Hype.Com

Insight on the News, August 21, 2000 by Victor Morton

Websites play leading roles in Hollywood promos, but the Net isn't yet ready for prime time.

This year's Oscars saw a new type of Hollywood pitch during an acceptance speech. And it had nothing to do with politics. The winning visual-effects team from The Matrix closed the usual thanks and praise segment with a plug for the film's Website. Expect more of the same, as Hollywood embraces the Internet as both a promotional device and an artistic medium.

Most theatrical trailers and movie posters prominently feature the film's Website address. Internet movie information sources from Yahoo Movies to reviews in the American Spectator now have links to the films' Websites. For the first time this year, the Online Film Critics Society gave out awards for best official Website for a film (nominees were Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Matrix, Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace, and the winner, The Blair Witch Project.

It was The Blair Witch Project that transformed film's relationship with the Web, developing an extremely elaborate site that included details of the invented Blair Witch legend and biographies of the "missing" film makers. The film became an event among Web-savvy filmgoers.

By the time of its nationwide release in July, the little film that cost less than $35,000 to make had generated such enormous buzz that it eventually grossed more than $140 million in the United States and $250 million worldwide. In proportion to production costs, it is the most successful movie ever made.

Today, all big-budget movies now come with an elaborate Website featuring the sort of goodies long associated with special-edition tapes and discs: "behind the scenes" trivia, clips and even bloopers. Gladiator, the year's No. 2 box-office hit thus far, has 40 traditional ancient virtues such as courage and honor hidden on its Web-site each marked by an icon. Diligent surfers who find all 40 receive film-related prizes.

Other sites have huge amounts of material not just about the film, but about the film's subject matter. The Website for The Perfect Storm, for example, has a downloadable 14 minute documentary about the real 1991 storm that inspired the book and the movie, complete with amateur video footage of that storm's effects on shore and stylized graphics about the effects of waves.

Likewise, the Website for The Patriot, a film under attack for taking various liberties with history, satisfies history buffs by providing its links to more than 130 sites on Revolutionary War history, personalities, museums and reenactment groups, plus original documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

The Internet also offers filmmakers a new medium for the movies themselves. In May, film-critic Roger Ebert and his guest, Michaela Pereira, reviewed Quantum Project on Ebert's TV show, which Pereira called "the first Hollywood-level multimillion-dollar motion picture developed and produced specifically for the Internet." The 166MB, 32-minute film is available for downloading at www.sight sound.com at a price comparable to a video rental. But both critics were skeptical about the technology. Pereira complained that Quantum Project took "hours to download" even with a high speed Internet connection; Ebert said he didn't even get to see the movie because, for encryption reasons, no Macintosh-compatible version of the film was available.

For feature films, they added, the Web likely will be viewed as the minor leagues. But they were enthusiastic about the Internet as a medium for short films, whose theatrical release prospects are negligible and where download times are less onerous.