Besides being a movie star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been spending time trying to create an interactive web and television creation called “HitRECord.”
Introduced a year ago t the Sundance Film Festival, the new “HitRECord on TV” (Pivot, 10 p.m.) makes its debut on the young network tonight. The first episode has already picked up a lot of viewers, however, with more than a half million having seen the episode online in just five days.
Pivot executives are so excited about the reaction, network president Evan Shapiro announced a second season for it at the TV Critics Association winter press tour panel last week.
Yet the first clip shown to critics, from the second show, seemed most old fashioned: An old time song and dance number from Gordon-Levitt and Tony Danza. The finished product taken from citizen video phones to animated enhancements totals more than 160 contributions.
The old fashioned approach “matches my personal taste in a lot of ways in that I have a really eclectic taste in what I like to watch,” Gordon-Levitt says. “I don’t only like to watch romantic comedies or action movies. I like all kinds of movies, and with music, I don’t only like to listen to you know, I don’t only like to listen to De La Soul or only like to listen to Johnny Cash. I like to listen to all different kinds of music, and “HitRECord” is a way that I can really work on a variety of eclectic things.
“That diversity really makes me happy, and I think it’s conducive to our process, where we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world contributing to our collaborations. We’re going to get a diverse range of material, and a variety show is a perfect way to fit all of that into a television show.”
HitRecord began in 2005 as an open collaborative production company that grew out of making videos and music on the Internet, Gordon-Levitt says. “Slowly but surely, a community sort of sprouted up around this little website that we were running with a simple message board. And what we discovered was much more fun than just talking about the little videos I was making was having all the different people that were joining this message board make stuff together. And that was everybody’s sort of natural tendency anyway.”
In 2010 they decided to make some professional level productions that way, he says. “And we worked out a way to do it all legally with the intellectual property laws and do it in such a way that we could pay the artists who would contribute to our productions. And one of our goals back then in fact, kind of the last, most far reaching pie in the sky goal at that time when we started it was eventually maybe we could make a TV show that’s actually on television. And we’ve actually just been talking. We need to sit down again and set some new goals because we got there.”