Famous Names Take To The Net

By Marion Long, Special To Interactive Week

Most “celebrity sites” are nothing more than online marketing campaigns or vanity sites – cyberspace shrines to Brad, Julia or J.Lo.

But a few enterprising celebrities have taken their Internet identities out of the hands of the publicity department and, trading on their fame, they’re often profiting from their online endeavors. Here are three Web celebs who have devoted considerable creative and financial resources to building their own distinctive sites.

Offbeat Cineaste

Indie film director Kevin Smith wrote his first movie, Clerks, in one month when he was 24. He shot it in the Quik Stop convenience store where it worked, financing it on his credit cards; it cost about $27,000.

That same resourceful, antihierarchical sensibility is in evidence all over his Web site, www.viewaskew.com, which operates from his production company’s Red Bank, N.J., offices. At The View Askewniverse, the focus is on interactivity. Smith jumps onto his site’s Web board twice per day to chat, and hosts online chats with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and other stars of his films. Says Smith: “It all comes from thinking: ‘If I was on the other side of the computer, what would I like to see?’”

Smith is so eager to share with his audience that when he was shooting Dogma two years ago, he wanted to put daily footage form the movie on the Web site, but he was blocked by his studio, Miramax Films. Since then, Miramax has realized the large online audience that Smith has cultivated, and gave him the OK to put up Internet trailers for his new film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The response forced The View Askewniverse to move to a larger server.

Smith pays for his site himself. He says that he makes a tidy profit from his online store, which sells posters, DVDs, soundtracks, T-shirts, action figures and comic books, a development that came about because fans kept asking where they could purchase film-related merchandise. “It’s quite profitable for us – but then, we’re not looking for huge profit margins,” Smith explains. “We aren’t talking about profits that would be acceptable to a corporation.”

For Smith, the emphasis is more familial than financial. “There are people who have been posting on the site for five years now. I can put a lot of faces to the names,” he says. “The site means the world to me. I care, really, what they have to say.”