Gordon-Levitt’s talk about latest creative venture is a ‘hit’

This weekend, former Columbian Joseph Gordon-Levitt, star of “(500) Days of Summer” and “Inception,” came to speak to students about his mass-collaborative production company, hitRECord, admittedly as a way to cope with the recent death of his older brother and co-partner, Dan Gordon-Levitt.

On Friday afternoon, a full house of 500 people—the majority of whom were female (including girls from New York University, Parsons The New School for Design, and even high school)—welcomed the indie heartthrob with open arms in Roone Arledge Auditorium. Bacchanal and the Columbia University National Undergraduate Film Festival served as the event’s co-sponsors.

Joseph’s entrance incited high-pitched shrieks from the girls in the audience, and the actor seemed to be in good spirits throughout the presentation, despite the initial announcement of his brother’s death.

“I’m sad all the time,” Joseph said. “He [Dan] and I shared the sentiments to encourage other people to express themselves and be themselves.”
Joseph added, “I wanted to do this [presentation] as a form of therapy honestly.”

Dan, a fire spinning artist, was a chief collaborator on the foundation of hitRECord, a website that allows its users to collaborate on multimedia projects. On the website, any user can contribute to a variety of digital multimedia projects that Joseph directs by recording them.

In an effort to reach out and collaborate with young aspiring artists, Joseph is touring a select group of colleges this fall including the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and the University of Southern California for discussion-oriented presentations about hitRECord’s collective creative process. According to Joseph, he wanted to open up collaboration to young media makers because he didn’t want to work solely with the insular Hollywood community.

Tarini Shrikhande, CC ’12 and CUNUFF co-president, hitRECord got in touch with CUNUFF over the summer and asked if they were interested in a college tour about the hitRECord project in the fall. “We said yes because it coincides with CUNUFF’s interests,” Shrikhande said. CUNUFF puts on an annual film festival in the spring where students can showcase their films and have their work screened and judged.

The hitRECord presentation was interactive and participatory. Joseph encouraged the audience to upload pictures taken during the event to hitRECord. Mark Johnson, hitRECord’s creative director, was in the back of the audience monitoring a Twitter feed for the event on three computers. Students could ask Joseph questions during the presentation, but only via Twitter. One eager high school girl in the front row raised her hand in the middle of the presentation, but Joseph told her to tweet her question instead.

“I think some people were a bit put off because they didn’t have Twitter or they didn’t have smart phones where they could tweet from,” Shrikhande said. “But I thought it [Twitter] was a good idea because Joseph himself is really big on Twitter, especially because of hitRECord.”

Jody Zellman, GS and Bacchanal president, said that he thought everyone who came seemed enthusiastic about hitRECord. “A lot of people had their cameras out,” Zellman said. “A lot of people liked seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt.”

The audience also screened the short film “Morgan and Destiny’s Eleventeenth Date,” which, according to Joseph, is hitRECord’s “greatest project so far.” The film started out as an idea for a collaboration on hitRECord then snowballed into a live-action interpretation of a short story with illustrations, animations, and music, all coming from different collaborators. It has since been screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest Film Festival.

According to the “hitRECord Accord,” a contract for joining the website, if a project made on hitRECord turns a profit, 50 percent goes back to the company and 50 percent is sent out to the contributing artists. Because dividing up revenue can be a meticulous process, hitRECord includes a “REsources and REsults” page on its site where the company first posts a proposal of how the profits will be distributed before it sends out checks. According to Joseph, this ensures that all contributors get the credit they deserve.

“They seem to have a good system in place to see who has contributed and who should be credited for work,” Shrikhande said. “Filmmaking and art is a collaborative process, so advocating that on this kind of platform seems like a really cool idea.”

Though Joseph started hitRECord just five years ago as a fun hobby, he said that he looks forward to doing even more large-scale projects. He expressed that he hopes to release a hitRECord DVD/book set to be sold in stores this holiday season, and he also wants to make a documentary about what it’s like to be a young artist today.

“I think this show was more of a chance for him [Joseph] to go back to what he and his brother started and go back to the roots of what hitRECord was and really pay homage to him and what they created, then promoting people to take part in it, because inevitably it isn’t going to be just about him,” CUNUFF co-president Nathan Ratapu, CC ’13, said. “He needs people like our students at Columbia to take the initiative and start projects and get things running.”