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NYT Syndicate
as millions of people were sitting down to watch the season premiere of HBO's 'Game of Thrones', those gathered at a small house party in the Van Nuys neighbourhood were still figuring out dinner.
The host, Filup Molina, didn't have the right pizza delivery app installed on his iPhone, so he paused DirecTV's East Coast live feed to sort it out."How many pizzas do we want?" he asked."Two? Three?" A half-hour into the much-anticipated episode the doorbell rang, so he stopped the show again when the Domino's delivery guy arrived with three pies. All the while the armchair analysis continued apace.
"Do they literally bring winter with them?" Molina asked about the White Walkers, referring to the zombielike army of the dead descending on a mostly oblivious human population in the south.
His longtime friend Erik Voss nodded as he finished a mouthful of pizza."We've talked before about this idea that winter doesn't bring White Walkers ” that White Walkers bring winter," he said."It may be that winter didn't exist in this world until the White Walkers were created."
This is how America watches live TV in 2017 ” starting late, pausing to grab food, debating the finer points of a show's mythology. But for Molina and Voss, this is more than an enjoyable pastime; it's a living.
The two men run a YouTube channel called New Rockstars devoted to 'Game of Thrones' and other intensely followed genre TV shows and films, one of a new breed of media outlets like IGN, Nerdist and Emergency Awesome reimagining criticism for a digital age. In addition to what they call a breakdown video ” an hour-long recap, review and analysis of an episode ” they make videos that dig into trailers, deleted scenes and even the music behind films and TV shows.
They are superfans ” sophisticated ones ” using visual aids to break down shows and movies for superfans. And their handiwork makes the audience for these pop-culture spectacles even bigger and more engaged.
"We are in a world where the cacophony of coverage, whether it's Vanity Fair or New Rockstars, drives the cultural zeitgeist around the show," said Sabrina Caluori, HBO's senior vice president for digital media and marketing."That breeds the FOMO ” the Fear of Missing Out ” that's driving continued growth of the show this season."
The morning after the 'Game of Thrones' premiere, Molina, 32, and Voss, 29, started work early at their one-room studio, which is across the street from Universal Studios. Molina had watched the episode twice, made extensive notes and built the motion graphics for 'Westeros Weekly', a new show that New Rockstars is producing during this season of 'Game of Thrones'. Voss was in another corner rewatching clips from the premiere and writing a script for an hourlong episode breakdown that he and Molina would begin taping the next day.
The two men both have comedy backgrounds, and both are working on their own film and TV scripts even as they are becoming known online as film and TV personalities. New Rockstars, though, will be their full-time gig for the foreseeable future.
New Rockstars started in 2012 as a YouTube channel for interviews with new-media creators like Grace Helbig and Tyler Oakley. At that time, the more popular videos generated 30,000 or 40,000 views, but most had fewer than 5,000. In 2015, a three-minute New Rockstars video speculating about how the next Fast & Furious movie would address the death of the co-star Paul Walker generated 8.6 million views, and New Rockstars promptly changed its business plan.
"The moment we saw the response to that Fast & Furious video, we decided to reduce all the coverage on all the YouTubers," said Jeben Berg, a former Google executive and a partner in Zealot Networks, which owns New Rockstars."People wanted to see heightened, sensible, intelligent speculation on what was happening on big Hollywood film properties."
New Rockstars videos now typically generate a few hundred thousand views each. Several have broken 1 million views, and one about Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 has neared 5 million. Popcorn movies generally dominate the entertainment discussion in the summer months, but 'Game of Thrones' is airing later than usual this year and has been as much a part of the entertainment discussion on social media and digital video as the Marvel and DC film franchises.
Berg said that New Rockstars is using the intense fan interest in 'Game of Thrones' as an opportunity to ramp up production from a few to a half-dozen videos a week across all the different movies and TV shows that they cover. The YouTube personalities Maude Garrett and Sam Bashor recently joined the channel, while Voss and Molina will continue writing and producing videos.
(Molina and Voss have focused nearly all of their attention on the YouTube channel, which has about 1 million subscribers and is supported by advertising and sponsors, though this fall New Rockstars will begin making content for Facebook. So far the company has not delved into podcasts, Instagram or Snapchat as some other sites do.)
There's a DIY spirit and modest scale to the New Rockstars operation. When Molina and Voss taped their breakdown video on Monday night, they were the only two people in the studio. They watched themselves on a monitor and advanced their teleprompter with an iPhone. No one yelled"cut"; they just kept recording.
The breakdown video reached 400,000 views within two days of going live but added only another 100,000 over the next week. Two weeks into the 'Game of Thrones' season, though, New Rockstars were already working to speed things up.
"We just shot a show live to tape for the first time, which means all of our mistakes are baked in," Molina said Tuesday after posting a new 'Westeros Weekly' episode."The mistakes drive me insane, but it means posting now instead of Thursday at midnight. People want to see it now more than they want to see it perfect."
