As summer winds down, why not treat yourself to a good, family-friendly teen drama? That’s what’s happening at The Lake, the new web-only series from the WB. Directed by the original Beverly Hills 90210 alum Jason Priestley, it’s the story of three families who head to the fictional Lake Eleanor each summer, the kids — all teens — forming a tight-knit clique who dive right back into their annual traditions (skinny-dipping in the lake, naturally).
This summer, things have changed a bit: the Knights and the Davenports are newly merged into one Brady Bunch-style unit, and each family is harboring a secret of its own. Like we saw on Priestley’s 90210, we’ll see romance and jealousy, friendship and rivalry as the vacation unfolds.
Last week, the show’s executive producer, Jordan Levin, interviewed Priestley about his latest directorial project. Having been a teen heartthrob himself, Priestley had plenty of advice to share with the young stars of The Lake. And what would the late 90210 executive producer Aaron Spelling think of this new series? “He would have liked the beautiful people we have in the show,” Priestley says. See what else he says in the interview embedded below.
With the latest change in our terms of use (TOU) and privacy policy, we now display your full name if you write a review or post to any of our discussion forums. We posted the new TOU and privacy policy for a month before requiring users to agree to it upon login, but many of you have been wondering why we made that change. (I am shocked, shocked, to discover that no one reads those dense and riveting legal documents.)
Here are the reasons. First, we don’t ask a lot of our users to watch all of the content on our site, but we do ask that people be civil in our community areas, like reviews and discussion forums. While anonymity has many benefits to society, helping to maintain a civil community online is not one of them. One way of reducing the random offensive comments and troll activity is to ask people to stand behind their words with their real names. We’re under no illusions that this is a silver bullet (a thought that occurred to me recently as I responded to a user named Fred Flintstone, though perhaps his parents really did have an interesting sense of humor), but it’s something we require moving forward.
As with many online communities, most of our users are friendly and reasonable, but the rants of a minority of loud and belligerent few can overwhelm the voices of the well-meaning majority. We’ll continue to prune the reviews and discussion forums by hand, but we can no longer scale to handle the volume of user-submitted content coming in our doors each day now.
The other reason for this change is that we envision a future where online video viewing is more social than the solitary act it tends to be today, and without gathering real names from our users it’s hard to lay the foundation for that. Even with a user’s real name and location, it’s still often hard to tell who someone that wants to be your friend actually is, as I’ve learned with some of the outstanding friend requests I’ve left untouched on Facebook for several months now. Of course, participation in all of these community offerings on Hulu, from reviews and forums to future social features, will continue to be voluntary, but we think there’s room for some groundbreaking advances in online viewing in the future and we’re laying the groundwork for that.
This change applies only to reviews and discussion posts written since the new TOU and privacy policy went into effect. If you’ve written any reviews or posted to any forums since then and wish for us to remove them, feel free to point us at them via a note to and we’ll pull them. (It’s most helpful if you can provide the Permalink URL to your post; this can be found by clicking on the “Permalink” link that appears to the right of your post.) We in no way want you to interpret this as pressure to write only good reviews of the content on our site, or to agree with every other user in our forums.
As part of this change, all of us at Hulu will be using our full names in all our communications with you, too. We won’t ask anything of you that we wouldn’t hold ourselves to.
This is a good first step but will ultimately be ineffective. As you stated, you simply don’t collect enough information to identify users so new anonymous accounts will be created.
A digg-style bury mechanism might be a better approach to the problem so that the community has a chance to police itself. The comment can be automagically deleted (via DB flag only – no actual deletion) after some arbitrary number of buries (let’s say 10). If the offending user continues to make comments that are consistently buried, their ability to make future comments are suspended until such time that they appeal. Admin (you guys) could then reset the numbers for this specific user. The user’s main login screen should also indicate how close they are to having their commenting privileges suspended.
This frees you guys to simply following up on appeals (with some backend resetting via the Admin ControlPanel for successful appeals). This would also reduce the amount of dead accounts by some smaller amount.
Conversely… users who consistently make positive comments (voted up) should be rewarded somehow. Some ideas here but don’t want to make this post too long.
I’m sure all of this has been tabled and discussed already as possible future implementations just wanted to post these thoughts anyway.
I’m really happy to be able to introduce a fantastic new series on Hulu, Rick Steves’ Europe. There are a lot of travel experts and a lot of travel shows out there, and although there are many good ones, Rick really stands out for a couple of reasons. First, he’s amazingly prolific. Amazon lists 74 travel titles with Rick as the author, and those are just the 2008/2009 versions, with new updates for most coming out every year. Beyond books, Rick has a number of TV series, specials and podcasts. It’s an amazing volume of work, and it always seems to be expanding. We’re really excited to launch Season 4 of Rick Steves’ Europe on Hulu today, and we look forward to offering more and more over time as Rick continues his travels.
