BACK FROM THE DEAD `WITCH' SCARING UP PROFITS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

How do you make a franchise out of an unrepeatable phenomenon?

That's the big question facing the folks responsible for ``Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,'' the sequel to the most profitable movie ever made.

Put together for a mere $30,000 and bought by the small independent outfit Artisan Entertainment for a cool $1 million, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's ``The Blair Witch Project'' - a shakily shot, faux documentary about three film students gone missing in a haunted forest - grossed an astounding $141 million at American box offices last year.

More than that, the movie was the pop-culture touchstone of 1999. Shot in a unique way (the directors basically sent three actors into the woods with cameras and instructions to improv a group nervous breakdown), promoted via a unique Internet Web site that became a mass sensation itself, and convincing many fans that it was a true story, ``Project'' left an indelible mark on the collective national consciousness.

Oh yeah, and around half the people who saw the movie thought it was a complete, overhyped crock.

Regardless, Artisan had that most desirable of properties, a scary movie that intrigued kids, on its hands. Naturally, it had to be exploited for all it was worth - and fast, before the backlash and the fickle tastes of the short-attention-span generation cooled interest.

But how to do that? The original brain trust, Myrick and Sanchez, were busy with their next film, a romantic comedy called ``Heart of Love,'' and their new television series ``Freakylinks.''

Perhaps more vexing was the issue of just what form a sequel could take. By late last year, Artisan had commissioned several scripts, all with a mock-doc angle similar to the first film, but there was still uncertainty. Then, one December day, a real documentarian came in to meet about a possible feature debut.

``I was pitching them another movie - one that I thought was going to be my first feature - and as I was talking and explaining my background, the executives started to get this idea,'' explains Joe Berlinger, who with partner Bruce Sinofsky has made three acclaimed documentaries about murder trials in small towns: ``Brother's Keeper,'' ``Paradise Lost'' and ``Revelations: Paradise Lost 2.'' ``On the surface, I'm this guy who's run around the woods pursuing real evil, talking to killers and making movies about really intense subjects. So I looked perfect to them for the 'Blair Witch' sequel.

``They sent me home with three scripts that they admittedly had problems with. When I read them, I thought it would be really difficult to directly continue the second movie from where the first movie left off. That's because 'The Blair Witch Project' was sold as a real documentary, then we saw the actors (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams) on the cover of Time and Newsweek and ... everywhere, frankly. So, to ask audiences to once again suspend their disbelief, I just thought, was not realistic. Also, it did not take advantage of a unique opportunity.''

That opportunity, in Berlinger's estimation, was to make a film that commented upon the Blair Witch phenomenon, and by extension what it said about media influence and mythmaking in the Information Age. In five weeks, working feverishly with television and movie writer Dick Beebe (``The House on Haunted Hill''), he hammered out a script about a young, mentally unstable resident of Burkittsville, Md., who capitalizes on the unwanted fame ``Project'' brought to the rural hamlet by conducting guided tours of the film's Black Hills landmarks for obsessed fans.

Jeff, the tour guide, and four customers lose track of time during one such campout, then retire to his lair - an abandoned warehouse filled with video equipment. There they try to figure out what happened during the missing hours while being plagued by alarming delusions. Violence ensues - and whether it's the Blair Witch messing with them or just group psychosis is left open to interpretation.

At the very least, the premise didn't involve a lot of ``found'' video footage.

``I think it addresses the Blair Witch fan, in that it maintains the mythology and that aspect of the first picture,'' notes Amorette Jones, Artisan's executive vice president of marketing. ``But Joe's film is obviously shot in 35 millimeter - and beautifully so - so it should also deliver to people who are not used to watching hand-held video.''

Whether or not this approach is really going to fly with the Blair Witch faithful remains to be seen. But if the sequel's young actors, most of whom claim to have been ``Project'' partisans, are at all a reliable measure, it's as good a strategy as any.

`` 'The Blair Witch Project' was an amazing movie and, like, a one-time deal, and I think Joe and Artisan went 100 percent in the right direction, which was to do everything absolutely opposite of it,'' says Kim Director, who plays the sequel's Goth girl, Kim (in one nod to the truth-or-fiction spirit of the original, ``Book of Shadows' '' five main characters bear the same first names as the actors who play them). ``What's fascinating about this is that it's a sequel to the effect 'The Blair Witch Project' had on the public, not the movie.''

