Good Will Games

After saving the planet as a World War II pilot in ''Pearl Harbor'' (a feat he'll repeat as a CIA operative in the upcoming ''The Sum of All Fears''), Ben Affleck is easing into another role: multimedia exec. Tucked away in his sparse Santa Monica office at LivePlanet, the integrated media company he and bud Matt Damon cofounded last year, Affleck has been coping with a platoon of lawyers, debating the potential legal quicksand created by the company's envelope-pushing slate of reality programs. ''It's a wonder anybody f---in' does anything, with how litigious society has become,'' sighs Affleck. ''The amount of lawyers that we've generated work for is astonishing. That's not the sector of the economy I want to be contributing to.''

No, Affleck's goal is considerably more ambitious than padding the pockets of lawyers. The actor, who turns 29 on Aug. 15, wants to connect the Internet to the real world via TV and movies -- and, incidentally, make LivePlanet a one-stop destination for interactive entertainment. So far, so good. At least two projects are already off the ground. In January, ABC will launch ''The Runner,'' the company's attempt to reinvent reality TV. The premise: A ''runner'' competes for a $1 million-plus prize by completing a series of ''missions'' across the country, while three ''agents'' try to ''capture'' him.

The LivePlanet-designed twist? Not only can potential contestants apply to be runners or agents online, but viewers can win a share of the pot by digging up and sharing clues about the runner's whereabouts on the Web.

LivePlanet is also going full throttle on Project Greenlight, a kind of Head Start program for young auteurs. The project began with an online screenplay contest that drew 7,291 submissions. The winning script, Peter Jones' drama ''Stolen Summer,'' was then shot last spring on a $1 million budget with a cast that included Aidan Quinn, Bonnie Hunt, and Brian Dennehy. Now in postproduction, the film has a distribution commitment from Miramax, and the entire making-of process is being chronicled for a 13-episode HBO documentary and a book for Talk Miramax Books. ''There are a lot of symbiotic relationships, which is why having LivePlanet involved was a good thing,'' says Miramax TV president Billy Campbell, who worked on the idea from its inception.

The company's emphasis on interactivity and a multimedia approach sets it apart. ''LivePlanet does media events, shows, and films that were impossible before the advent of the Internet,'' explains ''Runner'' creator Sean Bailey, a LivePlanet cofounder. '''Runner' couldn't have been done in 1990 because you couldn't have connected to the American public.''

While day-to-day business at the 63-employee LivePlanet is guided by Bailey, 31, the chief creative officer, and CEO Chris Moore, 34, the Good Will Hunters have not simply licensed out their names. Affleck recently holed up with Bailey to create a TV series and online treasure-hunt game called ''Push, Nevada,'' which is in development at ABC for 2002. Damon, 30, has less direct involvement in the company's operations, though he and Affleck personally pitched ''The Runner'' to ABC. But in the end, it's Moore and Bailey who are largely responsible for making their famous friends look like visionaries...or fools.

Why would the Oscar winners gamble their reputations and cash on a bootstrap operation? Like all other projects involving Damon and Affleck, who grew up together in Cambridge, Mass., LivePlanet starts with friendship. Damon and Moore both attended Harvard but only hooked up after landing in Hollywood, where Moore, a former ICM agent, met screenwriter Bailey. Affleck joined the quartet when Damon recommended him for a role in ''Glory Daze,'' a 1996 indie movie Moore was producing. One night over a game of pool and a few beers, the foursome promised that if they ever made it they would get a connecting suite of offices with a basketball hoop. (Today their work space not only boasts a hoop but a pool table, a kitchen, and a two-way Internet video hookup to LivePlanet's second office, in Silicon Valley's San Mateo, Calif.)

Their early bull sessions focused on the tiredness of traditional media on the Web. ''What we would come back to was, 'Would you ever go watch a short film on the Web?''' says Bailey. ''Even if a theater showed the 10 best short films in history around the corner from my house, I wouldn't go.''

Hoping to build a viable business that incorporated the Internet into traditional media ideas, the quartet hired the e-business consulting company Viant to write a business plan. Affleck and Damon put up about $200,000 for bare-bones start-up expenses, and the group set two hurdles for themselves: selling ''The Runner'' to a network with a deal that allowed them to own the underlying concept, and raising money in Silicon Valley. If they couldn't sell the techies, they reasoned, then the concept probably wouldn't work.

Given the company's pedigree, Hollywood couldn't wait to chip in. Former Disney exec and Revolution Studios founder Joe Roth was an early investor. But Silicon Valley was a much tougher sell, particularly since the LivePlanet team was approaching high-tech investors last fall, just as dotcoms were becoming dot-bombs. ''Those were some dark days,'' Affleck says. ''It would be a total lie to say it all went along easily.'' The day of their first meeting at the venture-capital firm Redpoint, Pop.com (an online entertainment site backed by Hollywood powerhouses DreamWorks and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment) shut down after spending $50 million and failing to broadcast a single pixel on the Web. ''We used to joke that we should be shorting ourselves because every time we got on a plane to San Francisco the stock market fell 400 points,'' says Moore.

Dave Roux, managing director of the venture-capital firm Silver Lake Partners, was initially skeptical, worried that LivePlanet might just be a vanity project. ''Over the course of six months, I was convinced they were passionate and had staying power,'' says Roux, who wound up investing by kicking in a portion of the company's $16 million start-up money. ''It would have been really easy for them to raise the money at a cocktail party in New York or L.A., but they went to Silicon Valley and got their asses kicked around by a bunch of curmudgeonly venture capitalists. The reason I invested was that it didn't look anything like a movie or TV production company.''

Whether or not LivePlanet actually succeeds as a business venture, Moore credits Affleck's passion with putting the company on solid footing. ''Ben would say to potential investors: 'Ask me how committed I am? Well, right now, I am sitting in your office begging you to write me a check for $10 million,''' Moore recalls. ''He signed away everything except his acting money into LivePlanet. He is writing one of our projects for free. He is appearing in the Project Greenlight TV show for free. He's marketing all of this stuff for free.''

Both Moore and Bailey understand the pressure of being partners with a couple of famous actors. ''If the company should have a big public failure, nobody will be making fun of me -- they will be making fun of Matt and Ben,'' Bailey says. ''They don't need to take that risk at this point in their lives. But they're those kind of guys.''

You Might Also Like

• Television News Run D.O.A. | Caroline Kepnes, Scott Brown, Josh Young
• News Summary Singers stage weekend of all-star benefit concerts | Gary Susman
• News Summary Matt and Ben produce a reality show (Jun 21, 2002) | Sandra P. Angulo
• On the Air Damon and Affleck produce ABC's ''The Runner'' | Lynette Rice