DIGITAL L.A. : LIVE, FROM CHAT ROOM TO STAGE, HERE'S LOLA `TALKING TRASH'.

Byline: David Bloom 

In a Century City nightclub, before an enthusiastic if not oversized crowd, a little convergence experiment took place last week. Whether Jerry Springer should worry just yet about the competition is another matter.

The event was the corporeal coming-out party for ``Talking Trash With Lola Pandora,'' a demonstrably trashy talk show that heretofore has been confined to text-based chats at sponsor ExciteHome.

But on July 15, Lola went live and breathing. A stage and couch were set up, cameras and microphones brought in, and so were live guests, discussing (in a weirdly appropriate choice, given that Lola Pandora is certainly not the host's real name) how the Internet lets you act like someone you're not.

There were the usual set of oddball guests, all volunteers gleaned from Lola's L.A.-area fan base, including a transvestite, an aging online Romeo and his newest belle, and a gimpy would-be dragon/poet.

The live video feed of the talk show was broadcast on Lola's site, in a small window in one corner of the page as the chat room conversation scrolled up underneath. Lola fielded questions from both the live and the online audiences, and even took (after a couple of false starts) a couple of questions by way of Excite's new ``voice chat'' service.

Lola, the same cushily built blonde who has been the chat's anonymous online host, acquitted herself well, if campily, enough. She said the transition to doing the show before a camera and live audience wasn't that difficult, given her 20 years of experience as an actress and singer.

``Hosting isn't difficult,'' she said. ``It's just the same thing I've been doing, but the technical aspect, with the live audience and the cameras, adds some to the job. But I thrive on live.''

Lola said she felt like she was ``helping usher in the new millennium with the show.

``TV was big in the '50s, cable was big in the '70s, and the Internet has been big in the '90s,'' she said. ``Broadband will be big in the next decade. You can watch Jerry Springer and yell at the TV all you want and it doesn't do you any good. Here you can talk back. It's a whole new culture. Pretty soon this will just be another choice on the TV.''

It was the first night of a 10-city tour of live broadcasts of the show that will run on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the next month around the country.

It's not yet known whether the live broadcasts will continue after that, a show spokeswoman said.

But it would be a natural for the show to transition to online broadcasting at some point. After all, Excite just did a corporate marriage with Home, the big cable-modem company.

Though the show is basically a low-rent version of the exceedingly low-class Springer programming (complete with its own musclebound Bubba the Bouncer), the ability of people to not only ask questions, but talk to each other online as they're doing so heralds some new kind of medium.

Throw in a high-speed broadband connection so the video can be larger and smoother, and you have the sort of thing that'll raise all kinds of ruckus.

Up the Amazon with a camera

I've written in recent months about how the Internet and digital technology eventually will allow filmmakers to sidestep the challenges and costs of film reproduction and distribution.

Shoot a film with cheap digital cameras, cut it with a non-linear editing program sitting on a cheap but powerful Macintosh G3 or PC, and burn your own DVDs or set up pay-per-views on high-speed broadband Internet connections.

That's the dream anyway, which would allow many independent filmmakers to get their product to a much wider potential audience.

It's still a ways from reality, but the possibilities became a little more real with one of the zillions of expansion announcements that Amazon.com has been making lately, this one at the recent Video Software Dealers Association convention in Los Angeles.

Now, Amazon's Advantage program will allow filmmakers - much as it previously has allowed bands and authors with their music and books - to set up a site and sell their films through Amazon. To access the Advantage program, go to amazon.com and follow the prompts.

The company only requires that two to five copies of a film be delivered to Amazon initially, to be kept on hand for fast fulfillment. That eliminates one big block for budding filmmakers trying to circumvent the studio system.

Amazon splits revenues 55-45 with the filmmaker, which is considerably more straightforward than most Hollywood deals.

And the first film to be sold through the new program turns out to be ``Cameras on Campus,'' a tape of five shorts by students from the top-notch film school at the University of Southern California.

Not everything qualifies for the program: Amazon screens material and could reject a submission based on ``suitability standards'' that include ``quality, value, subject matter, production standards and compliance with intellectual property laws.''

No porn allowed either. And video has to be in NTSC format, and DVDs in Region 1 format. This business of being your own studio can be tough.

We list to serve

Who says nobody writes, or reads, anymore? One look at the official listserv catalog maintained online by L-Soft International (at lsoft.com/catalist.html) quickly gives the lie to that position.

The site automatically catalogs and makes available so-called listservs, or online mailing lists. If you're looking for a mailing list devoted to movies or Microsoft or mowing, it's probably here. In all, the site tracks more than 131,000 listservs, about 25,000 of which are publicly available to join.

I can't say much good about the site's bare-bones search engine and lack of indexing, but if you have a hankering to find folks of like mind to share e-mail regarding specific topics, here's a great place to start.

More generally, listservs are part of what makNes e-mail the underappreciated killer app of the computer age, connecting communities of mind simply and with relatively little drag on the overall Internet.

America Online recently put out a press release saying that more people sent Instant Messages, ICQ notes and e-mail on its system in a day than the Postal Service delivered in the same period.

It sounds like the art of writing is quite alive, even if it doesn't come with the sensual experience of dragging pen across exquisitely textured paper, the ritual of folding and placing a note in an envelope, the annoyance of finding a place to mail it.

Where the geeks are

Computerworld reports that the Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County has 5,400 more single men than women, creating a happy hunting ground for attachment-oriented females but a dire situation for their male equivalents.

By comparison, Los Angeles (rated the nation's No. 2 high-tech center in a recent survey because of the huge entertainment technology business) has a mismatch the other way, by a whopping 127,000 more single women.

And why would Computerworld, a relentlessly technical trade publication for information tech managers, care about the dating lives of its most ardent, if socially unrequited, readers? Because a lack of companionship might turn into a staff retention problem, it says.

After putting in years of 18-hour workdays eating pizza and slugging down Jolt cola while crunching computer code, even geeks get lonely, the story says.

The good news for managers, however, is that many code warriors are ``pretty one-dimensional,'' more interested in work than dating opportunities. Just remember, boys, there's always L.A.

Cool program of the week

MetaCreations has come up with a program, Canoma, that gracefully does something I've not seen before: takes 2-D photos of a place, extrudes them into three dimensions and stitches them together into a panoramic space.

The Carpinteria-based company has been making amazing graNphics programs for years, from Bryce 3-D to Soap to the KPT effects plug-ins for Photoshop that first made founder Kai Krause famous.

Canoma, with the usual MetaCreations over-the-top interface, could be a boon for Web designers trying to make interesting graphics out of such things as real estate, catalog goods and the like.

At a recent trade show, MetaCreations was using the program and scans of a handful of postcards of a famed Italian plaza and clock tower to create a rotatable 3-D re-creation of the site on screen. It was just too darned cool.

For more information, go to www.metacreations.com. The program works on both Mac and Windows.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) PANDORA

(2) ``Cameras on Campus,'' a tape of five shorts by film students, is the first film to be sold through Amazon's Advantage program.