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Friday, December 13, 2002 Media Cynic | Forum | Advertising | Classifieds | Jobs Spacey's TriggerStreet.com Launches Content Showcase TriggerStreet is named after an actual street in the San Fernando Valley where Spacey grew up and dreamed of building a theatre and making movies. The late cowboy star Roy Rogers once owned a ranch on the land and named the street for his horse Trigger. When Spacey was forming his production company, the dreams he had as a teenager were ones he didn't want to wander too far from and so TriggerStreet was created. "I want to try to do something inspiring and interactive for new talent and for the filmmaking community," said Kevin Spacey. "Our goal is to give encouragement and visibility to artists who have no access to the industry. When I needed help in starting my own career, many people gave me encouragement and became my mentors. Now I feel that if you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent." TriggerStreet.com gathers filmmakers and film aficionados together in the virtual space to help independent and under-financed works find a wider audience. Novice and veteran screenwriters are invited to submit screenplays to the Screenplay Forum for review by their peers. Three times per year TriggerStreet.com will also sponsor a Short Film Festival with 10 finalists culled from the top-rated short films submitted to the site. Those finalists will be judged by entertainment industry leaders including Bono, Mike Myers, Tim Burton, Cameron Crowe, Edward Norton and Danny DeVito. Yahoo! Movies, a movie resource, recently launched an exclusive showcase of material from Mike Myers, Billy Crystal, Sean Penn, Edward Norton and Bono on the nature of mentorship, plus early work of established filmmakers. The TriggerStreet.com collection includes The Big Shave, a metaphorical 1967 short directed by Martin Scorsese; The Lift, an eerie 1972 USC short directed by Robert Zemeckis; The Bet, a 1992 drama about two New York brothers by the late director Ted Demme; FishHeads, a 1982 musical comedy from actor-director Bill Paxton; Bobby Silverman: An Actor Prepared, a 1990 satire of the acting profession by producer Richard Crystal; and Headless!, a 1994 black comedy about an overzealous professor's perilous adventures in the shrunken head trade directed by Larry Guterman. The hosting, streaming and encoding services and technology for TriggerStreet.com are provided by RealNetworks, Inc., and users will be able to view content within the TriggerStreet.com community via the RealOne Player. Aspiring filmmakers interested in submitting their works for viewing and peer review by the TriggerStreet.com community can use a free version of RealNetworks' Helix Producer to encode their films in RealVideo 9. TriggerStreet Productions was formed in 1997 and has produced the 1998 production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh both at London's Old Vic Theatre and on Broadway, where it received 5 Tony Award nominations. The first feature produced was The Big Kahuna written by first time screenwriter Roger Rueff and directed by first time director John Swanbeck. Next year TriggerStreet will release The United States of Leland starring Don Cheadle, Ryan Gosling and Jena Malone, written and directed by first time filmmaker Matthew Ryan Hoge. In addition, the company has produced two documentaries: Uncle Frank, directed by first time filmmaker Matthew Ginsburg, which will air on HBO in 2003, and America Rebuilds: A Year At Ground Zero -- a film which chronicled the year-long clean up operation at the World Trade Center -- aired on PBS, and was co-produced by Great Projects. In the coming year TriggerStreet will produce films with Lions Gate Pictures, Warner Bros., Intermedia Films and MGM Studios.
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