Anatomy of a disaster

In "Project Greenlight," Ben (Affleck) and Matt (Damon) spark an HBO documentary series that watches a chump get his chance at the big time.

By Carina Chocano

Dec. 6, 2001 | By now, everybody knows the Ben Affleck and Matt Damon story. (Cute boys write script and win Academy Award with moms in attendance; megastardom and panties in the mail ensue.) But once upon a time, Ben, Matt and "Good Will Hunting" producer Chris Moore were "just three guys, trying to break in, [feeling] like you had to have some secret key to the kingdom."

Now, roughly 40 movies among them later, they have set out to give "some smart, talented person" the same chance they were given. (Or, as a friend of mine puts it, "the chance to get a lot of people to rewrite what you've written.")

On Sunday night, HBO aired the first two episodes of what promises to be a riveting (to Hollywood geeks like me, at least) 12-episode documentary series called "Project Greenlight," which will document the adventures of a bumbling novice director as he sets out to make a movie of his own script with a million dollars of Miramax's money and the powerful patronage of our two Oscar-toting heroes.

The result demonstrates that there's nothing more enjoyable than the crashing failure of a hubristic chump.

The show is overseen by Miramax, HBO and LivePlanet, which is Affleck, Damon and Moore's production company. Along with their scripts, 10,000 aspiring auteurs -- including a mortgage loan processor, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, a postal worker and a burping man -- submitted biography videos demonstrating the stunning array of senseless acts that can be perpetrated with a video camera. "Greenlight's" hopefuls are eventually winnowed down to 10 and flown to Los Angeles.

In the first show, Damon, Affleck, Moore, four top Miramax executives and an HBO documentary crew (What the hell, who would you pick?) spend seven grueling hours debating the relative -- and they are relative -- merits of each of the scripts and sample videos. Idealistic Damon protests that the winner should be "the best director with the best script" -- a crazy idea that just might work. But greenlighting a project is never that simple, and after hours of deliberation, the keys to the kingdom are tossed to a flame-cheeked former insurance salesman from Chicago, an unlikely Cinderfella named Pete Jones, "the guy that'll never get the chance unless you give it to him," in the words of the sound man.

Jones' story is a syrupy sundae with rainbow sprinkles about a little Catholic boy and a little Jewish boy, one of whom dies of cancer. "Stolen Summer," which will be released in March and will star Aidan Quinn, Brian Dennehy and Bonnie Hunt, sounds like a real must-miss.

But the HBO series documenting the creation of this mess holds all the grisly promise of a 10-car pileup. "It may be a grand catastrophe and a terrible failure," says Affleck of the movie-in-progress, "which is part of the fun." If the first few episodes of "Project Greenlight" are any indication, however, grand catastrophe and terrible failure will be all the fun of the documentary.

Though clearly not the best at anything, Jones has a certain "passion" that Miramax responds to. Passion in this context means blurting out incredibly stupid and therefore highly entertaining things. Like this, to four slack-jawed studio executives and two gaping movie stars: "It's about you guys screwing the studio system and saying let's make the best film. Market the film? Fuck you. Who cares? We're making the best film. We're putting out a million bucks. I don't have a million bucks, but studios have some money and a million-dollar budget is not going to crush them."

Next page: "Already he's got a gripe!"