Interviewer: How would you describe your work, and what have you been working on most recently?

Jon Sanborn: Well, "Paul Is Dead" is a very large, Internet-based interactive story world that Michael Kaplan, my partner in LeFong, and myself did over the course of about a year in change with money from Microsoft Network. We produced it in association with MGM Interactive as well.

Both of those entities are no longer in the same business they were in when they got involved with us, so we are essentially releasing the project through a consortium of syndicated portal partners, including Rolling Stone on AOL, Broadcast.com, IUMA, Macromedia, Entertainment Asylum, Web TV. We've put all this together. We've gotten an ISP, Mindspring, out of Atlanta, Georgia, to host it, and we are selling the ad inventory ourselves through the Orb and 24 by 7.

It's a very, very big project, but I think the fact that we are essentially self-publishing it says a lot about the future of interactive content and the Internet. Basically, there is no future at all. Or at least, right now, not a future that anybody wants to invest in.

Interviewer: Describe why you thought it was a good idea to begin with.

Jon Sanborn: Well, we're not the only ones who thought it was a good idea. Microsoft had a million reasons why they thought it was a good idea. Paul Is Dead is a rock and roll murder mystery. It's episodic, it involves streaming movies with still pictures and soundtracks that push the story forward and are predicted by what you do in particular environments. In other words, every day, the forward moving story inches itself forward a little bit, and there are lots and lots of asides and areas of interest you can get into off of the main story. And, depending on what you've seen and what you haven't seen, future streaming movies are predicted or not, based on your previous choices.

So it's been developed with a lot of Macromedia Flash 2.0 and Real Audio. It's a lot of HTML. The whole project is almost a thousand HTML pages. It was meant to be 13 weeks of programming with 5 releases each week.

You remember the prototype that we built for Berkeley Systems? We optioned that prototype and another prototype called Blue Funk to MGM Interactive. MGM Interactive was being run by a guy named Ken Locker, a very bright guy who had previously run Worlds Inc., and a couple of other kind of internet-related ventures. They paid money up front to secure the properties. We kind of buffed them up a little bit and created some print materials that were being used for sales.

This was when American Cybercast was big and had all this investment and was moving forward pretty rapidly. And the Microsoft Network was creating channels for programming, original programming, with the idea that, since they had a proprietary network, like AOL, they would create proprietary content, like AOL, that would be available only through that proprietary system. And, it all seemed like a really good idea, and we actually had pitch meetings with a number of companies and sponsors, and Microsoft walked in and Bob [Bushon] took a look at Paul Is Dead, and said, "I want to do this. I think this will be really cool."

It worked because we had a lot of support materials to tell them where the story would go over thirteen weeks. We wrangled about a budget, but it came into, at the end of the day, pretty close to a million dollars. We had probably about 800,000 dollars to play with ourselves.

In like March or April of '97 we started to go into the early stages of development to take the simple prototype, and turn it into much more of a television-like experience, but obviously built with the elements of what make up the Internet.

In the first prototype, we tried to find ways of encapsulating different time frames on still pages, on pages that don't have any kind of real movement to them, except the use of scrolling. We developed a way to use a scroll bar to indicate two different kinds of time: a past time, which would be denoted by horizontal panels that you would scroll from left to right, and real time, which were vertical panels that you would scroll up and down. It was a pretty bright idea.

The story is about a supposedly long dead rock star named Paul Lomo and his mythical band, Miasma, and who killed Paul Lomo back in 1981. Did he really drown? Was he murdered? If he was murdered, who killed him? We have a modern day protagonist, Ellie Clyde, who is a rock and roll journalist.

Well, once Microsoft got involved, needless to say, we amped everything up, we started to get into streaming media, which was becoming more and more prevalent. We adopted Flash Two, which was a very sophisticated and yet simple way of doing streaming sound and sequential pictures. And since we had Microsoft putting up all this money and we had MGM as a production partner, we decided that this was going to be a very high production-value project. We spent 15 weeks or so in development creating different forms of the piece, from individual movies to navigation elements to a fully finished first week, both in terms of alpha and beta stages.

Everything we did was tested up at Microsoft in front of users, and I have to say that Microsoft is very, very bright about its users. It knows its' users very, very, very, very well. We learned a great deal. We saw Microsoft doing what they do, both in a good way and in a bad way, because it's a very confused and disrupted organization, and a lot of the people who were assigned to work with us had no idea about stories or entertainment.

As we started into production around August of last year, slowly Microsoft and the Microsoft Network were changing what they were all about. In the year that they've been up, they've had not as many visitors as they expected and not as many subscribers as they expected. I think they blamed the horse for the condition of the road, and they decided to whip the horse, and then change the horse. And midway through our production cycle--and remember, we're spending a lot of money, and the production value on this piece is very high--Microsoft says, well, it won't be for the Microsoft Network anymore, we'll probably launch it on the free web, and have it be advertising and sponsor supported. Then we watched Microsoft be really foolish about how they went about getting advertiser and sponsor support for us.

And finally, in December of last year, as we were finishing the project--I mean, we're talking 20 weeks of production, just a tremendous amount of work to create all these assets--Microsoft goes to MGM and says, look, we don't what we're doing with this. You guys release it. You're in the movie business, you know how to promo things. Release this piece. And Ken Locker, who is at MGM still, was delighted, and so were we, because we didn't want to get lost in the sauce at Microsoft. We were really hoping that MGM would be able to flex its muscle, and to a certain extent, they did. We started to make press books. We started to build this consortium of stations, of portals. We hired a press person, Jane Eyre public relations.

But there was trouble at MGM, and MGM interactive downsized about three months ago, orphaning Paul Is Dead yet another time. Although it's a property that already made money for MGM and was probably going to make more money for MGM, it wasn't the kind of money that a movie company is used to making. So, here we are self-publishing this piece. And we are wondering about the future of interactive content, interactive entertainment, advanced television, all of the above. Currently, Michael Kaplan and I are doing a sitcom pilot for Comedy Central, because, in a way, we're sort of disgusted with the interactive world.