In case we needed yet another A Bug’s Life vs. Antz reminder that filmmakers and independent thinking are incompatible concepts, there’s yet another Steve Jobs biopic coming out. Ashton Kutcher plays Steve Jobs in Jobs, Aaron Sorkin is producing an as-yet-unnamed Jobs movie, and now Funny or Die announced that has already made its own iMovie.

Actually, that would be iSteve. And they probably didn’t use iMovie to make it.

The New York Times reports that the Funny or Die movie stars Justin Long and, at over an hour, is the longest film the online comedy site has ever made.

“In true Internet fashion, it’s not based on very thorough research — essentially a cursory look at the Steve Jobs Wikipedia page,” Ryan Perez, who wrote and directed “iSteve.” told the Times “It’s very silly. But it looks at his whole life.”

Knowing the site, I’m sure the movie will be funny. But Ashton Kutcher has Justin Long beat by a landslide in actually looking like a believable Steve Jobs.

This movie, however, is all about speed. The script was written in five days, and the movie was shot in three days. And, it will hit the market sooner than Sorkin’s film, which is still in development, and Kutcher’s, which does not have a general release date set yet.

Apparently, the movie escalated from a newsroom prank, as writers for Funny or Die were thinking about creating a fake Steve Jobs movie trailer. Turns out they may have made an entire fake Steve Jobs movie.

The Black List is a network that connects scripts with the people who turn them into films. It started out as an informal survey of not-yet-produced screenplays, grew into a trusted annual list of the best 75 scripts in Hollywood, and is now a full-fledged marketplace.

Three out of the past five Best Picture winners and seven of the past 12 screenwriting Oscars victors were on The Black List before they went into production. Over the years, films on The Black List have been nominated for 148 Academy Awards and earned over $16 billion in worldwide box office sales. Of the 600 scripts that have been on the list, more than 200 have been produced as movies.

So what is the secret to The Black List’s success? Picking screenplays to turn into movies is in many ways a riskier endeavor than picking startups to invest it. Hollywood does not have the same process of due diligence as Silicon Valley does, and success is ultimately up to the whims of the viewer.

Franklin Leonard is the man behind The Black List, and he said crowdsourcing is the answer.

On one side of the marketplace, screenwriters submit their work which is evaluated by a team of readers. If it is good, they post the scripts on the site. On the other side, over 1,000 film industry professionals are registered members of the community. They have access to the curated selection of screenplays and vote to create a ranking system that surfaces the best content.

“Over 30,000 pieces of material are registered at the Writers Guild of America every year,” Leonard said in an interview at VentureBeat’s office. “Of that number, only 200 are released. How do you make sure those 200 are the best? The current filtering mechanisms are inefficient. By taking a systematic, crowdsourced approach to identifying quality, regardless of executive considerations or making money, and aggregating that, the scripts end up being successful.”

Leonard started The Black List to solve his own problem. He was working for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company and spent an excessive amount of time reading bad scripts. He sent out an informal survey to 75 of his colleagues asking them to respond with their 10 favorite screenplays that had not yet been made into movies. The document continued to circulate and grow to such a degree that Leonard decided to turn bring The Black List to the next level.

Eight years after the initial survey, The Black List has grown into much more than a place to compare notes on scripts. Now, the network involves a real-time list that tracks all the activity on the site as well as a screenplay-recommendation engine. In October, The Black List extended its mission to make it easier to screenwriters from around the world to upload their scripts into the database, giving them access to the closed circles of Hollywood’s elite.

“We are expanding beyond the highly insular, incredibly opaque universe that is Hollywood,” Leonard said. “In a world where if you don’t have the right network or connections, you don’t have the opportunity to tell your story in film, we are saying that if you are good, the only distance between you and becoming a full-time Hollywood screenwriter is your talent. The things The Black List is highlighting are things will see in movie theaters in two, five, 10 years down the road and at the Oscars.”

Hollywood is a prime example of an industry where business is primarily done offline in closed circles and the Internet is creeping in to democratize it. Leonard also envisions a future where data is a key component of making movies.

