Craig -
Forgive us if this note seems a little brusque but we've got a lot of territory to cover and not much time to do it in - plus, what with all the excitement these last weeks with the big mergers (Warners/AOL, then Warner Music/EMI) we're all a little manic over here - but manic in a good way. Make that "a very good way." Because, what with the new strategic alliances taking hold and all the wonderful new possibilities and new creative people coming on board from all the other areas, I just think it's going to open up all sorts of interesting possibilities for people who are able to meet the challenge of The New Paradigm.
Speaking of meeting the challenge, here's our plan - we are going to change the name of the band from "Steely Dan," which we are sick to death of by now anyway, to "The Content Partners," which is fresh, which is edgy, and which is absolutely guaranteed to make the New Paradigm bigwigs at Way-Oh-El (Warners/AOL - get it?) stand up and take notice of who we are and what we are about and where we want to go from here - wherever "here" is anymore. Secondly, music per se may or may not be the main creative focus of "The Partners" ( or "The Pards," for short) anymore - rather, we will be generating concepts and cashflow in all sorts of areas, including but not limited to music, video, streaming intellectual property rights, grass roots organizational and promotional networking and of course on-line retail sales, data-mining and partnering with whomever is so hip as to be in the vortex of what's happening now.
Example - at this very moment we are turning our attention to the development of a blockbuster property which will be film-based (or digital-video-based, depending) and which will be our entree into the feature presentation end of the conglomerate's revenue stream. We have already begun storyboarding a screenplay for production this fall which is based on the touching and strange story of the twelve year old Burmese rebel twins and their bizarre Army of God, which overran a Thai hospital and held the doctors and nurses and patients hostage for a day or two, until they were defeated by the Thai army regulars. Just think, Craig - this is a story that broke nationally yesterday - and we will begin casting the finished treatment by Friday morning at the latest! In any case, we are changing some of the story elements to make for a more satisfying plot line. For example, the heros will be changed from Burmese twin boys to Eurasian twin girls - and they will be sixteen, not twelve, for reasons of propriety and continuity. This thing is going to have a ton of continuity. The Thai hospital will be changed to the Cap d'Antibes Hotel in the south of France. The girls and their intrepid all-girl volunteer army will take over the hotel during the weekend of Midem, the international music publishers' conference, and they will hold all of the publishers and lawyers in the hotel hostage for three days. They will demand the assistance of a crack song-writing team in exchange for the lives of the hostages, said songwriting team to help them develop a Broadway musical based on their adventures as rebels and revolutionaries. We are not going to concern ourselves with the politics of the girls' revolution at this point - we'll just pick an appropriate cause with some significant amount of cache when we are ready to shoot/record/open out-of-town. After having murdered and mutilated most of the publishers and lawyers, the Eurasian twins, Simone and Solange, will discover that "The Content Partners" happen to be staying in the Poulenc Suite on the top floor of the hotel - and the rest of the story will just flow naturally from there. This is by far the most incredible idea we have had to date, "The New Chivalry" and "Penko Power" included.
We need a secretary - young but not too young, blonde but not too blonde, none too smart either. She'll need a secretary too. We'll need a couple of cars and drivers, pretty much round the clock. We will certainly need the Dean & Deluca account, plus a regular liquor store charge, and that phone number of the service that delivers stuff to the recording studios and race tracks. The Sony shoot is cancelled, of course - can't lose any momentum now to tired Old-Paradigm-style promotional hogwash. Tell Earl and Co. to stand by - this thing is going to be greenlighted by this time tomorrow, I just know it, and I want him and his kids ready to start shooting film and/or whatever else they shoot when it's time.
Ciao for now,
D & W
