The media industry's emerging strategies to valorize an established reservoir of fan labor perfectly complement their late capitalist context. However, the subsumption of subjectivities and communities with autonomous traditions under a corporate regime generates new antagonisms that demand delicate control. In the case of The L Word, the most heavily engineered expropriation of fan production was a series of user-generated writing contests. Showtime launched this marketing campaign in 2006 with a scheme to prompt a complete "fanisode" (faux television script), contracting the company FanLib to design and run the web-based competition as one of the start-up's earliest projects {http://web.archive.org/web/20060831222949/http://lword.fanlib.com/}. For this initial contest, a member of The L Word's creative team prepared a storyboard that filled in a diegetic gap of several months between the events of seasons 3 and 4, providing descriptions of the individual scenes that would make up an imaginary episode. Participants then voted for their favorite of the user submissions that realized each segment, and finally the winners were awarded prizes and their scenes were assembled into a downloadable PDF version of the final script (Figure 9). This successful venture garnered a mention in The Wall Street Journal's article about the transformation of fan fiction from a "fringe pursuit" to one that "helps unknown authors find mainstream success" (Jurgensen). FanLib shares this assumption that fans' labors of love have the same goals, motivations, standards and economies as professional authorship -- although in their business model, it is the corporation rather than the creators who will reap the profits. Since the "fanisode" wasn't intended for production, we might speculate that it was organized in script format (as opposed to inviting more familiar prose fan fiction) precisely to appeal to aspiring screenwriters with polished skills.
Whether we read this move as nurturing or mercenary, it follows that certain expectations for a lesbian community of creative professionals are part of the impetus for The L Word's FanLib promotions. In the introduction to the PDF 'zine that resulted from the "fanisode," Chaiken celebrated The L Word's fans, who "came at us enthusiastically with your reactions, your objections, your ideas, passions, preferences and opinions as to whether or not we were adequately and authentically representing the way that we live" ("The L Word: A Fanisode"). From the perspective of this politics of representation, encouraging involvement with corporate media-making among The L Word's presumptively lesbian audience is necessary to the project of lesbian visibility. However, as we've seen, the price of this brand of visibility is to render lesbian identity as a reified commodity that can be packaged and sold, not only by professionals but by each contest participant and each OurChart member. The feminist utopia of an "old girls network," wherein mentorship leads to success within mainstream industries, here butts up against the converse heritage of fans' non-commercial systems of value and recognition. Chaiken says that the writing competitions were inspired by the fact that "the fans of The L Word write a lot of fan fiction on their own" ("Meet Molly"), implying that submitting a scene in script form to a contest would have a comparable charm. But the majority of fan authors aren't professional hopefuls like The Wall Street Journal's winning interviewee (who was, incidentally, the only straight man to place in the "fanisode"). Chaiken's equivalence effaces the autonomous norms of fandom's gift economy, which cultivates alternative modes of sharing the characters and stories that originate in the corporate media. If, as The Wall Street Journal posits, "the rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of amateur-created content online... on sites such as YouTube and MySpace" (Jurgensen), we shouldn't expect ventures like FanLib's to negotiate the friction between capitalist mandates and "amateur" subcultures with any more consideration than these other commercial platforms.
Chaiken's statement is from a promotional video on Showtime's official website that presents a later FanLib installment (dubbed "You Write It!"), featuring the lucky winner Molly as she claims her prize -- a visit to the set to see her contribution filmed (Figure 10). "You Write It!" was structured similarly to the "fanisode," but its endgame made good on the promise of the script format by including the victorious submission in an actual television episode (much to the delight of Molly, who was indeed a screenwriting student). It also had more open-ended instructions: "Choose a scene from The L Word seasons 1 or 2 to rewrite as a scene from 'Lez Girls,' Jenny's thinly-veiled, fictional account of The L Word characters' lives." While inviting fan-written scripts may imply a breakdown of the distinction between amateurs and professionals, this video's rhetoric emphatically reasserts the ideological gulf between fans and producers, quashing any intimation that fans' unpaid work could be afforded equal respect. The comments addressed to Molly, while well-meaning, are starkly condescending, informing her of banal aspects of television production as if she didn't already have the knowledge to be a screenwriting success. The "You Write It!" contest was a perfect match with season 5's "Lez Girls," a movie-within-a-TV-show that campily remixed The L Word's early seasons. Molly's scene earned its winning vote tally by enhancing these self-reflexive layers with a Charlie's Angels mashup, alluding to the history of lesbian viewing. In contrast to the discourses of "we" and "our" that characterize much of The L Word's marketing, however, the turn to calling fans "you" highlights the limits of this openness to appropriation. Chaiken may profess an interest in "the way interactivity is taking over our lives" that is borne out in The L Word's cutting-edge online promotions, but this provocation extends only as far as fan labor channels value into the "lesbian" brand -- because "you" work for free. Chaiken's outlook on the FanLib project both reflects and forwards this strategy, and like Jenny, Alice or indeed Chaiken herself, Molly is an exemplar for fans' lessons in commodifying our passions.
