It was a new twist on interactive entertainment. In the summer of 2000, the makers of deadend.com, a road movie about three teens in a suicide pact, asked visitors to their website to e-mail story ideas.
As the cast and crew traveled across Canada, filming the loosely scripted movie, director S. Wyeth Clarkson considered each suggestion.
Some were half-baked: "One of the actors befriends a stray cat. The cat's strong will to live inspires the actor to rethink his own objectives." Others were bizarre: "Piss off a building onto people below in the street. If I was gonna die, I'd piss on everybody."
But one e-mail grabbed Clarkson's attention: "I'm the owner of some of the largest adult sites in the world," wrote a man named Michel. "If you are crazy enough, and your audience wants it ... I can fly over my ultrateen.com girls anywhere in Canada."
Embracing the idea of following his film wherever it might take him, Clarkson called Michel, and soon after found himself filming scenes starring his three lead actors -- plus porn stars Lita Chase and Jake Ryder. Michel even paid for the privilege, giving Clarkson enough money to keep the production rolling.
"That's what is so great about opening things up to the global online community -- you don't know what will happen," Clarkson said about his adventures in porndom. "And the porn scenes in deadend.com are fun -- you forget about the suicide pact for a while."
The collision of a low-budget art film and a hard-core porn company is one of the many stranger-than-fiction elements that helped shape deadend.com. The film premieres Friday at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Clarkson conceived the project after hearing a harrowing true story: Three teens made a suicide pact, drove across Canada and then committed suicide. The initial plan to tell the story as a straight documentary didn't work, nor did his idea to create a fully fictionalized version.
"We came to the conclusion that we could never get their stories right, that we couldn't put the pieces together using the remnants of what they left behind or by speaking to members of their families," he said.
After auditioning hundreds of teens, Clarkson cast three non-actors: Nicole Raven, Adrian Rogers and Harold Amero, a street kid who has since disappeared.
In the film, all three play characters very much like themselves. Without a formal script, Clarkson, the actors and a small crew began driving west from Halifax, letting their digital video cameras run as the kids talked about life and death.
Clarkson describes deadend.com as "reality fiction" -- a hybrid of nonfiction and improvisation. "The shell is fiction, but the innards are real. Of course, it's not a snuff film -- none of the kids are dead -- but I insisted they bring their real-life experiences to the film," he said.
Deadend.com is a raw, sometimes monotonous and often inspired collage -- part confessional, part buddy flick and, with lots of downbeat boozing and drug use, part grunge poem.
The film's website is a companion to the movie. An online graphic novel offers a story parallel to that told in the film, and the site also offers resources for suicidal teens, diaries of the cast and crew, portions of the auditions and a how-to section on low-budget filmmaking.
There is also a page of real suicide notes. "Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache," reads one.
Before and during the film's production, the site received more than 500,000 visitors. One reason for the heavy traffic, Clarkson said, is deadend.com's focus on the hot-button issue of teen suicide.
"A movie is a one-way discussion," Clarkson said. "You can't always get the messages across the way you hope you will in a film.
"With a subject like teen suicide, I don't want to steer kids in the wrong direction. The Web is more effective at steering them to someone who can help them one-to-one."
