Alfa CD

In the spring of 1993 I was asked by Time Warner in Burbank to come and discuss production of new automotive television series. Director of production, the late Larry Israel, asked me to arrive an hour before the meeting with the brass. He had something he thought I should see, he had said on the phone. After slogging through the relentless tedium of LA traffic, Larry was waiting in the lobby as I entered through the glass doors.
A handshake marked our actual introduction. A shadowing secretary offered coffee. It was accepted.
"We'll be in the computer lab, you can bring it in there, thanks Barb."
"We will?"
"That's why I wanted you to come before the main meeting. I wanted to show you something."
The walk down the hallway off the lobby covered just enough ground for us both to grouse about the morning drive in.
Larry went right over to a computer, of many in the room, and reached down on the desk. He turned to me and handed off a gold plastic disc.
"Seen one of these?"
"No," I said looking at what seemed to be a small translucent LP.
"It's called a CD Rom."
"Really?" My grasp of computer technology was limited to business and industrial applications. It was this entertainment setting that seemed to hold a key to the relevance of this disc I wasn't grasping.
"Here let me show you what the point is here."
He popped it in the running computer on the desk. Suddenly there was a comedian doing standup on the screen. He began this moment of media exposure by outlining the limitations of the computer; the computer’s refresh rate resulting in the dropped frames, “Because the CPU follows the soundtrack.”
The computer’s rendering of the video seemed a bit wanting as well. It didn’t seem to like the interlaced 29.9 frame rate.
“I wanted to show you this,” he said, punching the button that released the CD and handed it to me, “because as we go forward with the production, I think we should keep in mind the possibility of producing these as another post broadcast product.”
Later over a good scotch, I was reviewing the implications of the day; of which there were many. But, I kept coming back to this CD Rom thing. For a while I had been growing tired of the fact that writing scripts for automotive tv was like composing Reader’s Digest condensed stories. Cliff’s Notes. It didn’t allow for a good depth of story for this subject so full of personalities and a richness of industrial history hard to tell in thirty or sixty minute formats. While books provide the depth for a story well told, the linear plot often gets in the way of the story’s multi-faceted detail, while failing to portray the subject’s essential character: movement and sound.
I still have the cocktail napkin that was used to outline the plan. Hell, it would be easy I thought, silently laughing into my drink. All I had to do was invent a new form of literature native to interactive navigation that would blend the depth of print and the movement & sound of broadcast TV. Oh, and learn to program software. No problem for a tv producer who just replaced his typewriter with a Mac Classic II because it was neat it had a file cabinet attached.
The next step was to get one of my friends at the factories to participate. Though I knew very little about the digital medium, there was one thing I anticipated fully; I was going to need a hell of a lot of archive material to pull it off.
My first call was to Giovanni Perfetti at Ferrari. Shouldn’t be a problem, over lunch at the trattoria across from the factory he had agreed to let me disrupt production for three days to film. Yes, film, no ENG video B-roll here. The negative response was not expected. Something about Bill Gates’ recent purchase of Leonardo’s Codex, remember this was 1993, was making people nervous. Made note to design this CD thing-a-mabob so you couldn’t remove copy written material.
Called over to Cornelis Verwiej at Alfa, which was still in Arese at the time.
“Scott, I haven’t a clue what the hell you’re talking about, but you can have whatever you need.”
Neither did I really, but having owned seven Alfas I wasn’t disappointed in the response. Besides, I had already written a three hundred-page history of Alfa for the tv project. Good starting point.
The computer end was more of a challenge. Not being a member of the Southern California Monastic Order of Computer Programmers, I found little receptivity from this quarter. Time Warner’s computer group had become Time Warner interactive and all resources were buried in an accelerated delivery date of interactive TV for the Orlando cable market. It was wasted sweat.
Six tedious months later, Kip Crosby, copywriter supreme from the old ad agency in San Francisco, arranged a meeting with master programmer, Tom Ellis, at his East Bay home. The dinner was good, hospitality appreciated. Over brandies, to describe the after-dinner-on-the-patio portion of the evening, I laid out my vision of a multi-threaded plot structure, which could lead the reader through a sequentially interactive tale. I waxed poetic about the blending of print depth and broadcast animation, movement and sound. “It has to look like a book,” I said. “No arrows or buttons or bullshit. I want a car guy to sit with a glass of wine and know how to read it because he’s visually familiar with the territory. Even if it’s on a damn screen rather than the written page or tv screen.”
When his first words in response were, “Well you obviously don’t know anything about computers or programming,” I was already standing to go. The next words stopped me. “But that’s a good thing. One of the problems with programmers is they’re more interested in programming something to impress their peers than programming something the public may find entertaining to use. You think perpendicular to established practice. You think like a TV producer. And that’s what a project like this needs.”
I sat back down, lifted my glass and listened. And kept listening for two and a half years of sleeping every 48 hours. Sitting in front of a computer on my own and learning that with windows 3.1 you couldn’t have twenty photos open in Photoshop in the middle of manipulation, with Word and four other programs running without locking it up, after having forgotten to save for five hours. Well it just made ‘View’ better. And with old Perry Masons and Rockfords on all night, I had something to watch while I waited for it to reboot and swore at myself. I got to know the predawn weather in the Bay Area pretty well as night after night I dragged my ass out of Tom’s computer lab to the GTV6 bone tied. One night muscle memory failed me; I turned the key and stomped the accelerator like it was a Weber-fed Giulietta. In the middle of the starter spin I heard an unsettling thump under the hood. I was awake now. I popped the hood, got out, and squinted into the darkness of hood shadowed mechanicals. There sat the aluminum intake plenum an inch too high. I just gave it a gentle push down, and it kindly reseated. I drove home laughing. Like the mad man I’d become.
In the autumn of 1996 Tom and I brought together the directors and employees of the Blackhawk Automotive Museum with a case of Sauvignon Blanc in a Computer school class room. A BETA copy of the Alfa CD was loaded into the network. The Blackhawk personnel were there to see how museum attendees could access several different stories in a digital automotive archive simultaneously from a dozen different networked kiosks. And to prove that the uninitiated could come in the museum and immediately operate within the digital archive through the touch-screen kiosks. For Tom and I this was a focus group to prove the intuitive navigation procedures of the CD. For an hour an a half all that was heard in the classroom was car guy discussions of what they were reading and seeing. Then, the director of the museum turned to his assistant and with a broad smile and in a loud voice said, “Wait a minute. I’m computer illiterate!”
On a rainy afternoon in November 1996, Alfa Romeo: View from the Mouth of the Dragon was completed. It had been Beta tested, tested again, and tested again, and now it was being run off on the big CD presses, slipped into thin jewel cases with its four color operating manual and shrunk wrapped like a pack of cigarettes. I thought I would be releasing the first 800 x 600 CD. Turned out Lion King hit the shelves as I was watching the CDs run off the line and into shipping crates.
Now it was time to launch the gearshift website for tech support, send it out for review, put some ads in Autoweek and see what happens.
That was a little over twelve years ago. At the time it was jokingly referred to by my computer buddies, who were scientists, as on-the-bleeding-edge. Recently it was referred to as still five years ahead of its time. Perhaps so, but after selling at retail locations in Milan, London, New York and San Francisco, and a decade of running on a myriad number of customer computers around the world, XP saw to its becoming a legacy CD. Or did it? At first there seemed to be some kind of a conflict only with the film portions of the CD & XP. To insure smooth operation when the CD was programmed, we developed a way to go directly from 24 frame a second, with sound, analogue film to digital without video interface. The computer loved the historic race footage from the twenties and thirties in this analogue to digital format. Rather than go into a full tech work-around dialogue, save to say, it’s a classic that runs on XP fuel. This having been said, it is really elegant and bullet proof on PCs running Windows 95 through 2000, covering as it does the against-all-odds story of Alfa Romeo from the turn of the 20^th Century to a race in Germany in 1935. There are only a limited number availabe, less than one hundred, so if you'd like to own a classic, click on the Buy Now and order one. Major credit cards accepted through PayPal.
Either way you can enjoy a look behind the curtain here. Since we can’t reproduce the timed engineering animations and film of the 500 page CD here, I’ve given examples of the story and graphics. A number of these images from the book are freeze frames of the film & animations. Click on any photo and you’ll bring up an enlargement of the image.

Salute!