[ a condensed version of this section appeared as You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor at In Media Res ]
Whether we read this move as nurturing or mercenary, it follows that certain expectations for a lesbian community of creative professionals are part of the impetus for The L Word's FanLib promotions. In the introduction to the PDF 'zine that resulted from the "fanisode," Chaiken celebrated The L Word's fans, who "came at us enthusiastically with your reactions, your objections, your ideas, passions, preferences and opinions as to whether or not we were adequately and authentically representing the way that we live" ("The L Word: A Fanisode"). From the perspective of this politics of representation, encouraging involvement with corporate media-making among The L Word's presumptively lesbian audience is necessary to the project of lesbian visibility. However, as we've seen, the price of this brand of visibility is to render lesbian identity as a reified commodity that can be packaged and sold, not only by professionals but by each contest participant and each OurChart member. The feminist utopia of an "old girls network," wherein mentorship leads to success within mainstream industries, here butts up against the converse heritage of fans' non-commercial systems of value and recognition. Chaiken says that the writing competitions were inspired by the fact that "the fans of The L Word write a lot of fan fiction on their own" ("Meet Molly"), implying that submitting a scene in script form to a contest would have a comparable charm. But the majority of fan authors aren't professional hopefuls like The Wall Street Journal's winning interviewee (who was, incidentally, the only straight man to place in the "fanisode"). Chaiken's equivalence effaces the autonomous norms of fandom's gift economy, which cultivates alternative modes of sharing the characters and stories that originate in the corporate media. If, as The Wall Street Journal posits, "the rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of amateur-created content online... on sites such as YouTube and MySpace" (Jurgensen), we shouldn't expect ventures like FanLib's to negotiate the friction between capitalist mandates and "amateur" subcultures with any more consideration than these other commercial platforms.
Chaiken's statement is from a promotional video on Showtime's official website that presents a later FanLib installment (dubbed "You Write It!"), featuring the lucky winner Molly as she claims her prize -- a visit to the set to see her contribution filmed (Figure 10). "You Write It!" was structured similarly to the "fanisode," but its endgame made good on the promise of the script format by including the victorious submission in an actual television episode (much to the delight of Molly, who was indeed a screenwriting student). It also had more open-ended instructions: "Choose a scene from The L Word seasons 1 or 2 to rewrite as a scene from 'Lez Girls,' Jenny's thinly-veiled, fictional account of The L Word characters' lives." While inviting fan-written scripts may imply a breakdown of the distinction between amateurs and professionals, this video's rhetoric emphatically reasserts the ideological gulf between fans and producers, quashing any intimation that fans' unpaid work could be afforded equal respect. The comments addressed to Molly, while well-meaning, are starkly condescending, informing her of banal aspects of television production as if she didn't already have the knowledge to be a screenwriting success. The "You Write It!" contest was a perfect match with season 5's "Lez Girls," a movie-within-a-TV-show that campily remixed The L Word's early seasons. Molly's scene earned its winning vote tally by enhancing these self-reflexive layers with a Charlie's Angels mashup, alluding to the history of lesbian viewing. In contrast to the discourses of "we" and "our" that characterize much of The L Word's marketing, however, the turn to calling fans "you" highlights the limits of this openness to appropriation. Chaiken may profess an interest in "the way interactivity is taking over our lives" that is borne out in The L Word's cutting-edge online promotions, but this provocation extends only as far as fan labor channels value into the "lesbian" brand -- because "you" work for free. Chaiken's outlook on the FanLib project both reflects and forwards this strategy, and like Jenny, Alice or indeed Chaiken herself, Molly is an exemplar for fans' lessons in commodifying our passions.
[ a condensed version of this section appeared as You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor at In Media Res ]
