
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 30, 1995                   TAG: 9506300018
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A CALL FOR CASH IN CYBERSPACE

Jeffrey Stanley was at an impasse early in the production of "The King and Me," a film based on a screenplay he wrote.

The New York production needed money, but Stanley, who is from Vinton, is not wild about the idea of approaching strangers and just asking for it.

So he did what any self-respecting Internet junkie would do. He set up a home page on the Worldwide Web to tell people about the film and ask them for money from the safety of cyber-distance. A home page is a high-tech bulletin board that uses pictures and words to convey information.

"Join the Friends of 'The King and Me,''' the home page beckons, "an association of individuals who feel this film needs to be completed for the good of Western civilization."

Web browsers can join this "elite group of trailblazers" by contributing money to the film about the religious enlightenment of a crooked stained glass salesman from Franklin County stuck in New York City. A $100 donation gets one's name in the credits of the movie. And for $200 - enough to earn the title of "patron saint" - contributors also get monthly updates on the production, an autographed copy of the script and a VHS copy of the film when it's completed.

Stanley said the page is still "under construction." At the moment it features bios of himself, director Stephen Schmidt and the cast, still photographs from the movie and a soundbite of Stanley singing a song he wrote for the movie. Once the film is edited, Stanley says, there will be full-motion video clips from it on the home page.

Stanley expects to unveil the page today after sending anouncements to computer magazines such as Wired and Netguide and film industry magazines such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

He designed and set up the page after learning how through his job as a "sort-of office manager" for the Stern Business School at New York University. After reading about it in several magazines, Stanley learned HTML - hypertext markup language, the computer language that makes up home pages - "all by myself, though trial and error. Lots of trials and lots of errors."

Now he's got it down so well, his boss wants to make him "Web Czar" for the entire business school.

But Stanley's not interested. He sees computer stuff as a hobby and writing as his profession.

"I didn't come to New York City eight years ago to become a hacker," he said.

The URL (universal resource locator) is http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~jstanley/welcome.htm for "The King and Me" home page.

by CNB