mercy of something they can't control" - the adoption curve for DVD drives.
Banister maintains that Entertaindom is riding a rapidly rising DVD curve. According to some industry estimates, DVD players will be in as many as 20 million PCs by the end of this year. While CD-ROMs deliver grainy, sub-VHS-quality video and have limited storage capacity, he says, you can fit "two to four hours of beautiful MPEG 2-quality video" on a DVD. Banister adds that early adopters - especially gamers - have already cleared the behavioral hurdles associated with using a disk to unlock sites.
Banister's obsession with the elements of visual experience is rooted in his multifarious career as a physicist, filmmaker, animator and digital archivist. He mixed film and physics courses in high school, shooting a knock-off Star Trek movie in Super 8 titled "When the Clock Struck One" for a class assignment.
"I was Captain Kirk," he recalls. "I should have been Spock, but it was my ego. I had to be Kirk." After college, he got a job as a physicist in the Space Technology Group at TRW.
TRW is where Banister earned a reputation for using guerrilla tactics to promote his technology vision. He discovered that the innovative computer graphics tools used in the company's advertising campaigns ("Tomorrow is taking shape at a company called TRW") weren't available within the company. A junior-grade engineer, he left a message for his division chief, Dan Golden, now the top administrator at NASA. Banister was working in a crowded office when the callback came. "This is Dan Golden," the voice crackled. "Who the fuck is this?" Banister started talking. Three months later, Golden gave him $1 million to set up and run TRW's Engineering Visualization Center.
Banister left TRW in the late 1980s to launch Animated Technologies, a computer-graphics company, which merged with another computer-graphics firm one year later. Beset with "girlfriend troubles" and frustrated with the razor-thin margins and scarcity of talent in the computer- graphics business, he left to begin a "walkabout," his version of the aboriginal rite of passage where boys are sent into the desert. For two years, Banister had no permanent address; he wandered throughout Southeast Asia, Europe and Mexico.
Upon returning to L.A., Banister revived his filmmaking career and soon found himself rollerblading on the Croisette at the 1994 Cannes film festival, where two of his short films were being screened. After Cannes, he accepted a post as director of multimedia and postproduction for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Banister says he'd intended to spend six months on the Shoah project but ended up staying a year. Spielberg asked him what he planned to do next. "I was thinking of returning to filmmaking," Banister says, "or maybe checking out this multimedia thing." Spielberg offered to arrange some meetings at DreamWorks, which was setting up an interactive division in partnership with Microsoft.
Meanwhile, a Warner executive named Steven Koltai had gotten approval to set up an online unit. Koltai was looking for someone who had both technological credentials with a creative sensibility - a difficult combination to find. He dropped in on Banister at the Shoah lab on the Universal Studios lot. What began as a one-hour meeting turned into a five-hour dialog on the opportunities of the Web.
Banister took the job. Koltai also convinced veteran Warner executive Jim Moloshok to head up the unit on at least a part-time basis - he became full-time president of the unit in January. Together with Jeff Winer, VP of planning, development and administration, the three formed a cohesive team. "When you put the three of us together, you get one new-media superhero," Moloshok says.
Like many of its rival operations at the other studios, Warner Bros. Online was originally set up primarily as a marketing operation. But Maria Wilhelm, former deputy editor of Pathfinder, recalls Banister as a "larger than life figure" who wanted to make online "interesting