“The industry is going to have to start being a little more data-intensive about how they make decisions,” he said. “Everyone in Hollywood likes to quote Bill Goldman, who said, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ This is a good way to justify an expensive movie no one goes to see. This may have been true five years ago, but data and statistical analysis can provide insights that are an advantage over a willful, no-knowledge perspective on making business decisions.”

Argo is the latest to join the ranks of The Black List trophy case, along with The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire. While The Black List does not take responsibility for the success of any movie that comes out of its list, Leonard said the “correlative relationship” is undeniable. Rather, it acts as a catalyst to bring certain projects into the spotlight.

Photo Credit: Jenni from the block/Flickr

jOBS stars Ashton Kutcher as, of course, Steve Jobs, and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, telling “the story of Steve Jobs’ ascension from college dropout into one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of the 20th century,” as the movies’ producers have framed it on IMDB. Matthew Modine has a small role as well, playing ill-fated Apple CEO John Scully.

The jOBS movie, following on the footsteps of The Social Network just two years ago, shows the increased importance technology and those who create it have in popular culture. No one made a movie about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the ’80s or IBM founder Thomas Watson — who led IBM for a staggering 42 years — in the ’70s.

Of course, it helps that Steve Jobs was crazily charismatic. Even though Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world, and now one of the foremost philanthropists of all time, no one has ever produced a biopic of the Microsoft founder.

While most of us will have to wait almost three months to see the movie, the worldwide premiere is actually in just three days at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah. (If you’re attending and want to provide a review for VentureBeat, let me know.)

Meanwhile, the rest of us will just have to settle for a one-minute clip released to Entertainment Week this morning.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

Jobs and Wozniak arguing in an underground HP parking lot

Image credit: jOBS movie

As soon as I saw that a startup called Plizy raised $4 million, my head began swimming with potential rhymes. Easy. Breezy. Sleazy. Cheesy. But perhaps I should cut to the chase (just to try something new).

Plizy is a “media center in the cloud.” It aggregates videos, movies, and shows from around the web for users’ viewing and sharing pleasure. Its content comes from major video distributors like Amazon, HBO, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, Vimeo, and YouTube. Once a visitor to the site finds something they want to watch, it redirects them to the original source. It claims to have more than 550,000 movies, 200,000 shows, and 100,000,000 videos in its database.

The platform also emphasizes “discovery.” Users can rate videos, get recommendations based on their interests, see what their friends have watched, subscribe to specific shows, and queue movies for later. Plizy launched the 2.0 version in November with included a redesigned website and an iPad app, as well as deeper sharing and personalization features.

Now with this $4 million from Atlas Ventures, Plizy will continue to add users and aggregate content from other providers, such as Cinemax and Starz, and build out it platform to Androird and iOS. Plizy is also adding president of PayPal David Marus and Atlas Venture partner Fred Destin to its board.

Plizy previously raised an angel round of $1.2 million.

So in Skyfall, 007 is using a 13-megapixel-equipped Sony Xperia T, running Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Sony has launched phones with Bond before, showcasing the K800i in Casino Royale and the c902 in Quantum of Solace. Perhaps Skyfall will bring a big dollop of solace to Sony this year, as its latest earnings have shown widening losses.

After selling just 30 million phones in 2012 so far – Apple sold 27 million and Samsung sold 57 million in just the last quarter – Sony is aiming for 50 million for 2013.

Source: Sony

Sony Xperia T

Bond, James Bond, does not use the phone’s built-in NFC, but he does flash the camera in a not terribly subtle product placement. The Xperia’s impressive 13-megapixel camera is fully accessible just 1.5 seconds from standby, records in 1080P high-definition, and includes Sony’s face and smile detection technology. And Sony included a relatively recent version of Android in the 4.55″ smartphone: Ice Cream Sandwich.

One neat feature for Bond fans: Sony is apparently including some exclusive Skyfall behind-the-scenes footage, wallpaper, ring tones, and more.

After all, who wouldn’t want the Bond theme as their ringtone?

Image credit: Skyfall

“The Shore” is directed by screenwriter and director Terry George who was previously Oscar-nominated for his screenplays for “In the Name of the Father” and “Hotel Rwanda“.

