Web fans of ‘Snakes on a Plane’ bite at studio

LOS ANGELES - As film back-stories go, this one is fairly serpentine.

The Samuel L. Jackson thriller “Snakes on a Plane,” which wrapped last September in Vancouver, went back before the cameras this month for five days of additional shooting in Los Angeles.

In this case, it wasn’t the usual reshoot, hastily assembled to fix a nagging story problem. Instead, distributor New Line Cinema decided to create new scenes that would take the movie from PG-13 into R-rated territory.

The second round of filming also came about because of intense and growing fan interest in the movie, which is not scheduled to be released until Aug. 18.

Jackson stars as an FBI agent who has to fight a planeload of snakes unleashed by an assassin bent on killing a witness in protective custody. Sight unseen, the movie has grown from something of a joke into a phenomenon slithering untamed throughout the Internet.

As a movie whose fan base has grown spontaneously and organically, “Snakes” is relatively rare.

Intense fan reaction to movies most often is associated with titles that have established themselves in other media, such as comic book movies or fantasy novels, before making their way to the screen. Or it becomes attached to surprise hits, like the original “Star Wars,” that develop massive cult followings once they are released.

But original movies that develop a big prerelease following are uncommon. Artisan Entertainment pulled off that trick in 1999 with its viral Internet campaign for “The Blair Witch Project,” but that success has not been easily duplicated.

“Snakes,” directed by David R. Ellis from an original script by John Heffernan (with rewrites by four scribes), barely has an official Web site at the moment. But the movie already is the talk of a certain segment of the Net without any real prodding on the part of New Line.

It all started with the provocative and buzzworthy, if also reductive, title. New Line picked up the script after Paramount put it on the backburner in March 2003 — in the wake of Sept. 11, terror-on-a-plane movies had fallen out of favor. And even within New Line, there were skeptics who viewed “Snakes on a Plane” as nothing but a simple programmer with a “stupid title.”

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