Daily video podcast of WWII to run for six years

Chris Marlowe, The Hollywood Reporter

Published September 21, 2006 at midnight

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World War II just started for author-filmmaker Steven Jay Rubin.

He and his production company, Fast Carrier Pictures, began a daily video podcast that presents the history of the Second Great War in real time without the benefit of hindsight or larger context.

Host Dave Cox and selected celebrity guest hosts will share the news from the perspective of living through it - dressed in period costumes and performed in appropriate character - in daily audiovisual bulletins during the next six years. Rubin wants to add correspondents from Berlin, Paris and other key cities filing real-time reports from all over the world.

The production draws from contemporary news sources including magazines, newspapers and newsreels and does not allow hindsight to have an effect on the perspective.

"You're going to hear the headlines and stories as they were originally reported by newspaper correspondents around the world," Rubin said. "Since you're hearing the news chronologically, you will feel the visceral impact of those headlines as war spreads across our planet like a dark stain."

He began the video podcasts Sept. 11, which Rubin said was the most appropriate day that they could think of.

The series of 2,191 episodes then began rolling out on WW2Daily.com, which Rubin designed to be a portal for all things related to the global conflict, and are augmented with photographs, audio clips and other documentary material.

Additional features include pages people can use to create tributes to World War II veterans within their families, editorial contributions from historians and other informed commentators, book reviews, educational articles, video game overviews and blog pages relevant to the site's topic.

"I feel that this is a combination of military history and Hollywood," Rubin said. "The concept is to provide students, history buffs and other audiences with as much information as they could possibly want on the war from many different points of view and in all the different media."

Although it is secondary to this project, the site also offers information on East L.A. Marine, a feature-length documentary about decorated war veteran Guy Gabaldon that Rubin wrote, directed and produced.

A version of the story was told in From Hell to Eternity, with Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Gabaldon, but Rubin said the 1960 movie did not capture the reality of this Hispanic-American who captured more than 1,000 enemy civilians and troops while serving in his foster parents' homeland of Japan.

Rubin said his vision for the Web site would not be possible to realize without modern technology to acquire, restore, package and distribute all of the elements he is bringing together. "As an independent producer, I feel like I'm being hunted down every night by the potential of the digital world," he said. "And you'd have to be blind to not see the opportunities of broadband."

He plans to expand his project to radio, print, television and other platforms as well.

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