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Suddenly you started to hear all sorts of wild, adrenaline-pumped predictions about companies like Pseudo and Medium4.com and DreamWorks-backed POP.com. You might even have checked out some of these sites yourself, more than a little curious to see what the future of digital entertainment looked like. But as Pseudo and the others learned all too painfully (amid layoffs or worse), you probably didn't find so-called online TV habit-forming. The speeds were too slow, the content wasn't there -- it was all hype.
But DEN would be different. Collins-Rector and Shackley had made a fortune in the mid-'90s from the sale of Concentric Research, an Internet service provider they founded together in Michigan. Though they had no entertainment experience, they did understand technology. Along with Pierce, a 17-year-old actor best known for such family fare as First Kid and The Mighty Ducks, they set out to produce online programming that would be nearly as satisfying over a standard phone line as it was via broadband. The timing was perfect, and their pitch fell on eager ears.
One former DEN staffer (who, like most of the ex-employees interviewed for this story, requested anonymity) recalls the arrival of Collins-Rector and Shackley in L.A.: "Chad was 24. Marc was, like, 40, and came out here from Michigan. The first thing they did was sort of hang out with this Hollywood crowd. The geeks want to be cool, and Hollywood wants the geeks' money, which I think is what the whole goddamned L.A. thing is about."
These particular geeks were an odd, unsavory bunch. Collins-Rector, by then well into his thirties, had moved to Michigan to be near Shackley, a teenager who eventually moved in with him. In Hollywood, they added to their merry band young Pierce, a pouty-faced youth who was the subject of a mildly homoerotic Web site and several lively chats. (His devotees on the Net, however, have turned on him with a vengeance since he became involved with the DEN scandal.) These were the self-proclaimed prophets of the new Web, when they were not busy throwing parties for their young male retinue.
The dot-com bubble of '98 and '99 helped power the company's early success. Although DEN never offered its shares to the public, numerous private investors and venture capitalists wanted a piece of the action. While the dot-coms listed on the Nasdaq exchange saw their share prices head for the sky, private companies like DEN watched money flow in through the doors, from investors who wanted to be on board for the initial public offering -- which would often bring the insiders their first big payoff.
"A lot of Hollywood was seeing an opportunity to get in on the Internet [wave] that had so far passed it by," says Joel Brand, who covered Bosnia for Newsweek before joining DEN to help set up and run its news division. Indeed, major movers in the entertainment industry -- such as studio heads Frank Mancuso and Terry Semel, producer (and onetime congressman) Michael Huffington, and actor Fred Savage -- elbowed their way up to sink money into DEN, investing alongside Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Chase Capital Partners, and Enron.
To the outside world, backing DEN was a brilliant play. "This revolution will not be televised," predicted USA Today under a headline announcing that DEN was hoping to be the MTV of the future. An article on The Industry Standard's Web site proclaimed that DEN was "Getting the Net Ready for Prime Time." To would-be employees, the idea of DEN was just as seductive. Eventually some 300 people -- most of them young, ambitious, and clever -- flocked to the company, eager to see how they could use the Web to rewrite the rules of mass communication. "There was certainly a lot of idealism at DEN, a lot of people who drank the Kool-Aid," Brand says. "People believed what management said about a revolution, and then they heard it echoed by the mainstream press. It was intoxicating."
DEN was on its way. "We always knew that when the history of entertainment on the Internet was written, DEN was going to be a whole chapter," Brand adds. "The question was, was it going to be a huge success -- or a cataclysmic failure?"
