NTSF:SD:SUV:: Premiere

The hilarious new National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle, aka NTSF:SD:SUV:: premieres tonight on Adult Swim with the epic first episode, “Mexican Space Shuttle.”  So break out the no-doze, because when the clock strikes 12:15 am, NTSF:SD:SVU:: will go from being a fictional television show on the hospital drama spoof Childrens Hospital to real-life police procedural spoof. To put it simply, NTSF:SD:SUV is to CSI what Childrens Hospital is to Grey’s Anatomy.

Like the show it spun off of, NTSF:SD:SUV:: (whose full title looks like it belongs in the now-defunct analogies section of the SATs) is chock full of performers who are no stranger to My Damn Channel.  For example, here's NTSF cast member Martin Starr getting all his teeth knocked out by David Wain.  Plus, Executive Producer Jonathan Stern is one of the men responsible for both Wainy Days and Horrible People, writing and directing a number of Wainy Days episodes, including this one.

So watch it every Thursday night at 12:15am on Adult Swim!

---

Michael Ian Black series shoot today

It's 5a in San Francisco. We've got a non-slouchy 5:30a crew call for a full day of shooting in a city we love.

Michael Ian Black is finally starring in his own My Damn Channel series. We're so happy our face muscles hurt. You'll see why when our show goes live in December.

Our producer is our mega mainman Jon Stern, who gifts you Wainy Days, Horrible People, Childrens Hospital and everything we love.

Michael Ian Black is the kind of Slash King we worship: comedian/actor/writer/director/twitter lord.

His body o' work creates a major fanbase of people we want to hang out with. Evidence includes the genius magic of The State, Stella, Michael and Michael Have Issues and more. And Michael is Chief Content Officer of a co. we're co-conspiring with now...please partake in the wonders of the 24-hour live comedy ticker, WitStream. Ta da.

---

We're casting in San Francisco RIGHT NOW!

San Francisco and Bay Area people!  My Damn Channel is casting for a BIG SHOOT in San Francisco THIS WEEK!  We want and need YOU.  Here is the breakdown:


Looking for Real People to talk about their favorite TV shows for an interview-style web series. One-day shoot in San Francisco:

1. A Fan of the reality show Hoarders (who must also be a hoarder)
2. A devoted Dexter Fan
3. A Fan of the reality show Bridezillas (who must also be a bride-to-be)
4. A Fan of the reality show Deadliest Roads (who must also be a truck driver)
5. A Fan of the reality show Little Miss Perfect (who must also be a Pageant mom)
6. A Fan of the reality show Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (who must also be a chef)

 
Must be available for:

-Audition Monday, November 15th
-Call Backs Wednesday, November 17th
-Shoot Day Thursday, November 18th

 
Please respond with a photo and short description of yourself (pertaining to specific role).

 
Pay is $200 for the shoot day.

Please email your responses to rlcasting6@gmail.com.

If you or anyone you know fits the bill, please email us right away!

---

3 Years Ago: Launch Mode

Good things come in 3's.

3 years ago, a small band of true believers were readying the launch of My Damn Channel: 7/31/07.

Here are the inaugural videos from the first 3 artists we signed.

David Wain came in with the world's fastest pitch for Wainy Days: (paraphrasing) "I want to make out with the hottest women in the world and every date goes horribly wrong."

His first episode (a 3-parter) co-stars Elizabeth Banks as Shelly:


David Wain as David Wain, Elizabeth Banks as Shelly.



Harry Shearer was the first hero we signed. He sat in prosthetic makeup for over 4 hours to become Dick Cheney, singing sexy for Scooter Libby:


Harry Shearer as Dick Cheney.


We wanted music to marry comedy in our company from Day One. We turned to another brother and one of the best musicians and producers on the planet, Don Was.

Don's "Wasmopolitan Cavalcade of Recorded Music" is an earful of the best music you can't get anywhere else.

His first My Damn Channel production starred one of the smartest singer/songwriters we know, Jill Sobule:


Don Was, Rob Barnett, Jill Sobule, Warren Chao at the My Damn Channel west coast launch party, 2007.


Here's a rare, bonus video from the archives. Day one back on 7/31/07 also starred Big Fat Brain, the geniuses behind You Suck at Photoshop, and the web designers of all things DAMN. One of our only spoof vids looked 20 years into the FUTURE and poked our pals at Funny or Die, who had launched a few months earlier:



Matt Bledsoe, Troy Hitch

---

WAINY DAYS RIDES AGAIN

Thrills n chills yesterday on the set of WAINY DAYS. David Wain is shooting all new episodes for Season 4!

When we launched My Damn Channel 7/31/07, David was one of the first artists to believe we could build a home that re-wrote rules of how the show business is supposed to work.

Three seasons and 26 episodes later, this amazing man has created one of the best comedy series in the new world. We bow to HIM!

We've never once visited the set to play exec types with David and his producer, Jon Stern. They're too good at what they do to have us nosing around. The formula works - so why screw with it.....until yesterday.

Maria Diokno - our Director of Original Programming & one of the founding people inside our DAMN fam is leaving to move back to a new life in her native San Francisco. She's been the best co-con anyone can imagine. We're going to suck without her.

We decided Maria couldn't leave here without seeing David & Jon and company in action. And we ended up getting thrown into one of the new eps as extras.

All-new WAINY DAYS will premiere here this spring.

Get David's last feature film ROLE MODELS on DVD now - or else:  http://www.rolemodelsmovie.com/

---

SOCO MUSIC EXPERIENCE

Just back east coast & off the plane from our LA & San Diego shoots for My Damn Channel Music Nights presented by SoCo.

