Zhang Yimou is one talented guy. He’s directed everything from “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Ju Dou,” “Hero,” “The House of Flying Daggers,” to the whiz-bang opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 China Olympics.

Knowing his accomplishments, it’s surprising that he can’t get a simple thing like his name right:  in all his movie credits, posters, ads, trailers, reviews, articles, and photo captions—his name is always written incorrectly. 

Just check out IMDb.com. His name isn’t Zhang Yimou: it’s Yimou Zhang.

And he’s not the only one. One of my favorite directors is South Korea’s Park Chan-wook, maker of “Oldboy” and his amazing new film, “Thirst.”  As per IMDb, his name is actually Chan-wook Park.

Other Asian filmmakers that IMDB flags for their flawed nomenclature include Kaige Chen, Ki-duk Kim, Hsiao-hsien Hou, Woo-ping Yuen, Hark Tsui, and my personal favorite, Kar Wai Wong.

It is part of the language and culture of countries like Russia, China, Korea, and Singapore, to put last names first. But screw ‘em. We are the west and we know how to fix their mistakes. Let’s not mince words—this is cultural imperialism.

On one hand it’s an unwillingness to respect the way people in other lands prefer their names to be written. On the other it’s an insult to the users of IMDb: it makes the tacit point that they won’t be able to make use of these names otherwise.

I recognize that it is much more complicated than this. Not all Asian countries do this. And within cultures, some people flip their names around themselves, and some don’t. There’s no clear logic for it in every case, and many people have struggled with it. Some sought clarity through a consistent use of capital letters for the surname, as in ZHANG Yimou. That allowed the name to stay the same, but only worked if you were in the club that knew what the capitalization meant.  I assume the rationale behind the IMDb name switcheroo is to keep everything consistent, with first names always first, and thereby assist the user. But this strategy isn’t something that would ever occur to any film professor, museum curator or serious critic.  It’s much more like the thought process Internet Technology departments use when they create forms to input data: Put your first name in blank one and your last name in blank two.

Before IMDb “solved” this problem, it wasn’t a problem. Everybody used the name they saw on the screen, the reviews, and the ads.   Nobody needed to know what the real last name or first name was, any more than they were required to have any other knowledge about the culture of the film they were watching or reviewing. While it’s true that you come off as more sophisticated if you say Mr. Zhang rather than Mr. Yimou, you aren’t going to get into a lot of hot water unless you are a critic or attend a lot of parties at the Asia Society.

My question is: “Who is this for?”  The meaning of the order of the first and last names of an Asian film director or actor is something nobody needs to know unless they play roles in film culture like film critic, festival programmer, or museum curator, i.e., people who already know this stuff.  Everyone else could soldier on with the names on the prints of the films, as they always had done. 

Why am I making such a fuss about this? Names are very important things. Most people are very touchy and proud about their names—they could be named aftere a relative, or their name could have other resonances. They might want it to stay exactly the way it is. On the other hand, Zhang Ziyi starred in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;” lately she has taken to calling herself Ziyi Zhang. But that is a choice that she made for career or other reasons, whereas Gong Li and Bai Ling have chosen not to. It’s Ziyi’s real name now, at least as far as the movie business goes. But reading Li Gong and Ling Bai in IMDb makes me nuts.

The distinction is vital. It’s wrong to rob people of their right to change or not change their names as a crutch for lazy movie fans. Some do and some don’t, for cultural pride or for whatever reason, just as some women keep their names after marriage. Some keep their Asian names and then invent one for Westerners like Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh or Joan Chen. Whatever each human being’s personal choice is, it should be respected.

It doesn’t make sense to me to have 99% of the information wrong to eliminate “confusion” that wasn’t confusing anybody pre-IMDb. What they are actually doing is manufacturing linguistic mayhem in a sweeping intercontinental way, as so many of us have come to rely on IMDb, even if we often discover errors there. I doubt I’m the only film person who’s knocked for a loop every time they go to an IMDb page and are confronted with these topsy-turvy names.

This is something that is of particular concern to me lately as I’m trying to make SpeedCine a good reference and there are now untold mashups of Asian director names in it. That bothers me, and it will take me a long time to get it straightened out, if indeed I ever can. This bizarre decision they’ve made has seeped like sewage into Netflix and all sorts of online references, where it flows into our DB.

