[MURDER MASTERMIND UNCOVERED: Web Review investigates Tom Arriola]
How do you think something like Crime Scene could be supported in the future: a small entrance fee, or could it be sponsored?
I'm trying to think of how things would pay for themselves on the Net, and I'm thinking of the Internet in terms of early TV. Nobody ever paid a dime to watch The Lucille Ball Show. Lucky for them, there was a commercial every 15 minutes. I really don't think the future of entertainment on the Net is going to come on a pay-per-view basis. I think that will make people use it less. I don't think people mind having sponsors help them see the thing; they don't mind an ad every now and then. That's what Generation X is all about: ignoring those types of things and getting the entertainment out of it. So I see it as sponsored by somebody, not pay-per-view.

It would take a certain kind of sponsor to fund Crime Scene.
I don't think it would ever happen. So the other option I have is to turn Crime Scene into some sort of CD-ROM.

You'd lose the immediacy and live feel of the Web.
Yeah, when the thing is finished it would be like when the Web site is finished, you can look at it but it's not going to change. It's like taking a beautiful flower and pressing it in a book so you could look at it later. It looks like a flower, but it's no longer a flower.

Any influence from the OJ trial?
Oh yeah, I think the O.J. trial was one of the things that made me say, we've got to do this right now, you guys. I'd really love to make a file that was the O.J. Simpson Crime Scene. I think if you did it more theatrically, if you got a house with a garden and a patio, got some actors and had make-up artists gouge them up and mutilate them. If you spread the crime scene out the way it was found with the bloody glove and the footprints, I'd love to just put that one thing up and let people call up the file and walk around the crime scene. They couldn't pick up anything but they could touch on hotspots and get information. It wouldn't be anything other than a crime scene, we might even hype some things in there that aren't in the real O.J. thing, maybe some footprints or a gum wrapper, who knows what. The intent wouldn't be to solve it, just to appreciate it.

Certainly the O.J. trial has shown that many people like to dwell on the details of a crime.
Oh yeah. The idea of just watching things from beginning to end, reading a book from beginning to end, that's what we used to do when we told stories with books. I don't think it's going to be entertaining for much longer, to just let something wash over you for 90 minutes or 30 minutes.

In the future, when we watch Cops on TV, we're not going to be happy with just watching the arrests, we're going to want to know what was that guy's criminal record, who is this police officer that did this, how many crimes are there in Los Angeles of this type, whatever happened to that criminal, did he get arrested? We have questions, and right now we accept the fact that they're not answered, we got to watch an arrest. We got to watch a story happen. But what happened next, why did it happen, who are these people that did this? Those are all just as interesting as "will we catch the killer?" perhaps even more interesting.

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