work

Vince Gilligan has also taken a stab at full length movies, not just writing scripts, but also directing his own material.  His first film was Wilder Napalm that he wrote, but not directed—a very uneven first theatrical film attempt starring Dennis Quaid about two life-long best friends with supernatural powers to manifest fire.  Mixing a love triangle romantic comedy with some really dark and strange subject matter, the movie never quite coheres.  Some parts work, like the idea of portraying grown men who have god-like powers in shitty jobs like a circus clown.  The full movie is viewable on YouTube.



Home Fries, the first film Gilligan directed.  The marketing for this film was completely wrong, giving the impression it was a throw-away romantic comedy when, in fact, it was a movie about a very dysfunctional family whose matriarchal mother, through passive-aggressive behavior and coercion, gets her two grown military sons to commit murder for her.  In the opening scene Luke Wilson plays opposite Jake Busey who chases down a man leaving a fast food drive-thru with an attack helicopter.  They fire at him when he tries to surrender.  They just wanted to ‘scare him’ by using blanks, but the man has a heart attack.

It turns out this man was their stepfather who was caught cheating by their mother.

The mother won’t let it end there, however, and sends her boys out on a scouting mission to find out who the woman is.  Luke Wilson’s character quickly discovers it’s a totally innocent fast-food employee played by Drew Barrymore.  The rest of the movie involves him trying to misdirect Busey’s character into getting closer to assassinating her.  It has its flaws but the plot and acting is top tier and there aren’t very many if any movies like it.  Catherine O’Hara as the psychotic mother should have garnered an Oscar nomination.  Home Fries may be viewed in it’s entirety on YouTube.



Hancock, a more recent film starring Will Smith as a drunk, abusive, and destructive super hero was by all accounts a misfire.  Directed not by Gilligan, but by Peter Berg (who can’t direct his way out of a paper bag) and based on a script by Gilligan.  Some decent ideas thrown into the mix but has a third act, which completely ruins the entire film.

So, while you have your Gilligan withdrawals try some of those in the meantime (and go here if you need even more).  After all Breaking Bad’s 5^th will be its final season.  In many interviews, Gilligan has said that his goal from the very beginning was to turn ‘Mr Chips into Scarface,’ in reference to Walt.  If you have watched Breaking Bad up until its most recent conclusion, and you are familiar with Scarface, short of trying his own product and shooting a family member dead, Walt has pretty much surpassed Scarface.  I, for one, am excited to see where this man’s mind takes us next; maybe somebody will see his value as a filmmaker, similar to how studios plucked J.J. Abrams from TV.  Let’s hope, for his next project, he’s not as prescient as he was in The Lone Gunman pilot.

Written by Robbie Martin

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