I do admit that when I was working on “Crouching Tiger,” a journalist requested an interview with Mr. Ang. He was attempting to be polite and got it wrong. I set him straight: Ang is in fact Ang Lee’s first name. I don’t think that situations like this will be improved by IMDb’s approach. In fact, I think exactly the opposite: people who are interested in Asian cultures often know about the naming syntax, so they will instinctively turn an IMDb name around. So if they see Yimou Zhang in big type at the top of the page, they will make the logical assumption that his last name is YIMOU. 

The only way you can find Asian names correctly using IMDb is if you happen to know the way it should be and ignore what’s there.

But if you don’t feel confident enough to do that…look it up in Wikipedia.

There have been a lot of changes made at SpeedCine recently.  Most of the iTunes titles are already in and they should all be in by tomorrow.  We now have 16,000 films in our database and the Search Engine has undergone a lot of improvement.  There is now a Directors’ Search function in the box that was formerly for movie titles only.   Also, when you search for a favorite director, not only do you find out what he or she has available online, you also find out whether there are any free titles from that director (try it out with Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman and Roger Corman).    We will keep adding features and films in the months to come. We are actively seeking to form relationships with more downloading and streaming websites.   If anybody reading this has relationships with the operators of downloading and streaming websites, please tell them about SpeedCine and encourage them to get in touch with me at  business@speedcine.com.  

The first thing you learn when you go on Twitter is that nearly everyone onthere is a Social Media Marketing Expert. There are literally millions of them. I realize that being a Social Media Marketing Maven on Twitter is commensurate to writing that you savor long walks on the beach in your Match.com profile, but it got me thinking: if each one of these geniuses could generate a thousand dollars out of their social media skills, we are talking billions of dollars. And if there were ten thousand of them that were really savvy… that is trillions of dollars, my friends. That’s starting to look like some serious money. And it’s all from tweets.

My friends told me I would be insane to launch a business without taking advantage of this action. All I had to do was join Facebook and Twitter, learn about Digg and reddit and Delicious and StumbleUpon and I could sit back and people would link to my site in droves.

I probably spent over a thousand hours learning how to get the fullest use out of these things, and that doesn’t count the endless posting and tweeting. And these things were like heroin; they started to take over my life. I couldn’t look at a sunset without wanting to take a picture on my iPhone and post it to my FaceBook account. I would have serious anxiety about how many utter strangers I would allow to join my real friends on Facebook.

But I also used pre-social media skills, like writing a blog and sending out emails and press releases.

When I opened up SpeedCine a few weeks ago, I was very surprised when I looked at my analytics. There was no arguing with the facts. The links from my conventional marketing efforts were in the thousands; the links from Twitter were in the tens. For example, I wrote a blog post on John Hughes and posted a link on Twitter, and didn’t get a single retweet. But some people who got my email put a link to my post up on their blogs, which were seen by other bloggers until I got almost 4000 unique visitors in a single day.

Which leads me to Joseph M. Juran and his Pareto Principle, (aka the 80-20 rule) which he named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.

As Anders Toxboe  wrote:

The 80-20 rule claims that for any large system 80 percent of the effects are generated by 20 percent of the variables in that system. The rule has proven true in all large systems including those in user interface design as well as economics, management, quality control, and engineering, among others.

Examples of the 80-20 rule include:

• 80 percent of a product’s usage involves 20 percent of its features.
• 80 percent of a town’s traffic is on 20 percent of its roads
• 80 percent of a company’s revenue comes from 20 percent of its products
• 80 percent of innovation comes from 20 percent of the people
• 80 percent of progress comes from 20 percent of the effort
• 80 percent of errors are caused by 20 percent of the components

I realized that I had just spent 90% of my time on something that got me 2% of my results.

Having previously run two PR companies, I learned how to think strategically and mobilize my staff in the most efficient way. I understood that making the best use of time was one of the most important things we could do. Not that it often worked out that way-- my staff was obliged by clients to burn though weeks on guest lists for parties, utterly hopeless awards campaigns, and chowder-headed stunts—but we strived for that goal.  And we made sure we got that 20% of stuff done that was going to have 80% of the impact.

