The next Hollywood superstar could be you
Since 1929, the spooky Chateau Marmont has lorded over Hollywood from its perch atop the Sunset Strip. The hotel is a safe space where celebrities act like celebrities. John Belushi died in a ground-floor bungalow. Montgomery Clift convalesced in a penthouse suite. Jim Morrison dangled from its windows. How perfectly appropriate, then, to find Kevin Wendle, the CEO and cofounder of Ifilm, eating breakfast and discussing the next great film prodigy: you. "We're about to see the explosion of the home director-producer," says Wendle, who also cofounded CNET and is an executive founding member of the Fox Television Network. "Overnight successes will be made--that's the power of the Internet."
Wendle has already created such a success. Last summer, Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt finished a three-minute short film, 405, about an airplane that makes an emergency landing on a Los Angeles freeway. Total budget: US$300 (including a US$75 traffic ticket). It was posted on Ifilm, and in less than a year, almost 3 million people have downloaded it; only MediaTrip.com's short comedy George Lucas in Love has even approached those numbers. The partners were bombarded by offers, got representation from the Creative Artists Agency, and quit their day jobs.
Even two years ago this would not have been possible. With talent, you can become a rock star with a US$200 guitar; a writer, with a beat-up typewriter. But given the expensive equipment and know-how needed to make a film [and the connections to get it shown] Hollywood has always been an insider's game. No longer. Branit and Hunt used a digital video camera, which can be had for US$3,000, and edited the film on their home computer. At Sundance this year, more than 40 percent of the festival submissions were shot in DV.
"It opens up filmmaking as much as acrylics opened up painting," says Richard Linklater, director of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, as he sits in his modest hotel room above Sundance headquarters. In less than three hours, he would unveil Tape, an Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman psychological comedy he shot in six days using DV and edited on a Mac using Final Cut Pro software. And his Waking Life, an animated feature using cheap rotoscoping software, was arguably the highlight of the festival.
On such sites as Ifilm, AtomFilms, and MediaTrip, any movie can reach the masses with ease. The amazing fact about the success of 405 isn't the total viewer numbers but the viewer rate: about half of the people had broadband access at the time. As that total soars--some 27 million people should have high-speed connections within three years, according to Forrester Research--a similar kind of penetration would reach Gladiator-type numbers.
If your taste runs more toward Temptation Island, DV technology and broadband connections allow people to turn their lives into unedited, uncensored versions of The Real World. At CameraPlanet.com, you can watch surprisingly gripping footage of an angry protester chaining himself to a McDonald's counter in an attempt to shut the restaurant down. At Z.com, the entrepreneurial and highly popular Dare for Dollars features people eating dog food and digging through manure for cash and prizes. None of this is beyond the capabilities of a high school cameraman, and all of it has a chance to be a hit. And like the guys of 405, these hits will transcend the Internet. At Sundance, David von Ancken was awarded a US$1 million deal from Universal after winning a Hypnotic online short film contest. "People who are developing a loyal audience on the Internet," says Doug Liman, the director of Swingers and the upcoming The Bourne Identity, "will carry that into television and film."
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
