CYBER-CRITICAL

As a video store owner working in New England in the mid-’80s, Stuart Skorman spent much of his time trying to connect the right film with the right customer.

Rather than simply pointing them in the direction of the new release area, Skorman and his co-workers developed a special process that better matched up movie and viewer. Skorman’s Empire Video Superstores soon became the highest-volume video retailer in the country.

Though Skorman, 48, no longer owns the video chain, portions of this superstore system still exist--on the World Wide Web.

On Jan. 8, Skorman launched Reel.com (https://www.reel.com), a Web site that attempts to hook up Internet users with films they might enjoy. Reel.com is one of the newest in a long line of entertainment Web sites vying for attention in the densely populated cyberspace frontier.

In the Reel Genius portion of Reel.com, users rate an extensive list of films. In turn, the Genius suggests films it believes best mesh with the user’s tastes. The more films a user rates, the more films Genius proposes.

Besides the movie-matching service, Reel.com offers 30-word film reviews and a movie thesaurus. Type in, for example, the 1988 comedy “A Fish Called Wanda,” and the thesaurus suggests “The Tall Guy,” “Blazing Saddles,” “The Jerk” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Skorman believes that in order for his fledgling site to be successful, it must offer features that repeatedly draw users in and must constantly evolve to satisfy users who won’t accept stasis.

“That’s the thing about the Web,” says Skorman, who has invested $1 million of his own money to fund the 60-person, San Francisco-based operation. “It’s so dynamic. It’s not a book--it’s a work in progress.”

At the Bellevue, Wash.-based Mr. Showbiz (https://www.mrshowbiz.com), site operators use the oftentimes light nature of the entertainment industry to fuel some of the site’s most creative aspects. In addition to the entertainment news, reviews and interviews offered by the site, financially backed by Paul Allen’s Starwave Corp., Mr. Showbiz’s most unusual features lie in its games section.

In the Plastic Surgery Lab, users can morph together the facial features of a handful of movie stars, talk-show hosts, the cast of “Seinfeld” or the cast of “Friends.” The “Slice and Dice!” button lets the user play mad plastic scientist and discover what Goldie Hawn’s eyes, Keanu Reeves’ nose and Ellen Barkin’s mouth look like on Danny DeVito’s head. The game Romantically Linked challenges users to get from one star to another only through their romantic involvements. Races start at 3 p.m. daily.

“Let’s face it,” says Susan Mulkahi, 40, the site’s creator and Starwave’s vice president of entertainment. “We’re talking about entertainment, not foreign policy. It’s fun.”

Twenty-three staffers work for Mr. Showbiz.

Hollywood Online (https://www.hollywood.com) specializes in coverage of Hollywood and the motion picture industry. The site, owned by Times Mirror Co., offers stories regarding the entertainment world and also makes available a number of movie sound clips, previews, scenes and production notes for downloading.

When first launched on America Online in mid-1993, Hollywood Online covered the entertainment industry as a whole. As time went by, however, its co-founder felt it wiser to concentrate exclusively on one area.

“In order to prosper in this Wild West of the Internet you have to be the best,” says Stuart Halperin, 33, who is also executive vice president of the 40-staff-member site. “We always felt that we had excelled at the movies and we said, ‘Let’s make it better.’ It’s a business decision to really focus on something and do a knockout job of it.” The film industry also makes for an excellent subject because “movies spend the most money on marketing and movies also offer the most glamour.”

Like the larger Hollywood Online, many of the smaller entertainment Web sites find successby creating their own entertainment niche: Drew’s Scripts-O-Rama (https://home.cdsnet.net/~nikko11/scripts.htm) links to more than 500 movie and television scripts. The Internet Movie Database (https://us.imdb.com) offers a comprehensive list of any actor’s film credits. Girls on Film (https://www.girlsonfilm.com) gives movie reviews from the female perspective. The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~bct7m/bacon.html) makes the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game easy by naming and computing the number of actors between any star and Kevin Bacon.

At Mr. Cranky Rates the Movies (https://internet-plaza.net/zone/mrcranky), bitter film critic Mr. Cranky savages new releases as well as old favorites. The character’s movie rating scale ranges from at best one bomb (“Casablanca” received this “almost tolerable” rating) to at worst a clump of dynamite (“Showgirls” was lauded for being, “So god-awful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity”).

According to Hans Bjordahl, 27, who co-created Mr. Cranky along with Jason Katzman, 29, a film critic in Boulder, Colo., the site draws a dedicated following because of its unorthodox viewpoint and the opportunity for users to interact with Mr. Cranky via an on-site message forum.

“This was content created for the Web, specifically written for the Web and designed around this new, interactive medium,” says Bjordahl, creative director for XOR Internet Technology. “I don’t think it would really fly if we were to pitch it through a mainstream avenue.”