Lough Shore Investments is based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, which also happens to be George’s home town, and is a seed investor in Irish startups. Lough Shore wouldn’t reveal the exact amount of the investment but said that it was relatively small. “The chance to fund a business plan/project that we felt had a strong probability of getting to the Oscars was simply too good an opportunity to turn down,” said Lough Shore partner Danny Moore.

“The Shore” follows Joe Mahon on his return to Belfast with his daughter Patricia, having fled from the conflict 25 years earlier. In his absence Paddy, Joe’s childhood best friend, has married Joe’s former fiancée Mary. The short was shot entirely on location in Coney Island, Co. Down, and the investors saw it as a great opportunity to showcase Northern Ireland abroad.

I asked Moore if the risk-reward analysis on this investment was very different from the fund’s tech investments. “Having someone like Terry George leading the project was obviously a huge factor for us. I suppose in start-up terms he’s a serial entrepreneur with a history of delivering success.”

So does Moore have any advice for other tech investors who want to break into show business? “Find a director like Terry George,” he counsels.

Lough Shore Investments was founded in 2010, is based in Belfast, Ireland and its last exit was cloud startup WorldDesk, which was acquired by DeskStream.

Japanese film site Eiga.com (translated via Andriasang) has revealed the first pictures of the full cast of Ace Attorney, the upcoming live action film based on Capcom’s Phoenix Wright franchise. Credits and a gallery below:

• Phoenix Wright – Hiroki Narimiya
• Miles Edgeworth – Takumi Saitou
• Maya Fey – Mirei Kiritani
• Mia Fey – Dan Rei
• Manfred von Karma – Ryo Ishibashi
• Larry Butz – Akiyoshi Nakao
• Dick Gumshoe – Shunsuke Daitou
• Lotta Hart – Mitsuki Tanimura
• The Judge – Akira Emoto
• Misty Fey – Kimiko Yo
• Sayuri (the bird)

I have to say that Capcom is responsible for some of the worst video game movie adaptations of all time and that at first glance, Ace Attorney doesn’t appear to break that mold. But what do I care? Resident Evil has already been defiled and pissed on more times than I care to count, so at the very least it can’t be as bad as that, right?

Ace Attorney’s plot follows a case where Miles Edgeworth has been arrested as a suspect in a crime, which will either make the dynamic between Edgeworth and protagonist Phoenix Wright more intriguing, or disjoint it completely. Japanese moviegoers and American torrenters will find out when the film hits theaters on February 11.

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If you liked King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, you’ll love Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, a new documentary showing the world’s best Tetris players as they hone their skills (and talk plenty of smack) gearing up for the Classic Tetris World Championship.

According to the movie’s official website, “From the days of Thor Aackerlund and his historic victory at the 1990 Nintendo World Championships right up to the present and Harry Hong’s perfect max-out score, this documentary expertly chronicles over two decades of Tetris mastery.”

Portland filmmaker Adam Cornelius started making the documentary about Hong, who was the first Tetris player to officially reach a max-out score. He raised a slim $1,610 for that project on Kickstarter.

However, when Tetris master Robin Mihara informed Cornelius that as many as two Tetris players might have actually been better than Hong, the scope of the film changed.

“He took the news well,” wrote Mihara in a blog post, “and from there we fantasized about holding a live contest with all the greats, and having big screens, announcers, spotlights, all like we did [at the Nintendo World Championships] in 1990.

“The next day I got a call from Adam. ‘OK, I want to do it. You’re my star. You put it together.’ I was in my car speeding to his house in 30 seconds.”

Ecstasy Of Order: The Tetris Masters is currently in post production and will be in the festival submission process during the last few weeks of 2011. So far, the documentary is an official selection of the Austin Film Festival and SF Doc Fest.

The producers are accepting donations through the film website via Paypal to help complete the documentary. Go be a nice gamer and give ‘em a couple bucks for curiosity’s sake.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Lovefilm is the top DVD-rental subscription service in Europe. As with Netflix, users sign up for a subscription online and then request DVDs, which are sent by mail. A digital streaming service to PCs, Internet TVs and the Playstation 3 is also available. LoveFilm offers 70,000 titles and has nearly 1.6 million members across the UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

I talked to Dharmash Mistry from Balderton Capital, one of the main investors in LoveFilm. He told me that one of the reasons Amazon decided to buy now is the success of Lovefilm’s nascent digital business (the digital streaming service launched in May 2010). 20 percent of Lovefilm’s movies are now consumed via streaming. The advent of smart, Internet-connected TVs, also represented a turning point.

