LOS ANGELES: Oscar award-winning movie director Steven Spielberg will co-produce a new television talent show to identify the country's next great film maker. The show, On The Lot, to be screened on Fox channel towards the year-end, will provide an opportunity for the winner to work with DreamWorks, the movie studio co-founded by Spielberg and sold recently to Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures, and produce a movie.
The format for the show will largely be that of American Idol, also a project of Fox, with viewers deciding winners each week. There will be 16 finalists, who will be taken to Hollywood, put into teams and given the task of making a short movie each week.
The project for each week will cover a different genre and the contestants will have access to professional writers and actors. Their movies will be screened before a studio audience and a panel of judges, including a movie critic and a movie executive. The decision on the winners and losers will be made by the audience vote during a second show the next night. Losing directors will be eliminated.
Television producer Mark Burnett is also part of the project. Burnett said Spielberg had brought him the idea and they had worked on it for several months.
The regulars on the weekly shows will be the judges. Spielberg and Burnett, who will be partners in the series, will not appear, but Spielberg would be an executive producer and he had already designed the show's movie-theater set.
Burnett said the show was offered to every network, but Fox had made a compelling attempt to bag it. The network's president Peter Liguori said he responded instantly to an appeal for the series made in Spielberg's office at DreamWorks.
Spielberg said all through his career he has done what he can to discover new talent and give them a start. "This opportunity ... allows all of us to reach out directly to open a much wider door."
