The New York Timesreports on a growing trend of web auteurs having their work picked up by major studios. Known as video bloggers or vloggers, these auteurs of short films usually upload them to sites like Youtube.com where anyone can view them.
Whether the Internet will ever become a seed bed for full-length movies remains to be seen. The independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg ("Kissing on the Mouth," "LOL"), who was hired by Nervevideo.com to create what he describes as an "indie soap opera for the Web" called "Young American Bodies," said the Net is the wrong place to watch a conventional narrative of conventional length.
"I have a hard time focusing on the computer screen for 90 minutes,” Mr. Swanberg, 25, said. "A feature film isn’t interactive. I think a theater is still the best venue for that."
Yet Web users have already shown that they can bend a movie to their tastes. The most obvious instance has been New Line Cinema's coming film Snakes on a Plane, which was the subject of endless Internet interest, mostly spoofing the title and its self-evident premise. New Line decided to play to this audience by incorporating some of its ideas, requiring a week of reshoots and a change in ratings from PG-13 to R.
"We really got to service the fans," said "Snakes" director David Ellis. "Decisions are usually made by guys 50, 60 years old. They only know during test screenings. If you can get it out early, you can deliver what they want."
Still, to let the audience feel genuinely in charge of the phenomenon, Mr. Ellis and New Line had to sacrifice prerogatives that directors and movie companies normally hold dear. "The worst thing we can do is take it over," New Line’s marketing chief, Russell Schwartz, said of trying to control the "Snakes" Web boom.
These new horizons are not to everyone’s liking. Pointing to the precedent of American Idol, Mr. Gilmore said, "If you were told a decade ago that a TV show would determine the next major pop star, would you believe it? I have a fear of the tyranny of mass taste." Mr. Gilmore also wondered what sort of "filtering mechanisms" would evolve on the Internet, if any. Of course what makes the Web attractive is that there are no gatekeepers — managers, agents, studio executives, or film-festival programmers — to get past. But that’s also what makes finding truly satisfying entertainment difficult. On YouTube alone tens of thousands of videos are posted every day.
Andy Samberg's career is a classic example. Samberg was a member of the Net comedy troupe the Lonely Island -- he's now on Saturday Night Live where he will always be known for his brilliant comic short "Lazy Sunday: The Chronicles of Narnia Rap."
