Scott Zakarin

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Scott Zakarin is an American writer and producer. In 1995 he was an aspiring filmmaker from New York who had been directing television commercials for advertising agency Fattal & Collins. He convinced his employer to back the idea of an interactive fiction site called The Spot, the first such site to add photographs and video, and the first to be ad-supported. The site premiered early in June of 1995 and ran through the early summer of 1997.

The business model Zakarin developed for The Spot influenced the Internet dot com boom that followed. However, some of the expectations of those involved in the early days of online entertainment proved to be premature. Zakarin and his creative team left the site about 10 months after its launch because of creative differences with its owners. The company which took control of The Spot, American Cybercast, spun off from Fattal & Collins into a separate entity and attracted millions in venture capital, but eventually proved unable to turn its sizable audience for The Spot and other companion sites into a reliable advertising revenue stream. American Cybercast went bankrupt at the beginning of 1997, and the Spot site was purchased by others who attempted to operate it on a reduced budget. Eventually The Spot itself folded, its last original episode going on line at midnight on July 1, 1997. Zakarin had long since separated himself from any creative involvement with The Spot, although he did attempt to purchase the rights to it at the time of American Cybercast's closure. An attempt at revival of The Spot in 2004-05 under the owners who did acquire the site's intellectual property seven years earlier also failed. That left the site dormant and offline once again--although its original 1995-97 run, and the creative contribution of Zakarin and the rest of his original team, are still fondly remembered by many of its 1990s-era fans.

Zakarin's later projects under his new company Lightspeed Media, included a site called "Grape Jam". The corporate office of Lightspeed Media, in true dot com fashion, was an actual two story house in Culver City, only a stone's throw away from the Sony Pictures studio. Many celebrities such as Leonard Nimoy and Dean Kane, would visit the house with the intention of getting somehow involved in creating original web content. As original web soaps didn't bring in much revenue themselves, Zakarin and his staff contracted to design and maintain corporate web sites such as Playboy TV, Activision, and All Sport. While not as huge of a hit as The Spot, it did attract the attention of ex NBC President Brandon Tartikoff who convinced Zakarin to let AOL purchase his small company.

Zakarin built and launched Entertainment Asylum for AOL's Greenhouse Networks. This was short lived, as AOL closed down the web house and via armed-guard, escorted the staff to their desks for personal belongings only, then back to entry way, before handing over their last pay check. Zakarin then turned back to more traditional media in producing, directing and representing movies for a company he cofounded called Creative Light Media. That firm operated from 1998 until 2006 distributing and producing independent films, some of which Zakarin wrote, produced and directed. It also produced several critically regarded documentaries for theatrical, video and cable release including "Mind Meld" (featuring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy discussing their Star Trek characters and experiences) and "Comic Book; The Movie." Creative Light also compiled, and distributed for video and cable, a collection of classic Sid Caesar comedy programs from material originally produced and broadcast for NBC-TV in the 1950s.

Zakarin returned to his new media roots in 2006, creating movies and internet shows for the internet with projects including Soup of the Day, The NoHo, HiHo and WeHo Girls, The VanNuys Guys and Shatnervision.

In 2006 Zakarin cofounded a new company named Iron Sink Media[1] which premiered its new movie named Charlie Cobb's Flashbash on 2 April 2007. Still more recently, the company has won considerable press with its current (fall 2007) online series, "Roommates."

Zakarin's work also is a building block in the development of Alternate reality games.[citation needed]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Iron Sink Media

[edit] External links