By Marisa Pjerrou
Serving as mostly a vanity page for corporate identity and advertising,
MGM's web site at www.mgmua.com
heavily promotes its most recent film releases and popular TV shows,
as well as keeping long favorites such as The Pink Panther
and James Bond 007 in the limelight. Film-industry executives,
investors and just plain old movie fans seeking film information or
film merchandise to buy are likely to frequent this site. Very sleek
and fancy/flashy web sites created to promote new films such as Hannibal,
Heartbreakers, or Rollerball are featured prominently,
and plenty of merchandise tie-ins as well. It was interesting to see
that the Pink Panther site was aimed at teenage girls who probably
have no idea what The Pink Panther films from the 1960's were
about; mostly a site to promote Pink Panther merchandise, there
was surprisingly no reference to the actual Pink Panther films
themselves, nor even to Peter Sellars.
This site is well designed and easily navigable: functions and features
are clearly defined and where the user would expect them to be. The
familiar MGM icon with the roaring lion is miniaturized in the upper
left corner of the screen, and functions as a roll-over feature: the
lion actually moves and roars! An award was given to the site for
being the "Best Major Movie Studio Site" at the 2000 NetAwards
event, a decision determined by Internet users and a "Blue Ribbon
Committee of established Hollywood professionals" (yeah, whatever).
The write-up at the web site about this award indicates www.mgmua.com
has a strong focus on gearing its content to film buffs - or at least
this is what MGM wants people to think. But there is definitely a
business focus to this site as well: investors seeking corporate news
can pick up relevant information at this site regarding film projects
in production, MGM acquisitions, quarterly reports as printed documents,
and even the most recent Q4 earnings conference presented in audiostream.
Fans will appreciate the well-designed promotional web sites of new
film releases and a section called "Backlot" that includes
behind-the-scenes interviews. A neat feature of "Backlot"
called "MGM University" allows one to see clips of films
such as The Graduate alongside the film's actual script pages.
The history timeline was disappointing: with a history as glorious
as MGM's - once the most prestigious studio during Hollywood's heyday
- there is absolutely no excuse for the handful of small film images
and paltry text that do poor justice to MGM's 76 years in business
and a gargantuan film library of 4,100 titles. Sadly in the name of
corporate profit, the attention paid to film archiving is probably
at the bottom of the totem pole as far as business expenses are concerned.
The corporate investor section of the site gives one a better sense
of Peter Bart's comments from "Your Survival Guide for the Big
Media Age" in the December 1999 issue of Brill's Content.
The lack of original scripts and the audience-tested, formulaic, and
"prechewed quality" familiar to many current films - including
several promoted at www.mgmua.com -
remind one that gone are the good, old days of Hollywood in which
the "old-time bosses followed their hunches." Rather, the
conglomeration trend of the major film studios brings to mind the
oft-quoted comment made by Michael Douglas' character in Oliver Stone's
Wall Street that "greed is good" - a mentality underlying
the modern production style of popular cinema which Peter Barts reminds
us as not exactly being a "recipe for art."