SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
Cracking the code
A group of techies plugs in the numbers — and the words — and finds  
box-office potential.
By Robin Abcarian, Times Staff Writer
January 24, 2006
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et- 
techies24jan24,0,4527618.story?coll=cl-home-more-channels

PARK CITY, Utah — When it comes to predicting a movie's success or  
failure, as William Goldman so memorably wrote, nobody knows  
anything. But that's not for lack of trying. Here at indie ground  
zero, Matthew Prince and his merry band of techies at Unspam  
Technologies Inc. are pretty sure they've come up with a formula to  
reliably predict success in two of the Sundance Film Festival's  
competition categories: drama and documentary.

Good news for "TV Junkie" and "Flannel Pajamas." Not so good for  
"Puccini for Beginners" and "small town gay bar."

"Our engineers were thinking that determining whether a movie is good  
or bad could be similar to determining whether e-mail is spam or  
not," said Unspam Chief Executive Prince, 31, who loves the festival  
and uses it as a recruiting tool. "We had the last 10 years of the  
festival's film guides, which are like inputs, and then a bunch of  
outputs, like how many people saw a film, did it win anything at  
Sundance, did it have commercial success. If you could figure out the  
pattern between the inputs and the outputs, then you could actually  
predict future winners."

Details at [11]  http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et- 
techies24jan24,0,4527618.story?coll=cl-home-more-channels