Image Makes Deal, Keeps It Real By SHELLY GARCIA Senior Reporter In “The Lost Tapes Circa 1989” album, Tupac Shakur rapped, “As real as it seems the American dream Ain’t nuthin’ but anotha calculated scheme.” While their faith in the system is far more steadfast, the lyrics likely struck a chord with the folks at Image Entertainment Inc., a Chatsworth-based DVD distributor that in April will launch a series of documentaries about the lives of rappers, including the late Shakur. Though one of the earliest to hitch its wagon to the DVD format, the independent distributor has had to battle not only the big record labels, but also the fickle entertainment industry and the vagaries of popular culture to eke out a living. And despite the meteoric rise in DVD sales in recent years, Image failed to turn a profit for the first six months of 2001. In a bid to boost its fortunes, Image is turning to a largely untapped segment of the market. The company inked a deal with QD3 Entertainment, a company formed by Quincy D. Jones III, to license and distribute a series of 12 DVD documentaries exploring some of hip-hop’s most celebrated and controversial names Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls and Eazy-E, along with Shakur and others. “The consumer and the retail accounts are asking for this sort of product and we’re looking to fill this demand,” said Barry Gordon, vice president of sales for Image, a publicly held company with sales of $100.8 million. “We’re looking to fill this demand.” Fueled by the quality of the images they can project and, more recently, falling prices, sales of DVD players have been skyrocketing, in turn boosting sales of the audio and video discs played on them. As of the end of September, DVD player shipments increased 55 percent over the like period last year to 9 million units, according to DVD Entertainment Group, an L.A.-based organization that promotes the category. With prices falling to under $100 on many models over the current holiday season, prognosticators like The Yankee Group expect DVDs to be the number-one selling item. Similarly, nearly 80 million discs were shipped as of the end of the third quarter of the year, up 87 percent from 42.7 million units in the same period last year, the organization reported. “This is definitely a growth sector for the industry,” said Jano Cabrera, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America of the popularity of music DVDs. “Bands are increasingly releasing their music, not just on CD but on DVD.” But for Image and other independent distributors like it, it has not been easy to tap into that growth because far larger movie studios and record labels dominate. Image, for example, late last year lost exclusive licensing deals with Orion Home Entertainment Corp. and Universal Studios Home Entertainment Inc. that resulted in a net loss of $1.2 million, or 9 cents per diluted share, for the six months ended Sept. 30, 2001, compared to earnings of $3.1 million or 18 cents per diluted share, for the same period a year ago. Revenues dipped 16.1 percent to $41.5 million from $49.5 million in the year earlier period. So Image is turning to producing its own programming with an emphasis on music-related DVDs. “The one area of music that we were not creating a market for was hip hop and urban,” said Gordon of the company’s current 26-percent share of the music DVD market. “And the hip-hop and urban business in audio and clothing is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, in video and specifically in music-related video, it’s completely under-served until now.” No longer an ethnic music niche, hip hop and rap music have become synonymous with pop culture, drawing a large and diverse audience. Last year for the first time, the rap and hip-hop genre, also known as urban music, jumped to second place in music sales, commanding 12.9 percent of the market and overtaking country music, which has held that position for most of the 1990s, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The first three documentaries in the series deal with personalities that have achieved nearly legendary status, as much for their artistry as for their lives, stark reflections of the so-called ‘gangsta’ lifestyle. Shakur, a rapper, poet and actor, was gunned down in 1996 at the age of 25. He was so prolific that new records from the works he left behind continue to be produced to this day. Smalls, whose real name was Christopher Wallace, died a year later, also at the age of 25, in a shootout that has been linked back to Shakur’s murder and the rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap. Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, died in 1995 at age 32, a victim of AIDs. The “Fallen Soldier Series,” as it’s called, is an attempt to tap into the mystique of their lives in a way that will appeal not only to fans of rap but to the larger hunger for information about personalities in the world of entertainment. “There’s not a lot of hip-hop documentaries that have been made,” said Quincy Jones III, the son of the famous jazz musician and producer, and a successful producer and songwriter in his own right who has written for Shakur, Ice Cube and L.L. Cool J, among others and scored and composed soundtracks for movies including “Pootie Tang” and “Menace II Society” as well as the Eddie Murphy comedy television show, “The PJs”. “Our goal was to create a series where people could get the 360-degree representation of what these people are all about. We’re going behind the scenes and showing what made this guy tick.” There are only a handful of documentaries in the hip-hop genre, but some of those that have been produced have been highly successful, Gordon said, among them a “Welcome to Death Row” about Suge Knight and the record company he built. The programs will feature documentary footage and live concert performances, along with interviews from friends and associates. The first in the series, “Thug Angel: The Life and Times of Tupac Shakur,” is set to launch in April, with the succeeding shows rolling out over the next few years. Discussions are also underway to secure television broadcast agreements. “This will be the first time the whole hip hop culture will be documented,” Gordon said.
