Affleck Hopes to Keep 'Greenlight' Burning

[Brian]

If a third season of "Project Greenlight" comes to pass, Chris Moore probably won't be a part of it.
The "American Pie" producer and partner in Live Planet, the company that launched the "Greenlight" contest for aspiring moviemakers, "decided that he didn't want to be the Simon Cowell" of the show, says Ben Affleck, Moore's Live Planet partner and another driving force behind "Project Greenlight."

HBO has passed on a third season of the show, which chronicles the winners of the contest as they work with Miramax to get their movie made, with all the attendant conflict. The sometimes quick-tempered Moore was the dominant character in the show's first two seasons, and without him, HBO didn't really want the series.


"HBO thought that without Chris involved that we wouldn't want to be a part of it," Affleck told Zap2it.com during a junket for his next film, "Paycheck." "That was totally not true. I called them and told them that."
He does understand why Moore would opt out of the series, however. "I'm sensitive to the fact that people come up to him and say unpleasant things," Affleck says. "He didn't get into the thing about being in front of the camera. He stuck to his guns."

There's a chance that Bravo might pick up the series; the cable channel recently ordered "Project Runway," a similar show for would-be fashion designers that Miramax is producing.

One possible stumbling block, Affleck says, is that "Greenlight" recently became unionized, which brings a higher production cost.

"Bravo would never really pick up a union show. So, we're trying to see if we can get some additional sponsorship money, to cover the nut of producing it or maybe figuring if we can schedule down," Affleck says. "We had a lot of camera crews around all the time. If we reduced that number, we're afraid that we won't get the great stuff. For a documentary, you sort of gotta be everywhere."