The Auteurs

The idea for TheAuteurs.com, a global online Cinematheque, sparked from a simple need in a remote part of the world. Founder/CEO Efe Cakarel, 32, was biding his time in a Tokyo coffee shop one day when he felt the urge to watch Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. He logged onto his computer and was amazed to find he could not get it. “I saw that nobody offered a good selection of movies and the right user-friendly experience online,” he recalls. Seizing the moment, Cakarel invited his friend Kamer Altinova from Turkey to help him design a new video-on-demand site. In May 2007, they set up their headquarters in Palo Alto with a lean team of tech-savvy site developers led by American-Brazilian Gabe da Silveira and Jatinder Singh from India.

Since its unveiling (in technical terms, public beta) in November 2007, The Auteurs has grown to 55,000 members and boasts 30,000 monthly active users of Movie Theater, its Facebook application.

Aware that content is pivotal to a site’s success, Cakarel, an MIT and Stanford MBA grad, cajoled the heads of The Criterion Collection and the Paris-based production, finance and sales firm Celluloid Dreams to partner with The Auteurs. The site has also established alliances with major film festivals such as Berlin, Telluride and Cannes.

The online movie theatre is now streaming videos in 174 countries. This means clearing online rights in each territory, requiring not only a set of finely honed negotiating skills but considerable stamina. “In order to screen one film globally, you sometimes have to speak to more than 100 people,” says Cakarel.

Buenos Aires-based Costa Films was the first to invest in the site. “I think what distinguishes The Auteurs from similar webs out there is its sleek design, its user-friendliness, its concept of community and its content,” says Costa president Eduardo Costantini, 32. He recalls how his mother used to bring home films from the Criterion Collection, which includes the works of cinematic giants Marcel Camus, Federico Fellini, Jacques Tati, Luis Bunuel and Ingmar Bergman. “I grew up on these films,” he muses.

It was Costantini who introduced Criterion president Peter Becker to Cakarel. Other investors include some of Cakarel’s former colleagues at Goldman Sachs who wryly claim the site has been their best investment yet.

While some films are available free through sponsorship deals, The Auteurs uses the “Big Mac Index” to determine its pricing structure. Users from wealthier countries like Japan, the U.S. and Europe pay $5 or 5 Euros per film, while developing countries pay $3. The site also recently launched a monthly subscription service offering unlimited viewing for monthly fees ranging from $18 in First World territories to $12 in developing countries. Criterion programs a continuing monthly series of free, ad-supported film festivals.

Running alongside The Auteurs the online film magazine, Notebook, which hosts editorial coverage from around the world. “The subject of inquiry will always remain the same: cinema new and old, obvious and obscure—helping new readers discover these works and veteran readers push deeper into film,” Cakarel says.

Their next step is to get more advertisers on board to enable more screenings gratis. The Auteurs has tapped leading ad agency Fallon Worldwide in London and is in partnership talks with a publishing house in Italy, a consortium of distributors in Spain, and film- financing company in Japan.

The venture is not in the black yet. “We’re spending heavily to build the platform we envisioned, with faster downloads and improved technology,” Cakarel says. Pirate sites abound, he admits. “But when I execute on our vision to show our library for free down the line, it’s game over.”

Next stop: The Auteurs’ official launch at the Cannes International Film Festival in May with such new features as offline viewing, improved encoding capabilities as well as a new design and implementation of its forums.

The Gossip Entrepreneur
by Romina Ruiz-Goiriena.

Perez Hilton is more than just your garden-variety gossip columnist. In less than four years this media-savvy former freelance writer has turned his hobby into a full-blown 24-hour celebrity news website that draws more than 9 million viewers a day and is making a pretty penny.

His real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., and he can make celebrities cringe at the sight of his paparazzi-style photographs tagged with white light-pencil comments highlighting the absurdity of today’s fame culture.

He began blogging in 2006 under the domain of PageSixSixSix.com. After being sued for domain infringement by The New York Post—home of the “Page Six” gossip page—he later changed it to PerezHilton. com as a spin-off of do-nothing celebrity Paris Hilton’s name.

After 12 months of writing for entertainment, he got a call from TV show The Insider asking to feature his site as “Hollywood’s Most Hated Website.” So how did Lavandeira turn bad publicity into his jump shot to fame? He made it his slogan. “Instead of being ‘that dude’ from ‘that website,’ I became Perez from PerezHilton.com. It really was the birth of my brand,” Lavandeira explains.

Since establishing the PerezHilton.com brand, what some see as accidental entrepreneurship has become a launching pad for Lavandeira, whose posts and site have become a place to endorse artists and promote concerts he produces. He also has recently authored a book, Red Carpet Suicide: A Survival Guide on keeping up with the Hiltons. And although he won’t reveal his annual earnings—not even on Martha Stewart’s talkshow—BlogAds, the company that sells his advertising, lists a one-week, top-of-fold skyscraper ad at $16,000 for 41 million impressions.

He tells PODER that his success story is based on what he describes as his “Cuban work ethic... My parents did a good job instilling that in me. And I work very hard.” Hilton also has attributed his obsession with gossip to his upbringing. “I had a very normal upbringing in Miami. It was a very traditional Cuban household. I would listen to my mom and my relatives gossip, and gossip never had a negative connotation,” he told The New York Post. “I think that’s part of why I’m good at what I do.”

Asked if he thinks if people will keep coming back to his website, he has no doubts, especially as he works to feed what he describes as “people’s insatiable appetite for celebrity news.”

So what’s next for Lavandeira? The celebrity media mogul foresees his brand growing quickly. He may even start another website. He has made no secret of his ambitions to become the next Oprah Winfrey: “I would like to be in a position where if I have an idea, I could make it happen. I’m open to new ideas, and I’m not afraid of change, and that’s a very healthy thing for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to change with the times or you become irrelevant.”

www.theauteurs.com