‘Pajama entertainment’ the newest cultural shift
WHEN the coronavirus quarantines began to hit several weeks ago, Deborah Kampmeier was in pretty much the worst professional position you could find yourself: on the cusp of releasing a film.
The independent director had a #MeToo drama, “Tape,” inspired by a friend’s harrowing experience in the entertainment industry, and needed a theatrical rollout to garner attention and reviews.
“We hadn’t actually gotten to the release, but we were too far in to undo all the work,” Kampmeier said by phone, explaining her predicament for the movie, which was scheduled to be released Friday.
So she did what many with cultural products at this hunkerdown moment have done: She pivoted to digital. Kampmeier’s movie has come out on schedule – as a “virtual theatrical release.” For US$15, consumers can watch the film digitally two weeks before it hits rental platforms. And maybe most important, they can interact virtually with a panel discussion of a different set of actors and activists each day beginning Friday for the duration of the run, a kind of in-person experience from their bedroom.
“It’s everything you could ever want coming to the theater, but in slippers,” she said.
Kampmeier is part of an emerging creative economy. Call it pajama entertainment – taking the same casual at-home vibe many Americans feel and channeling it into the product itself. With states having closed down businesses and advised against big gatherings, large-scale film and television production has come to halt, leaving purveyors of entertainment to find fresh ways both to create and distribute their work.
“This is becoming a time of creativity – of things that are not slick and not pretty but are entertaining,” said Preston Beckman, a longtime TV executive at Fox and NBC who helped create the latter’s “MustSee TV” schedule.
Experts compare the form to the early days of the Web: handmade, communal and surprising. While they note this is a dynamic moment, capable of turning on a dime, they are heartened by what has sprouted up.
The form remains – for now – not about money (some charity ventures aside). But what it lacks in monetization, experts say, it makes up for in promotional muscle, and perhaps the even more valuable currency of reducing isolation.
“I haven’t felt this way online since I was on The Well in the early 90s,” said the digital expert and author Douglas Rushkoff, referring to a the early-era virtual community that featured a host of first adopters discussing a wide range of topics online, often with an abundance of camaraderie and text. “The Internet suddenly feels like the Web of yesterday – a hot medium, like radio – instead of what it has become, which is basically a big television streaming platform.”
The form was on display a week ago as the Los Angeles deejay D-Nice staged a massive “Club Quarantine,” a dance party for furry-slipper nation. (Michelle Obama and Democratic presidential contenders stopped by, along with, Jamie Foxx, Alicia Keys and others).)
Last Sunday brought “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” in which the former talk-show host revived her program from her garage, engaging with shelteredin-place stars from Broadway and elsewhere. Hosted by Broadway. com, the program generated more than a half-million views on YouTube and raised money for the Actors Fund, which is supporting performers put out of work by the shutdown. Consumers saw Patti LuPone give a tour of her basement, and the actress who plays Tina Turner on Broadway sing from her bathtub.
Though the examples of pajama entertainment vary widely, practitioners say they all share one trait – heightening intimacy by peeling away modern television’s slick layers. (Well, and that lack of profitgeneration.)
“Audiences don’t care now that guests aren’t in makeup, hair and wardrobe,” said Paul Wontorek, the editor of Broadway.com who directed “The Rosie Show” remotely from his house in Upstate New York. “The guests don’t care. It’s ‘You’re in your kitchen and I’m in my living room and Patti LuPone is in her basement.’ And that makes you feel like you know performers in a way you’ve never known them before.”
Wontorek said that while he created one of its leading examples, he didn’t know what to call the new coronavirus-era form of entertainment since it borrowed from sources as varied as talk shows, podcasts and the throwback MTV show “Cribs.”
That spontaneous feeling also has been conjured by Mark Armstrong, who runs a longstanding live event called “The 24 Hour Plays.” The programme, which attracts big-name writers and actors, involves an actor bringing a prop and costume, a playwright writing a five-minute monologue based on it and the actor performing the monologue – all within 24 hours.
Normally a ticket-selling event on a Broadway stage, the show was adapted last week into a virtual video version dubbed “The Viral Monologues” – with very different results.
“The intimacy has brought a huge change,” said Armstrong of the new effort, which featured actors, at home, in close-up; the comic David Cross performed from his bathtub.
“We did shows after 9/11, after the financial crisis, after Hurricane Katrina. But I think people connected to this more than even those because of where and how they’re taking place.”
The first show was so successful in attracting both viewers and talent that a second – with Oscar nominee Michael Shannon and “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs – was quickly put together. As with many of these efforts, monetization is neither an option nor a goal, limited at most to small advertising revenues. That is not a challenge at present, organizers say, because the talent is usually willing to work free.
Producers say the grassroots trend is happening because purveyors of corporate entertainment have largely abandoned media for the moment. Sports is nonexistent, movie theaters are closed, daytime shows are scrapped and even prime-time shows have to carefully parcel out new episodes because they’ll soon run out, as the people who run these events impose social-distancing practices in a bid to protect talent and staff. Even many late-night TV hosts, among the most active, have until now done mostly modest monologues.
“There is a void here that a lot of us are trying to fill,” Armstrong said. Sometimes even consumers are getting in on the act. Ashley Fauset, chief operating officer of Stardust, a platform on which consumers give video reactions to shows and movies, said the app has seen an increase of 35 percent daily usage since social distancing began. Many of the uploaded videos, she noted, feature users talking about their quarantines, using the app as a de facto movie theater (and therapy session).
Some high-profile celebrities have also gotten in on the pajama game. Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, the husbandand-wife writers of the 2016 hit “The Big Sick,” have been among those starting new podcasts that directly address the quarantine. “Staying home With Kumail and Emily” offers comically barbed tips about how to live and work together at home peacefully, inspired by their own experience of sometimes doing that for Gordon, who has an immune disorder. Certainly restlessness plays a part in these moves: Creative people are sitting at home with an installed fan base and a machine that lets them broadcast to the world.
But creators also say the streams contain a more serious idea – that the virus has awakened them to both a need and an opportunity to push back on modern television’s slickness. They point to a kind of flipping of the modern media equation: If influencer culture has taken ordinary people and made them stars, pajama entertainment takes stars and makes them ordinary people.
“I think you’re seeing the finishing of what social media started,” Wontorek said.
“Now everyone, even famous people, are willing to put a camera on themselves in a raw and vulnerable way.”
But how long consumers will still be willing to tune in for something that is unabashedly low-budget remains a question; when the novelty of seeing stars in their pajamas wears off, the trend could leave as quickly as it came. Finding these events can be tricky, too; without established marketing channels or means of promotion, consumers are often left to discover them while they are happening, if not later. — The Washington Post