This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity.
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Alright, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I’m really looking forward to it, and thanks to Steve for the introduction. I’m thrilled that you guys will get to spend some time with this guy, Mr. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I found to be extraordinarily thoughtful on a freakishly wide range of subjects professional and personal so I think this will be great.
I first met Joe in 2012 because he had this revolutionary idea for a variety show, the one you just saw, that would be authored not by Hollywood but by thousands of artists working collaboratively around the world, which is HitRecord on TV. In preparing for today so many of you said to me, the future of marketing comes down to those exact same themes: content, collaboration and community.
Joe, I could theorize that in 2005 when you founded HitRecord, perhaps you were trying to invent the future of media. I also happen to know -- and this surprised me at the time -- that you started HitRecord in part because you couldn’t find a job.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Yeah, that’s true. It was in 2005, and I just finished working on “3rd Rock from the Sun” and I quit [acting] for awhile. I went to college, and then when I wanted to start acting again I couldn’t get a job. It really hurt very deeply because when you’re an actor, it’s difficult. You kind of wait for someone to give you permission and hire you, then you can pay the role and you get to be creative. Without that, you’re kind of at a loss and I came to the conclusion that this was unacceptable. I had to take responsibility for my own ability to express myself and be creative.
HitRecord was just this little turn of phrase like a pun on hit record -- to hit the record button. To me, this became a symbol that my whole life others had been pushing the button and others would roll the camera while I would just act. I wanted to be the one to push the button. So I was making little short videos, writing stories, and making songs and my brother helped me set up this little website that we called hitrecord.org.
That’s how it started -- it was as simple as that. Where it started turning into a community and a collaborative process was with a message board. It was very small, a smattering of a few hundred people. We come to the message board and talk about little videos I made or whatever, but we realized that the natural tendency was not to just talk about the videos I made, but instead to make things together. So we started doing that and then it grew from there.
It happened over years. My brother and I built the website further up to try to facilitate that kind of collaboration before spending any money. This was before it was illegal. We would totally just rip off any Bob Dylan song or whatever from a CD and use it on a video. We weren’t thinking about it as a company for years.
Then my friend Jared who’s out here and I started talking about how could we take what’s going on here and make professional scale productions. That’s when we figured out that we kind of have to craft our own Terms of Service and figure out how the intellectual property laws will work, how we pay people if we’re going to be making money through this collaborative process, and how can we pay people. We figured all that out in 2010 then we launched it as a website where we could do it like this. Five years later we met you and we made it into a TV show.
I have to say when we started working on season one of the TV show (and I may not have told you this), there was a part of me that was very nervous because I didn’t know if we would get one contribution from my mother somewhere in Illinois or if we would get 130,000 contributions. We ultimately did for two seasons, but you were far more confident and I think for a room full of people who are working daily to try to inspire people to collaborate with their content, what did you discover were sort of the secrets to focusing people’s creative energies as well as getting them to actually deliver what you needed?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
The reason I think I had confidence was because we’d been doing it already. I don’t think we could have just started from square one said “Oh I have an idea let’s make a variety show where we’ll start a website and get hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world to contribute.” There would be no way they would have showed up, but because it had been growing slowly for eight years, there was a very gradual development and it was an organic one. I think that’s a big part of why people feel good contributing to our sites. It doesn't feel like a marketing campaign and if it did, I feel like that it would probably be harder to get them to contribute.
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Please see part two here.