Old, New Hollywood Meet to Put an Odd Twist on Entertainment

Hungry to watch a live-action soap opera set in space? How about an animated horror series about a vampire-in-training or a psychological thriller about an obnoxious entertainment exec who has a thing for paint ball? Yearning to read an early version of the sci-fi script “Alien 3” or get an update on the latest UFO sightings?

Are you, in other words, even the slightest bit twisted? With their new Web site, DistantCorners.com, Joe Roth and John Hegeman are betting the answer is yes.

Roth, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and Hegeman, a movie marketer who one year ago proved that the Internet could make a little horror movie called “The Blair Witch Project” huge, have joined forces to create an Internet entertainment destination for off-kilter audiences--what Hegeman likes to call “a last beacon of sanity.”

“Deep in the folds of your mind is a place you can’t control, that always exists,” the site announces by way of a greeting. “Thoughts flying like lightning. Exploding in your head. . . . Distant Corners presents original entertainment for those wishing to break out of the jaded prison of having seen it all.”

The 7-week-old site--which features animation, streaming video and games, as well as a weird selection of news items, memorabilia offerings and cranky movie reviews--aims at a very narrow niche: 16-to-34-year-old computer owners with a taste for fantasy and cult entertainment. But Distant Corners also is conceived with bigger things in mind. Roth’s new media company, Revolution Studios, will use Distant Corners to develop characters and story lines that could come to life offline as well.

“This is the laboratory for me, and John is the mad scientist,” said Roth, who sees the site not only as a promotional and merchandising tool, but also as a place to hatch ideas for feature films and television. “This is the place to incubate properties, gathering genre material and using that as the basis to make films. I can’t wait to have the first piece of material flip over.”

Amid much talk these days about the convergence between Hollywood and the Web, Distant Corners is taking a different tack. Unlike Atomfilms.com and Ifilm.com, which display all kinds of short films, Distant Corners seeks to serve up only startling or spooky fare. (“You’re not going to see love stories unless they involve an alien or some genital-eating monster,” said John Fasano, a screenwriter who’s working for the site.) Unlike the as-yet-unlaunched Pop.com, which may someday show films made by big-name talents, Distant Corners wants to air voices you’ve never heard of.

Ask Roth and Hegeman what they’re up to, and the two veterans of traditional movie studios say the same thing: If the Internet is entertainment’s next frontier, its programming has to be conceived in a whole new way.

“I want the user to explore and experience the site in a nonlinear way--to say, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve been on the site for a month and I never even looked in there,’ ” Hegeman said. “Everything is about doors opening up and things being hidden and making the journey. Because you’ve got to get people to come back. If they’re just seeing something they could see on TV and at the movies, but in a smaller format, why do it?”

Distant Corners has a novel approach: seven designated channels, each hosted by a different demented oddball who serves as guide to a bizarre universe. Hegeman’s unlikely inspiration for this idea, he admits, was the wholesome world of Disney.

‘A Disney on Acid’

“I’ve always looked at Disney as this crazy model, because its characters are not only the stars of the show, but they’re the pitchmen for everything else,” Hegeman said. Instead of Mickey and Minnie, Distant Corners’ hosts include a paranoid-schizophrenic in a straitjacket, a seedy version of Walter Cronkite and a disembodied brain in a jar named Mr. Gray.

“We’re trying to create a Disney on acid,” said the 37-year-old father of three.

For Hegeman, who left his job as marketing chief at Artisan Entertainment in March and started building Distant Corners the next day, the site is the result of six years of near-constant rumination.

He’d been a movie marketer for almost a decade when he first hit upon the idea of creating a genre-specific online network. He liked horror--at his first job, at United Film Distribution Co., he’d worked on George Romero’s 1985 zombie flick “Day of the Dead.” Later, he created the first-ever movie promotion Web site, for the 1994 sci-fi odyssey “Stargate.” And the success he and his team at Artisan had with “The Blair Witch Project” helped propel a micro-budgeted indie film into a $140.5-million domestic box-office phenomenon.

