The low-budget horror movie The Blair Witch Project鈥攕hot on camcorders
to very scary effect鈥攚as a huge box-office success in the US partly
because it manipulated the Internet to market itself, generating a buzz on
Usenet newsgroups and fan sites. The movie鈥檚 website (www.blairwitch.com) gives
you a good grasp of the movie, maintaining the fiction that it鈥檚 based on
documentary footage shot by three student film-makers who subsequently
disappeared in the Maryland woods.
Now other movie-makers鈥攆rom true independents to the major studios
that just want to sound that way鈥攁re trying to use the Net to plug their
movies, too. For instance, a spam for a hip-hop movie called Whiteboys seems to
have 鈥渁mateur鈥� written all over it鈥攆rom mispelt wrods to overuse of
CAPital LeTters. But the website (www.whiteboys.com) shows it鈥檚 actually a
mainstream movie from Rupert Murdoch鈥檚 Fox empire. The strategy might yet
backfire: one contributor in the rec.music.hip-hop newsgroup writes: 鈥淎ll I know
is, that after all that spam they sent me I am not touching that movie with a
ten foot pole.鈥�
While hyping movies over the Net might soon be pass茅, distributing
them could be the next big thing. A new company called Lot 47 (www.lot47.com)
wants to distribute neglected independent movies over the Internet. 鈥淲e鈥檙e going
to retrieve them and give them a second chance at success in totally new and
revolutionary ways,鈥� said Scott Lipsky, president of the company. Him and whose
bandwidth?
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Of course, the first and biggest Internet marketing success was South Park,
the foul-mouthed cartoon. Recently released as a full-length movie (see
www2.southparkmovie.com), the show has its roots in an animated short from 1995
that was e-mailed around the Internet as a Christmas card. It鈥檚 called The
Spirit of Christmas鈥攐r Jesus vs. Santa Claus鈥攁nd features a brawl
between the title characters. Download it at
www.cen.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/soxmas.