The second reason Rick stands out is more important, and that is how passionate he is about all the places he visits. He loves the history, the interesting details, the small out-of-the-way places … and it all comes out in his books and TV shows in a way that really makes you eager to go explore. Rick lives in the U.S., but he’s spent more than 30 summers in Europe, searching for all those interesting nooks and crannies that aren’t so easy to find unless you have a guide like Rick. A good sign that a travel writer really lives and breathes the places he describes: My wife and I bought our first Rick Steves book a few years ago for a trip to Italy, and we actually ran into Rick and his cameraman while walking on the shores of Lake Como. Hard to believe, but here’s the snapshot to prove it:
I think these kinds of run-ins must be a common occurrence for Rick. Notice that he didn’t ask the professional cameraman standing next to him to take the picture, but instead snapped the picture himself by holding the camera out and pointing it back at us. Nice technique, and very gracious. The crazy thing about this is that I’m not even the only member of the (relatively small) Hulu family to randomly run into Rick in Europe. The wife of a friend here at Hulu saw him in Venice. It’s a good sign that a travel expert is dedicated and passionate if you can hardly avoid running into him whenever you travel. :)
If you love to travel, I have no doubts that you’ll love this show. Here’s a sample in which Rick visits Tuscany and makes us all want to reach for a suitcase.
Most kids have a defining moment when they realize what they truly want to be when they grow up. As for Emily Hagins, her mind was set at the age of 8, when she first saw Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: She wanted to be a filmmaker. Hagins even went so far as to write a letter to the director, and his encouraging response set her on her course. Inspired by an Australian zombie import called Undead, she set about her first full-length feature film, Pathogen, when she was just 12 years old.
Enter filmmakers Aaron Marshall, Erik Mauck and Justin Johnson. Having worked on numerous short films and television themselves, they were looking for a bigger project. And then they stumbled upon Hagins and her project. “We all used to live in Austin, where Emily lives,” says Marshall, who spoke to Hulu by phone last week. “And we came across a casting call for her movie on the Internet. She was looking for 12- to 15-year-old kids to act out a zombie movie directed by a 12-year-old girl. We contacted her family, and within a week we were filming.”
The result is Zombie Girl: The Movie, which streams for free on Hulu and SnagFilms this week. The three stood by as Hagins shot her own film, documenting all of the behind-the-scenes moments on camera. “We decided from the very beginning that since we had knowledge that Emily does not, we would stay back as far as possible,” says Marshall. “We shot like we were flies on the wall. Emily was going be making decisions and making mistakes, and if we intervened at all, we knew we would stunt her learning process. We didn’t want ourselves to be part of the story.”
That meant there were times when Marshall and his partners didn’t say a word as they watched Hagins commit a blunder, even, when Hagins neglected to turn off the music in the back of the scene, for instance. The budding filmmaker had to reshoot the footage. “There was only one moment that any of us had direct contact with the film. Emily was messing with a tripod for 10 or 15 minutes,” says Marshall, who, inspired by Hagins, recently wrote his own horror script, and is also working on a comedy. “She couldn’t find the button, and finally she said, ‘If you have enough footage of me struggling, can you help?’ And so Justin went over and gave her a hand.”
As for financing Hagins’ project, most of the support came from her mother, Megan, who was very much a part of Pathogen. “She realized pretty early on how Emily passionate was about this,” Marshall says. “She decided to help her any way she could, so she drove the car, she wrangled all the kids, took care of food, did all the makeup. We caught some high-pressure moments between the two on film. Their relationship strained because of the project but overall, when everything was done, it made their relationship much stronger.”
So how does the young auteur feel about the “running vs. shuffling” zombies debate? “I know that [Emily] does not like a running zombie. She is a walking, shuffling zombie fan,” Marshall tells us. “She mentions this in the film at one point. She is a George Romero zombie purist.” (Marshall himself is a little more lax, saying that it really depends on the nature of the film.)
After its run on Hulu and SnagFilms, Zombie Girl: The Movie will be playing in festivals (it won the Spirit Award at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival). As for Hagins, she funded her second film, a ghost story called The Retelling, with proceeds from Pathogen (DVDs are available through her website). She’s entering her films into festivals, Marshall says, and is currently working on another screenplay, this time a comedy. We’re sure we’ll be seeing more of Hagins in the future.
