Rookie directors vie for Spielberg reality show

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Few women applied
Women clearly have an advantage because so few of them have applied. “I wish there were more women filmmakers,” McNulty says. “It’s male-driven. It’s like ‘The Contender,’ trying to find the Great White Hope.” Adds Frank, “We have found some great women.”

Actress-writer-cartoonist-filmmaker Michele Seipp hopes she is one of them. She first heard about the show from the Filmmakers Alliance and started calling Fox, DreamWorks and Burnett before Fox launched the Web site. As soon as it went up, Seipp’s comedy short “The Instant Nostalgia Club,” in which she stars and which has aired on IFC, AMC and WE channels, was uploaded almost immediately, she says. (It now takes many weeks for shorts to go up.) “Club” has been watched by 918 people, averages a four-star rating, and Seipp (called Susy Sue on the site) boasts five pages of friends.

The 40-ish Seipp admits that she has no MySpace page and hasn’t done much to publicize herself: “I’m not as computer savvy.” She can’t even stream the “Lot” shorts on her computer; she uses her boyfriend’s. She blogs and networks and has set up two lunches with some of her new Los Angeles area friends, including drag queen Michael Yeah, whose live-action/animated comedy short “Popcorn” has been viewed 5,924 times. “I gravitate toward the best writers, the ones with humor,” she says. “The actor-directors are sometimes the best directors.”

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By contrast, San Francisco Realtor John Meredith’s “Boy Trouble” boasts 10,777 views and 15 pages of friends. Meredith has even given awards to his rivals on his blog. He includes his own film on the list, naturally.

While McNulty is assembling a long list of candidates, no final decisions have been made. “Every single film that comes in is watched and reviewed,” she says. “We’re narrowing down all the way to the deadline.” She watches all the movies, which include one cell phone short and several multimillion-dollar shorts starring and/or directed by name actors and reads the blogs, which reveal potential conflicts for the show. Goffin insists the blogs are taken less seriously than judging the filmmakers as storytellers, many of who have already made names for themselves on the Internet. “It’s the next generation of talent,” he says.

Christopher Coppola, brother of Nicolas Cage, is one “Lot” aspirant who has generated controversy, according to Seipp, who says that folks on the site are either trying to suck up to him or knock him down. Many are debating, she says, whether his celebrity family name will make him a controversy magnet for the show.

McNulty declines to discuss any contestants. But she was wowed, she admits, by one guy whose intro included a giant UFO in the sky behind him. “He grabs a bazooka and blows the spaceship out of the sky,” she says, “and then says, ’Here’s my movie.”’

After enduring background checks and in-person interviews to prove that they express themselves well, the selected contestants will be flown to California for indoctrination, Goffin says. “They’ll learn the rules of this wild ride to film stardom.”

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