GothamCity.com: Our Domain Is Now Your Domain!

By Gotham City partner Joel Roodman

Many people have asked us how we got our hands on such an iconic domain name.

Back in the mid-’90s, at the tail end of a five-year hard-labor sentence at Miramax Films under the Weinstein brothers (a stint that aged me like a bodega banana), my colleague Patrick McDarrah and I had the idea of knotting some sheets together, scaling the prison wall and breaking out of the studio prior to parole and starting our own film production company. We called it Gotham Entertainment Group—because, hey, if you’re gonna dream, dream BIG.

The day we escaped from the TriBeCa Film Center, I hopped onto GoDaddy, typed in GothamCity.com, and—boom—the domain was available! For $12.95! I mean, seriously, who drops the ball on locking down a brand name like that? Probably the same genius who thought Crystal Pepsi was a good idea. Yeah, it was early in the dot com days, but someone had already bought sex.com and those were not the types of movies we were going to make.

So, Patrick and I spent a couple of years hustling to produce movies under the Gotham banner. We actually got a couple of the films green-lit and off the ground—but like many so-called “producers,” we found ourselves in that awkward space between barely breaking even and calling our mothers for rent money. And if you’ve ever worked in the film business (or know someone who has), you know that being an independent producer without a trust fund, rich spouse, or massive savings account is like trying to pay New York rent with Monopoly money. You might as well slap on an apron and start steaming milk at Starbucks, because you’re gonna need a side hustle – or cashed in a winning lottery ticket.

Within a couple of years of toiling in the indie world, we both were recruited and offered solid well-paying gigs working for others in the biz, and for cash-flow reasons, Patrick and I amicably parted ways. (I actually went back to Miramax and did another two-year term without parole, nor time off for good behavior, but the solid weekly paycheck that cleared the bank was a welcomed relief.)

And while my entrepreneurial career since then has taken me into some fascinating and successful growing areas of ‘the biz’, I continued to hold onto the GothamCity.com domain because I knew I would one day find something of value for the brand name.

Over the years, I got some significant and tempting offers to sell the domain, including one from a major movie studio who thought it would be a nice tie-in for their superhero franchise. But the money offered was never quite enough to make me say, “Screw it, I’m retiring to the south of France.”

So, occasionally, I’d come up with some half-baked (literally) idea to do something with it. A video game? A travel site? Apartment rental portal? A dating app for jaded New Yorkers who’ve been ghosted one too many times? Oh, and there were many more.

Then, last November, I hit the squash court with my old buddy Jan Renner. After I wiped the floor with him in a hard-fought five-game match (he’ll tell you otherwise, but don’t believe him), I mentioned that I was still sitting on the domain and wondered if he had any ideas on how we could make this something that was New York centric.

Over some well-earned beers at the Ear Inn, we started brainstorming ways to turn it into something for all the folks who love New York—because, let’s face it, this city’s got a million stories, and not all of them involve a corrupt ring-kissing Mayor or tourists blocking the sidewalk at Katz’s Deli.

Since neither of us had the wordsmithing chops to make it happen, Jan suggested we call his buddy Drew Kerr, who had already been sending out a similar email newsletter to his friends. Drew is a walking New York encyclopedia who clearly knows how to string words together without sounding like a stoned drunk guy on the E train and he came up with our tagline “Don’t Say We Didn’t Tell You”.

And just like that, we partnered up and Gotham City was born—your new go-to spot for everything you want to know about NYC.

Welcome to our domain. Just don’t ask us for a loan.

Joel