This week on Hulu, PINKS All Out, show creator and host Rich Christensen and his team deliver something never televised before: four-wide drag racing from the zMAX Dragway in Concord, North Carolina.
“There’s only one track in the country that has four lanes of drag racing, and that’s the zMAX track just outside Charlotte, North Carolina,” says PINKS All Out‘s technical crewmember Willie B. “And it’s awesome.” For this particular episode, the sanctioned track — intended to keep the race going when two lanes are shut down due to oil spills — hosted four cars going at it side-by-side as the drivers raced for the finish line in hopes of snagging $10,000 cash and a fully loaded NAPA toolbox .
“When four cars line up side by side, that’s a spectacle,” Christensen says. “Now you’re not hearing two burnouts, you’re hearing four burnouts. The sound is amplified times two. The visual explosion — instead of watching two cars race to get to the finish line first, you’re seeing four. It’s almost overload, and that’s a terrific thing.”
And the cars competing run the gamut: racers drive old cars, new cars, muscle cars and even one known as the Wheelie Wagon. “There’s every car, from import to domestic to old-school to brand-new, to all-wheel drive and front-wheel drive, and every manufacturer,” Christensen says. “Most importantly, they all have one common thread: grass-roots racers. They don’t have big sponsors paying them big dollars to travel the country. These are your neighbors and people that you know who wrench on their cars on the weekends.”
As a result, the racing is real fun to watch. “You’ll see some of the craziest, absolutely unbelievable driving that you’ve seen at a PINKS All Out show all year long,” says Willie B., a former racer on the show who’s also a radio DJ in Denver. “There are some guys that are out to prove a point, and they don’t get out of the throttle until it’s proven. I couldn’t believe some of these guys laid on the gas when their car was sideways, facing the wall — and these guys are still just hammering it.”
You’ll also see a bit of Big Three rivalry. “The rivalries are fantastic. That’s become the most fun part of the show. We ask the crowd who’s the Ford people, who the Chevy people are, and who the Mopar [Chrysler] people are,” Christensen says (a Mopar man himself). “Everybody starts rooting for their brand, and it’s no different than watching the Vikings fans versus the Green Bay Packers fans. It’s fantastic, total rivalry in the friendliest, most respectful form. Even Chevy people know there are some bad Mustangs out there and, of course, the Ford people know there are some bad Camaros out there. These things are bad to the bone. They’re fast, they’re awesome, so even though [the fans] root for one, they still have respect for the other brand or model.”
And though Christensen puts himself on that box between the tracks for every race — where he’s been struck by car parts, lost some of his hearing, and come within a couple feet of being hit — he’s never gone down the quarter-mile track himself. “For me, I actually get to sit back and really enjoy the enthusiasm, and get caught up in the moment,” he told us. “But no, there’s no real desire for me to get in that car and go down there as fast as I can. That’s telling the truth. I love watching others do it. I’ve really become a true fan of watching these unbelievably talented and smart people put that horsepower to their back wheel and get that tire to the concrete and get down that track as quickly as they can. They’re artists and geniuses as far as I’m concerned.”
You can catch PINKS All Out on the SPEED channel, or watch full episodes anytime right here on Hulu.
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Simply wanna remark that you have a very decent website , I like the design it actually stands out.
[...] explanation for the policy change stressed the value of real names in promoting civility: [W]e don’t ask a lot of our users to [...]
nice changes
[...] explanation for the policy change stressed the value of real names in promoting civility: [W]e don’t ask a lot of our users to [...]
Glad to see another site fighting for civil discourse on the Internet. You guys do a great job here.
This is a good first step but will ultimately be ineffective. As you stated, you simply don’t collect enough information to identify users so new anonymous accounts will be created.
A digg-style bury mechanism might be a better approach to the problem so that the community has a chance to police itself. The comment can be automagically deleted (via DB flag only – no actual deletion) after some arbitrary number of buries (let’s say 10). If the offending user continues to make comments that are consistently buried, their ability to make future comments are suspended until such time that they appeal. Admin (you guys) could then reset the numbers for this specific user. The user’s main login screen should also indicate how close they are to having their commenting privileges suspended.
This frees you guys to simply following up on appeals (with some backend resetting via the Admin ControlPanel for successful appeals). This would also reduce the amount of dead accounts by some smaller amount.
Conversely… users who consistently make positive comments (voted up) should be rewarded somehow. Some ideas here but don’t want to make this post too long.
I’m sure all of this has been tabled and discussed already as possible future implementations just wanted to post these thoughts anyway.
Keep up the great work Hulu!