FRANK ROSE

For the next scene, two crew members wheel a queen-size bed into place. Justin Hartley, the 6'3" Smallville actor who plays Nick, is lolling on the bed in his boxer shorts, sporting six-pack abs and a bright orange belly button. The script calls for Anna to come out in a sexy black negligee and climb into bed with him. The sound man cues up Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Everybody laughs.

But for Anna, romance has given way to suspicion: first the orange tub ring and now, as she settles reluctantly into Nick’s arms, his orange navel. If the camera were to pan a little wider, it would also catch two grips crouching behind the headboard to keep the bed from sliding across the set as Dawson gets in. Rogow smiles ruefully at the amateurishness of it all. “I think we should keep those guys in the background,” he quips. “It’s a nice touch.”

SOMETIMES EVEN ROSARIO Dawson wonders if people want to see a Hollywood star in a Web serial. “The thing that’s succeeded on the Web—besides, obviously, porn—is people themselves,” she says over lunch. She’s on a break from shooting the DreamWorks thriller Eagle Eye with Shia LaBeouf; soon she’ll start rehearsals for Seven Pounds, a Sony film in which she plays a desperately ill heart patient Will Smith falls in love with. “They’re putting up their own stuff, really off the cuff, no money involved. So I mean, we’re taking a huge risk. But it’s exciting to be part of something new. And even if we mess it up, like, we were the first, you know? That’s kind of awesome in itself.”

But if casting Dawson was a break from the nascent conventions of Web video, the format of Gemini Division is not. It isn’t just that this is short-attention-span entertainment. It’s that, like Lonelygirl15 and Prom Queen and even such TV shows as Lost and Heroes, Gemini Division is designed to involve the audience in ways that more closely resemble videogames than conventional narrative drama.

That’s no coincidence. Friedman spent years writing for television; then he joined Electronic Arts, where he wrote the best-selling Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and the soon-to-be-released Tiberium. At EA, he had to relearn scriptwriting, because the conventions of film and television don’t work in interactive media. In a one-hour drama, he explains, “you put the characters together over some beers and allow them to bring out the plot. It’s exposition disguised as dialog.” But games dispense with the entire first act, the part that sets the plot in motion. “When the story begins, you’re in-world—you have a gun, all hell is breaking loose, and your job as a player is to stay alive and figure out where you are.” Web video gets subjected to that same compression algorithm. “We’re starting every episode with Anna on the run,” Friedman says. “She’s already in the second act—the part where everything goes wrong. It’s a more game-style narrative.”

Friedman had never intended to go into show business in the first place. But as a creative writing major at UCLA, he’d met a movie producer at a Beverly Hills party who invited him to pitch a story. He showed up at the producer’s Sunset Boulevard offices to find no one at the reception area, so he wandered inside. He opened a door and found the receptionist on her knees under a desk, her head bobbing up and down on the producer’s lap. Not knowing the protocol for this particular situation, he made his pitch regardless. The producer didn’t seem to be listening—but then, just as the receptionist finished, he cried out and in the next breath offered Friedman a deal. This was Hollywood? Friedman felt as if he’d fallen through the looking glass.

His ambition now is to merge television with videogames in a new form of storytelling, one that will engage audience members on multiple levels—and not just with the narrative, but with each other. So while Anna dodges “sims” (simulated life forms, with their telltale orange stigmata) and agents from the mysterioso outfit known as Gemini Division, fans will be able to log on to the show’s Web site and get transmissions from Anna’s police department partner. Users will be recruited as Gemini agents themselves, at which point they’ll be able to talk with other agents—er, users—by webcam. “I think this is where entertainment is heading,” he says. “It’s where I want entertainment to head, because that’s what I want to experience.”

Rogow and Friedman first tried this approach to storytelling in their initial Web effort, an animated serial called Afterworld. Developed just after Lonelygirl15 made such a splash, Afterworld was where they met Rosario Dawson. Dawson is a comics geek, and as a favor to a comics writer she knew who was working on Afterworld, she agreed to do a voiceover for one of the characters. Rogow asked her about doing a video series based on Occult Crimes Taskforce, a comic she had helped create. That didn’t happen because she already had a film deal in the works with the Weinstein Company. But a couple of months later, Rogow called to tell her they were developing Gemini Division. It had been written for a male lead, but they were thinking of reworking it for her. They would make her a partner in the production and give her a cut of any profits.

Dawson had already signed on to play a military investigations officer in Eagle Eye, and her character in Occult Crimes Taskforce is also a detective. “When Stan told me I’d be playing an officer in Gemini Division, I was like, you know, this is going to seem weird.” Even so, she liked the idea. She’d been acting for a dozen years, ever since she was discovered on the stoop of her parents’ squat on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and cast in Larry Clark’s Kids. “Normally at this point it starts to get stagnant,” she says. “You’re worrying about looking older, are they going to like you anymore. But I’m more going, what new can I do? I’d rather put myself into the fray than sit back and go, well, I played it safe.”

ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON IN MARCH, Rogow pulls his black Porsche SUV to the curb, collects a ticket from the valet, and walks briskly into the Creative Artists Agency building on LA’s Avenue of the Stars. Perfectly framed in an enormous glass wall is the Hollywood sign, 8 miles away. Rogow is here to meet with Anita Lawhon, the Cisco executive in charge of entertainment partnerships. This is crunch time for Gemini Division, the weeks when everything—advertising, distribution, financing, production—has to come together. On a table in the vast marble reception zone sits this morning’s Daily Variety. CHANGES TO BIZ GIVE TOWN THE JITTERS, reads the front-page headline.