I interviewed Lovefilm’s chief digital officer, Lesley MacKenzie, late last year. At that point, the company saw itself at the early stage of a transition from physical to digital delivery. The speed of that transition depends on the level of broadband access in various European countries as well as on whether users value the digital service as highly as a physical DVD.

Lovefilm supports Sony and Samsung smart TVs, but MacKenzie told me that Europe is 18 months to 2 years behind the US when it comes to TVs that support Internet connections and can display Web videos and other services. The company had noticed that smart TV users are 3 times as active as PC users. Mackenzie also said that, for more recent movies, if users are given the option of ordering a DVD or paying extra to stream the movie immediately, a large proportion of customers will pay.

Mistry pointed out that Amazon has a global distribution network and strong relationships with the studios. It also owns a plethora of assets, such as the IMDB movie database, that could be used to enhance LoveFilm’s services. Could this mean that Amazon plans to go head to head with Netflix?

Netflix is rumored to have plans to launch a European service soon. When I asked MacKenzie if Lovefilm felt threatened by those plans, she mentioned that Netflix pulled the plug on a previous UK rollout in 2004. In her opinion, Europe was not ready for a mainly digital service from a brand largely unknown in Europe. In the US, Netflix is charging ahead with providing a streaming-only movie service to compete with that of rival Hulu.

Lovefilm is based in London and was founded in 2003. Its backers include Amazon.com, Index Ventures, Arts Alliance Media, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit.

The studio will give away $2.7 million in cash prizes, in addition to developing a top project as a full commercial film through a deal with Warner Bros.

From filmmakers, the studio is looking for submissions of “test movies” — full-length, low-budget amateur movies made from an original script or a script submitted as a part of the contest. From screenwriters, it’s seeking original movie scripts. The best movie script will receive $100,000, while the best movie will bag $1 million.

All submitted scripts and movies can be reviewed by fans on Amazon Studios‘ website, where the company has also produced and posted five sample movies potential participants can take inspiration from. Judges on the panel include the screenwriter of “Top Gun”, Jack Epps, Jr., and “Face/Off”, Mike Werb, along with Mark Gill, the former president of Miramax.

To keep its content submissions “rookie-level,” the company is asking entrants to give Amazon 18 months of exclusive rights, something it doesn’t expect working Hollywood filmmakers and scriptwriters to adhere to.

While somewhat of an uncharacteristic move by an e-commerce company, it’s not out of Amazon’s ambit. Last year, the company had a similar contest asking submissions of TV commercials advertising its Kindle product, and earlier this year, a contest for budding novel authors to win a publishing contract.

Submissions end Dec. 31, 2011, when the company will announce its major cash prize winners. Until then, it will also be giving away minor awards every month throughout next year.

Moskovitz, who is now building Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz-backed productivity startup Asana, gave his take on the upcoming film on Quora, a question-and-answer site from other Facebook alums.

He surprisingly thought that the trailer ended up portraying Mark Zuckerberg in a positive way, despite its largely critical source material from Ben Mezrich’s fictionalized account, “The Accidental Billionaires.”

He wrote:

“It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter (like the Winklevosses, who I’ve still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years) and leaves out things that really did (like the many other people in our lives at the time, who supported us in innumerable ways). Other than that, it’s just cool to see a dramatization of history. A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.

I’m very curious to see how Mark turns out in the end — the plot of the book/script unabashedly attack him, but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is. And the Ad Board *does* owe him some recognition, dammit.”

Unlike the earlier teasers, which were rather apocalyptic, this one features real footage from the film and is set to the music of a choir performing Radiohead’s “Creep.”

It focuses, like Ben Mezrich’s book (which was the foundation for the script), on the relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Justin Timberlake gets a few seconds here and there as Sean Parker, the company’s first president, classically flipping off the camera. The film comes out in October and will open the New York Film Festival in late September.

http://d.yimg.com/m/up/ypp/movies/player.swf