Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 15, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If the founders of Project Greenlight had had their way, you wouldn’t be reading this review right now. In the debut episode of the third Greenlight series, now airing on Bravo Tuesday nights at 9 p.m., the script selection process has winnowed down thousands of submitted scripts to three, only one of which—Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan’s Feast—is a horror story. PG’s original overseers, actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and producer Chris Moore, and new addition Wes Craven have severe reservations about Feast, but the Dimension honchos sponsoring this installment make it clear in no uncertain terms that this is the script they feel they can get behind.
After the first two Greenlight contests resulted in troubled productions and a pair of box-office flops, the goal this time out was to make a genre movie that could turn a profit—and so, despite Damon’s pleas that “You’re sitting two feet away from the master of horror [Craven], who’s telling you it sucks,” Feast is chosen over a pair of other scripts that seem to have more artistic value. Perhaps it’s only fitting that this Greenlight is airing directly in the wake of Dimension’s release of Craven’s bowdlerized Cursed.
There are those who feel that the Project Greenlight contest, and the resulting TV show, have all along been something of a setup—a reality series where the object is not to watch the process by which aspiring filmmakers get to realize their visions, but an excuse to chuckle as they get in way over their heads and the productions go awry. (That’s certainly the come-on this year, as Bravo’s advertising tagline is “Watch the horror of making a movie.”) Here, the deck seems stacked from the beginning, with the Greenlight team on one side of the art vs. commerce war, Dimension on the other and producers Joel Soisson and Michael Leahy (also new to the Greenlight arena) somewhere in the middle. The group’s debates about the scripts—which also include Marshall Moseley’s con-man drama Wildcard and Rick Carr’s wonderfully titled sci-fi comedy Does Anybody Here Remember When Hanz Grubenstein Invented Time Travel?—will either be revealing to viewers or confirm what they already suspect about how Hollywood picks the movies that get made.
With the screenplay selected, the time comes to choose the director, and the race becomes narrowed down to two candidates: bright-eyed, energetic, ambitious and straight-talking James Ryan, and introverted, not especially articulate John Gulager, both of whom reveal strong talents of different kinds in the snippets of their audition videos that we see. For the few who aren’t already aware, I won’t reveal who wins, but to veteran Greenlight viewers, the mismatch in terms of artistic temperament may seem as great as the one that doomed The Battle of Shaker Heights, whose production was chronicled in the second series. After all that has come before, it’s no surprise when, at the conclusion of this season’s first episode, Dimension honcho Andrew Rona is seen telling the director and writers that they can, and may, be replaced.
But will they? Project Greenlight establishes its “characters” so well, it’ll hook even those with only a passing interest in the movie business into wanting to see how the creation of Feast plays out. Like the most successful reality shows, it quickly establishes good guys and bad guys; though both sides of the quality vs. commercialism argument are given time to make their cases, it’s abundantly clear who we’re intended to root for. Damon in particular makes a strong impression as he argues the case that if there’s anywhere that filmmaking risks should be taken, it’s here—but if there’s anyone involved whose image might get a boost from the show, it’s Affleck, who reveals both savvy and a good sense of humor about both the business and himself. (Calling Gulager, who had previously moonlighted as a wedding photographer, with the news of his selection, Affleck starts out by joking, “I’m getting married again…”)
Horror fans in particular should get a kick out of seeing a look behind the scenes of a low-budget chiller that’s far more penetrating than the usual EPK or DVD supplement. Can this team pull off Feast on a budget that, as pretty much everyone admits, isn’t sufficient to pull off Melton and Dunstan’s script? Time will tell, but there’s an equally interesting question that may never be answered: How will the two writers react when they see the initial episode, in which their work is derided by many of the same people who are giving them this opportunity?
