Skip loves Jennifer. But Tony’s coming back to town, packing a piece, and he wants Jennifer back. Meanwhile, Monique, an Art Institute graduate student and amateur tease, tries to lure Jake out of his Bears obsession by inviting him to Shelter, the downtown nightclub, where she’ll be modeling a revealing new dress.
In a town that already boasts Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones and Mike McCaskey, one might wonder whether there’s room enough for more melodrama. But Skip, Jennifer and Tony’s emotional wrenching isn’t real life or television–it’s cyberdrama.
“Lake Shore Drive” is Chicago’s first Internet soap opera and, indeed, one of the first soap operas made just for the Internet. The characters are played by local actors, writers, computer gearheads and, really, anyone else who wants to join the cast.
While the buzz about the Internet has focused mainly on its potential for information, chat lines and downloadable pornography, “Lake Shore Drive” creator Gordon Lake sees it as an empty prairie just waiting to be filled with entertainment programming.
Since December, his twentysomething characters have been leading their lovelorn lives around the streets of Chicago and sharing their angst through e-mail. For instance, Internet voyeurs who point and click at
http://www.chiweb.com/chicago/lsd can read about Jennifer’s latest dilemma:
Date sent: Tuesday, Jan 16 1996 18:59:29
From: jennifer@chiweb.com (Jennifer)
To: Skip
Subject: Tony
Skip,
I did a dumb thing. And I may have put you in serious danger.
Here’s the Readers Digest condensed version:
Tony wrote me a while ago asking me to move to New York with him. I blew him off in no uncertain terms. He’s MAJOR pissed. . . . and coming to Chicago. I think he has the impression that you’re the reason I’ve turned on him.
Skip, I’m scared. For me AND for you. Angela thinks I should take an extended vacation and she suggested I tell you to do the same. . . .
Jennifer
There’s about as much plot in “Lake Shore Drive” as on a television episode of “Seinfeld.” The cybersoap’s dozen or so other characters crowd around Skip and Jennifer’s love life like colorful furniture, sharing jokes, gossip and petty insults.
“It’s not just a mechanistic kind of atmosphere where a bunch of geeks get together and live out their romantic fantasies,” says G. Mark Stewart, 41, a Naperville computer engineer and free-lance comedian who, until mid-January, played Jake, the football fan being pursued by Monique. “On `Lake Shore Drive’ they’re all just a bunch of schmoes, and instead of using a phone to call their friends, they use e-mail.”
Stewart created his character after answering an ad Lake placed on the Internet. Others who visit the “LSD” site are invited to get involved with their own characters.
The conversations are made up, mostly by Gordon Lake and his partner, Sandra Kelley. Each episode, though, contains references to real-life Chicago events and places, such as the recent Operation Silver Shovel sting or the day’s weather. At the end of the day, once Lake and Kelley have figured out where the story should go next, a new episode is posted.
Since summer, a handful of similar professional cyberdramas have popped up across the Internet.
The first and most popular, called “The Spot,” features model-like characters from Los Angeles and their interesting sex lives, and draws more than 35,000 viewers and hundreds of fan e-mails a day.
The site (at http://www.thespot.com) features lots of photos, particularly of buns; daily, usually insipid, “journal entries”; and even interactive gizmos where one can, for instance, dress a character in different bikinis with a mouse click.
In Gay Daze (at http://www.gaydaze.com), we read about the day-to-day tribulations and interesting sex lives of six gay men and women who live in Los Angeles. An initial screen lets viewers click on photos of Hugo, Andrew, Eric, Greg, Fran or Mike and look at their daily journal entries.
Real college students run continuous, real-time digital cameras inside four rooms of their off-campus house and hold chat sessions in “Virtual Dorm” (at http://www.taponline.com/tap/v-dorm.html). Viewers can click on an icon and share the excitement of students toasting bagels in the kitchen, lounging in their “hangout room” or studying in one character’s bedroom.
