A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow From Beaver to Butt-head: ABC's look at TV teens The Negotiator Reviewed by Charles Taylor This cop flick may be big and noisy, but it plods along too slowly to be called an action movie Y E S T E R D A Y "At some point you gotta be strong" By Bob Cannon Trisha Yearwood talks about her reluctant reign as queen of country music (07/29/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Nina Simone, Marshall Crenshaw, Christian McBride and Gillian Welch (07/29/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor Love hurts: the exquisite agony of Bertrand Blier's romantic dramas (07/28/98) American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Kevin Spacey's je ne sais quoi (07/27/98) Saving Private Ryan Reviewed by Gary Kamiya Steven Spielberg brings hell to a theater near you (07/24/98) The Mask of Zorro Reviewed by Charles Taylor A glorious, rousing adventure starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones (07/22/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "The Moon's Our Home": Silvery art deco romantic comedy (07/21/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

______H O L L Y W O O D __S Q U A R E D ___pithemovie.com PUTS HOLLYWOOD'S __________UNINSPIRED WEB SITES TO SHAME. BY TIM CAVANAUGH | If there's one thing less inspired than a Hollywood movie, it's a Hollywood Web site. Considering how cheaply a good Web project can be done, compared with the amount of studio money that gets lavished on making sure Leo has the right selection of mints on his pillow, it's unforgivable that the vast bulk of movie sites are little more than repackaged press kits. So it's somehow fitting that one of the more interesting Web projects out there has been devised by a handful of independent moviemakers. "Pi," the much-discussed feature by Darren Aronofsky, is a case study in how to transcend, rather than merely stretch, a $60,000 budget. The film -- a high-contrast black and white mélange of vague math theory and sharp conspiracy theories, corporate espionage and cabbalistic hints of divinity -- has spawned a Web site that puts most studio Internet projects to shame. Sean Gullette, the movie's star and designer of the site, calls Pithemovie.com "a cocktail party primer on the topics raised in the film." To that end, the site offers thumbnail lessons on chaos theory and other subjects covered in the movie; where most movie sites wouldn't dare to direct viewers to more informative sites, this one provides numerous links to sites that will provide more insight on, for example, cabala and numerology. The site's content richness is impressive if only because it's so rarely done (compare "Pi's" examination of the stock market with, for example, the "Titanic" site's vague gesture at historical context). It doesn't take anything away from Gullette's achievement to point out that the movie provided him enough ideas to go on; content-based Web sites have always been aimed at inveterate time-wasters, but even that demographic would get more mileage from "Pi's" conspiratorial intricacies than from, say, Sony's "Mask of Zorro" role-playing game. Gullette acknowledges that the success of the site results partly from the movie's oddball strengths. "A Web site allows you to experience the world the way Max [the screen-gazing math genius Gullette plays in the movie] experiences it. The movie is about paranoia and cabala, and since the Internet is a paranoid and intertwined medium, it's well-suited to convey those ideas. That's why the site would suck if the movie were about big wave surfing, because the Web is a particularly poor medium for expressing ideas about big wave surfing." It's a particularly good medium, though, for expressing ideas that are tangential to, or even absent from, the movie itself. After seeing the Free Truman site, you might have had high hopes for the movie version of "The Truman Show." Paramount took some trouble to make the site look spontaneous, with a bogus bulletin board, a collection of grainy photos and the sort of amateurish design usually reserved for "Free Tibet!" or "Macedonia is Greek!" sites (not that this stopped various Web geniuses from trumpeting their discovery of Big Brother's invisible hand behind the site). But the site's real dodge lies in leading its readers to believe that the "Truman Liberation Front" (never mentioned in the film itself) was something integral to the plot of the movie. If there's some doubt about the movie's substance -- and there usually is -- an online promo is an excellent place to flesh out the bones of a High Concept. Last year's $95 million "Starship Troopers" was a wheels-within-wheels cycle of satires -- a seamless hybrid of action movie, Web-style infomercial and fascist recruiting film, all playing on the idea that fascism may actually be the right model for future leadership. But it was easy to miss the sly achievement in the thickets of the movie's relentlessly arch tone and absurdly awful acting. The "Starship Troopers" Web site -- a total immersion in the movie's newsreel propaganda -- nicely underscored the pungent facetiousness that most viewers and reviewers missed. Another Paul Verhoeven picture -- the universally maligned "Showgirls" -- spawned a celebrated early example of the better-than-strictly-necessary movie Web site. Featuring slithery prose and an automated chat routine whose clumsiness kept hyperborean wiseacres amused long after the movie had shuffled off its mortal G-string, "Showgirls" online was, like many theatrical trailers, better than the movie itself. But the formula of theatrical trailers (buildup, intertitle, punch line, title, second punch line, premier date and credits) is impossibly