• by Sheree R. Curry , May 26, 2006

TV fans love interacting with characters on their favorite shows; they enjoy deciding which couples should hook up or break up. Movie fans scream at the screen to warn a chick in a horror flick not to go upstairs. Hard-core fans often get together online and write their own scripts, and that’s the audience FanLib says producers and advertisers should chase.

“The media landscape is changing. Marketers have to go where the eyeballs go,” says FanLib CEO Chris Williams, who created the concept that allows clients, such as Showtime’s “The L Word,” to monitor fans who are writing a script, or “fanisode,” in exchange for a chance to win prizes. One of the show’s writers introduced weekly topics for the “L Word” contest, which runs through June and invites registered participants to vote. At press time, each visitor had viewed an average of 20 pages — good news for advertisers Lending Tree and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Launching in July is “ScreamWriters,” a horror film that will be written jointly with fans and distributed by a major studio, Williams says.