SDCC'07: Brouhaha at the Beat.

Let me just say that I am a fan of Heidi MacDonald. I think she is witty and knowledgeable and teh Beat is on my daily read list. But something she wrote doesn't set right with me.

I was going to write this after her second SDCC '07 recap post but decided against it. Then there was something in her third post that pushed me over the edge.

Her first recap was seemed okay. Basically her saying how busy the con was and the usual stuff like that.

Her second recap was what caught my eye. About half way down, around the photo of Clive Owen, she relates how she got to the Warner Bros./Watchmen panel late (and by late, in all fairness, I mean 15 minutes early. In real life, arriving somewhere 15 minutes early would mean, well, that you were early. In con-reality, you are SOL if you haven't camped out. This brings up Bill's comic convention tip #1: If there is a panel, signing or event you wish to attend, show up at least 30-45 minutes before it starts, if not an hour to an hour and a half. Because everyone else will.).

She stands in line for a while.  Then they announce that the Fire Marshall is closing the room for fear of overcrowding, and people will be allowed in only when someone leaves. This didn't sit well with Heidi so she tries to go to the side door and try to get into the show using her press credentials. That doesn't work either because, well, the Fire Marshall had closed the room, meaning no one, press or not, was getting in and the Con did not have a press list..

But, the fact that some of the press received special wristbands led Heidi to beileve that she was being lied to. I'll let her words speak for themselves:

"“There is no press list,” said the Elite guy. And I admit, this really pissed me off. I am a grown up and you don’t need to lie to me. And in fact, the nice lady from Comic-Con said that if you were on the WB press list you would already have your wrist band and your pass."

This was later straightened out in this post by a SDCC spokesperson David Glanzer. Warners had a bunch of all-purpose passes that they deemed to give some out to the press. Other passes were probably given out to friends and familty of the panel members, etc. But they weren't press exclusive.

But what stinged me most was this comment Heidi made afterwards.

"I realize that thousands and thousands of people get “press passes” to Comic-Con and some of them are little dinky bloggers, and some of them are EW and the New York Times. And not all of them deserve equal access."

I don't think Heidi meant this as a insult to "little dinky bloggers", but rather to say that the powers that be at Warners would like to exclude the smaller folks.

However, if you look at it as is, it seems that Heidi almost feels insulted to be lumped with the "dinky little bloggers" and to be kept out of the room.

Now, I am a blogger. But I am also a columnist for a smaller comic news website (Broken Frontier) and review comics for a pop culture website (PopMatters). I certainly don't consider myself dinky. But I grant that compared to Heidi, who was an editor for Vertigo and Disney and is currently an editor at Publisher's Weekly, I am Mario Mendoza to her Reggie Jackson.

But, that being said, if the whole "Warner's only letting in certain press" was true, I'd probably have more of a right to be there that Heidi. Not being arrogant, but Heidi's main job is as an editor for a trade publication for book retailers and publishers. It would be hard for Warners to see how Publishers Weekly would be helpful in spreading the word about their Watchmen MOVIE. Warners was hoping for good word of mouth from movie websites and bloggers to spread the word to people who respect their opinion. Now my blog reaches all of five people. But Ain't It Cool, IGN and others reach far more. It make sense for Warners to include them over Heidi if you think about what they are trying to get out of the publicity.

But, since Warner's excluding certain members of the press didn't happen, I think this all boils down to SDCC growing bigger and faster than Heidi would like. In my speculation, it seems like Heidi was once a big fish in a large but managable pond to being a small fish in a humongous ocean. I gather this opinion, and that's all it is, an opinion which very much could be off base, from this statement of hers:

" I began to resent the fact that I had to stand in line at all. If 23 years of covering Comic-Con doesn’t get you a pass, what does? "

 The SDCC has grown into a beast. Hollywood has recognized it as a tool to market their films in their backyard and other press markets have been forced to cover these panels. If I was covering the con before covering the con was cool, I'd too be upset at these interlopers. But, unfortunately, it doesn't look like things will ever go back to the way they were.

The something in her third post that rankled me was this:

"I kept saying that the crowding at San Diego was the best ad possible for the New York Comic-con, and indeed, I heard many publishers saying they are saving their announcements and roll outs for that show. As I suspected, Europeans are beginning to choose New York over San Diego — it’s cheaper and all Euros love New York. The people who got turned away are going to spill over to other venues, that’s undeniable."

Now, I have never been to SDCC, but plan to next year (It's the one thing I want to do before I die. For some, it's climbing Mt. Everest, others, it's skin diving in the Maldives, for me, my Mecca is the SDCC), but from what Heidi described of the SDCC, it still seems better than the NYCC.

I HAVE been to both NYCC's. The first year was so crowded that the State Troopers, in addition to the Fire Marshall, had to shut the ENTIRE con down from allowing people in, instituting a strict one out, one in policy for the entire show. The organizers fixed this the next year by instilling a German military way of doing things which meant that crowds were microcontrolled to a point where if you bought your passes ahead of time. and were promised you could "proceed directly to the con floor", you still had to wait outside in the cold in a line for a half hour (or more) to get in.

The NYCC as I experienced is more poorly managed that what I read of the SDCC.This could be chalked up to a learning curve that comes about by starting a major comic con from scratch. SDCC grew and adjusted with the changes as it got bigger over time.

I should say this, because Heidi forgot to mention it, that the NYCC is put on by Reed Exhibitions, a subsidiary of Reed-Elsevier, which also owns Publisher's Weekly who Heidi works for. I'm not saying that she is being paid to shill for the PW's sister corporation. It could just be that her loyalty to her employer causes her to turn a blind eye to the foibles and problems that were existent at  the NYCC. (Although, since she was considered a member of the press, she didn't have to deal much with the controls place on crowd entry. My friends had press passes and could come and go as they pleased.) But regardless. NYCC has the same, if not worse, problems that SDCC is experiencing, from what I read. It is not the idyllic paradise that Heidi would have us believe.