Yesterday was the all-day & til-Midnight SoCo Music Experience concert outdoors in San Diego.

(PHOTOS TO FOLLOW as soon as i get a lil schleepeee)

Props, respect & all terms of goodness to our sponsors, our hosts, the production team, our crew, our staff, all the musicians & the extra beautiful & fun-loving humans that made up a crowd that had to hit near 10,000 or more by the time we got to the headliners last night.

The SoCo Music Experience is touring the country with a festival that features live music outdoors, adult beverages, food, tents, games, and overall....a sexy good time.

Common headlined an impressive, eclectic line-up that went from hip hop to rock with The Black Keys, and then to uncategorizable, extremely funky, multi-flavored sets from Kinky and Saul Williams too. Slammin'.

Two stages all day - also featuring: Grand Ole Party, MC Flow, Shark Attack, The Silent Comedy, Buddy Akai, The Burning of Rome, & Lady Dottie and the Diamonds.

Grace was interviewing bands & the fans all day & all night, covering the scene.

Maria was running the My Damn Channel tent where we had way too much fun bonding with da fans - and giving away freebies including the ultra-rare YOU SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP tee-shirts, new My Damn Channel pins, and My Damn Channel TATTOOS.

We filmed all day for a new pilot series in development. The working title is: "LISTEN, KISS, MEDITATE." In a world with WAY too much noize - we're creating a new web series WITHOUT SOUND. Picture people from every walk o' life - doing three things that bring you one step further away from the madness & one step closer to SOUL. We filmed fans listening to music, kissing (passionately), and meditating. It's off the edit room to see if we're onto something great......or not.

Next SoCo Music Experience event....Madison, WI on 9/6 & we'll be at the Experience show in Albany, NY on 9/13!

---

FACE

They've got a new blog app in early launch mode. "The Night Feed" is there.

We're also putting all of this week's Southern California, Southern Comfort event details there.

Flying west this week to film "My Damn Channel Music Nights" in LA on the Sunset Strip during the week & down to San Diego this Saturday for the all-day/all-night SoCo Music Experience with Common, The Black Keys & about 10 other bands - our cameras, free tattoos, tee-shirts, Grace, Maria, Paul, Robert, Victoria, our crew, our cameras & your face on new programming we're filming now.

---

GO GONZO

If you experience a lack of inspiration, writer's block, anxiety about the boss, wars, lies, lost freedom, corruption, rejection, repression, fear and loathing...then write yourself a prescription and take it to the closest movie theatre showing "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," the new film directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney. Here's the trailer.



Gibney puts accuracy above glory in his retelling of the life of the man once able to conjure up enough powerful wordplay to push millions to reconsider a sense of ourselves, our government, and our freedom. 



Here's Thompson documenting the last great wave of freedom - from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream:

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

---

A ROTTEN ODOR

Before you start waving the flag today, eyeball some bad news in the morning paper.

Two heavyweight champions have been in a classic battle that effects our access to information and entertainment.

Our privacy just got thrown into the middle of the ring:

Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube

By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far.

The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors.

Full story here.


Summer Redstone                                     Eric Schmidt

("The Night Feed" note: I worked at Viacom's MTV, VH1, & CBS. My Damn Channel works with Google & YouTube. We're represented by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.)

Happy Independence Day.

---

ADAM CAROLLA

Posted in Adam Carolla, FREE FM with tags Adam Carolla, FREE FM, Howard Stern on 12/19/2007 9:19:00 PM by Rob Barnett

Last weekend, I googled the man I hired for the awesome little job called "replace Howard Stern." I found an anonymous blog that smelled like something rotten was stinking up the kitchen at CBS: http://somedudefromjersey.blogspot.com/2007/12/shit-in-my-awesome-sandwich.html Adam Carolla has a playbook filled with more options and winning strategies than any idiotic morning zoo or any hack program directors can ever hope to create. Danny Bonaduce was a desperate hail mary pass thrown by people too short-sited to see that it took Howard decades to build his radio empire. When Stern first syndicated, it took four years for him to lay waste to the competition. Adam was always first to say that Howard was irreplaceable. I couldn't have agreed more. But when 'the KING' departed for a new throne, someone was left having to figure out how to start over. That someone was me. I went home the night that I was given the ball and told my wife there was good news & bad news. The good news was that I was made President of CBS Radio programming. The bad news is that I had to figure out how to replace Howard. We'll skip the long stories here about who the REAL choice was for NY & save all that for later. The ONLY choice for LA, and for the west coast Stern stations was the man who'd been on Howard's show for scores of LIVE appearances - the man who rocked THE MAN SHOW with Brother Jimmy Kimmel - the man who made LOVELINE a latenight hit - the man with unique comic skills to improv and create immediate compelling content out of every scrap of raw material - the man who can build a house with his bare hands - and you get the drift: C-A-R-O-L-L-A. We gave Adam a new start in a new format called FREE FM. Our mission wasn't complex. Hire BIG talent and give them the support and freedom they need to build better radio on their own terms. People are sick of over-formatted radio with too many commercial interuptions. No breaking news there. Talent is the only answer to better ratings and revenues. But old media doesn't have a terrific track record backing talent. The current writers' strike is front page news that tells the same story in Hollywood. A great drama seems to be unfolding. Morning radio fans in LA, Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Sacramento, Reno, Fresno, Palm Springs, Portland (Oregon & Maine), Boise, and Pittsburgh wait to find out if Adam Carolla will be back on January 2nd. I'll lay down this bet with a song: Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying 'Tis you, 'tis you must go.

---