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THE CONNECTION BETWEEN FILM AND WEB

NOTHING SO STRANGE Executive Producer Brian Clark first met Brian Flemming in 1998 during the festivals in Park City. "At the time, I was there as part of the team for the fledgling filmmag.com and indieWIRE.com," Clark says. "And Brian Flemming was staging this extremely guerilla alternate festival called Slumdance. Part of what Flemming did so well was take the story of Slumdance unfolding on the ground, and share it with a sense of wit and narrative on his website. We had a similar taste in the aesthetics of film and the Web."

"In 1999, Brian called me to talk about his new film project about the assassination of Bill Gates," Clark describes. "He described his visions for the texture of a fiction film that felt as real as a documentary, and his elaborate mythologies relating to the assassination of Bill Gates. It was clear to me that this project had a unique creative approach, and our natural rapport promised a great collaboration. It was natural for my company, GMD Studios, to get involved with Flemming on both the creative and financial ends of the production."

Clark was equally impressed by the potential for telling portions of this story online. "When a film or television show's premise has enough unique depth, it's possible to build compelling interactive fictions to support them," Clark says. At the time, his firm GMD Studios was developing another such interactive fiction with Haxan Film's (The Blair Witch Project) Gregg Hale for the Fox Television series Freakylinks. In that project, an elaborate web universe of sites was deployed nearly a year before the short-lived series debuted on broadcast television: the week of the series premiere, the now defunct www.freakylinks.com was the third most trafficked television website on the Web, according to NetRatings.

"It was a similar approach to the way the NOTHING SO STRANGE web universe is created," Clark says. "The focus is on storytelling and entertaining fiction, not on marketing the film as a product. The Web is an opportunity for creative storytellers to expand the kinds of stories they are telling, not just marketing the ones already completed. When done right, the approach has an amazing ability to connect with the audience and involve them in the fiction."

BUILDING A CONVINCING UNIVERSE

"The first obvious task was to flesh out the mythology that Flemming had created for the film and expand on some of the more tantalizing aspects that the film mentions only in passing," says Clark. "The fact that we had the opportunity to collaboratively build this during the filming allowed the creative decisions in one to be reflected in the other, as both the film and Web adapted to fit each other."

GMD Studios knew that two elements of the film's energy - the mixing of reality & fiction, and the attentive detail to character drama - had to carry through to the online storytelling as well. "This atmosphere of fiction delivered with the same authenticity as the reality around it is a production style that works just as well on the Web as on the screen," Clark says.

Key to this online experience are the sites that support the universe of the film, most notably the meticulously detailed website of the grassroots organization Citizens for Truth ( www.citizensfortruth.org ) and the archive of the "official" report on the Gates murder ( www.garcettireport.org ). These two sites, along with a website about the film (then under the working title www.macarthurpark.com) that chronicled the real process of production while still set in the fiction, launched in November of 2000 in time for the first anniversary of Gates' assassination.

"We wanted to create a rich world with dizzying depth, and make use of the kind of visual textures that Web users are already familiar with," Clark explains. "The primary sites are supported by a vast variety of little authentic textures, from Bill Gates memorial homepages on free web hosts, to promotional websites for books that don't exist … all mixed with elements of reality that support the fictional narrative. It's easy for a visitor to spend hours in this alternate universe, and equally easy for them to forget, if even for a moment, that it is fiction."

Not everyone on the Web, though, is as fond of the thin line between fiction and reality as the production team was. "One of the earliest calls we received was from the Cyber Crimes unit of the Office of the Los Angeles District Attorney," Clark recounts. "They were concerned that our fiction might be too convincing, and that we could be jeopardizing their reputation and their ability to secure convictions in the future. Of course, given that the Rampart scandals are a large part of the inspiration for the film, criticizing the reputation of the District Attorney was precisely the point - but we changed the design of the Garcetti Report to eliminate some of the concerns nonetheless."

THEME, CHARACTER AND NARRATIVE

The online production, though, extends beyond the characters introduced in the film. "We knew we wanted to stay true to the themes of film and the honesty of the characters, but at the same time needed some additional central characters to drive the narrative of the post-film universe," Clark says. "Key to that was a central focus, a character neutral to all the divisive separations of the other characters."

They found that character in Jack Perdue, an unemployed aeronautical engineer in the Midwest who, shortly after Gates' death, achieved some level of Web celebrity as the self-appointed "biographer of Gates' life, death and legacy" at his website www.billgatesisdead.com. "We get to see more of the chaos and reactions hinted at in the film, played out through Perdue's less-than-objective biographies, which mix fiction and reality even more completely."