So if you send out tweets to people who have 10,000 followers and some of them send them out to their followers,what is that all about, really?  

Let’s talk about one of the most widely-hyped uses of Social Media lately—the Obama campaign.  As a friend, an avid user of social of media, wrote me:

Of the online tools used to motivate that captive and motivated audience, social media was a very small, almost insignificant piece. By the Obama camp's own admission, email and the good ol' database were the most crucial tools used here, for organizing and for raising gajillions of dollars. And guess what they raised all those gajillions of dollars for? For TV ads. Radio ads. PR. Because that's where the big numbers are.

Why has usage of Social Media shot up so much in the last year?  Because the regular media has started to cover it more. 

Ashton Kutcher is one of the best-known people who use Twitter.  But obviously he got his success offline and before he started doing it.  In fact, he got leveraged more offline press because he was one of the first celebrities to get into Twitter in a big way.   Likewise for all the other actors, politicians, athletes, journalists, and porn stars you can follow there.  There is value and fun in the way they interact with their fans though this new medium.  But will you be able to promote your business there?  I’m sure you can.  But the Pareto Principle will get you.  You will waste time, a very precious commodity.

The only thing I know about marketing is that it’s about believing in what you are selling and trying to pass that enthusiasm on to others.  And it takes time to make an appeal like that—much more than 140 characters.   After you make your spiel, people will either buy what you’re selling  or they won’t. What social network marketing has to do with this I have no idea.  There is something missing in all those  mini-thoughts twirling around like maple tree seeds—and it is called authority.  Publicists know that the value of even getting a few words in a magazine or an important blog is that there are lots of people trying to get a spot in that same space.  It has been curated so that it has implicit value. Does that value balance on the scale with hundreds of mentions from  people who have ten seconds of time on their hands?   

To those who say that Social Media Marketing offers opportunities for people who have no access to traditional marketing methods, Papa Pareto says--get a book on publicity.  Or read about it online.  And then do the work.  Find the people you want to reach and get their contact information.  Write your press release.  It’s not brain surgery.  You will invest 20% of your time and you will get 80% of the results.  Which will leave you plenty of time to diddle around with Social Media. 

By the way, I would really appreciate it if you would push the Digg Button below to help me promote this splendid post.  You will have to take some time to register, but if you do I think I will get something or other out of it, and it might alleviate my curiosity about what that might be.

Also, if you are one of my 476 Facebook friends please check out my post on my Facebook Home Page, where I plug this post.  And on top of this very page is a useful link to help you follow me on Twitter.

Addendum:  Shortly after I posted this screed, SpeedCine got its best plug ever, on Lifehacker.   That mention scattered birdseed all over my TweetDeck.  Social Media, I love ya!

When the media cluster-f*ck was going on around Michael Jackson’s death, I thought, “well I know something interesting about Michael Jackson that few other people know.” But I had no interest in blogging about him then. It turned my stomach the way everyone was cashing in on his death. But I guess it will never end so I’ve decided to write this, because I think it’s different from the usual peregrinations about the singer/dancer/cherub/plastic surgery addict/accused child molester/pill-popping eccentric.

I want to write about Michael Jackson the businessman.

People don’t usually talk much about Michael Jackson’s business side, probably because it doesn’t gibe with anything else we think we know about him. It’s easier to push it aside. It’s like: “That fragile sweet-voiced guy? Oh, and by the way, he was a cutthroat businessman who bought the Beatles catalog out from under his Ebony-and-Ivory chum Paul McCartney.” It didn’t seem to me that McCartney was living in perfect harmony after Jackson took his life’s work away from him. It always sounded kind of ruthless to me, albeit no different from what anybody else did in Hollywood, Wall Street, or Washington, D.C.  But it jarred my mind somehow that a guy who floated around on fairy dust could get all medieval and Madoff on you if he was in the mood. 

I never met him, but I had a connection to Jackson’s manager, Freddy DeMann, through a woman I knew who was also a client, a singer named Madonna. When I met her, as production publicist on Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan” in 1984, she told me that Freddy’s approach was to skew their marketing towards the very young. DeMann’s idea couldn’t be simpler. Build a fan base of young people and they will buy a ton of records. Sales brings money and credibility which makes the record company support you. Before long your audience will get older, and if you continue to hold that young audience, you will always be a superstar.

