People who had HBO in the early 2000s, rejoice: As previously reported, your favorite let’s-make-a-movie reality series Project Greenlight is returning for a new season. And in keeping with its embrace of changing technology, the show is putting all of the final 20 short films in the competition online for your viewing—and voting—pleasure. Starting today, you can watch them all and vote for your favorite. The top choice will be entered into the next round, where it will go up against the nine other finalists determined by “a panel of entertainment industry judges.” The directors of those 10 finalists will then direct and film a scene from a script that was provided to them for the competition. And from that, a winner will then be chosen to star on the new season of the show.
In case a nine-year absence turns out to not make the heart grow fonder, a quick refresher: Project Greenlight was a docu-series developed by producers Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Sean Bailey, and Chris Moore, to give new, untested filmmakers a chance to create the Hollywood movie of their dreams. Shockingly, it turned out that subjecting every step of a young, inexperienced writer/director’s first project to the harsh glare of a reality television camera was not the ideal incubator for great art. Season one’s final product, Stolen Summer, is currently sitting at 36-percent on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Season two’s The Battle Of Shaker Heights, starring everyone’s favorite not-famous person Shia LaBeouf, isn’t doing much better, with a 41-percent Tomatometer and a 33 on Metacritic.
In season three, the show moved to Bravo and brought on producer Wes Craven to help shepherd a genre horror film, Feast, through the reality TV grinder. Though the film turned out notably better than the first two, it was still the last nail in the coffin for the show. (It probably didn’t help that Affleck and Damon, who were all over the promos for the series, turned up for roughly 10 minutes in the show itself.) The new iteration of Project Greenlight will no doubt be hotly watched by those eager to compare notes with the journals they kept of the little-seen original series back in 2001.