Raising Caen…
My first home of record in California was San Francisco, and the newspaper of record then, as it is now, was the San Francisco Chronicle. Love it or loath it, in those days, millions of Bay Area residents wouldn’t dream of starting their day without first checking out the latest round of “three-dot journalism” from world famous columnist Herb Caen.
By the time I arrived on the scene, Caen was well into the backside of a long and distinguished career. A perspective that often left him more than a little cranky about many of the happenings and events taking place in his beloved Baghdad by the Bay, as he fondly referred to San Francisco.
More than a few of Caen’s critic’s—themselves often the target of some of his more scandalous items—began referring to him as the Chronicle’s resident “curmudgeon,” a title Caen gleefully took up and embraced for all it was worth.
Often defined as an “ill-tempered (and frequently old) person full of stubborn ideas or opinions,” a journalistic curmudgeon in the mold of Herb Caen is exactly what I began to feel like during the final days of San Diego Comic-Con International 2008.
The Reason Being…
One of the true joys of covering Comic-Con is that during my week-long stay in San Diego, I have the pleasure of sharing digs with o-meon associate editor Kenneth Larsen.
“There’s a reason that more than 90 percent of Comic-Con’s attendees are under 30,” I told Kenneth, while accepting the glass of Pinot Noir he handed me as I walked through the door of his flat late on the evening of the third day of Comic-Con.
“They’re the only ones I know of who’d put up with this sort of crappy treatment,” I went on, as memories of Herb Caen echoed in my head.
Crabby old coot or not, more than a week after returning from San Diego, I stand by that observation. Twenty-somethings have yet to learn what many of us, if we’re lucky, begin to understand in our thirties. Going along to get along and not making waves is just a load of hooey. There’s no excuse for crappy service and even less reason to accept poor value for money spent.
Comic-Con, in my cranky opinion, has become a victim of its own success. When I first started covering this giant geek love-in, people were advised to go early and avoid Saturdays. Saturday was the day people from around the Southwest could attend without having to take a day off from work and, therefore, was the most jam-packed day of the Con.
This year, all four days of Comic-Con were sold out well in advance. Wednesday, before the conference programs began, saw wait times in access of three hours for advance badge pickup. The following day, wait times reportedly exceeded four hours, and by this time the conference programs were in full swing.
Everyday was Saturday at this year’s Comic-Con as crowds approaching 65,000, the maximum capacity of the massive, six-block long San Diego Convention Center, strained everything from street traffic, food service, crowd control, and the air conditioning nearly to the breaking point.
While the official position of the City of San Diego is that it is both pleased and proud to be the host city of Comic-Con, all you had to do was stand near the dozens of police and fire marshals struggling to maintain order in and around the convention center to discover that it’s an honor many of them are ready to share with someplace else, say Las Vegas.
In fact, during my four-day tour, rumors of Comic-Con’s probable relocation were the main topic of conversation overheard throughout the convention center and adjacent Gas Lamp District.
Even with streets closed and traffic rerouted lower San Diego still experienced nearly day long
human gridlocck throughout Comic-Con 2008.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
Hobson’s Choice…
In past years, the most difficult decision faced by Comic-Con attendees was between competing seminars. Each hour of every day, the many conference rooms of the convention center are filled with seminars and presentations on a variety of engaging topics. It was not unusual to have to decide between a talk by famous writer/artist/animator A or a presentation by publisher/producer/studio B.
Now that the entertainment industry has all but taken over the Con, many sessions were in such great demand that the choice became how many sessions to sit out, while standing/sitting in line waiting to get into that “must see” presentation.
Because Comic-Con officials do not clear conference rooms between sessions, Con goers have, over the years, developed the habit of invading a program room often two or three presentations before the one they actually want to attend. The end result can be, and often is, thousands of people patiently waiting in hours-long queues just for a chance to get into a conference room.
One day, I arrived at a 1,500-seat theatre-style conference room set up in Ballroom 6 around 5 p.m. for the 8:30 screening of two SciFi Channel season premieres. Not a panel discussion with writers and stars mind you, just a simple screening of two shows that would debut on the cable outlet the following week.
The corridor was barely navigable, and security people were relentlessly chanting, to those not already in line, to keep moving.
When I arrived, there was a presentation already taking place in the large conference room and another scheduled to take place between then and the SciFi Channel screenings. I asked the Comic-Con staffer at the door where the queue for the 8:30 screenings would begin. I was told that there was already a generic queue for the Ballroom 6 theatre.
“The room’s full now,” the staffer told me, “and the line was closed off at 3:30.”
“For this session?” I asked.
“For the remainder of the day,” I was told.
Bear in mind that unlike me—I had media credentials—those hundreds of people lined up for hours against the walls of the San Diego Convention Center had all paid between $25 and $75 to sit around and do and see nothing while gambling that their one-, two-, three-, or four-day membership fee might be able to get them into the session they’d originally come to see.
