Undercover Brother flying high with the series' growing success. © Urban Entertainment.

An Urban Dream
A Canadian by birth, Michael Jenkinson ventured through several different landscapes before launching himself onto the Internet frontier. After working as an attorney with the Federal Department of Justice in Toronto, he obtained an MBA from the prestigious Ivey School of Business and subsequently spent a year working in the financial industry for Chase Securities in New York. Embarking on a new career path, Jenkinson then crossed back over the border to become a resident producer in Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Center where he spent the next year in intense and immersive studies of the entertainment world. Wanting to be at the "epicenter of the activity," he struck out for L.A. and quickly landed an intern position at 20^th Century Fox. In the ensuing six years, Jenkinson rose first to VP of Acquisitions before moving over to work as Fox's Vice President of Development and Production.

Although valuing his experiences there, Jenkinson became more and more frustrated over the limitations of shepherding ethnic related projects through the entrenched studio systems. The Web's landscape during the fall of 1998 was pivotal, then, to Jenkinson's next move. Online trading services like Schwab and E-Trade had just hit their stride and Jenkinson, having always been fairly active in the stock market, says, "In doing my research for investment purposes, I focused on Internet entertainment companies." He recalls, "It wasn't hard, if you were paying attention, to see that something really fundamental was happening to the way we communicate and entertain ourselves and conduct commerce. It became a really appealing time to do something entrepreneurial, which was always part of my plan. I felt that I had a pretty well-rounded background that would lend itself to allowing me to start something -- the legal background, the business background, as well as the creative entertainment experience. It just seemed like an irresistible time and so I launched UrbanEntertainment."

As Sir Dunkalot, Undercover Brother dunks college b-ball corruption in episode eight. © Urban Entertainment.

Enlisting award-winning independent producers Nichelle Protho (VP Programming and Production) and Angela Northington (VP Acquisitions and Development), Jenkinson opened shop in the early summer of 1999. They began in earnest acquiring the many African-American films he'd screened over the years which had not been picked-up by the majors or mini-majors with the plan to distribute them primarily to outside video and TV venues. As a marketing gimmick, the trio started the company's first Website UrbanMedia.com where distributors, armed with a password, could access information to Urban's catalog, screen trailers and in some cases, even view the full-length motion pictures. The novelty of selling features online "certainly got us the attention we needed," Jenkinson remembers, "...and as a spin-off, I found that I was getting a lot of traffic from individuals that weren't in the business, who weren't distributors, and they were constantly e-mailing saying, 'How can I watch the movies?' That gave me the idea -- why don't I try to service that traffic? And so I started to buy short films, as well, making those available for everybody to watch on the site."