I’ve got a weird strain of thought brewing, and I find when this feeling starts to bubble up, it’s best to just scrawl it out, and see where the idea takes me. There’s often something useful there, and besides, it won’t leave my head until I exorcise it in this fashion.

Last night, home after a night of drinks and Mexican food with friends, I found myself unable to sleep. I looked at my DVR to see what shows I had left to watch, while there was a good 10 hours worth of programming stacked there, I really didn’t feel like watching any of it.

On-demand programming has spoiled me. I notice that lately I don’t even flip through my DVD collection. And, in fact, I’ve largely stopped collecting DVDs. Instead I went to my new go-to solution: Netflix Watch Instantly.  But as I flipped through my queue, and then through comedies and recent arrivals and action/suspense films, I started to realize I was still restless – despite all of these avenues, I realized I was still missing something: a true variety of formats for a wide variety of content.

By way of explanation, let me mention a conversation I had with a co-worker last week. We were discussing the “awards season” and the films pumped out at the end of the year, and I remarked that this seemed to be the result of a growing dichotomy in the film industry – the summer blockbuster and the “awards” film. It seemed to me that film production and distribution had become increasing binary: either you pumped out a dazzling effects-laden spectacle based on a popular franchise, or you put a film out at the end of the year for award recognition, which would lead, in turn, to greater ticket sales. Any film that doesn’t fit these two categories gets unceremoniously dumped in the months between summer and winter.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I like blockbusters, and I like movies that win Academy awards. But the blockbuster, for example—as it’s become entrenched in ritual—takes on certain stereotypical features (also known as the “trusted business model”). The stories are often very streamlined, giving way to bloated set pieces upon which ornate effects sequences are laid. And film is a visual medium, so I don’t want to dismiss that. It’s something film does very well. But quite often, these summer spectacles become 3-hour films with about 90 minutes of story and 90 minutes of spectacle. And sitting down to watch, let’s say, Avatar, at midnight on Sunday just isn’t really what I want. Nor do I necessarily desire a deep psychological portrait filled with somber tension and nuanced symbolism.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I’m trapped between these two increasingly binary tracks.

What spurred all of this was the fact that the 1932 Carl Theodor Dreyer film Vampyr had made its way onto Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature.  I had heard of but hadn’t seen the film before, and I was curious. However, what intrigued me most last night was the fact that the film was 70-odd minutes. That was exactly the length I was looking for.

And it got me thinking: here I was with this on-demand streaming channel in which I could essentially dial-up anything, but in looking at any recent films, I was still restricted to the formats that have become doctrine.

We all know we’re on the cusp of monumental change.  DVRs have changed our viewing habits. YouTube and other Internet video channels have demonstrated our viewing flexibility and the range to the content we’re willing to consume. Server space and bandwidth are becoming cheaper and more available all the time. I remember the first time I tried to launch Netflix over my Xbox console, and it’s amazingly different today in quality, speed, and breadth of content.

What I really wanted last night? A pulpy action thriller that was sleek and spare without a single wasted moment.  I wanted a story that fit neatly into 70 minutes and was not part of a larger series. I don’t want that to be my only choice, but I wanted the choice. I wanted something that fit my mood and my attention span at 12:30am on a Monday morning.

And in this on-demand world, why can’t I get that?

Netflix has famously declared that they’re on their way to becoming primarily an online streaming company.  It’s a subscription-based distribution model. With that in place, it seems to me that CAN be offering ANY kind of format, not just what the larger studios offer up. 5-minute shorts. 60-minute action movies. 6-hour epics. Whatever. I don’t believe the audience only wants 3-hour bloated special effects vehicles. I think that running time helps you swallow the cost of a $14 movie ticket, but I don’t believe that everyone needs that same justification when dialing up their Netflix queue during an insomniac moment or on a rainy weekend afternoon. On-demand means we can have it whenever we want it. But there’s a deeper change that comes with that – it’s not just on-demand programming, it’s in-the-mood-for programming as well. And that can mean a much greater diversity in storytelling.

