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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/movies/30shin.html
September 30, 2005
His 'Secret' Movie Trailer Is No Secret Anymore
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 29 — Robert Ryang, 25, a film editor’s assistant in Manhattan, graduated from Columbia three years ago with a double major in film studies and psychology. This week, he got an eye-opening lesson in both.
Since 2002, Mr. Ryang has worked for one of the owners of P.S. 260, a commercial postproduction house, cutting commercials for the likes of Citizens Bank, Cingular and the TriBeCa Film Festival.
A few weeks back, he said, he entered a contest for editors’ assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.
Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.”
Mr. Ryang won the contest, and about 10 days ago, he said, he sent three friends a link to a “secret site” on his company’s Web site where they could watch his entry (www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov).
One of them, Mr. Ryang said, posted it on his little-watched blog. And that was that. Until this week, when he was hit by a tsunami of Internet interest.
On Wednesday, Mr. Ryang said, his secret site got 12,000 hits. By Thursday the numbers were even higher, his film was being downloaded and linked to on countless other sites, it had cracked the top 10 most popular spoofs on www.ifilm.com, and a vice president at a major Hollywood studio had called up his office, scouting for new talent.
“He said it’s being circulated everywhere in the film community,” Mr. Ryang said of the executive, not wanting to name the man for fear of alienating him. “He wanted to know who I was, and if I had any creative ideas. I told him I’d put together a reel.”
Mr. Ryang said that he was blown away by the experience, and that his boss wasn’t exactly angry, despite the computer system’s nearly having crashed, because of all the attention he had won for P.S. 260.
Though, it seems, the attention was directed more specifically at Mr. Ryang — who is suddenly being forced to rethink his future as an assistant.
“People have been calling producers here, asking about who made it,” he said. “I really didn’t realize how fast the world moves.”
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