Daedalus Howell | DHowell Media Group

After reading film historian Rick Mitchell’s exhaustive study of studio title cards at HollywoodLostandFound.net, I suddenly realized that my fledgling media empire had yet to develop one. Title cards are more than mere curtain openers – they are an expected phatic function of the cinematic experience Before “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” there was the 20th Century Fox klieg lights and fanfare (which still makes my heart skip a beat). Title cards, likewise, represent a tremendous branding opportunity for producers, whether that screen is in the multiplex or one’s pocket. The dream factory of DHMG, however, has been unwittingly living the “going to school naked” nightmare by releasing projects that weren’t properly clad in a title card. New rule: A flick without a title card is candy from a stranger without a wrapper. Fortunately, in-house goto Brodie Giles cooked up a motion graphic based on the “labyrinth” logo created by Nubby Twiglet and paired it with a soundmark intended to evoke the vintage station IDs of PBS and WGBH of Boston (click and enjoy) to which I’ve been partial since I was a wee mogul in the 70s.

Shop 'til you drop dead.

Neither my office nor my home presently has air conditioning Though, I’m avidly working to fix this, I’m presently forced to hide from the stifling heat and humidity of Sonoma’s summer wherever I can. Lately, this has been in the strange, outer reaches of my usual cultural experience – namely, big box stores and the various air-conditioned cubbies contained therein. And if such places have caffeine and wi-fi, all the better, for then I may pretend that I’m “working,” when in fact I’m merely hiding from global warming, sheltered in the very consumer culture that created it.

Yesterday, while stocking up on eco-nappies for the wee and, apparently, green bum which will be taking up my spare room for the next 18 years, I discovered a Starbucks hunkered in the corner of a Target store in Napa, CA. This particular installation of the coffee chain wasn’t like the Starbucks most often found indoors. That is to say it wasn’t prominently positioned as a sort of caffeine distributing foyer within, say, Safeway. There, a kind of marketing symbiosis occurs in which Starbucks is the beneficial bacteria spawning iced-lattes in the grocer’s large intestine. Rather, this tiny store within a store was exiled to the far southern wall, in what could be considered the “purgatory” section of Target, otherwise known as the customer service center. I often end up in such areas because I can’t find my way out of a paper bag let alone a big box.

This time at least I knew I was in the right Target (Napa, inexplicably, has two), since my wife had driven me there and I’ve learned, finally, that she’s right about things like where to buy cheap diapers that will also spare the earth from the rotisserie of climate change. She had done her part by ideating the diaper plan; the kid will do his by pooping in the diapers. My part, I wanted to believe, was to bask in the bone-chilling A/C in the breezeway of a Starbuckette, while being stared down by an Argus of branded red bullseyes. Of course, the temperature is at refrigerator levels in these places – like morgues – lest the impulse to purchase decay like our bodies in the heat.

My piggy bank.

I visited a colleague’s office the other morning and there, gleaming on his desk, was what I assumed was a new-fangled martini shaker. He must have noticed my raised eyebrow and quickly explained that the chrome-colored container was a thermos and not evidence that he prefers his breakfast shaken, not stirred.

My colleague explained that he had recently crunched the numbers on the so-called “Latte Factor” and realized he was drinking over a $1,000 of caffeine outsourced to Starbucks per annum. Though this is great for Starbucks shareholders, it’s terribly wasteful for new businesses such as his and – gulp – mine, especially in a flailing economy.

Personal finance guru David Bach’s site, FinishRich.com, lays out some impressive numbers of what one might save by forgoing the one’s quotidian fix of brand name mud (nearly $100,000 given a few decades and some financial jujitsu). I’m admittedly more impressed by shiny objects and what they confer, however, than mere numbers. I remember when every eco-and-health-conscious person I knew upgraded their hard plastic water bottles to gleaming aluminum bottles during what my wife and her ilk refer to as “the BPA scare of 2005.” Those who refused to relinquish their plastic bottles were stigmatized like smokers and were similarly treated to choruses of “You’re going to get cancer.”

The trend toward vessels of gleaming steel seems to have overtaken thermoses as well. Long gone are the plastic lunchbox thermoses of my youth, emblazoned with the Six Million Dollar Man and various iterations of Star Wars. While I was ruining my savings potential, not to mention the environment, with lattes to-go, thermoses had apparently evolved into sleek columns of ergonomic product design. At about $20, the investment only takes a only 0.02% sip of the 100 grand you’ll save. That said, I’ve evolved into a cost-conscious creative entrepreneur too frugal to spend even a pittance of my projected coffee savings on a shiny thermos. To wit, I stole my wife’s old Stanley “Alladdin” model industrial grade thermos – a mortar shell-sized vessel that appears to be made of the same material as airliner “black boxes.” After the nuclear holocaust it’s just going to be roaches and Stanley thermoses left to rebuild civilization. Stanley knows this, which accounts for their online product registry – if somehow those records survive, so will some little part of you. Or at least your thermos. I’m going to engrave my name into mine for this very chance at posterity. Or perhaps I should hold out for the Stanley martini shaker-thermos combo…