rigid. To the average moviegoer -- fussing with the pre-feature ritual of spiking a medium no-ice Coke with a smuggled-in bottle of rum -- the trailer for "Lethal Weapon 4" can seem barely distinguishable from the one for < href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/1997/11/14wings.html">"Wings of the Dove." A promotional Web site, on the other hand, can spin a movie in any direction. With its ample storage space and endless content sprawl, the Web offers unique opportunities for false advertising. The colossal promo page for "Titanic" offered an extensive catalog of histories, myths and legends to make up for the wealth of Titanic lore that the movie failed to use (the designers were smart enough to split the site into "history" and "movie" sections, so that fans would lose no time in finding the Leo pictures). The site for Disney's "Mulan" goes on at such length about the project's debt to Chinese art and literature that we don't know whether to feel relieved or ripped off when the movie features Confucian dialogue like "Who spit in her bean curd?" and "Call out for egg roll!" Even godzilla.com, despite a dearth of content, was livened up by its bulletin board, which became so inundated with hate mail from disgruntled fans that thin-skinned producer Dean Devlin began counterflaming with posts bragging about the size of his paycheck, and Sony was forced to shut the bulletin board down June 5. If there was any way on earth to enjoy "Godzilla," this was it. But even the most ambitious movie sites at this stage are still little more than expanded press kits. If freetruman.com is important at all, it is as a pointer toward the final Boba Fettishization of cinema. Dry-mouthed observers of the "Star Wars" phenomenon will recall how fans mysteriously built a cult around "Boba Fett," an insignificant character from the series who occupies the screen for no more than a few minutes, forcing the Lucas empire to respond by giving Mr. Fett his own line of merchandise and adventures. Whether the Boba Fett phenomenon was a stealth maneuver by Lucasfilm or a spontaneous fan cult, this raising of even a movie's insert shots to mythical status points us toward a truly win-win future, and a fulfillment of the "content rich" hopes that characterized the Web's early years. Imagine a future in which every movie, from "Secrets and Lies" to "Monkey Trouble", can sire its own little "Star Wars" universe of spin-off novels, favorite characters and lunch boxes. After all, why should it be left to obsessed writers of fan fiction to spin lurid curlicues on cinema's lesser moments? Who knows what gold Hollywood might strike with a Web site that give the back story of every crowd scene extra in "Meet the Deedles?" But before you can twist an idea, you need an idea, which may be why a no-budget art-house flower is setting the standard not only for thoughtful filmmaking but for clever, high-buzz marketing. Significantly, "Pi" has already bred its first spin-off, a graphic novel that will come out next month. In the week before the movie's New York premiere, the city was peppered with "Pi" symbols. And Gullette, whose résumé includes founding the fabled but short-lived magazine KGB and several years of Web design, has compiled that guerrilla marketing theory into a first-rate Web site. In a summer that has seen the most colossally futile movie ad campaign in history, "Pi" -- the movie and the site -- offers a Godzilla-sized promise of a product that does more than just take up space. SALON | July 30, 1998 Tim Cavanaugh is the reclusive auteur behind www.simpleton.com. Addendum: Our high praise for Sean Gullette's work on pithemovie.com raised the hackles of some vigilant Web surfers, who sent us several e-mails like the following: "In his rush to join the gush-fest surrounding 'Pi' the movie, Mr. Cavanaugh failed to notice (or mention) the fact that Pithemovie.com blatantly heisted its code from Futura2000, another popular website ... I wonder how 'Pi's' 'designers' feel about your dubious accolades. I'd suggest some follow-up reporting." Our follow-up reporting revealed that the nearly identical design shared by the hub page for "Pi" and the hub page for Futura 2000 was no happy accident. Futura, a Brooklyn-based artist, was alerted to the similarities by his fans shortly after the "Pi" site premiered in May. "I was shocked when I saw it. I really was," Futura, a Brooklyn, N.Y., artist and Web designer, told Salon. Nevertheless, he says, he and Gullette reached a settlement whereby Gullette, in exchange for a payment in the "few hundreds of dollars" range, was allowed to continue using the original Futura design. Gullette concedes that he took "an undigested bite" of the design ideas, but insists he did not realize at the time that the design was original to Futura, whom he calls "a great, innovative artist." "This is a case of mea culpa," Gullette said. "I've been to the woodshed with Futura on this, and we're square. This is not an episode in my life that I'm proud of." He confirmed that he paid Futura in exchange for use of the design. But at Futura's request, he did not credit the 42-year-old former graffiti artist. That lack of a credit caused problems as "Pi" caught on with critics and commentators, and Futura's acolytes suspected that the movie site was making illegal use of Futura's work. After we contacted Gullette about the hubbub, he changed the "Pi" site (this time with Futura's blessing) to acknowledge the artist's contribution. None of which takes away from pithemovie.com's achievement as a content-rich movie-related Web site. But it does hark back to the days of full-scale idea piracy that made the Web such a beautiful nightmare in its early days. SALON | July 31, 1998