Artisan Entertainment, the independent distributor behind the low-budget horror hit "The Blair Witch Project," wants to sell stock in itself. How appropriate. Owning shares in movie companies usually ends up being a really frightening experience.
Even scarier is that while Artisan prepares its initial public offering to raise as much as $140 million, the company is roiled with internal tensions, much of it surrounding the Internet strategy that first put the company on the map with "Blair Witch" last summer. The internal concern is that Artisan is grabbing the quick cash rather than spending time to develop a broader entertainment company with a significant Internet component. The shortsightedness has already cost the company a key executive.
It's not the sort of thing an investor gets from reading the company's stock prospectus.
This Friday, John Hegeman, the 37-year-old marketing whiz largely credited with making "Blair Witch" a phenomenon by promoting it in cyberspace, officially leaves his post as Artisan's head of marketing to join former Disney Studios chief Joe Roth in his new company. He's leaving after a feud with Artisan Chief Executive Mark A. Curcio.
Hegeman, who's based in New York, is widely regarded in Hollywood as the best Internet marketing strategist in the movie business, first turning heads for successfully launching the 1994 film "Stargate" over the Internet when he was an executive at MGM.
Inside Artisan, Hegeman's departure is considered a big loss that could have been avoided. Curcio failed to support Hegeman's longtime dream of launching a genre-specific Web site. To Hegeman, this was a natural extension to the company's "Blair Witch" initiative.
But the problems extend beyond Hegeman's departure. Artisan's board stripped sole responsibility for Artisan's Internet business from Curcio earlier this year, worried that he was squandering the Internet-related success of "Blair Witch" by moving too slowly to develop that area. Curcio now shares that responsibility with Nicolas van Dyk, head of strategic planning, New York-based co-president Amir Malin and Santa Monica-based co-president Bill Block.
Artisan has taken baby steps with the Internet, claiming it has a number of deals in the works and owns a stake in online movie company Sightsound.com.
