RafeWorld

It’s that time of year again: San Diego Comic Con – the geek pilgrimage to San Diego for a convention that long ago stopped being a comic book show and instead has taken all of the interests of Hollywood and jam packed them into one building. Even shows that have limited genre appeal have started making an appearance. Shows like Castle can get away with it because they star Nathan Filion, of Firefly and “Doctor Horrible” fame. Other shows like Psych and Glee just have large followings, so if you take a large part of the populous, even those who like to dress up like Stormtroopers and Batman, and you’re likely to have enough people who are fans of those shows.

I’m not at Comic Con this year, and I can’t say I’m terribly sad about it. Nor did I get to go last year. The first, last, and only venture I’ve made to the annual event was in 2008, when I attended as a member of the press, if you can really call what I was doing as a blogger and podcaster “press.”

Attending as part of the press means that I didn’t have the typical Comic Con experience. For normal people, they go, they get their badges, they wander around the exhibit hall buying all kinds of cool swag, and they plot out what events they really want to see, often requiring they forego other events to make it into the ones they really want to see. Going as press meant I was there as part of a team – three writers and a photographer – so many of the panels and events we would go to were plotted out in advance.

All of the cool stuff happens in Hall H – a massive, airplane hanger sized room with multiple projection screens so people sitting in the back can see what’s going on up on the microscopic stage. From an entertainment reporter’s standpoint, that’s where the good info comes from, so one person from our team was dedicated to that room. They got in a line at 7:30 in the morning, almost three hours before the room would open up, and eventually plopped down at a seat in the hall. They had to carry food in with them, although as we got better at things we figured out how to relieve them for lunch breaks (helped by the staggering of less interesting presentations in with the popular ones). Not that it matters: Hall H was not for me. With the exception of seeing Kevin Smith and his Zack and Miri Make a Porno presentation (which was at night, after most of the rest of the convention had wound down), I didn’t really see much of Hall H.

Another room, the name of which I forget, also holds a considerable amount of people, and has the second popular stuff – material that won’t have the draw of Hall H sized crowds, but are still pretty big. Luckily, this was also staggered with decent presentations in some of the other rooms, so one person could cover this room and some of the smaller rooms pretty easily, provided they planned when they left and could return to the room. It also was easier for them to grab food. Again, it didn’t really matter to me, because again, this wasn’t me.

Instead, as the one person with broadcast experience, I was saddled with interviews. Celebrities would go do their panel, where they would show new footage of whatever project they were hawking to the masses. Then they would move to a back hallway of the convention center where members of the press had scheduled time for interviews. These interviews took one of two forms:

a. Roundtable discussions, where you sat at a table with four or five other press members and the celebs would rotate from table to table every ten minutes, answering questions from all of the press people at the table. As you might guess, one person would wind up dominating the table time, with others not getting to ask many questions.

b. Red Carpet extravaganzas, where the celebs would make their way down a red carpeted area, moving from interviewer to interviewer. Handlers would move the celebs on every couple of questions, but typically the time allocation was incredibly uneven, and the celeb would have to go elsewhere before they finished the  carpeted gauntlet. Guess who has been within four feet of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Gerard Butler, and Chris “Ludicrous” Bridges (among others)? This guy!

In short, interview duty was miserable. Roundtable interviews worked pretty well. I had enough journalistic integrity to let other people ask questions, but enough of a presence to push my way into getting a chance to ask questions. The problem is, you wind up with a recording of everyone’s questions, and the ethical thing to do is not to run other people’s parts of the interview, which makes it tough to use the audio recording for anything more than transcription, which is more miserable than interview duty.

Red Carpet interviews were a joke, even more miserable than roundtables. My video camera is prosumer – high end consumer gear, but consumer gear nonetheless. I had borrowed a better camera from a friend, but I still looked like a joke among the professional rigs there (seriously, if you’re Gerard Butler, who are you going to make time for – the TV Guide crew with a steadycam rig, or the guy with a fist-sized camcorder?). Even worse, I had no cameraperson. Our photographer didn’t know how to operate video cameras, so she was useless when it came to these types of interviews. This means I was required to run the camera, which means sitting behind the camera, but also had to conduct the interview, which meant holding a microphone out to the celeb. What I really needed was a boom mic attached to my head and a smiley face picture I could stick on the end of the camera so the celeb could look at something and I could work magic from behind the camera.

Despite being on interview duty, which was miserable, and feeling like I was babysitting our photographer a lot of the time (we wound up running a lot of my digital pictures, as well as captures from my video fooage), I still had some good experiences at Comic Con. Among them:

• Meeting the cast of The Big Bang Theory, which was just out of its freshman year. The guys were all pretty awesome, and a conversation between the three leads sounded like something straight out of the show, including comments from Kaley Cuoco that were as clueless about geek culture as her character.
• Meeting Dakota Fanning, who I had maligned numerous times in opinion/editorial pieces. She turned out to be a sweet  young lady who came across as very sincere and nowhere near as precocious as I had (mistakenly) credited her for.
• Seeing one of my writing heroes, J. Michael Straczynski, who spoke for an hour and then signed autographs. It was the closest I came to an average person’s experience of the Con, and it was glorious. I never did get an autograph, in part because I left my copy of his screenwriting book at home, and in part because I decided I’d rather keep him as a hero than meet him in person and possible have that hero aspect ruined.
• Interviewing Robert Englund. It was one of only two one-on-one interviews I got the entire time I was there. I was told I would only get five minutes with him, but he gave me ten, although he only answered one question in that ten minutes. He was pretty friendly and awesome, and it was one of the only interviews I was proud of from the Con.
• Seeing an advance screening of Tropic Thunder. Although I didn’t say hi to any of them, I sat in front of the Ain’t-It-Cool folks, who I’ve appreciated for a long time, and Jay Baruchel (who co-stars in the movie) was in attendance. A special video introduction from Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Ben Stiller alone made this screening worthwhile.
• The Fraggle Rock presentation, which celebrated the anniversary of the show with a live performance by Karen Prell (Red Fraggle) and a screening of an episode. When the opening credits rolled, the audience clapped along with the music without any prompting – a perfect display of fandom. Afterwards, I was one of only three members of the press who showed up to interview Prell and Dave Goelz (Boober Fraggle, but also The Great Gonzo), and the duo gave almost an hour and a half to the three of us. Sure, occasionally the conversation veered farther into territory the Jim Henson Co. rep felt the need to keep us from discussing, but it was awesome to be in the presence of some of the big Muppet pioneers, especially for such a big fan of Jim Henson as I am.

When the Con was over, we all sat down and had a few drinks, which was a nice relaxing experience, but even then I felt sad that I didn’t really get to experience Comic Con. I got to experience a hallway of the Con most people don’t, but it was filled with members of the press that I couldn’t hold a candle to, and other members that showed why the blogging community doesn’t get the respect and professional courtesy other outlets do.

I really think that trip was the beginning of the end for my time as an entertainment reporter, but that’s a story for another time. For now, I just enjoy reading some of the big scoops from Comic Con and knowing that I’m on the other side of the country, in a nice, quiet house with my family – an experience that doesn’t require sitting in a line for hours or maintaining a feud with rival journalists.

That Robert Englund Interview:

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 5:08 pm and is filed under my hectic life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.