Fear and Loathing in Frisco

Home Theater, October 1998

Divx was an early disc-based attempt by the Hollywood studios and electronics mega-retailer Circuit City to create a pay-per-view home video player, back in the days when the internet couldn’t yet handle live streaming. It had the potential to derail the launch of the DVD format just as it was set to replace VHS tape as the premiere home video format. Fortunately, the Divx version of DVD never gained traction commercially and died a fairly rapid death, something I like to think we helped along with our two major features at Home Theater.

After our Divx-bashing cover story in December of 1997 that explained the origin of the technology and the incredibly complex set of rules and limitations that was to govern the use of the discs, we set about doing a review of the first player. But having become personae non grata with Zenith, the one manufacturer building the decks, a review sample was not forthcoming. We solved the problem by going to San Francisco, one of two early test markets, and buying one ourselves. This also afforded an obvious opportunity to see how well the salespeople at Circuit City, who had invested in the system, and its competitor The Good Guys, had been trained on the intricacies of Divx. I had an absolute romp reporting the story and ended up writing it in the voice and Gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, hence the headline. I mean, how often do you get to lede a piece with the words, “Do you serve alcohol on this flight?”

Our esteemed editor Brent Butterworth edited the story in a classic deadline crunch (I barely had time to get back and write it before we shipped to the printer), and our gifted art director Heather Dickson commissioned an awesome illustration of me dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Thompson’s trademark beanie cap; I still have the marked-up color proof framed in my office. Spoiler alert: I found out after we published that the mystery blonde who became a key character in the article was actually Laura Evenson, then a tech reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle who, by sheer coincidence, was out reporting on Divx on the same day in the same two stores.