Hearken back to the late Jurassic period of the web (2000 AD), when branding one’s endeavors online meant hording all of one’s content under a single site loaded with logos and various means of “protecting” one’s digital assets. Fast forward to the social web when one’s branded digital assets are extended through various third-party providers and now live on and off one’s personal site through nifty embed codes and widgets. MarketingDaily’s Karl Greenberg has uncovered a mutation of this current trend in the form of North Carolina ad agency Boone Oakley whose url, booneoakley.com, simply redirects to a YouTube page and does away with the notion of a branded-site entirely.

Says David Oakley, Boone Oakley’s co-creative director:

“The agency vision thing in so many Web sites is such bullshit. We have never taken ourselves that seriously, so we like to poke fun at ourselves, and people find that refreshing; we have gotten some comments that it’s an ‘anti-website.’”

The anti-website has received over a 100,000 views since launched five days ago. Albeit, the traffic is being driven, in part, by blog-borne acolytes like myself who applaud the novelty of an agency site that cuts through the dross of self-promotion and simply presents the goods at a total cost of zero. More to the point, the move to a YouTube-only site has proven tantamount to something of a social media marketing campaign in itself. I, however, won’t be making such a move until I acquire enough Google stock to brand the video-sharing site Daedaltube (though that sort of defeats the purpose, methinks).

Pulitzer material.

When I’m not mogulizing - and if it’s not a word it should be - I’m talking about it.

“Mogulizing” is the notion of both “becoming as well as being a mogul as in ‘media mogul.’” Currently, I’m on the “becoming” side, which is just like the “being” side but with C-O-M jammed in the middle. I’m not sure if this has a secret meaning that would-be moguls are meant to decipher on our way to total “moguldom,” the enlightened state of the mogul at which point one is ready to instruct others in the art of mogulizing.

Admittedly, I’ve done this prematurely on a few occasions. When speaking to an English class at San Francisco’s Balboa High School a few years back, I was asked where I attended journalism school and admitted that I hadn’t, but that “I’ve seen ‘Fletch’ a few dozen times.” Since the flick was off their cultural radar by about 15 years, I was compelled to explain its plot and related trivia (did you know Chevy Chase beat Mick Jagger for the title role?). Suffice it to say, I was not invited back. At the Willamette Writers Conference a couple of years back, I presented an ingenious little talk titled “From the Byline to the Brand Name,” which permitted me no less than an hour and a half to discuss my own tribulations going from zero to 35 whilst making a living stringing words together in a manner that suggests meaning.

During the Q&A, however, lightheaded from gazing at my own navel so long, I suggested that aspiring writers might be better served actually writing rather than attending conferences.

Once this reached the conference organizers, of course, the ink mysteriously ran dry on my invitation to return. I conceded I was wrong on at least one point - walking the length of an Airport Sheraton parking lot is a fine way for writers to get some much-needed sunlight.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to the Northern California Screenwriters Group. Overcome by my online OCD, I posted this fact on Facebook and promptly received the replies, “Thank God. They need it,” from a studio exec pal in LA; “Yeah, please tell them I said ‘You’re welcome for standing on your picket line with you, now please make Apatow stop,’” from a journo friend and colleague in San Francisco, and simply “Ha!” from her buddy.

Of course, I shared these comments with my audience as a sort of rallying cry for those embarking on screenwriting careers 500 miles from the action (hey, there are worse ways to start a career in the biz, trust me). I’m pleased to say, my chat resulted in an invitation to speak at a forthcoming Napa screenwriters expo. Needless to say, I will not invite writers to write instead of attending, convinced as I am that in the very least they need to come out and see me, right?

Come 4 p.m., Tuesday, June 9, I’m one of three guest speakers appearing at La Muse, Vins et Fromages at the Sonoma Valley Woman’s Club, 574 First St. E., Sonoma. I’m one of three guest speakers presenting in my capacity as Sonoma County’s Lifestyle Ambassador (which is to say, “Sonoma brand advocate and branded entertainment specialist,” though it sounds equally meaningless). Ned Hill, of La Prenda Vineyards Management, Inc., and social media promotions director, Shan Ray, are also presenting.

Somehow, I’m billed last, just above the cheese course (provided by The Epicurean Connection), which I attributed to being a late addition - perhaps another mogul dropped out.

Fact is, I’m particularly good in a pinch, when expectations are low and comic relief is necessary, if unintended. Spoiler alert, I’m going to reveal the plot of “Fletch Lives.”