The site also serves as the heart of the community for the online story, as much of the action plays out in Perdue's discussion boards, where online visitors mix with characters from the film like Debra Meagher, David James, Mark Anderson, Veronika Warren... and a fictionalized documentary filmmaker, Brian Flemming. "The site encourages visitors to cast themselves in the roles of 'the Bill Gates research community', exploring new wrinkles of the theories and evidence," Clark says. "We've had visitors build Bill Gates memorial websites to be included in our sites section, we have visitors who post regularly convinced that the Illuminati are behind it all. The fans drive the narrative as much as we do."

"My favorite example of how fans help you build your stories is the origin of 'The Martyr Post,'" Clark explains. "Working from materials in the Garcetti Report that claim the assassin Alek Hidell visited several websites the morning of the murder, a fan started searching through old Usenet archives and found a message posted on the fictional date of the assassination by an 'AH' to an obscure newsgroup. In that message, with the subject line 'Martyr,' AH tells a 'George' that he has 'no regrets' and to 'get my name right in the histery.' That same misspelling of 'history' is also mentioned in excerpts from Hidell's diaries in the Garcetti Report. So this fan posts a message claiming that he found one of the messages that Alek Hidell wrote the day of the assassination, and the community starts buzzing about who 'George' might be. As far as we can tell, the message in question really was posted that day … but not by us, and it is just a complete coincidence that's gotten folded into the mythology by fans. Sometimes, it's difficult even for us to tell where the fiction ends and reality begins again."

THE UNFOLDING STORY

At the end of NOTHING SO STRANGE, viewers are left with a deflated Citizens for Truth after an explosive parting of the ways between the organization and David James in December, 2000. The online storytelling of the web universe carries on that story, unfolding in real time for visitors. "Working in collaboration with Brian Flemming, we sketched out the plotline of what happened after the period of time the film covers," Clark explains. "David James leaves to found his own organization, Citizens for Action, with a mission to be the investigation that Citizens for Truth only called for. Debra Meagher and David Anderson, part of the small of core of what remains of Citizens for Truth, are left paralyzed by their inability to accomplish even the simplest goals."

"What we're unleashing is a one-year series of episodic story archs exploring Citizens for Action's search for evidence and agitation," describes Clark. "In the process of deconstructing Bill Gates and the crime, the lens of social commentary sweeps across law enforcement corruption, corporate competition in America, the long wait for truth, and the desire for immediate action."

The first two of these plot threads are already developing on the Web. With the launch of Citizens for Action's website (complete with a diagram of potential conspiracy participants they intend to investigate), David James reveals that he has been receiving evidence "liberated from police archives" by a secret informant close to the LAPD, "Raoul." As David James releases this information, new light is shed both on the potential mishandling of the investigation by the LAPD, and how far James might be willing to step over the line to get something accomplished.

At the same time, word from the Garcetti Report that lone gunman Alek Hidell had posted messages to an Internet BBS system called "Windoz Watch" which promptly shut down the next day has fueled the relentless search of uber-conspiracy theorist Cooper Williams. Despite being discounted as a crackpot by most of the Bill Gates research community, Cooper makes a startling series of finds that points to a quiet conspiracy of anti-Microsoft activists, and suggests some tangental connections between these activities and some of Microsoft's legal and corporate rivals.

"This is really what makes the NOTHING SO STRANGE universe a compelling environment for storytelling," Clark says. "The breadth of territory suggested by Flemming's alternate reality offers a tremendous opportunity for social criticism. We began to realize that the online storytelling was essentially 'Nothing So Strange, Chapter 2' and that many fans would experience it before it's cinematic prequel."

INITIAL PUBLIC RESPONSE

The production team always assumed that this web universe would exist below the threshold of public awareness for most of 2000, and did not expect to reach large Web audiences initially. However, some ideas seem to spread like viruses, and word of a film about the assassination of Bill Gates reached the ears of some journalists, most from the technology press who had covered "the Microsoft beat," much quicker than the producers anticipated.

"The sites hadn't even been up for a month when the first journalists started calling," Clark recounts. "Several of the earliest reporters had clearly spent time in the websites and saw the potential for social commentary in NOTHING SO STRANGE's premise. These first articles, many of them just on the Web, caught the attention of other journalists in the entertainment and technology press. Reporters are calling Microsoft looking for comment, and aren't getting any. They're asking us when the film will be theaters, and we're trying to explain that independently produced features go through a festival process first."

By summer of 2000, articles about NOTHING SO STRANGE (then using it's working title of "MacArthur Park") had appeared in numerous print publications (including Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and Yahoo Internet Life) and in over 300 online publications in 26 languages (ranging from MSNBC and BBC Online to ZDNet and Good Morning Silcon Valley.)

"We never anticipated that kind of press reaction, especially on a indie feature still in production," Clark says. "We had to make conscious attempts to stay out of the press in an attempt to slow the public's anticipation for the film before it was even finished. Once the world premiere screening at the Slamdance 2002 Film Festival was announced, the way was open to accelerate the intensity of the online story."