Horrors! 'Project' is back

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — "Project Greenlight," the reality TV series about making a theatrical movie, has been both a big success and a huge failure.

The TV show about the making of the movie has been a big success for two seasons on HBO. The movies that were made were huge failures.

"There's always a certain amount of pressure in terms of making the show successful so that people want to watch it so we can continue to be able to afford to do this project," said Ben Affleck, who appears onscreen as one of the project's producers in the season premiere (Tuesday at 7 and 9 p.m. on Bravo). "And, additionally, there's a lot of pressure that's on us to have a commercial movie. Maybe more so. The show has been more successful in the past than the movies have been."

"The show has two years of being successful and people knowing what it is and liking it. The film has two years of not a soul going to see it," said Chris Moore, the producer of both the show and the movies and the guy who runs LivePlanet Productions for his buddies Affleck and Matt Damon.

"We do have to start making a little bit of money back on the movies or we're not going to find somebody who's going to pay us to make the movie. And, unfortunately, if we're not making the movie, there's not a lot to cover in the show."

"Project Greenlight" is a contest of sorts cooked up by Affleck, Damon and Moore to give Hollywood outsiders a chance to make a movie. Hopefuls submit scripts and directors audition to helm the project, with the LivePlanet bunch and Miramax (which puts up the $1 million-plus budget) deciding what film gets made and who makes it.

This year, it's a horror film. And horror meister Wes Craven is on board as a producer.

"It's a viable television enterprise," said Affleck. But the series shows the movie people as they "kind of put the screws to us and say, 'We don't care what your artistic sensibilities are or what you think the best screenplay is; we're the studio. We're taking over. And we're going to tell you what movie has the best chance to make money and that's what we're going to make.' "

In other words, they don't want to get saddled with more box-office flops like the first two "Greenlight" films, "Stolen Summer" and "The Battle of Shaker Heights."

The new film is "Feast," a gory "genre" film written by neophytes Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan and helmed by first-time director John Gulager.