Sound familiar?

Madonna was too sexual to pretend to be a Michael Jackson naïf and and too insouciant to want to. Her approach was to avoid wearing clothes that a kid couldn’t afford to buy; and she didn’t want to create an image that would get young girls thrown out of the house if they tried to imitate it. Of course she enjoyed wearing and looked great in the teddies, plastic bracelets and the “Boy Toy” belt, but she wanted to create an image that teenage girls could easily recreate. If memory serves, Cyndi Lauper—who was huge at the time—had green hair, maybe even half her head shaved. Madonna wasn’t going that route. If you find this overly calculating, let me make it clear that Madonna had a sincere identification with her fans that was honest and heartfelt. It wasn’t very long before that she was one of them—and she remembered well.

The essential difference between Madonna and Michael Jackson is that Madonna outgrew and abandoned that strategy very quickly. She held onto her audience by running ahead, not by retreating to the schoolyard. We had to keep up with all her new personae and reinventions. But Michael Jackson glued himself to the DeMann strategy until the day he died, even though he fired DeMann soon after he began repping Madonna.

Going for a youthful demo was business for Michael Jackson. It was a means to become the biggest star in the world and stay on top forever. But of course it wasn’t all business, or it could never have worked. It came from a love for his fans that they could see was genuine. They were dazzled by his talents, but they were fans forever because of his love.

There was only one slight hitch with the plan: it was impossible. As he grew older, Jackson’s youth strategy got mixed in with all the other sicknesses he had and became obsessive and twisted. A child-like 25-year-old’s identification with the innocence of children is sweet; a 40-plus guy who likes to take boys into his bed is downright pervy, no matter what Reverend Al says.

It was no big deal that he was 50. Lots of performers work through their 70s and beyond. But he was afraid to change course. He didn’t know any other way to hang onto his King of Pop crown except for appealing to little kids. Neverland was basically Disneyland, taking a page from the book of America’s most beloved purveyor of children’s entertainment. If you are an old PR Man like me, it’s hard to think that helping sick kids isn’t to a certain extent Public Relations. Call me cynical, but that is the way this stuff is played, and everybody in PR knows this.   In my mind, celebrities who do charity and political work are guilty until proven innocent of some kind of self-promotion or self-interest.   Say what you will, Jackson had hundreds of millions to gain by retaining his youthful demo. 

From this perspective, his perpetual facial alterations could have other explanations beyond “My Dad told me I was ugly.”   This was the “Rosebud” explanation that Jackson put out in every interview, and it’s part of the accepted canon of belief about him.  Of course, he also told journalist Martin Bashir in “Living with Michael Jackson” that he hadn’t had any surgery except for maybe a little work on his nose, and people didn’t really buy that. People listened to the things he said, accepting much of it without question, and ignoring anything that exceeded their personal tolerance for his self-delusion and lunacy.  Joe Jackson gave me the willies with just one appearance on Larry King—I’m sure it was very traumatic to have him as a dad.  But his brothers didn’t screw with their faces; nothing only has one reason.  The truth is, Jackson didn’t want to be a teen idol like Fabian and have his fan base become a bunch of Golden Oldies-loving old ladies—shudder!—his own age. He didn’t even want to be a classy Tony Bennett-style legend, aging with grace.  He had to be the #1 star in the world, a superstar’s superstar.  And as the only road he knew how to travel was the kiddie’s lane, he wouldn’t allow himself the right to age.  It wasn’t about looking like Diana Ross so much as it was trying to stay 30 into his 60s and 70s and beyond.  Not allowing yourself the right to age is a very cruel and desperate thing to do to yourself, but as he told Bashir, he was hardly the only one in America who did plastic surgery. 

Let me state as forcefully as I can that I’m sure Michael Jackson sincerely  loved children and wanted to help them.   But doing that was also business, and Jackson had learned how to be a very shrewd, take-no-prisoners businessman.  Perhaps he understood what many frightened and weak-willed boys have learned: that money begets power, and power keeps the Boogey Man away.  Of course in his case, the Boogey Man became a part of his posse.

