08/01/93 San Francisco Examiner (Copyright 1993)

IT'S MIDDAY at South Park, and the gracious green commons is humming with eclectic energy. Chattering moms push their prams past faded Victorians and gleaming new condos. Shirtless young men erecting scaffolding for a TV shoot draw the bemused attention of lunchtime crowds at trendy Ecco and the South Park Cafe. A brownbagger on a park bench, lost to the world, taps away on his laptop computer.

Welcome to Multimedia Gulch, San Francisco's burgeoning nexus of high-tech innovation, entrepreneurial overdrive and artistic ambition. Here, visionary "new media" that combine television and computers with compact disc technology take shape, and former investment bankers, plugged-in painters, video game whiz kids and assorted oddballs conspire to create the interactive, electronic future.

Stuart Cudlitz, creative director for new media at Colossal Pictures and a contributing designer, writer and artist for WIRED magazine, observes: "South Park is becoming a media mall. At lunch time there used to be a lot of working guys hanging out, drinking beer; now it's packed with brown bagging digi-wannabes eating burritos and drinking coffee. The fact is you couldn't plan to build South Park as it is; you couldn't afford to. Its had to grow naturally, one culture on top of another, in many ways similar to Silicon Valley's development ."

Walk five minutes in any direction from Second and Bryant and you run into dozens of new-media enterprises, plus more traditional media that chronicle their growth.

In a Second Street loft, they're knocking out walls to accommodate the growing staff of Wired, a magazine for "the digital generation." Across the street, phone book-thick PC World magazine operates out of the IDG building, as does the next-generation video game company PF. Magic. At tony Gold's Gym on the ground floor, the young and ambitious burn off stress and calories on the Stairmasters. On nearby Federal Street, the intouch group is just now rolling out an interactive audio and video kiosk it plans to install in 2,000 music stores nationwide.

Farther afield, at Seventh and Townsend, cutting-edge computer animators at Xaos are creating special effects for movies and TV ads, while out near Hunters Point, computer artists at Colossal Pictures are conjuring visual magic for MTV's "Liquid Television."

The heart of Multimedia Gulch, though, is South Park, where old-time sea captains built their Victorian mansions and black and Filipino families later found housing they could afford.

Today, Bay Bridge traffic thunders by, virtually overhead, while the renovated red brick factories andwarehouses below buzz with entrepreneurial energy.

"This has always been a media neighborhood," observes PF. Magic's Ben Calica, a 30ish senior product manager. "But the media have changed. You have had printers, typesetting and photographic services, then video. It's a mix of light industry and artists. This area has cheap, big space that was undervalued."

That combination enticed Joshua Kaplan, the 31-year-old president of intouch, to move from Boston while he was still in his mid-20s. Kaplan worked as a computer industry analyst for Robertson Stephens & Co. until he dreamed up the idea for a multimedia information kiosk.

Kaplan had his brainstorm on a trip to Switzerland, where he saw traditional record store listening booths and thought, why not update the concept by combining existing technology: video, photography, compact disc sound and animation?

The result, called an i.Station, uses an interactive touch-screen to allow music store patrons to sample from 32,000 CDs through headphones. Mounted in an eyeball-shaped case atop a vertical column and activated with a bar-coded plastic card, the i.Station also provides liner notes, reviews and titles of other releases by artist or genre.

Kaplan, a brisk fellow wearing shoes with no socks and a beeper on his belt, says it took "50,000 man-hours to compile the music and millions in development money" - some of it from Esprit's Susie Tompkins - to bring the kiosks to market. Counting dozens of San Francisco Conservatory of Music students who choose the CD tracks - and swarm intouch's office like Santa's elves - the company employs 100 people.

The video game industry, so important in helping to fuel the growth of Silicon Valley, is also embracing multimedia.

PF. Magic, a startup entertainment company that moved to San Francisco from Foster City 18 months ago to plug into the synergy of Multimedia Gulch, has cut development deals with Republic Pictures and AT&T.

Creative director Rob Fulop , who was at Atari in the glory days of the late '70s, and "went through the first wave of video," has developed a new video game for three or more adult players. Called "3rd Degree," it is played on a TV monitor modified for a CD-ROM format and is set for fall release.

A magic act and game show fanatic as a kid, Fulop describes "3rd Degree" as a modern parlor game "that people do together." It's designed to break down the couch-potato passivity and isolation of traditional TV-watching.

"3rd degree" sets up witty hypothetical situations and presents them with photographs and video clips of actors and recorded sound, all activated by players' choices. Four of us played the game one recent afternoon, passing a remote controller from hand to hand. A recorded voice addressed each player by name after we signed on. When the first three contestants turned out to be men, the voice intoned "Welcome to Testosterone Central!"

