I don’t expect to post many items here that aren’t about movies, much less notices of two-day-old breaking news. But I’d like to write shorter things, more often, and this seems like a good opportunity. After ten and a half years, Steven Soderbergh is shutting down the merchandise storefront on his Extension 765 site.
Even since I started drafting this post, several of the remaining items that were for sale there have had their listings removed. The fact that everything has been marked down 50% must have helped. Gone already are the Command Z (2023) hat pictured above and its EXT 765 sibling. The unique foreign press-kit books from various film releases have been sold out almost since they appeared, and seemingly remain with their sold-out labels attached only to taunt those of us who were too slow. There are still a couple $375 exposure-test Polaroids from the set of Traffic (2000) available, though I expect those will be nabbed soon enough.
Soon enough, the shop link will be broken, though one hopes the Wayback capture will remain. The impermanence of Soderbergh’s digital ventures dismays me; the interactive version of Mosaic (2017) lasted only fourteen months, and I live in concern that the current ownership of some streaming services will start delisting films with no physical editions. Don’t even get me started on his camera app.
But what I really want to talk about, while it’s still possible to glance over the remaining goods, is the constraints Soderbergh has given himself (and Joanna Bush, designer and sometimes creative director of Extension 765) with regard to merchandise. Aside from the Command Z logo items, whose proceeds I believe were donated, there is nothing for sale that includes any reference to Soderbergh or his work.
Far be it from me to dismiss the glory of the celebrity vanity project, but this is an unusual choice for a personal branding enterprise. It’s one thing to be running a commercial venture like Super Yaki for movie dweeb t-shirts with no specific center except giddy enthusiasm. Extension 765 is another thing entirely: one man’s website, and a man with a vast and popular intellectual property portfolio at that.
Yet you can’t buy a Schizopolis (1996) poster or any of Soderbergh’s published books from their author. Instead, the shirts and hats are all references to the non-Soderbergh films that Soderbergh enjoys, just like the web domain itself: the license plate from The French Connection (1971), the apartment address from Last Tango in Paris (1972), or the insurance company from Double Indemnity (1944). You can (well, could) buy possessory-credit apparel for other people who have the same job as the site owner—Mike Nichols, Lina Wertmüller, and Dede Allen—and one that attributes precisely nothing to his favorite critic, Pauline Kael. But Soderbergh himself has never taken a possessory credit, and never put his name on a t-shirt either.
I’ve never met Steven Soderbergh; whether he’s a self-effacing man in his personal or professional life, I can’t say. But I think his decision to sell products entirely in celebration of other people’s art is aligned, in a way, with his famous use of pseudonyms. What a film director really directs, Alexander Mackendrick said, is the audience’s attention. The elimination of one’s own name in favor of a reference is a choice to direct that attention away from the persona and toward the work.1Place your orders now for soderblog dot blog’s 1250 Vista Blanca embroidered bucket hat, coming in 2044!
I hope that the elimination of the merch shop will not mean the end of correspondence from Fabrizia del Dongo,2 I suspect it’s not deliberate, but if you actually subscribe to Soderbergh’s blog by RSS, the entries in the feed are credited not to their author, but to “Matt Riskam.” I can only presume he was the developer who installed the CMS to begin with. Maybe Joanna Bush knows. the exasperated (and fictional) lackey who signs all the letters from the Extension 765 mailing list. Even that name is referential. Fabrizio del Dongo is the protagonist of La Chartreuse de Parme, a nineteenth-century French novel.3I’m sorry, but I haven’t read it. I have enough homework for this thing already. To Anglophone residents of the twenty-first century, his name is also an eye-rollingly puerile joke. The feminine –a makes me suspect that maybe the real person behind that curtain is the aforementioned Joanna Bush, but the writing’s tone and quirks—like always going full-caps for titles—hint that Fabrizia is just one more Soderbergh pseud.
Either way, I am fond of Fabrizia and the world implied in their inventive correspondence. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that Mr./Dr. Soderbergh’s promises not to eliminate the del Dongo position are trustworthy. Pour one out for the Extension 765 mercantile experience, and do make sure the bottle you splash from is Singani 63.
- 1Place your orders now for soderblog dot blog’s 1250 Vista Blanca embroidered bucket hat, coming in 2044!
- 2I suspect it’s not deliberate, but if you actually subscribe to Soderbergh’s blog by RSS, the entries in the feed are credited not to their author, but to “Matt Riskam.” I can only presume he was the developer who installed the CMS to begin with. Maybe Joanna Bush knows.
- 3I’m sorry, but I haven’t read it. I have enough homework for this thing already.