Issue date: 5/3/07 Section: Play

Dan Macsai
The Daily Northwestern

Sitting in an upscale café just outside Chicago, office temp Lisa Eckersberg appears decidedly un-Hollywood. Her brownish-gray hair is swept back in a wild bun. Her dark green overcoat conceals a sweatshirt with a tattered sleeve. And her mild, raspy voice carries no hint of pretension. But in recent years, 47-year-old Eckersberg has become a makeshift media mogul. A self-proclaimed "film buff," she's made a fortune brokering movie deals, gambling on coming attractions and acquiring the most bankable actors in Tinseltown. As of last week, she was netting 10 figures. "I can say, 'I'm worth over a billion dollars,'" Eckersberg says. "It's kind of fun."

Unfortunately, it's also kind of fictional.

Eckersberg, who lives in Wilmette, Ill., is one of 1.4 million users who have traded on the Hollywood Stock Exchange (www.hsx.com), where players can register for free to predict which films, stars and studios will hit - or miss - at the box office. All gamers start with $2 million in fake money ($H). If they're lucky, they can double this base in a single weekend. If they're not - well, there's always a "reset" button.

With 25,000 hits a day, HSX is the Internet's leading virtual market and a burgeoning source for big-studio market research. Dedicated users, like Eckersberg, have spent more than five years researching the latest movie deals, tracking the hottest stars and scoring the biggest payoffs. Some trade against old friends. Others play to make new ones. But for its high-ranking users - or those who aspire to the status - HSX has become a lifestyle.

COMING ATTRACTION

When Max Keiser, a stockbroker, and Michael Burns, an investment banker, launched HSX in 1996, public movie predictions were a relatively new phenomenon. Though studios still employed analysts, compiled market research and polled focus groups, without the Internet everyday audiences had little voice. "Before HSX," Eckersberg explains, "I didn't even know other people cared (about movie performance)."

Continued...

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