Explicitness on these soaps can range anywhere from Playboy magazine to Bon Appetit.
Producers of such serials are wagering that the Internet will one day become as essential to daily survival as television. They expect that as the World Wide Web gets increasingly colorful, interactive and easy to use, more and more people will turn to it not only for information, but for entertainment, as well.
So not only are we able to read about Eddie’s big secret (he’s a virgin), we can discuss it with him personally via e-mail, or even meet him when he and other “LSD” characters make specific plans to meet somewhere in Chicago.
“We might take two or three characters and have them meet in a club and have one throw a drink in the face of another, and that scene will also appear on the Internet,” Lake says. “People can stop down and actually get visibly involved if they want.”
The couch-potato factor
But whether multimedia entertainment sites like this will draw dedicated followers or just occasional surfers remains to be seen. Optimists liken this stage of the Internet to the dawn of television. Pessimists say it’s not passive enough to become as addictive as TV.
Indeed, the Internet takes work. Couch potatoes may be good at pointing and clicking, but interacting requires a drop of sweat. Also, Internet viewing pleasure may be hampered by knowledge that, the longer one’s on, the more it costs.
“At this point, no one’s really making any money at it, but it’s just kind of fun,” says Lake of Gordon Lake Productions, a Chicago multimedia production company. “The long-term goal is that, eventually, there has to be a Universal Studios of Internet programming.”
According to Russell Collins, 46, creator of “The Spot,” that day has come. This month, he launched American Cybercast, a digital entertainment network that he hopes will become the NBC of the Internet. His “network” includes five episodic, interactive programs similar to “The Spot.”
Gordon Lake says he plans to develop a children’s soap opera on the net, as well as a local cable television show styled after “Entertainment Tonight,” but which would highlight what’s new and cool on Chicago-area Internet sites.
Collins and Lake are vying to get into the Internet entertainment business for a number of reasons. First, it’s relatively cheap. Collins, who has sunk $1 million into producing “The Spot,” says it costs as much to produce one year of daily Internet episodes as it does one weekly episode of the television show “E.R.” Lake, who has an all-volunteer cast for “Lake Shore Drive,” spends considerably less.
Also, if a cyberseries gets popular, advertisers get interested. “The Spot” has become popular enough that two advertisers–K Swiss and Honda–have paid $15,000 each to have a month’s worth of product placements woven into the story, starting this month.
“There is not an advertiser in America that is not considering this Internet strategy,” Collins says. “Weaving the advertising into the story has to be done with a lot of creative integrity, though, because people on the Internet are very suspicious and cynical–they will not buy it if they think you’re trying to slip something in subliminally. We have to be very forthright about it.”
In the Jan. 15 episode, for example, an advertising contract that allowed “Spot” housemates to continue living in their beach house was signed on the hood of a Honda.
Instant popularity
The popularity of a Web series like “Lake Shore Drive,” at least at this point in Internet history, is measured by “hits,” or the number of times someone calls up a particular site.
The new medium may also prove a boost to all the pre-stars and other out-of-work actors and screenwriters looking for their big breaks. “The Spot’s” main character, Michelle, for instance, is played by a no-name receptionist who agreed to pose for periodic lingerie photos and answer e-mail messages from her fans (she gets about 100 a day), while producers wrote her diary entries.
Today, the 24-year-old has to sift through numerous modeling offers and casting calls, and was featured as one of the most intriguing people of 1995 in People magazine because of her role on “The Spot.”
Mark Stewart hasn’t made any People magazine lists yet, but still he’s thrilled with the 30 or so e-mail messages he’s received. That instant feedback, he adds, is part of the fun of cyberdramas.
“I expected people to write and say, `Why don’t you go get a life?’ but all of them have been supportive,” he says. “Somebody sent me an e-mail a couple of days ago that said, `Jake is so cute. He’s so cool.’ It’s a big kick.”