``I thought the original movie was fascinating; I was part of the first audiences that went to see it, and everyone around me was just terrified,'' adds, um, Jeff-player Jeffrey Donovan. ``But I was more fascinated with people's response to the movie than I was in the movie itself. I couldn't believe that you paid $9, you had popcorn in your hand, and you actually thought that this was real.

``The aim of our movie is to raise questions about that,'' Donovan continues. ``I want you to be able to walk out of this movie asking, 'Is media controlling our perception?' or 'Are we perceiving what the media never intends?' Just starting that dialogue, I think, is the most important part of this movie.''

Like most Blair Witch fans, Donovan is young and ... oh, we'll call it idealistic. For Artisan, of course, the most important part of the sequel is its capacity to generate at least a respectable fraction of the original's profits. To this end, a merchandising effort that goes well beyond tied-together stick figures has been launched: novels, comics and assorted other publications, computer games, Halloween masks, T-shirts, baseball caps, and a plethora of ``Book of Shadows'' tie-in videos and television specials are all flooding the market.

And while it can't expect to excite the cybercommunity to the groundbreaking extent it did the first time around, Artisan has revamped the series' Web site and hosted a three-day, round-the-clock ``Blair Witch WebFest'' last week, which featured footage from the sequel, chats with the cast, performances of soundtrack songs, prop auctions and even practicing Wiccans' viewpoints on the whole darn thing.

``We realized that this was going to be a very different experience,'' Artisan's Amorette acknowledges. ``Last year, the Web really became a vital component in blurring the line between fact and fiction. This time, we realized that the Web could still be of terrific use to us, but in a very different way.''

All of this is natural enough; hot horror franchises such as ``Scream'' and ``Nightmare on Elm Street'' are traditionally hyped to the limits of their unnatural lives. But the Blair business not only has to overcome a peculiar roadblock to sequelization - a substantial number of fans who appreciated it for its counter-commercial, guerrilla filmmaking technique and, therefore, resent the very concept of franchising - it has to be sold past some unfortunate prerelease publicity.

Recently published production stories emphasize 11th-hour recutting and additional, late-summer pickup shooting. Berlinger claims that nothing out of the ordinary happened - at least for a movie that was conceived, written and filmed in the space of approximately 4 1/2 months, shorter than most pictures' script-development phase - and both he and Amorette insist that reports of creative interference from Artisan executives are greatly exaggerated.

``Because I am a noncommercial moviemaker, left to my own devices, I probably would not have made a commercially viable movie,'' Berlinger admits. ``Artisan was pushing me in more commercial directions, and I listened. But I took the spirit of their ideas and tried to find my way of expressing them. They didn't dictate, 'You have to do this shot now!' They said, 'We're feeling this; how can you solve that problem?' ''

``We respected Joe's vision from the beginning and continue to do so,'' Amorette adds.

There is also a deafening silence on the part of Myrick and Sanchez concerning the sequel. While Artisan officially attributes this to consuming involvement in their next film project, Berlinger concedes that his executive producers probably feel a great deal of ambivalence toward the new project.

``I think the fact that they're somewhat inaccessible is a statement,'' he reckons. ``If they hated it, I think they would take their names off of the film; if they loved it, I think they would be more vocal about it. But they're in a tough place. This is a movie that is very different from the first movie and is not made by them. They gave me tremendous respect while making it, but I think they're just keeping a healthy distance.''

Whatever the difficulties, disappointments and surprises that come with ``Book of Shadows' '' 4,000-screen, multiple-country release on Friday, at least one thing is certain: People are very curious, and it's hard to imagine that some kind of spectacular ticket sales will not result from that.

``Pressure?'' Artisan's Amorette says with a laugh. ``It's one of our wide-release movies, and there certainly is a lot of awareness on it. But y'know, it's not our only movie.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) The Un-Blair-able frightness of being

Re-creating the `Blair Witch' phenomenon won't be easy ... but they'll die trying

(2) Numerous items based on the ``Blair Witch'' movie are available, just in time for the ``Book of Shadows'' sequel and Halloween season.

(3) Erica Leerhsen, left, Stephen Barker Turner, Tristen Skyler and Jeff Donovan star in ``Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,'' the follow-up to last year's wildly successful ``The Blair Witch Project.''

John McCoy/Staff Photographer