Today, Rogow is focused on how to get that business model working. It’s going well—so well that Herskovitz recently met with his CAA agents to learn how Electric Farm is doing it. And Cisco is key. Those Gemini Division agents are going to wield some pretty cool tech, much of it—thanks to a deal brokered by CAA—actual products from Cisco: a video surveillance system that sends an alert when someone penetrates the wrong sector; digital billboards that can be reprogrammed on the fly; TelePresence, a teleconferencing system with life-size video so hi-def it makes virtual meetings seem almost real. In the past few weeks, similar deals have been cut with Acura, Intel, Microsoft, and UPS. “In a cold business sense,” Rogow confides, “this show is a self-financing marketing vehicle.”

Settling into an all-white conference room, Rogow tells Lawhon they think it would be cool to show TelePresence on a private jet. “You think Rosario’s at a table on the plane talking to people,” he explains, “and we pull back and reveal they’re not there.”

Lawhon isn’t sure—after all, TelePresence isn’t being marketed for private jets, and the goal here is to show Cisco’s products as they’re actually used. She’ll check. “But if you could look at other insertion opportunities…”

“Like putting it in an office? Absolutely.”

Rogow is thrilled with Cisco’s digital signs, which can be remotely programmed to display anything you want—like a coded message for Anna. “Which is, I think, why you really invented it: for superspies to get secret messages in malls,” he quips. “We think that’s real cool.” He’s equally happy with the surveillance system, which can send Anna a digital alert on her smartphone. “But we want to make sure we’ve got the Cisco logo in a prominent position,” Lawhon points out. The days when product placement meant going full frontal on a Coke can are supposed to be over, but the client still has to get something in exchange for its six-figure fee. “That’s why I love being able to see the script,” she says.

“That’s great,” Rogow replies enthusiastically. “I’ll have script material for you starting next week.”

The next day, Friedman is at Electric Farm, in a Santa Monica office park, busily reworking the scripts to integrate all the products they’ve done deals for. There’s the Acura TSX, the superspeedy UPS delivery, the search and mapping functions from Microsoft. He’s not sure yet what to do with Intel. Maybe slap a POWERED BY INTEL badge on Dawson’s smartphone? “It has to pass the creative smell test,” he says, “so we feel like we’re enhancing the story rather than trying to sell you something.” In any case, they’ll have to make up a brand for the phone itself: CAA approached several handset manufacturers, but none bit.

There’s one other way to bring in money: venture capital. Funny or Die was funded by Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture firm behind YouTube. VCs like the idea that big Hollywood names can break through the clutter. But VCs also want an exit—a sale or stock offering that will net them the kind of payoff Sequoia got with YouTube. And while many would-be Web producers see venture money as manna from heaven, they haven’t yet had to report to a frustrated money guy who doesn’t know show business.

“There’s an old joke,” Rogow says, trying to explain why Electric Farm hasn’t tried this route. “A filmmaker dies and goes to heaven. Saint Peter greets him at the pearly gates. ‘Good news!’ he says. ‘You can make any movie you want! You can get Beethoven to do the score. You can get Shakespeare to write the script.’ The filmmaker gets all excited. ‘And who can I have to play the girl?’ he asks.” Long pause. “‘Well,’ comes the reply, ‘God’s got a girlfriend …’”

IT'S A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in May. Two weeks earlier, NBC announced the formation of NBC Universal Digital Studio, with Gemini Division and Woke Up Dead, another Web series Electric Farm has in the works, as its first offerings. Now Rogow is back on a soundstage with Dawson—but this time it’s a bigger soundstage and a far more professional operation.

The last shoot, back in January, was almost too bare-bones to work. The camera’s shutter speed was set too slow, causing a motion blur so bad that some scenes need to be reshot. Worse, Dawson’s hair wasn’t properly styled—it had big, wispy curls that congealed into unsightly blobs once the green backdrop was pulled away. “Hair turds!” cried Duane Loose, the burly EA veteran who’s the show’s production designer.

Nonetheless, they’ve put together a couple of episodes. A crew member is playing back episode 5 on a computer screen in the corner: Anna Diaz in an abandoned factory in Paris, watching openmouthed as a man in a lab coat inserts a steel rod into Nick’s orange navel. Seconds later, a pair of agents bursts in. One gets his arm sliced off by the doc’s surgical laser. The other pulls out a weapon of his own and reduces Nick to a boiling puddle of goo. Anna screams: The man she loved is dead—and he wasn’t even human!

Today they’re shooting episode 12. Dawson is on the greenscreen with a tall, well-muscled actor who’s wielding the same kind of weapon that killed Nick. Anna is caught in a war between the sims—creatures like Nick—and the seemingly all-powerful Gemini Division, which is bent on eradicating them. Muscle Man plays a Gemini agent who’s just puddled a sim that was gripping Anna’s throat. Now he’s turning away, leaving her as mystified as ever. “I want in,” Dawson cries, reaching for his arm: in on Gemini Division, in on why they destroyed Nick, in on whatever the hell is going on.

On the sidelines, arms folded across his black Che Guevara T-shirt, Friedman nods approvingly. In fits and starts, the world he’s imagined is taking shape before him. Not a game world, not a TV world, but something different: a world viewed through the tiny window of Anna’s phone. “That’s an intimacy you don’t get from television,” he says. “But our mantra is, we want to do what television doesn’t.”