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Howard and his more than 50 online competitors are eyeing the one place we, the most overentertained culture ever, are still bored: the office. Likewise the producers Brillstein-Grey and 3 Arts are set to roll out Z.com a site that has signed Oliver Stone (Nixon, J.F.K.), producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Armageddon, Top Gun) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Magic Johnson). Among Z.com's acquisitions is a six-minute pilot for a claymation series called Rotten Fruit, about an English band whose members curse at one another. You don't need much of an idea for a six-minute show. But for that idea, the writers got $10,000 and a slew of stock options. "For clients who want to do something different and keep ownership, it's an incredible opportunity," says the writers' agent, Peter Micelli of CAA, one of many agents who began pushing Web deals a few months ago.
For years Hollywood giants ignored the Internet because it didn't accomplish their artistic goal: namely, making money. But they were roused out of slumber this winter, when America Online announced plans to buy Time Warner (which owns this magazine, many cable outlets and possibly a small part of your soul). As if guys like Hawke running around with video cameras weren't scary enough, now they had to worry about those thick, broadband cables carrying big entertainment to PCs on demand. Even more threatening is the probability that AOL, by far the biggest Internet player that sends monthly bills to its customers, will charge micro fees to use the Web to watch movies or listen to music. That means it will be able to do something that many have tried to do online: make money, possibly tons of it, by selling content.
The content sites are booming, then, partly because there's a heady smell of money in the air. More than 50 sites patterned after TV networks are jostling for eyeballs--from Shockwave.com which has a deal with Matt Stone and Trey Parker to show South Park episodes, to the all-animated Icebox.com which has signed ex-Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, to the girl-friendly Voxxy, which has hired Jennifer Aniston to produce a weekly series. All of them are lousy with money. "This is going to be Hollywood's Vietnam. There's going to be a lot of money spent and a lot of blood lost," says David Wertheimer, 32, founder of the webtertainment site Wirebreak. "If MTV doesn't buy us in a year, we'll buy them in four."
The best part of the new entertainment economics is that you don't have to commission people to give you content; in fact, it's hard to get them to stop. Especially the filmmakers. Boston-based Todd Verow, 29, has already released five digital features, including Shucking the Curve, which is about fashionable East Village junkies; he plans to make 10 more by the end of the year. Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos, two freelancing filmmakers, spent all of $900 in 1997 to shoot a digital-video movie called The Last Broadcast, which, like The Blair Witch Project, was a mockumentary horror movie involving a murder in the woods (in the future, it seems, "Arboreal Murder Mockumentary" will surpass "Romantic Tearjerker" as the most popular Blockbuster category).