It's not just HBO, it's a message

Web taking advantage of digital platforms

By MICHAEL SCHNEIDER

"The Addiction Project" has already had a profound impact inside HBO's offices. Now, the pay cabler hopes it has the same effect on the general population.

HBO is taking advantage of emerging digital platforms -- and a few more familiar, traditional ones -- to saturate the media with an important message: Addiction is a "chronic relapsing brain disease that is treatable."

"I'm not sure how TV changes the world," says exec producer (and HBO documentary chief) Sheila Nevins. "But this has changed my life and the life of my workmates and friends."

Nevins says she heard from a wide variety of co-workers at HBO's New York headquarters, all of whom had a story of addiction to share.

"As we talked about it in the building, everyone had a kid, a father, a relative who has been impacted by addiction," she says. "I don't think in my career I've ever dealt with any issue in which everyone had a story -- and everyone had a question and misinformation. This became a personal experience, helping colleagues and reaching out to the audience."

Nevins said the project gave her a "real education" on the disease: "It was like going to school on my own job."

It soon became apparent to her and producers John Hoffman and Susan Froemke that this was a bigger undertaking than just another documentary.

"The Addiction Project" preems March 15 on HBO with the feature-length docu "Addiction." (HBO will offer its signal free to subs over the course of the weekend on participating cable systems.) But that's just the start.

To make sure viewers get the message, HBO will immediately offer all 14 parts of the "Addiction" docu series (including 13 short films in addition to the main doc) on its HBO On Demand service, as well as available for streaming on an accompanying website (which has already launched).

At the same time, a four-DVD set containing the entire film series will hit stores on March 20, and a companion book ("Addiction: Why Can't They Just Stop?") is available in stores.

The 14-part series will also be available for podcast downloads -- allowing viewers to manually transport the films. And more traditionally, HBO and its multiplex channels will air all 14 parts.

Taking advantage of so many emerging outlets, HBO couldn't have put together a project with the size and scope of "Addiction" until now.

"We started realizing how much valuable material we had that lent itself to shorter forms," Hoffman says. "We started looking at the changing times, that the medium had caught up with this content that we could cater and really craft the content to different platforms."

As a result, promotion for "The Addiction Project" urges the public to "watch it/stream it/own it/read it/view it."

The main "Addiction" doc includes the work of filmmakers such as Jon Alpert, Liz Garbus and Rory Kennedy, Eugene Jarecki, Barbara Kopple and D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

Some of their work is expanded in the 13 mini-docs. By offering everything on the Internet, DVD and On Demand at once, the net can allow viewers to choose topics that might be more applicable to them. That includes subjects such as "The Adolescent Addict," "Getting An Addict into Treatment: The Craft Approach" and "South Boston Drug Court."

"There's no reason people should watch this in a linear fashion," Hoffman says. "The stand-alone episode on adolescent addiction provides so much info, but if your husband is drinking too much, why would you have to wait until the seventh episode?

"TV doesn't often think this way," he adds. "To be really steering people to very narrowly defined topics is an unusual opportunity in TV. We told the network that we needed to make all of this stuff available simultaneously."

Another benefit that HBO afforded the filmmakers: the ability to go after the insurance industry without any worry of advertiser recourse. The doc faults insurance providers for failing to give parity to addiction as a mental health problem in the same vein as physical health problems.

"We have no fear of pissing off the major health insurers," Hoffman says. "We're happy to generate a live discussion about this problem."

"Addiction" was produced in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Hoffman, who came to the project with little knowledge about the roots of addiction, spent a year researching with Froemke.

"The fact that HBO, a highly regarded network, would choose to look at addiction and at that struggle, says a lot," Hoffman says.

For Nevins, it's also personal.

"My own family was impacted by addiction," she says. "And I felt I didn't know anything. I felt a little helpless. I figured, if I'm feeling this way, what about my audience?"

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117960878.html

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