MGM Taps Teen Web Wizard

Five years ago, the film “Stargate” made history as the first movie with its own Web site. This week, the “Stargate” television series broke cyberground by hiring a 17-year-old to help oversee its official fan site.

On Sunday, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios Inc. signed Sean Fitzgibbons, a slight, soft-spoken senior at Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Mass., to revamp the official site of its “Stargate SG-1” TV series, which is syndicated in more than 98% of the country and is heading into its fourth season.

His background? Creating the most innovative “Stargate” fan site its producers had seen on the Web.

A huge fan of the science-fiction drama, Fitzgibbons slowly built a single Web page into a linked community of related sites with offerings from more than 100 people in seven countries. It includes an elaborate diary of one of the characters, an episode guide, show encyclopedia, video clips and sections in French and German.

“I wouldn’t say my friends and I are typical of the high school student,” says Fitzgibbons. “But after you figure out that you’re not athletic and you don’t want to make academics your life, or even if you do, the computer becomes a major part of it. Once I discovered how much information and entertainment I could access with a computer, I wanted to help create that.”

Now, MGM has him meeting the show’s stars, Richard Dean Anderson and Amanda Tapping, and plans to fly him to Vancouver in February when the series resumes shooting. He’ll also work on MGM’s “Poltergeist” and “Outer Limits” sites.

Meanwhile, Fitzgibbons will spend the next month overhauling the existing “Stargate” site at https://www.stargate-sg1.com in anticipation of an early 2000 launch, and incorporating some elements from his old site, which will ultimately disband.

While it’s too early to announce specifics, MGM expects the new site to have multimedia components, episodic updates, behind-the-scenes information and a virtual 3-D world where a user can interact with the “Stargate” team.

“With the growing success of ‘Stargate,’ we wanted to make sure we were servicing our fans to the maximum potential,” says Geoff Gordon, executive director of marketing for MGM Worldwide Television Group. The show is averaging 3.5 million viewers this season, according to Nielsen Media Research. “It seemed smart to get a fan to spearhead our efforts, simply because of the inventiveness and enthusiasm.”

Fitzgibbons’ reaction to MGM’s first call?

“Can I call you back? I have to ask my parents,” Gordon says with a laugh. “It’s not something you usually hear from someone you’re trying to make a deal with.”

He may as well get used to it. In tapping Fitzgibbons, MGM has jumped on an emerging trend of companies hiring people as young as 11 to design Web sites.

“This technology has become so specialized and detailed and massive that when you find someone who so suits a purpose, it’s smart to bring that person into the fold,” says MGM Television Entertainment president Hank Cohen.

Fitzgibbons discovered the Internet four years ago on his parents’ new NEC computer and casually browsed Web sites until deciding to attempt one himself. He used the Internet to find out how to make Web sites, learning everything from the ground up.

Although the “Stargate” film inspired his site’s genesis in April 1997, the TV series became the focus after it debuted that July, with Fitzgibbons spending about 10 hours a week tending the site. The following December, he began a collaborative effort with other SG-1 Web masters, unveiling the communal venture at https://www.sg-1.net in January 1998. During the next year, SG-1.net became the largest and most popular “Stargate SG-1” fan site, averaging more than 20,000 unique visitors a month to date this year, according to HitBox.com, a Web traffic counter.

Meanwhile, Fitzgibbons’ efforts landed him on MGM’s radar screen after its executive producers, Brad Wright and John Glassner, took note and alerted studio brass. Last August, MGM contacted Fitzgibbons about a job.

“He’s got a coolness and a focus about him that points so clearly to his intelligence, and that’s what adults pay attention to,” says show star Anderson, also an executive producer. “It’s also nice to meet someone who isn’t so obviously impressed with the Hollywood hoopla--there’s a sweet air of stability about him. Regardless of how old he is, he’s producing a great Web site.”

But Web site design is not the teenager’s professional goal. Film and TV production is. He’s hoping this gig will facilitate his admission to New York University next fall.

And it may hold an unexpected bonus. Now that there is a known correlation between computer geekdom and Hollywood, and Fitzgibbons has managed to create a connection for himself, is he starting to get asked out by cheerleaders?

“I don’t know,” he says and smiles. “I’ll find out when I get back.”

* “Stargate SG-1” can be seen at 10 p.m. Fridays on Showtime and at 6 p.m. Saturdays on KTTV. Its Web address is https://www.stargate-sg1.com.