Greenlight signals change in Net talent hunt

Pete Jones of Chicago was just another insurance salesman with a dream -- until he won a contest on the Internet last year and got to try his hand at making a movie.

Stolen Summer, the $1.9 million movie that Jones, 32, wrote and directed, opened last weekend, capping off a year-long adventure instigated by actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They came up with the idea for the contest, co-sponsored by Miramax Films, and made Jones' progress into a documentary series called Project Greenlight, which ran recently on HBO.

Jones' movie, which opened in four cities, made $62,000 its first weekend -- but the money is almost beside the point.

At the time the contest began, many Web entrepreneurs were speaking loudly and boldly about the Internet becoming a new place to find undiscovered talent, a way of breaking through the traditionally closed doors of Hollywood.

Then came the reality: It costs a lot to run entertainment sites, investor funds were drying up and the online ad market was struggling. Many believe the opportunity is still there, but the choices are now far fewer and, in most cases, no longer free for the asking.

Jones' ride began a year ago, when 7,291 contest entrants submitted scripts. His story, a family film about a Catholic boy wondering how to get to heaven in 1976 Chicago, was one of the ones picked as a finalist by visitors to the Project Greenlight site. The actors and their partners chose Summer as the winner, giving Jones a $1 million budget (later increased to $1.9 million) to make the movie.

''We still think the Web is a great place to find new talent,'' says Keith Quinn of Live Planet, the production company owned by Damon and Affleck that staged the contest. ''The Web is the way you get your peer review, with your users choosing the finalists.''

But while Live Planet and Miramax say they hope to stage a second contest, they haven't been able to agree on terms. They're currently running a Web survey asking users how much they would pay to participate in a sequel, after the first site reportedly went $750,000 over budget. The first contest was free.

The only free contest site still out there is Hypnotic's Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival. Hypnotic's first festival resulted in a grand prize winner -- who won a $1 million budget to shoot a feature film. The contest was held at the same time as Greenlight, and actually announced its winner first.

However, the film -- about a would-be earthquake in New York City -- has yet to be made by David Von Ancken, formerly an employee of an accounting firm.

''David submitted a very ambitious first draft, which was wonderful, but a different movie than we could make for a million dollars,'' says Hypnotic's Gene Klein. ''He's rewriting it now.'' They hope to get it before the cameras this summer, to be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Hypnotic, whose traffic is under the 200,000-monthly-visitor threshold tracked by Jupiter Media Metrix, showcases film shorts. The site is part of the Vivendi/Universal media empire, which includes Universal Studios, the music Web sites MP3.com and Get Music and the just-launched MP4.com, which also presents video shorts and clips.

The new contest currently spotlights 25 short films, mostly student works, which will get winnowed down to 10 by Hypnotic users, with the winner to be selected in September.

Jeff Wadlow, 26, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California, submitted his 22-minute student film, Tower of Babble, consisting of three stories with similar dialog but different endings.

He doesn't envy Pete Jones. ''At first I thought he's the luckiest guy in the world,'' but making a movie is stressful enough without somebody making a documentary. ''But I'd love it if someone gave me $1 million to make a movie.''

USC associate dean Larry Auerbach says he's ''not a big believer in these contests. The odds of winning are horrendous, and if you do win, the contracts really need to be examined closely. They take all rights away and demand a lot of our students' time.''

Despite all the attention to the Net, Auerbach still thinks festivals are a better way to go. ''The Internet market was hot for a while, but now it's not. It was built on hype; no one could make money. I don't know if it will come back.''

Try telling that to Patrick Daughters. ''To have an opportunity like this is fantastic,'' says the Hypnotic contestant, recently of NYU, who works nights as a bartender. ''There are a lot of frustrated young filmmakers out there. It's like there's this big party going on in the next room and you can't figure out how to get in there. When stuff like this happens, it's encouraging.''

Besides Jones, two other Greenlight participants had their scripts bought by Live Planet, and another sold her screenplay to a director. In the first Hypnotic festival, several of the contestants got agents.

Jones is writing a new screenplay, set again in Chicago, which he hopes to sell to Live Planet. And Von Ancken, while he waits for Universal's OK on his script, has been signed to direct an upcoming episode of HBO's prison drama Oz.

Despite the relative lack of competition, Live Planet's Quinn thinks a second contest, if they pull it off, will be bigger than the first.

''We went from the idea in the writer's mind to releasing it in the theaters. Now that we've done that, and 10 to 20 million people saw the show on HBO, don't you think a lot more will want to be involved next time? Pete went through some well-documented troubles, but he made a really good film and got his foot in the door.'' Copyright Jefferson Graham Usa Today

Related sites

* projectgreenlight.com
* hypnotic.com
* tonos.com
* insidesessions.com
* chrysler.com