Maybe he didn’t die because he was Peter Pan or the King of Pop.   Maybe he died because he was King Midas.

Soon after I moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1986, the Paramount publicity department offered me a meeting with John Hughes on a film he was about to make called “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” I asked if I could see a script (I liked to be prepared for the “What do you think of the script?” query), but the guy from Paramount said that Hughes didn’t give out his scripts. I thought that was cool, very Woody Allen, for Hughes to keep the suits’ hands off of his screenplays. Of course, I couldn’t have cared less what the movie was about. I loved Hughes’ movies.

I got to the Paramount lot early, because everything about getting around in LA still flummoxed me, especially studio lots. I can get lost practically anywhere, but give me a little map filled with trailers that might not be there by the time I get to them, and I’m hopeless.

But Hughes didn’t have a trailer--he had a building. Hughes Entertainment was exactly where they said it would be on the map. I went up the stairs and took a seat in the waiting room. The place was nice, but it wasn’t trying to knock me off my feet with its massive import to the universe, like other offices I’d visited. It was low-key and hip. There was a bookcase designed to slant in this off-kilter way against the wall. It was cool looking, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t buy if I wanted to.

The characters in John Hughes movies like “The Breakfast Club” weren’t my age, they were a bit younger, but I related to them a lot, particularly Ally Sheedy’s character in “The Breakfast Club.” She was a weirdo, but I was an outsider in high school too—the only Jew and long-haired bell-bottom-wearing hippie. American high school life was pretty timeless, and I realized that these tales of people slightly younger than myself were written by someone slightly older. I had a certain idea in my head about what Hughes might be like. I wanted to be right.

I was ushered into a room where I was introduced to Hughes and his producer. Hughes set me at ease right away and asked me about the movie I had just finished working on--Robert Redford’s “The Milagro Beanfield War.” He had a lot of questions about Redford and also took an interest in the white paratrooper pants I was wearing. I had bought them at an Army-Navy store before I went to Belize for “The Mosquito Coast.” This was appropriate garb for the jungle heat, but back in the States they made me look like a fey guerilla wannabe, striding the mean streets of Westwood in my hiking books and Banana Republic safari shirt. Of course I thought I cut a raffish figure. Hughes loved my look.

Me on the set of “The Mosquito Coast”

I could see that this wasn’t going to be one of those fussy job interview-type meetings; we were just going to shoot the bull until he could figure out if I was going to be someone he’d like hanging around. After a while I forgot that I was interviewing for a job I really wanted and started having fun. The only thing that was disconcerting is that his producer took an immediate dislike to me. I knew that wasn’t a good sign, as he’d be the guy who would really decide to hire me or not. But Hughes was the boss, so maybe I still had a decent shot at the gig.

After a while, I asked him what his movie was about. I knew next to nothing except the title and that John Candy and Steve Martin were going to be in it.

Hughes started telling me the story of “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” But he did much more than just describe the plot—he performed it for me. It was funny and moving, just the way the movie would be. At the time I was thinking that he really must have connected with me to tell this story that was a Woody Allen-style secret. Looking back I realize he was doing something a similar to a pitch. But pitches are for high-powered studio execs, not for lowly Unit Publicists. The Unit Publicist usually ends up on the credits somewhere between Craft Service and the guy who drives the Honey Wagon (toilet truck). But talking through stories was a normal aspect of LA life, and for some reason, he felt like telling his story to me. It was wonderful, but as he went on, I kept thinking. “There is no possible way he is going to take this all the way to the end….” But he did. He performed the whole damned movie just for me.

When the show was over, so was the interview. Hughes said goodbye to me warmly and the producer looked at me like I had just killed his dog. Perhaps he had heard the story of “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” a few times before and didn’t appreciate a guy who could elicit another retelling. Still, I left feeling it had been a good meeting and I felt pretty confident I was going to get the job. I was very disappointed when the producer called me the next day and said it wasn’t going to work out.

