Movie spies right out of a Hollywood script

By ALAN PERROTT


It has the makings of a rollicking script for a Revenge of the Nerds sequel: geeks give themselves cool codenames, create a website for movie spy reports, develop the power to make or break big-budget projects, and then launch careers as scriptwriters.

In the case of budding writer Eric Vespe and the team behind influential American website Ain't it Cool News, it's the simple truth, and the covert operative has been sniffing round Peter Jackson's King Kong set in Wellington.

While Vespe is still Eric to his family, to millions of webfans he is known as Quint.

The 23-year-old Texan has worked for Ain't it Cool since he was a spotty 16-year-old and is already credited with destroying one movie, a proposed adaptation of Stephen King's Talisman.

"I got hold of an early screenplay and my review was apparently one of the things that helped to derail it. If that's true, I'm happy - it was a crappy adaptation of one of my favourite books."

Ain't it Cool was launched in 1996 after an accident left founder Harry Knowles bedridden. He scoured chatrooms for movie gossip and ran them as genuine spy reports from his web of secret contacts.

It wasn't long till Knowles, also a Texan, started receiving the real deal, such as leaked scripts or reviews from secret screenings.

It quickly captured the film industry's attention and an army of imitators, especially after one campaign of exposes and attacks helped to end the Batman series.

The website now claims about 2 million unique visitors every day.

Quint is a fan of Jackson - he had a cameo in Return of the King - and such relationships can cramp your style when it comes to digging for dirt.

So for the past month he has retracted the claws and viewed set visits as a chance to "geek out" and be close to history.

"These films will live past me and my grandchildren. It's like watching the making of Wizard of Oz or Casablanca."

Hollywood's present flirtation with New Zealand has spawned a few Quints of our own.

Tehanu, aka 40-year-old Erica Challis from Massey, spent months trekking the back blocks of Matamata and Queenstown to get exclusive photographs and gossip from the Lord of the Rings sets for website theonering.

Among her scoops were revealing how Irishman Stuart Townsend almost got Viggo Mortensen's role of Aragorn, and leaking early versions of the digitally created Gollum character.

Theonering's global reach meant every discovery caused an avalanche of attention - and enough aggravation to earn her a trespass notice and a few threats.

"But it's all been great fun ... It's like I've found an extended family that goes right around the world."

Tehanu now has her camera and ears trained on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and the Hercules mini-series, which have both been filming in West Auckland.

Ain't it cool News

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