I grew up watching the old Joe Franklin tv talk show on WOR in New York City. Franklin used to feature clips from old silent films; the place I first saw stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Fatty Arbuckle.
In a humorous asides, a couple of years ago I tried to get Joe Franklin to do a DSI for me, hoping that, since he faded away from the public eye years ago (over a decade since he was a radio host and nearly 15 years since his television show ended) he might be amenable to an interview.
But, he had a really snotty agent, whom I contacted on a really out of date website that looked like it had been made in 1994. The guy was a real character, something out of the great comedy film by Woody Allen, Broadway Danny Rose- a film about an out of his depths booking agent. The fellow was what is known, in cyber-terms, a Last Century Jones. He simply had no idea about how to market stuff in the 21st Century.
Our conversation went something like this: I'd ask if Franklin would be willing to do the interview, that I was a fan and would like to help the old man gain a popular foothold with a new generation of potential fans, given that the Franklin show had been off the air so many years and had never broken beyond the Northeast, in terms of viewership. Totally unawares of how obscure his client now was, the agent went into pure Allenesque schtick, telling me that Franklin had fans from 8 to 98. Furthermore, he was absolutely clueless about the power of the Internet and that there was no paradigm for the old culture of paying for what amounted to trivial information. He kept asking me what I was gonna do for him and Joe if Joe did me this favor. He then asked for a fee that was ridiculous, even had I the means to pay it.
The funny thing was that the agent had no clue that I was the one holding all the cards, that I had built an large audience in a new medium, one which the agent and his client had no clue of.
As a favor to an old tv fave of mine, and without any rancor over my idiotic treatment, though, I informed the agent about a little thing known as YouTube, and how it might behoove him to put up free clips of his client's old show online, and then try to market the best moments and interviews on DVD, and use the free YouTube clips as de facto commercials.
Well, it looks like the agent may have taken the first half of my advice, although, as I write this, there are no DVDs of Franklin material online.
Even if there were, though, something tells me I wouldn't get my fair cut from the agent for giving him a great marketing tip. C'est la vie!
This clip is from 1987, near the end of his show's run:
