Joseph Gordon-Levitt: King of Pop Culture
Perhaps more than any other celebrity right now — more than Ashton Kutcher and his Silicon Valley investment streak, more than Will Ferrell and his Funny or Die! empire — Joseph Gordon-Levitt understands the power of the Internet. “I guess I’m an optimist,” he says. “There are plenty of possible pitfalls. But the Internet has the power to bring the human race together in a way it’s never come together before. I find that beautiful. But it’s up to us to decide how to use it.”
To that end, Gordon-Levitt is the co-founder, along with his late brother Dan, of hitRECord, a television show, production company and online community of artists that encourages collaborative creation.
Members can upload a story they’ve written, or are in the process of writing, only to have an illustrator somewhere else — maybe even in another country — pick it up an illustrate it. Or visa versa. Or a whole group of people might contribute to a short screenplay, and then film it, and then score it, and then have produced a completed movie. Or Joe himself might star in it with one of his famous friends, like the videos he’s done with Parks and Recreation’s Ben Schwartz or Zooey Deschanel. And they do it all for real — they show at film festivals, record actual vinyl albums, produce a legitimate TV show, and if any money is made, it’s distributed accordingly.
I really think the media can be something that doesn’t just create isolated couch-potato behaviour.
“HitRECord started as a symbol, a mantra I’d repeat to myself through my early 20s,” he says. That was the period when he returned to acting, and when he was finding it hard to get the kind of work he wanted. “My whole life, other people had been rolling the camera, but I wanted to be the one pushing the record button. So I started making little videos, and I found it enormously fulfilling.”
The idea snowballed. Gordon-Levitt started putting those videos up on a website he and Dan built, and a community began forming around them — a community that wanted to participate in the creative activity, not just consume it.
He opened up the platform to allow that to happen, brought in a few new partners, started figuring out how to make these things real, moneymaking ventures, which culminated last year in an Emmy nomination for the televised version, “A New Kind of Variety Show,” according to its tagline.
“I really think the media can be something that doesn’t just create isolated couch-potato behaviour,” he says. “It can be a way for people to come together and understand each other, and make each other laugh and make each other sing. It doesn’t have to be so transactional. We don’t have to use technology to do the same things we always did.”
At hitRECord, Gordon-Levitt makes a point of doing things differently. And he does so by attempting to straddle two very different roles. On the one hand, there’s his persona as creative facilitator and fun-loving television host, an endlessly youthful and exuberant figure who’s both tech-savvy and creatively confident.
And then, in the online forums he hosts weekly and the written treatises he posts to his Facebook page, there’s the strong, down-to-earth businessman, a company co-founder and, possibly, Silicon Valley-style visionary. The unifying factor: both parts of him want to make cool shit. At the end of the day, it’s all about the work.
