The Great Online Talent Search - Industry Trend or Event

Dozens of sites promise to bring undiscovered artists to talent-hungry editors and producers. So far, they're not working any magic.

IT'S THE LIFELONG DREAM OF every agent or editor: Spot the raw talent in an unknown writer or artist and transform him -- or her -- into a star.

But finding that brilliant novelist tapping away at her keyboard in Indianola, or that ready-for-prime-time garage band in Tulsa, has never been easy. It takes instinct, digging and plenty of patience to suss out promising work.

To a host of Web entrepreneurs, the Internet offers an opportunity to streamline that time-consuming and unpredictable process. In their view, the Web is an ideal vehicle for helping the talented and the talent-seekers find each other. It is tidier and more convenient than sending unsolicited submissions that quickly accumulate at publishing houses into the demon known as the slush pile. It offers speed and, most of all, a chance to democratize the process; it removes the it's-who-you-know factor from the process of being discovered.

Dozens of sites have sprouted up to unite novelist and editor, musician and producer, scriptwriter and agent. The sites gather unpublished songs, films and manuscripts -- in some cases filtering out the truly bad ones -- and make excerpts or the whole piece available on the Web, where they are accessible to talent scouts everywhere. The sites promise to make it easier for the harried producer or editor to sift through the muck to find the gem. At IFilmPro, for instance, the mission is "bringing together next-generation filmmakers and Hollywood insiders in first-look deals."

Sounds great. But do sites like IFilmPro really work that magic? A handful of agents and editors have turned to the Web, but many who hunt for talent in Hollywood and in New York's publishing world say the old-fashioned methods of finding talent work just fine, thank you. Few are enthusiastic about the Internet's prospects for simplifying the submission process. The Web success stories, so far, are modest in number and revenues, with a couple of notable exceptions. And several discoveries that have been trumpeted as products of online matchmakers were in fact unearthed the old-fashioned way -- phone calls, meetings and handshakes among people in the know.

Linda Swink is one of the Web's earliest success stories. Agent Elisabet McHugh stumbled upon Swink's manuscript, a guide to public speaking for women, while browsing the Web site Authorlink. McHugh tracked down Swink, offered to take her on as a client, and sold her book to Carol Publishing in 1997. "I tried to find a publisher for quite a while, but I kept getting rejections," says Swink, a magazine writer who lives in Indiana, far outside the New York publishing nexus. Swink paid Authorlink $12 a month, plus a $20 setup fee, to make a synopsis of her manuscript available on its site.

Doris Booth, founder of Authorlink, says Swink's deal is one of 61 in which the site has played a role in its four-year history. Most of them involved modest advances -- Swink received $2,500 -- with small publishing houses. But in about one-quarter of those deals, the matchmakers were human, not digital, Booth admits. For example, Authorlink lists Random House's purchase of a book on motherhood as one of its success stories, but in fact it was Booth, not her Web site, that helped bring about the deal -- she recommended an agent to the author, whom she had met at a writer's conference. It turns out the author never listed her manuscript on Authorlink. "A lot of times we work behind the scenes," Booth explains.

Other sites perform a similar function for aspiring filmmakers and scriptwriters by showcasing their work on the Web for consumers and talent scouts. But some of the deals and projects those sites boast about were barely products of the Internet. IFilm claims in a press release that the makers of a short film 405: The Movie found an agent after Dan Adler, head of new media at Creative Artists Agency, discovered 405 on the site. But Adler didn't find it surfing the Web -- he heard about the film during a meeting with IFilm's top brass -- a fact that iFilm now admits.

IFilm has also publicized the deal that the makers of Sunday's Game signed with Fox Television Studios after their short film premiered on IFilmPro and became one of the site's most popular offerings. Manager Brian Inerfeld, who represents the filmmakers, says the deal was made the day before the movie debuted on the site; Inerfeld says he personally shopped a rough cut of it to Fox.

Mike Macari, a movie executive who helped come up with the concept that became ScriptShark, a Web site now owned by IFilm that sells writers an evaluation of their work and forwards good scripts to industry insiders, says such sites have failed to make much of an impression on people in Hollywood. Even he doesn't use ScriptShark. "To be honest, I'm inundated with scripts, and so I really only read the ones that come from established sources -- where I really like the agent, or there's a producer attached that I really want to work with," says Macari, creative executive at Fine Line Features. "If I get a script and it says it got 'consider' coverage from the Web site, well, who's the reader? Do I know this person? Do I trust their taste?"

The handful of agents and editors who periodically scour the Web for talent tend to be young. Senior publishing executives say they get so many submissions in the time-honored way -- bulging packages sent through the mail -- that they're not likely to go hunting for more. Agent Loretta Barrett, a 30-year veteran of book publishing, doesn't use the Web to hunt for new writers, even though she represents one of the first authors to self-publish a book online -- M.J. Rose, author of Lip Service. Like many editors and agents, Barrett is unmoved by the Internet's promise to reduce that 6-foot pile of manuscripts cluttering her office and the postage costs of returning them. Agents also have to cope with the reality that most book editors are not high tech. "I can't submit anything to publishers electronically" because publishers just don't use the Web that way, explains agent Mark Ryan.

Despite the naysayers, several major companies -- among them Dreamworks, Time Warner Trade Publishing and Universal Music Group -- are turning to the Web as a source for new talent, creating sites that invite unknowns to submit their work. Will the results be any better than sending unsolicited material through the mail? It's too early to tell.

Some artists, in fact, have already walked away from the Web with pockets full of cash -- and they didn't pay a dime up front. Garageband.com, which launched last October, promotes itself as a forum for unsigned bands to get discovered. The site has turned that promotion into a guarantee by offering a $250,000 recording contract every two months to the band that gets the highest marks from online listeners. But it's too early to say if those bands will generate enough sales to offset that advance. So far, a half-dozen musicians have won the prize, but none of their albums has been released yet. The first should be in stores early next year.

For musicians who don't win the top prize, Garageband touts its advisory board of about 45 producers who review a total of 900 songs from the site every three months. (The site has about 25,000 songs on it.) But how many bands have been offered contracts with other labels so far? Zilch. CEO Tom Zito admits that Garageband will have to start matching bands with labels in order to succeed.

In the end, most talent scouts agree that the Web will have a hard time competing with the ingredient that initiates most deals, be they in book publishing, music or Hollywood: personal relationships. "We do have people surfing the Web, but at the same time we rely very heavily on the relationships," says Dan Adler, who leads a team of 15 agents and executives in CAA's new-media department. "What this business is all about is relationships."

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