(1888PressRelease)
August 14, 2007 - Martha Waggoner, The Associated Press
WILMINGTON - This cop drama is filmed mostly on weekends, when the actors aren't working day jobs. And no one, including the creators, earns a living wage.
But those obstacles hardly indicate that "Port City P.D." isn't successful, in its own way. The gritty show has found its tech-savvy niche in a time when "Lil' Bush," a cartoon spoof of President Bush originally made for viewing on cell phones, can make the leap to Comedy Central.
The show focuses on two former hotshot investigators now assigned to seemingly dead-end cases. Its pilot episode cost a mere $500, but the show now has a $3,000-per-episode budget courtesy of Adam Curry, aka the "podfather" and founder of Podshow Inc. The Internet site carries about 9,000 episodic programs. PCPD is one of the top 20 downloaded shows.
The show, filmed in North Carolina, is the brainchild of friends Charles Stewart Jr., 31, and Shaun O'Rourke, 32, who met at Riverside High School in Durham in the early 1990s.
Stewart worked as a videographer at a television studio when he and O'Rourke, a struggling actor whose past jobs include certified vehicle safety and emissions inspector, came up with the idea. They wanted to create a show made just for podcasting.
"I was kind of the geek that was online a lot," Stewart said. "And I started seeing how podcasting was going. I realized the direction was a lot of audio, but there were a few things of video, but it was mostly like people messing around in their living room with a camera."
The friends agreed it was the perfect delivery method for their cop show.
Subscribe once, and the show is delivered to your computer, where the pod world can watch at its convenience.
"I'm so amazed at what they're doing with cameras, a couple of computers and for me," said Curry, who founded Podshow in 2005. "I watch 'CSI' and I watch 'Port City' because of its gritty, macabre humor."
Curry, a former MTV video jock, taught himself the AppleScript programming language, then created the program known as iPodder. He said Podshow markets its programs through advertising and product placement, where products are used by actors or featured during the show.
Not in it for the money
So far, O'Rourke and Stewart estimate their "salaries" from "Port City P.D." in the low hundreds, but Curry predicts that will change as Podshow's marketing takes over.
"They're no longer taking money out of their own pockets," he said. "So some people in their group are starting to make money. I'm not saying people are becoming overnight Hollywood millionaires."
Until the money starts rolling in, day jobs pay the bills. Co-star Raymond Shepard is a loan processor, while O'Rourke worked this summer in the production office of a movie being filmed on the Screen Gems lot in Wilmington. Stewart, the director and co-creator of "Port City P.D.," continues to freelance as a videographer.
Others involved in the show work in restaurants or coffee shops or as disc jockeys.
Stewart and O'Rourke started Eleven Bravo, a company named after Stewart's light infantry unit during his five years in the Army, that produced a seven-episode first season. Podshow provided financing after the first four episodes.
The 16 episodes in the second season will be shorter -- 15 minutes compared to the 22- to 30-minute shows featured in the first season -- because technology in much of the country hasn't caught up with the hip quotient of podcasting.
Too many people are still on dial-up, and the download time for a 30-minute show was too long and too frustrating, Stewart and O'Rourke said.
The show, which focuses on the characters of Detective Alex Dekker, played by O'Rourke, and Detective Williams, played by Shepard, will change for the second season, which begins July 27. The creators feared the show became "too Hollywood" in the first season.
That description seems a bit heavy-handed for a show whose third episode cost $125. "It was a lot of talking," Stewart said.
And the most expensive episode before Podshow intervened, the second show, cost $849, O'Rourke said. "We had a guy get shot and go through a pane-glass door, and that cost money. I think it was $400 just for that."
Feedback can be immediate, with fans posting comments on the show's Web site. One fan dissed a story line involving an imaginary psychologist as "too cliche." Another described it as: "AMAZING. I've never seen content like this in a podcast."
In the second season, focus will shift from O'Rourke and Shepard's characters to the ensemble cast.
The episodes will focus on a serial killer who murdered a lead character at the end of the first season.