What film did I end up doing instead? A Molly Ringwald vehicle called “For Keeps.” It wasn’t the only time I would encounter important people from the Hughes universe. I rode from the set of “Jacob’s Ladder” with a pre-“Home Alone” Macaulay Culkin (who played Tim Robbins’ son), and years later I became Ally Sheedy’s publicist, beginning a friendship that continues to this day. A lot of representing Ally involved fielding “Brat Pack” memory requests, including a very nice tribute to “The Breakfast Club” in Premiere Magazine.

I would really have liked to have worked on “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” and gotten to know Hughes a little bit. What would he have been like? I’ll never know, although this person’s beautiful story tells a lot. But I had a really entertaining and memorable experience meeting with Hughes. I got my money’s worth, as much as I did at “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Home Alone,” and of course, “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” Looking back, I’d have to say it was the most successful job interview I had during my years in LA.

The responses have been pretty good for the early Beta version of SpeedCine. We have a ton of work ahead of us, like adding iTunes, features like "Director Search," and many more movies.  It’s been interesting to find out that a lot of the films are viewable in some parts of Europe,  which I didn’t think they would be.

But we've been getting a lot of useful feedback, and we'd love to hear from you.  Email us at feedback@speedcine.com

I am happy to announce that we have launched the Beta version of SpeedCine. This is a site that allows you to search for legal films that are available on the web: to watch free, rent, buy, or via Netflix's "Watch Instantly" feature. You can think of SpeedCine as a Google for helping you find legal movies--we don't link to the other kind.

We currently index over 13,000 films from Netflix, Amazon VOD, Hulu, and many other sites.  We're adding more movies every day, and will have iTunes in our system by the end of the month.

Most of you are aware that lots of recent Hollywood productions, classic movies, horror, and high-quality American Independent movies (many through Cinetic and b-side) are available for free online.  But I doubt that you know the diversity and quantity of what’s available.  So many good films are scattered over the web, on sites that you may not be aware of.

Some of the free films available today include: Sundance prize-winners like Tom DiCillo’s "Living in Oblivion" Todd Solondz’s "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and Chris Smith’s  “American Movie;” Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,”  "Monty Python’s  "And Now For Something Completely Different;" Joan Micklin Silver’s "Hester Street;" Nicholas Ray’s "Bigger Than Life" (in case you missed it at the Film Forum);  Sam Fuller’s "Fixed Bayonets;" Jacques Demy’s "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," Bruce Robinson’s "Withnail & I," Takeshi Kitano’s “Boiling Point;” Robert Downey Sr.’s long out-of-circulation cult film, "Greaser's Palace," Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks;” Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” and “Our Man in Havana;” Richard Lester’s “The Knack, and How to Get It;” Hal Hartley’s "Henry Fool," Ringo Lam’s “Full Contact” (one of my very favorite Hong Kong films), Alan Rudolph’s debut "Welcome to L.A.,"  Orson Welles' "Mr. Arkadin" and "The Stranger;" John Carpenter's "Dark Star" and "Starman;" Roman Polanski's "Cul-de-Sac" and "Repulsion;" Billy Wilder rarities like "Kiss Me, Stupid" and "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes;" under-apprecIated 70s films like John Huston’s “Fat City,” Bob Rafelson’s “The King of Marvin Gardens,” and Ivan Passer’s “Born to Win;” Stephen Frears' debut "Gumshoe;" Werner Herzog's "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" and "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," Robert Altman's "California Split," "Streamers," and "Buffalo Bill and the Indians," and ten films by Mika Kaurismäki. 

This is is truly a cineaste’s delight. And they’re all free, and available in a few seconds.  And there are hundreds more.  Just look in A-Z index on our Home Page and click “Free Movies.” 

Of course, they are free-with-ads.  If you’re willing to pay….thousands more movies are available for rental and sale, commercial-free.

It is often said that new business models are needed to get people to pay for movies online.  There are a lot of things that can be done from that perspective, that is—not focusing on stopping people from watching for free, but convincing them that it is in their interest to pay.  And that can be free-with-ads, a rental, a purchase, or a Netflix-style subscription.  There’s a lot of companies doing good work trying to make this happen.  We are offering a free service for movie fans that we hope will help websites that provide movies online, distributors, and filmmakers themselves (particularly DIY ones). 

Give SpeedCine a test drive.  Let us know what you think at feedback@speedcine.com or in the comments section below.