But Hegeman wanted to create an online world that didn’t just promote traditional offline entertainment, but was fun all by itself.

“I wanted no banner ads. No text going down the side. We wanted to make it feel like you are in space and there are images that flash before you, as if you’re looking out the window,” he said of his early idea. “It would be like a big drive-in in space. That’s what we were trying to create.”

While still at Artisan, which bankrolled the site’s early development, Hegeman hooked up with a 29-year-old freelance illustrator and comic book artist, Eli 5 Stone, to create the drawings that set the mood. Stone, who legally changed his name two years ago to include the number 5, said at first he simply tried to “flesh out” Hegeman’s wild concept. But soon, Distant Corners began to have a sensibility all its own.

‘Sexy-Creepy-Goofy-Funny’

“I want the mood to be sexy-creepy-goofy-funny. That’s the name of my first album, by the way,” joked Stone, who praised Hegeman’s “great knack for having a kid brain in an adult body--but with a lot of money, which is pretty ideal.”

Ultimately, executives at Artisan decided the project would not be a priority for the indie movie studio. They continued funding the site while Hegeman sought other investors, and they remain an equity partner in the venture, but Distant Corners needed a new patron. Roth fit the bill.

While still at Disney, Roth had watched the success of “Blair Witch’s” Internet campaign closely. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Ninety percent of the country was aware of that movie without spending TV [advertising] dollars. And they felt such ownership when the movie came out. [The site] got away from the hard sell and had a clever conversation with the audience.”

How Roth Got in the Picture

Once he’d started Revolution Studios, Roth jumped into the Web world himself, buying a majority stake in MediaTrip.com (which will provide original comedic content and promote his slate of movies and TV shows) and partnering with Hegeman on Distant Corners. So far, the site has cost about $3 million to build, with a second round of financing ($10 million to $15 million) now being sought. And it’s still growing. For example, Hegeman recently recruited actor-writer-director-producer Bob Balaban to anchor the Masters of Horror and Sci-Fi channel with the screenwriter Fasano.

Balaban, who wrote a book about the making of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (which he was in), already has created an animated cartoon series for the site and has taken viewers on a field trip to a UFO convention.

“I’m accessing all the moments of my life. I love the immediacy of it,” said Balaban. “For the cartoon series, we didn’t have to go to any meetings. Nobody said, ‘Where’s the character we fall in love with?’ ”

Fasano, who wrote “Another 48 HRS.” and “was one of 12 writers on ‘Judge Dredd’ and on ‘Alien 3,’ ” agreed that the chance to control his work made him sign up to create Distant Corners programming essentially for free. He is writing a vampire series for the site called “Bad Vlad” that will have “one act of fornication and dismemberment per episode.” He’s also posting his draft of “Alien 3,” as well as an interview with the guy who did the makeup for “The Exorcist”--all while finishing a feature film script for Disney.

Web sites are notoriously unprofitable. But Hegeman plans to seek corporate sponsors for each channel and wants to place products in some of the programming (“If the characters were out late the night before, they may be reaching for a bottle of Pepto Bismol--or Jack Daniels,” he said). Horror and sci-fi memorabilia will be auctioned off. And Hegeman plans regular four-day “subscriber events”--an Internet version of pay-per-view, where, for the price of a magazine, devotees can get access to themed programming, games and tournaments.

And then, of course, there’s the chance of turning e-programming into mainstream fare. Of the 25 original properties Hegeman plans to introduce each year, he hopes “three or four will be deemed worthy” of being expanded into film or TV scripts.

“You can’t force something to work. But when the time is right--when your audience is open to it, when the technology is accessible and the financial entertainment community wants to support it--that’s when something can succeed,” he said, adding that the recent success of movies like “X-Men” and “Scary Movie” have fueled his optimism. “This couldn’t have happened six years ago. The time for it to happen is now.”