‘Annoying Orange’ Tries for a TV Career

Sprint and Dole have paid to use his wisecracking cartoon creation in marketing campaigns, and Toys “R” Us, Radio Shack and J. C. Penney are rolling out related merchandise for the Christmas season.

But TV channels and movie studios have yet to bite on Mr. Boedigheimer’s videos, which feature the kitchen adventures of an animated orange with a sinister smile and his buddies from the fruit and vegetable bins. And Mr. Boedigheimer, 31, isn’t waiting for their courtship. After receiving lukewarm responses to his informal overtures for an “Annoying Orange” television show, he opted for an alternative route: he made his own pilot, financed not by a studio or network, but by the management company representing him.

“The reaction is always, ‘I see why it resonates in a bite-sized way on the Web, but how is this a full-blown TV show?’ ” said Dan Weinstein, one of Mr. Boedigheimer’s managers.

Maybe it isn’t. There is certainly no guarantee that a cartoon orange can become the next SpongeBob SquarePants.

But Web video was supposed to be Hollywood’s greatest laboratory ever, a place to incubate ideas cheaply and take some of the stomach-churning guesswork out of selecting concepts for shows and movies — instead of spending millions to develop entertainment that more often than not flops straight out of the gate.

Six years after the proliferation of Web video, the number of entertainment concepts that have moved from Internet shorts to successful television shows are few. Hollywood still largely relies on its time-tested methods of finding hits: scripts funneled through agencies, young comedians, books and magazine articles. “The industry needs to continue to take risks on fresh ideas and people and, to that end, figure out how to better mine the Web,” said Jeff Gaspin, former chairman of NBC Universal Television. There are instances when it has worked. One home run was Nickelodeon’s “Fred: The Movie,” based on a Web series created by a Nebraska teenager, Lucas Cruikshank; its premiere attracted more than eight million viewers, according to Nielsen, making it one of the year’s top children’s telecasts. A sequel arrives Oct. 22.

But the result has more typically been a thud. “$#*! My Dad Says,” a CBS comedy based on a blog, was canceled after one season because of low ratings; “Quarterlife,” an NBC show that sprang from a Web drama, was dropped after one episode. As it turns out, what pops on the Web — short, unpolished bursts — is extremely hard to refine into the kind of longer-form content that flows through Hollywood’s traditional piping.

Part of the problem, at least in the eyes of Mr. Boedigheimer and his managers, involves that systemized development process. When network or studio teams do find something online with potential, they push it through the same creaky mill — focus groups, executive scrutiny — that they have relied on for decades to refine raw ideas into great entertainment (or at least commercially viable entertainment).

It is a process that can take two years, during which the online spark could easily die out. A new YouTube sensation could steal your thunder. “You get pushed around for months on end and so many voices get involved that the original voice — what was special — gets diluted or ruined,” said Gary Binkow, a partner at the Collective, the management company that represents Mr. Boedigheimer.

So Mr. Boedigheimer and the Collective are making the pilot themselves, with the managers picking up the bill. Aside from speed, the costs are lower. Making a 30-minute animated pilot through Hollywood channels (the route that “SpongeBob” took) costs about $1 million. The “Annoying Orange” pilot will cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

Conrad Vernon, one of the directors of “Shrek 2” and other DreamWorks Animation movies, is producing the pilot, which was co-written by Tom Sheppard, an Emmy winner for “Pinky and the Brain.” The Collective plans to shop it to networks starting next week. The target audience is children 6 to 12.

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