Film Web Sites Go Beyond Text And A Few Polaroids

You read the book. You saw the animated film. You bought the cute little backpacks and the spotted shelf paper. And now you’ve witnessed the live-action remake with its dozens of digital doglets. What’s left to experience? How about “101 Dalmatians,” the Web site?

As the Internet enters its third holiday season in the public eye, movie makers have graduated from creating simple promotional Web sites for their big-screen extravaganzas to dreaming up entire interactive worlds designed to enlighten and entertain as well as sell tickets to the main event.

Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” Web site (http://www.disney.com/101/) alone will have more “pages” than there are puppies in the movie. Visitors can download puppies, paint puppies, find missing puppies, even teach a virtual puppy to do tricks. Where it will all end, nobody knows.

Brent Britton, president of Light Entertainment, which designed the site accompanying Paramount’s “Star Trek: First Contact” (http:/ /startrek.first-contact.com/) envisions a near future when a movie will “serve as a trailer for an extensive entertainment service offered on the Web.

“The bar keeps getting raised with every new site,” Britton says. “It’s no longer acceptable just to throw up text and Polaroids.”

Employing a new Web programming tool called VRML (virtual reality modeling language), Britton’s crew, with a background in movie special effects, created a 3-D walk-around model of the famed Enterprise. With a click of the mouse, visitors can move about the starship at will. No special software downloads are needed. Keep phasers at the ready. A Borg attack may be imminent.

And it’s not just the big studios that are expanding their virtual empires in time for Christmas. Independent distributors, which usually lack the resources to spend heavily on television or newspaper advertising, have been among the first to push the technology envelope.

Web sites are especially helpful in establishing a smaller distributor’s image. Independent distributors like New Line Cinema (www.newline.com) and Miramax (www.miramax.com) blend cool design, innovative interactivity and tongue-in-cheek humor to appeal to their hipper urban audiences.

In a viewer feedback area, for example, Miramax offers Web surfers the option of beginning their e-mail messages to the chairman, Harvey Weinstein, with the cheeky phrase “I can’t believe you guys were dumb enough to …”

Another reason for greater attention to the Internet is that studios are discovering that women and entire Web-surfing families are finding their way to promotional sites in increasing numbers.

Of course, the Internet’s primary constituency remains young, white, male technophiles. In a nod to this core group, Miramax rewards visitors who stumble across its site for Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You” with downloadable photos of Drew Barrymore in a negligee and Julia Roberts wrapped in a sheet.

Universal’s Web site for its new Sylvester Stallone action thriller, “Daylight,” about a tunnel collapse, has a game using Shockwave software that allows wannabe heroes to flex their virtual muscles by rescuing damsels from fire and rising water.