Nothing to See Here…
Con attendees weren’t the only ones feeling the heat from overcrowding. Warner Brothers spent a few thousand dollars designing a booth to showcase, for passersby, the stars from several of their upcoming productions, such as the new HBO series True Blood and the returning NBC series Chuck.
The problem came when people tried to stop and take pictures of stars, such as Anna Pacquin, Zachary Levi, Joshua Gomez, and Adam Baldwin.
This year, after being chastised in the local media for poor crowd control at previous Comic-Cons, the San Diego Fire Marshall put everyone on notice that bottlenecks of any kind would not be tolerated.
While far safer for all parties, this meant that, no matter how much you paid to get in or how long you were willing to wait, only a lucky few inside the booth really got to see the Warner Brothers celebs as those ever relentless security personnel kept everyone moving past the booth without stopping.
Actor Adam Baldwin, from the NBC TV series Chuck, was kind enough to pose for a picture even as a concerned "handler" looks on.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
How Long Was It?...
This truly was the year of the long, long queue at Comic-Con. The Convention Center’s Hall H is large enough to house a Boeing 747. The cavernous hall seats 6,500 so many people that most end up watching the live panel discussions on closed circuit TV screens around the hall, because the distance from the stage to the many seats is literally hundreds of yards.
On Saturday, the cast of NBC’s Heroes headlined the first Hall H panel discussion from 10:30 to 11:45. The second panel, scheduled for noon, was a presentation by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, executive producers of ABC/Disney’s hit series Lost.
If you arrived at Hall H at say 10:00 a.m., planning on securing a good seat for Lost at noon, you were in for a big surprise.
According to media reports, audiences for Saturday’s Comic-Con Hall H presentations began queuing up at 1:00 a.m. By ten in the morning, there was a six-switchback, zigzagging line a block long outside of Hall H. It snaked its way behind the convention center and ran the length of the facility. Only those in line as far back as the first fifth of the convention center made it inside for the first program.
Bait and Switch…
Frustration, too, seemed to be running higher than usual at this year’s Comic-Con, with what appeared to be a significant increase in the number of absentee speakers.
There will always be scheduling conflicts and traffic tie-ups at an event the size of Comic-Con. Last minute changes to a number of its scheduled programs have been part of Comic-Con for at least as long as the major studios have been participants.
This was, however, the first year I can remember ever hearing a producer say, that despite a star’s name appearing in the program announcement, the celebrity in question was never expected to appear at the Con.
This year, there were also a number of speakers who refused to participate in the panel discussion they’d traveled to San Diego to be a part of. Reportedly, several well-known, performers from Los Angeles refused to be associated with programs that were, contrary to what they had been led to believe, commercial in nature rather than educational.
Rather than having their participation seen as an endorsement of the services being offered, for a price to Con attendees, the performers in question turned around and headed back to L.A.
Elvira Mistress of the Dark is hustled along an exterior walkway to avoid nonpaying autograph seekers.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
Lord Only Knows…
There’s absolutely no doubt that Comic-Con is a pop culture phenomenon. That’s both the good news and the bad news, for most such phenomenon burn out sooner or later. In addition to the overwhelming crowds, a few additional cracks are beginning to show in the Con’s well-worn patina.
Celebrity access and the autographs and pictures that go with them used to be a Comic-Con staple. As recently as last year’s Con, the casts of NBC’ Chuck and the SciFi Channel’s Eureka stepped off the stage and waded into the waiting crowds. The stars included Chuck Executive Producer and writer McG who freely signed virtually everything shoved in their faces and posed with fans for half again as many pictures.
Pandemonium nearly broke out as various Lost cast members and stars, like Robert Downey Jr., made their way across the exhibition floor for booth appearances and everyone got to take pictures. Of course, that pandemonium was one of the things the Fire Marshall was taken to task for.
Now, with few exceptions, there’s almost no such thing as a free-range celebrity. All high-profile programs feature secure, guarded entry and exit ways for celebrity panelists, virtually guaranteeing separation from the fans.
Autographs and photo ops are now mostly for sale, and even media access has been heavily curtailed. The bigger stars work the exhibit floor either for their employers, like the aforementioned Warner Brothers, or the professional autograph dealers, who had attendees lined up like kids in a mall waiting to see Santa Claus, at $25 a pop, to say hello to the stars of Torchwood and several StarTrek series.
Upstairs in the “autograph area” over the course of the convention, a dozen or so Z-listers whiled away the hours swapping tales with one another between increasingly sporadic sales of autographed headshots.
I retuned from Comic-Con 2008 with a whopper of a head cold. It left me in bed or on the sofa coughing, sniveling, and sneezing for four days. Between that and all the things I found wrong with this year’s geekout, you’d be right to wonder if I’ll ever attend another Con.
What?...and miss my chance to be cranky and crabby for another year!
C’ya real soon!
