'Snakes' slither into public consciousness via Internet

Rachel Leibrock, Sacramento Bee

Published August 18, 2006 at midnight

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It started off as just another sure-to-be-bad B-movie. So how did Snakes on a Plane turn into the most eagerly awaited film of the summer? You can thank a cheeky movie title and the blogosphere for the season's biggest pop-culture phenomenon.

Snakes on a Plane - which opens today but wasn't screened for critics to review - is a movie about . . . well, the title says it all.

Snakes. On. A. Plane.

Directed by David Ellis (Cellular) and starring Samuel L. Jackson, it's the story of an FBI agent (Jackson) transporting an important witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles. The mobster the witness will implicate tries to prevent his testimony by loading cartons of poisonous snakes onto the plane and arranging for them to open in midflight over the Pacific. Hissing, biting and screaming ensue.

Sounds like simple B-movie fare. But the hype surrounding Snakes on a Plane escalated into a full- scale rattle before the film even finished shooting. And some say it could forever change the ways movies are made and marketed.

The urban legend goes like this:

Jackson signed on to do Snakes at least in part because he liked the film's campy title. He balked when the studio tried to change the title to a yawn-inducing Pacific Air 121. Then interest was sparked among movie buffs in August 2005 after screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds) used his blog to praise the film. Friedman wrote: "It's a concept, it's a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be." It was just a matter of megabytes before Internet dwellers caught on and "SoaP" (as it's commonly referred to in the blogosphere) became the hot topic on numerous forums and blogs.

Today there are T-shirts, fan sites and video parodies. There's even an UrbanDictionary.com slang listing in which the movie's title translates into a new way to say, "That's life."

And in an unprecedented case of life imitating the Internet, the film's studio, New Line Cinema, responded to fan requests by allowing Ellis to amp the movie's rating from PG-13 to "R." Now your SoaP dollar gets you more violence, more gore and more swearing - including Jackson's already-famous declaration, "I've had it with these (expletive) snakes on this (expletive) plane." Ellis says he was happy to mine the Web for input. Trolling sites such as SnakesOnABlog.com, he read posts and message boards and even chimed in with e-mails and board comments.

"Sam and I initially wanted to make an 'R' movie and New Line wanted a PG-13. But then they realized their mistake and gave me the money to go back," says Ellis, talking on his cell phone from Los Angeles. "(Because) this isn't a political movie and we're not trying to be true to some book, I had the opportunity to incorporate some of the things fans wanted."

That's exactly the sort of interaction that SnakesOnABlog.com Web master Brian Finkelstein also wanted. Inspired by the film's title, the Georgetown University law student decided to make himself a part of the fun when he set up his aptly titled site in January.

"I just thought it would be funny to get involved somehow," says Finkelstein, on the phone from Washington, D.C. "And then it all just turned into something bigger. . . .

"(New Line) got in touch with me and I asked if they were going to sue. They said 'No, we see what you're doing and we approve, but we don't want to be involved.'They recognized that the site was something that had value to them, but if they got involved it would lose some of its cachet."

Now Snakes on a Plane is considered revolutionary for the way it has used the Internet. And while the Snakes buzz probably is impossible to duplicate in another film, this example of viral marketing could well change the very nature of filmmaking, says Charles Coxe, editor-in- chief for Giant magazine's online content (GiantMag.com).

"The next step may be to let fans write the whole script or be involved in the casting process," he says.

What the studios didn't want us to write about

Snakes on a Plane isn't the only movie that wasn't screened for critics this week:

• The movie: Material Girls

• Rated: PG

• The stars: Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff and Angelica Huston

• The premise: A sister team of models must pick themselves up by the bootstraps (and ride public transportation) after they lose their jobs and their big bank accounts.

• What could be so bad? It's probably best to keep the press away whenever a movie could be mistaken for an Olsen-twins vehicle.

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