In fact, from a creative side, I find that incredibly liberating. When Jeremy Rogers and I set out to launch Wormwood, we thought it would probably be a smart idea to try to conform our podcast episodes to 22 minutes. Or 30 minutes. Something that fit with the established rules of television. Something that showed we could hit that mark. It took us about 2 episodes to ditch that idea. We quickly realized that this was fresh new territory, and we just needed to follow the story. We didn’t have to answer to anyone, so why pretend we could? There is no single set length for a story, or even for a chapter of a story. There’s nothing uniform in the realm of fiction and the telling of stories. And I ‘d like to think the viewer can also appreciate when something is exactly as long as it needs to be. And when they’re in-the-mood, that story will be waiting. On demand.

With my head full of these blossoming thoughts, I naturally had to tweet. Two or three times. That’s the beauty of the immediacy of the Internet. And I was happy that a few people responded. Among them was comics and storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman, who agreed, but also added the crucial component that my dream hadn’t yet considered. He wrote: “Let’s hope there some kind of economic model that could work that way.”

And that, of course, is the real work. My train of thought dropped me off in front of that mountain. And it’s not the kind of mountain that one man can climb. It’s going to involve Sherpas and icepicks and lots and lots of rope, and it may not even be my mountain to climb. But, dammit, there’s an opportunity there. And as both a creator and a content watcher, I want to see it happen.

I stand in front of my car and I begin to howl, a steady sound like “oooooooooooo.” I am unsure whether this is true rage or theatrics. My voice doesn’t seem to carry.

After a moment, my girlfriend grabs my arm. She hurries me away. She’s indicating that someone is coming. As we walk to the far end of the small lot, a light shines nearby. There is a truck. I can’t see it well, but as it circles around my ruined car, I see it is filled with men. The truck pulls around and somehow the light falls on a man, sitting in the back of the truck. He is wearing a machine gun strapped over his shoulder. My girlfriend and I begin to run.

At the back end of the lot is a small stairwell. As we run toward that, the men in the truck shout. I know at this point they will shoot at us. I begin to wonder what the bullets will feel like as they pierce my flesh. I consider whether or not I will feel pain, or if the velocity will make initial impact painless as bullets pass through me. There is a sharp burst of rapid gunfire, but it sounds distant, not as close as it should. In this moment, I reflect on the fact that while I have heard gunfire, I have never been shot at.

My girlfriend and I reach the stairway and descend. We enter into a dark, cluttered backyard. It appears to be the ruined area behind black apartment buildings. We coast along, effortlessly. We don’t see the men in the truck, but we seem to know they are following us. They are perhaps at the edge of the dark buildings. We seem to easily hop over small chainlink fences, dashing across interconnected yards in various stages of ruin. Everything is deeply immersed in the gloom.

Now we cut along a small house. Weeds cling to the sides of the dark slats, but I can see that windows are lit. We pass by a warm yellow square and a woman disappears from our sight. We walk along the side of this house further, through the patchy foliage. On the other side of us is another low chain-link fence. It occurs to me that there is another road on the other side of that fence, but it is not visible. I do realize, however, that the men in the truck may appear here at any time. We keep moving quickly. In this moment, I believe that we must get inside the house with the yellow windows. We move to another window and I raise myself up, peering inside.

Inside the yellow room, a man looks up and catches my eye. He is a dark-skinned man with black unruly hair and a patchy black beard. His eye is liquid obsidian. I realize he’s looking at me over a lit candle on a table, which is why the room seems so yellow and warm. He looks at me and does not blink.

I awaken. I am not scared, but the image of the man staring back at me lingers in my mind. I go to the bathroom, pee, return to bed. I sleep again, but that dream does not return. Instead there is a different dream. A casino. Gangsters acting out a sting operation just as it happens on the TV. In another scene, I am in a women’s restroom and I am given a baby to hold. The child is the size of an infant, but she seems to have a toddler’s head, features, and verbal ability. She gives me a note she has picked up from the ground of the restroom and asks me if she has deciphered the letters correctly. I look at the note, the strange symbols. Yes, I tell her, you are correct. I turn the note upside down and I realize that the letters actually spell out words. I read the phrase:

“U R Great.”