The doldrums - here at the project, and those out there in the Max continuum - have gone on a very long time. They may well be over, as there are again changes, updates, plans and other rumblings occurring.

Here now the news:

Max on YouTube

Submitted, for your approval, Max Headroom in a stunning array of rare video clips. See the new Max on YouTube page immediately.

Web Site Update

The restructuring of the board continues - you'll find a large percentage of the pages updated to the new format and with at least mild updates in content. Look around, if you haven't recently.

Interview Schedule

I have a really fascinating slate of interviews lined up in the next few weeks. Only one major cast member, but several technical crew members and one real surprise (not directly related to any of the Max shows). I am thinking that I might add an interviews section and post the edited interviews directly, rather than just having them become grist in the archives mill.

Max Changes (Some) Owners

For those who haven't gleaned this from other mentions, all of the rights and holdings of Chrysalis Productions, the original producer of the 1985 telefilm and the Channel Four music/talk show, have been purchased by another UK media consortium. Although Chrysalis continued to honor those few licensing requests that were made - for posters and t-shirts, mostly - they demonstrated almost no interest in continuing or developing the Max Headroom property. (A good part of that disinterest may have been the muddled sharing of rights in the US and elsewhere.)

The new owners of all this original material and productions are much more aggressive and have already licensed the production of a DVD of the original telefilm - in Japan, reportedly only for the rental market. All signs of this DVD, released in the fall of 2006, have disappeared and it no longer appears to be for sale or rental.

This is a major change in the map for Max's commercial future, but it's only one part of the puzzle. There are still complex rights and ownership issues to be resolved, including the disposition of the Lorimar/ABC/Warner Brothers rights to the 1987 series. There are also standing ownership claims that may supersede or take other precedence over many others.

The good news is that the time of inaction and disinterest is over. The bad news is that there may be too much (conflicting) interest for anything to happen very soon.

Max on Streaming Video

Although it's no longer news and the access seems to be erratic (would Max have it any other way?), interested viewers can find at least a half-dozen episodes of the ABC series on AOL-TV, including the rare "Baby Grobags" that was never originally aired in the US. Try this link for a direct connection, or, if that fails, go straight to In2TV and search.

I so far have been unable to determine who authorized the use of these episodes on streaming video. This datum would produce some interesting light on the ownership and control of the Lorimar rights.

The Great MaxHeadroom.com Hiatus... and Its End

I'll recap here what I've said in diverse places over the last few months:

The Max Headroom project and its main public facet the Max Headroom chronicles were launched with a strong running start in late 2005, and progress in collecting, vetting and publishing the information and findings was for a time rapid. Then I was increasingly weighed down by commitments to another project - one that was supposed to need only my occasional guidance but floundered and required me to take a nearly full-time role for more than a year. Everything else on my desk suffered, especially the Max project. With the interfering project concluded in July 2007, I was freed to pick up the threads of my other efforts... especially the Max project.

I have spent a couple of months blowing the dust off files, reestablishing contact with principals, sources and colleagues, and evaluating the work done so far. As an inveterate perfectionist, I've found myself unhappy with the web site as it stands - it's functional, but had already started to get unwieldy in size and maintenance requirements. In the last year or so, I've acquired better tools and learned better techniques, so I decided to make my restart by rebuilding the web site using a new format and more efficient technique. It's as good a way as any to refamiliarize myself with the 'map of the territory.'

This change will be made progressively, with the top and middle and simpler pages of the site updated first, then the deeper (and more complex) data pages. You'll see both old and new pages for some time to come.

But make no mistake: I'm back. The project is back. And I hope the progress to be at least as rapid and the results even more intriguing than the glory days of when this started up.

Come Back and Contact Me Some Time...

I'd like to issue a call to all those cast and crew members who have contacted me over the last year or so. I tried to reply to each of you, and will be sifting my email archive to see if I can catch up with you now, but not a few of you may have thought your interesting and appreciated messages went into a black hole. (Well, they sort of did: the black hole of that other project!)

My sincere apologies to anyone who didn't get an appropriate reply. Do drop me a note again when you have time - I do want to speak with as many of you as I can!

A restart or continuation of Max Headroom is looking more likely by the day. See the new special Max 2.0 page for details.