UBO, the Movie

Got hip to this recently from my B(ronx)-girl homie Lynne d Johnson: evidently there’s a documentary coming early next year on the rise and fall of Urban Box Office, a/k/a UBO.com. Coming from director John Threat and his MediaThreat production company, First Generation Urban (think that’s the title) investigates the $60,000,000-funded umbrella site started by the late former Motown CEO George Jackson, and how it failed so miserably.

I worked at UBO myself for about two months after leaving Vibe in late 1999; it aimed to be all things urban to all people urban, a multitude of different sites all launched from the central hub of UBO, kinda like Gawker with Fleshbot, Gizmodo, etc. (I did an interview with George Jackson for old Sam Goody’s Request magazine before his untimely death from a stroke at 42. ) UBO went about snapping up any- and everybody who reflected the different audiences they wanted to attract as users, and it seemed that everytime I turned around, someone else I knew had just been hired: Ronin Ro, Tish Benson, Genevieve McCaw. Then they even hired my girlfriend at the time, Dinkinish O’Connor, to deal with fashion at LikePepper.com – a site for sistas run and operated by the original editors of Honey magazine (which at the time was edited by another ex, Asondra R. Hunter… long story).

The dotcom bubble was already sort of bursting circa 1999/2000, but funding was just starting to trickle down to sites targeted to black folks, “urban” or whatever. I was ostensibly editing a NYC city guide section for UBO, with a budget to go eating and drinking at the restaurants and clubs I was expected to write blurbs about. But other players like Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, HBO’s Volume.com and BET.com were poaching from hiphop-gen mags and other African-American sites to take advantage of the urban net wave, and so after about two months, I left to edit BET.com’s music section.

But my girlfriend regaled me with stories about the big UBO blowout launch party under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty out on Liberty Island and other incredibly wasteful shit that eventually led to the site’s downfall after the death of founder Jackson. LikePepper.com never launched, and indeed, most of UBO’s mini-sites didn’t. Peep the documentary trailer below.