by Screenmancer Staff
Circa 1997, Screenmancer has been screenmancing through Hollywood. That is to say collecting rare and oddball interviews along the way to becoming “a gathering place for people who make movies.” We have clocked the careers of Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton, Joel and Ethan Coen, Syd Field, Del Reisman, Ingmar Bergman, Tim Robbins, Brittany Murphy, Frances O’Connor, Lynn Redgrave, Elias Koteas, Robert Luketic, Max von Sydow, Jorja Fox, Tori Spelling, Kevin Smith, Mary Kay Place, Pedro Almodóvar, Ismail Merchant, Helen Childress, Spalding Gray, Allen and Albert Hughes, Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love screenwriter Marc Norman, script consultant Dara Marks and more. The original pages also house Mark Ebner’s Ebner-at-Large and filmmaker dispatches, such as our exclusive early feature from Nick Veronis, his Director’s Diary with a young Liev Schrieber in one of his first roles ever – shocker that he doesn’t list this credit often. Nick left filmmaking behind to join the family business, of capital management. Much more lucrative job choice, lol, judging from his bio now.
Screenmancer went online with the tagline “A gathering place for people who make movies,” because we were the first to imagine a virtual movie studio, where filmmakers could connect, upload work, talk craft and reach audiences directly.
The surviving page still advertises “Ancient Warfare” one of our favorite niche independent magazines out of the Netherlands. Plus “UPLOAD YOUR MOVIE” and “SCREENMANCER GREENLIGHTS VMOVIES” — artifacts of an Internet before YouTube, Facebook, social media or Netflix streaming, when putting movies and moviemakers together online was itself an experiment.
We remain 100 percent independent media: no studio parent, corporate news division or media conglomerate deciding what belonged on the page.
Screenmancer came from the first generation of independent film sites that used the open Web as its own publishing and distribution system, before consolidation and acquisitions brought much of digital entertainment publishing under larger media companies.
In 2014, the site was finally recognized in “Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology” with a crowd-sourced quotes from our Founder.
But makes this archive more than vintage celebrity interviews, is that it reflects a surviving piece of the independent Hollywood Internet — the conversations, experiments, newsfeeds, filmmaker tools and shockingly primitive HTML preserved largely where they originally lived. The page even retains its © 1997–2009 Screenmancer footer.
Screenmancer was here before everybody. The pages are live still. Go explore.
ENTER THE ORIGINAL SCREENMANCER INTERVIEW ARCHIVE → SCREENMANCE…
Be warned: The original archive is still alive in its funky vintage Web form — old-school htm, shtml, html, peculiar graphics, wildly feral font sizes and colors, digital archaeology, a very altogether 1990’s sheen.
Enjoy as we prep for the 30th Anniversary, when all these links will migrate into the slick pixelated of 2027.
Visit our app SCRNMNCR.
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