One game situation: You are renting an adult video and your prim former schoolteacher walks into the shop. What do you do? What do you think your fellow players would do?

"The game is stocked with local actors," says Fulop. "It's all done with Bay Area talent."

Indeed it is. Comedian Dexter Madison, photographer Mikkel Aalund and writer Reed Kirk Rahlman - homeboys all - are among the creative contributors to the game.

Fulop hired Rahlman, a veteran of the Ringling Bros. Clown College and the local improvisational comedy troupe Faultline, to write "3rd Degree's" script. Rahlman cooked up variations on 60 embarrassing situations.

MULTIMEDIA'S potential to generate jobs in an age of downsizing has both the public and private sectors aquiver. Last December, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution praising multimedia as a key element of the information society, and the Redevelopment Agency rained $5,000 on the newly created San Francisco Multimedia Development Group, a trade organization that helps the high-tech startups get on their feet. SFMDG also has a growing list of corporate patrons, such as Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Pacific Bell and Microsoft. San Francisco, says Tim Boyle, the trade group's acting executive director, "is the recognized capital of multimedia in New York, Hollywood and Tokyo."

No one knows for sure how many people work full- and part-time in Multimedia Gulch. The number 3,000 is bandied about, with scant documentation. Similarly, no one knows whether San Francisco will always be the industry epicenter.

But Boyle likes The City's chances because, he says, San Francisco has a deep pool of "authoring" talent needed to supply the content for multimedia products: "We need the storytelling skills of a print community, supported by programmers, both of which we have."

And multimedia needs visual artists - people like Michael Tolson of Xaos Tools, sister company of Xaos Inc. (pronounced chaos, as in mathematical chaos theory) and provider of special effects and signature looks for ads and films.

Tolson, a lanky, well-spoken man whose card identifies him as "principal scientist," is a painter who studied math and physics in college and "had mathematical ideas about images." He learned "to program an old mainframe IBM computer" so he could use computers to make art.

Tolson, who has a book of Titian's work on his desk as he talks, works in a fluid, colorful visual style that XAOS spokeswoman Linda Jones - herself an artist - calls "organic." It distinguishes XAOS' work for commercial clients like Nike, Michelin Tires and the Mill Valley Film Festival. It also differentiates XAOS from what Jones calls the "hard-edged sterility" of much computer animation. Tolson describes his computer work as "painterly images in a medium that has no paint and no surfaces."

THAT SOUNDS eerily abstract. But the multimedia scene was concrete enough to lure American expatriates Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto, who roamed Europe for 10 years, to San Francisco, where they launched WIRED, the unofficial organ for the new-media explosion, early this year.

WIRED has only published three bi-monthly issues so far, but the magazine has already drawn national attention for its cutting-edge coverage of the new technologies and related social issues. Rossetto, the editor/publisher - laconic, gray-maned, in a black sweat shirt and running shoes - says that WIRED "is on the cusp of breaking even." But being an authoritative resource for leaders and opinion-makers, he avers, is more important than sheer growth.

Metcalfe, the magazine's tall, elegant president, says WIRED aims to go beyond the product news and reviews that dominate consumer computer publications and the bottom-line mentality of the business press.

"WE WANT to cover the personalities, the passions, the idiosyncrasies of the most colorful people on the planet today," she says. "We are looking at a group of people in their wholeness."

That sounds a bit abstract, too. But Rossetto insists that "a lot of the stuff we're talking about will become mainstream very quickly."

The question is, how quickly? The widely publicized creative ferment in hotbeds like Multimedia Gulch and President Clinton's proclamations about the coming "information superhighway" have raised sky-high expectations. The South Park startups have already been declared the next Silicon Valley, and even the next Hollywood, by some of the more excitable elements of the press. Disappointment is bound to set in unless these new enterprises begin delivering soon on some of the lofty promises.

Industry insiders say they aren't fazed a bit. David Feldman, director of product development for PF. Magic, observes: " "Birth of a Nation' appeared something like 27 years after the advent of motion pictures. Multimedia has only been around for four years. Yet, people are biting their nails, saying "When is it going to happen?' "

Colossal Pictures' Stuart Cudlitz allows that all this attention puts intense pressure on multimedia's creators. But he says he doesn't mind if the public in effect looks over his shoulder while he works.

"As a mural-maker in the '70s, I was used to having people peer over my shoulder," he shrugs. "As a filmmaker it became part of the process. It's certainly true for the theater arts as well." The buzz, the anticipation, says Cudlitz, is no bother at all. "It just means it's working."