I’m not one for reality television, but a few years ago, I got hooked on the third season of Project Greenlight (as usual with TV shows I like, it was cancelled after the third season). For those not familiar with the show, it was started by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; they wanted to give amateurs the chance to get a real hollywood production. Every year, they solicited scripts and directors and allowed anyone to enter.
Of course, the success of the series is up for debate. As the Onion A.V. Club notes:
The failures of the Project Greenlight experiment—first Stolen Summer, then The Battle Of Shaker Heights, and now Feast—have been pinned largely on the novice contest winners who were in over their head. And while that’s not entirely unfair, given the banality of the scripts and mostly feckless direction, a more substantial chunk of the blame should fall on the producers who set them up for failure. From the start, they’ve backed conventional Hollywood projects at miniscule budgets, and then diluted the material further by constantly second-guessing the filmmakers. In the end, the films look like the cheaply stitched gowns fashioned during week one of Project Runway, all mangled hemlines and unflattering proportions.
I haven’t seen the first two seasons, but I have seen The Battle of Shaker Heights, and I can see why it wouldn’t be considered a success (though it wasn’t that bad either). In any case, I enjoyed season three greatly, mostly because they chose a lunatic to direct the film, called Feast. Without the nutcase, it would have been interesting to get a behind the scenes look at how a relatively low-budget hollywood film is produced. But director John Gulager has a special kind of crazy that’s just a blast to watch. It’s amazing that a movie got made at all…
Unless, of course, you talk to James Berardinelli, who gave the film zero stars:
Zero-star movies are a rare and terrifying breed – films that warrant recommendation only as an alternative to physical distress. Sitting in a theater as one of these examples of cinematic diarrhea unspools creates a curious tug-of-war within the viewer. On one hand, there’s an almost overwhelming desire to flee from the auditorium, to get away as far and as fast as is humanly possible. On the other hand, there’s a compulsion to stay – the result of a sick fascination to see if the production can possibly get worse.
Ouch. Most reviews give the film a little more credit than that, but I doubt the film is all that good. Still, I’d like to see it, if only to see the end result of crazy John Gulager’s efforts (plus, I’m a fan of bad horror flicks). Apparently the film only had two showings this past weekend, one at midnight on Friday and one at midnight on Saturday, so I’ll have to check it out on DVD… though honestly, I think I’d rather watch the show again.