Aurora

Good Morning, Citizen Producers... here's your top-of-the-week update for July 19th, 2010.

Tuesday marks the 41st Anniversary of the Moon Landing. I've been an Apollo kid since I was five years old, and my interest in aerospace and aviation -- and recently, my intense interest in private space -- gave me the background to talk a little about the transition from a government-run Space Program to a private one. You can see that story -- my background, the things we did right, the things we did wrong and where things are headed -- by clicking here: http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=3898

(Some prior PJTV users may need to register to see the video)

What does that have to do with Declaration? Well, the plot of my screenplay, AURORA, follows a mission to Jupiter set 20 years in the future; but the theme of the movie is really the recovery of the frontier values that made America what she is: individual responsibility, hard work, intelligent risk-taking, innovation, courage and tenacity.

We'll talk about all of these elements in great detail in the near future; for now, here's a little tease picture of one of the stars of the movie:

In other news...

The "elevator pitch" for THE ARROYO continues to generate the best responses Jeremy and I have ever encountered for any project we have ever been associated with. (The term elevator pitch refers to the 40-second thumbnail description of the movie that you can give on the elevator ride up to the office.)

Interest in this film is white-hot among the few film insiders we have shared it with, and we continue to develop those relationships this week.

Finally, we have gotten off to a tremendous start! We have signed on enough of you Pioneers to meet all of our web-hosting and other operational expenses, and this week we continue to widen out our appeal and keep the membership steadily growing.

Jeremy and I have been, and always will be, comitted to utter transparency with regard to our plans and motives regarding you, our Citizen Producers. So let us briefly explain something that puts us in a bit of a quandry, and how and why we plan to respond.

Starting later this week, we will be presenting celebrity interviews. First up: KEVIN SORBO, of Hercules and Andromeda fame. He has a lot of terrific things to say about old and new Hollywood, the role of heroes in modern society, the decline of masculinity, earned effort, and a whole lot more. This content is made available by you, our citizen producers, and once we reach a critical mass of memberships it will be made available only to you. But until then, we are trying to find the best way to provide members-only content, versus the need to promote the Declaration model and sign on new members.

So what we would like to do is this: take a strong 10 minutes of the interview, and push those out wide on YouTube to generate interest and bring new potential members to the site. Then, all of the "inside" parts of the interview -- in this case, Kevin talking about his inspirations as an actor, his work on Andromeda and Hercules, etc. -- will be members-only content available only for our Citizen Producers (and only for registered members of PJTV, who is co-producing this content, at least for the time being).

Hopefully, this will be the best of both world's: a solid, widely-available interview, coupled with even more members-only content available just for you.

The Kevin Sorbo interview is utterly mesmerizing -- at least, I think it was. That will be up later this week. Until then, we can't wait to hear from you. Let us know what you think in the comments section below, or in the TOWN HALL forums.

More soon. And, as always, thanks for your support and for being a Pioneer.

Bill