The internet is razing the battlements of old Hollywood, with projects such as the Jameson First Shot in the vanguard of the DIY storytelling revolution. Yolisa Mkele met rebels Adrien Brody and Kevin Spacey inside the city walls Since time immemorial, breaking into Hollywood from without has been about as doable as burgling Fort Knox armed only with a box of Viagra, a Batman voice and an ill-fitting catsuit.Conventional wisdom dictates that in order to make it big in Tinseltown, you must reside in its belly for a fairly long time, a bit like an overripe curry, pestering the beast from within until someone powerful eventually gives you a "big break".Not for long, if Kevin Spacey has anything to do with it. The times they are a-changing, he told me in LA last week, enthroned beneath the solar glare of a film crew's lights and the deadpan stare of his publicist."We are very good in the film and theatre industry at building walls and saying you can't get in unless you have the right agent, or are in LA or New York. But now if you have an internet connection and an idea, there is no barrier to entry."Currently in vogue for his portrayal of the nefarious Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Spacey is fielding my questions as part of the media palaver around the Jameson First Shot competition, which Spacey co-founded. Now in its fourth year, First Shot gives young directors a chance to work with a big-name actor - this year it's Adrien Brody - to create a short film.story_article_left1This year's winners were South Africa's Mark Middlewick for The Mascot (watch the short film), Canada's Stephan Tempier for Boredom (watch it below) and the US's Travis Calvert for The Library Book (watch it below). The idea behind the competition is to give unproven filmmakers a platform to showcase their talents to Hollywood's great and good. With enough luck the combined star power of TV's favourite villain and one of the youngest Oscar winners in history will be the first golden square on their yellow-brick boulevard to success.The walls that Spacey describes were visible before he entered the room. Hardly a breath is taken without the express permission of a horde of publicists, assistants and functionaries. All of these well-dressed and ostensibly pleasant people seemingly spend their days awaiting approval for some indeterminate action from someone who is doing the same thing. An earlier experience showed that this wall is not exclusive to actors.We were perched in the hallway of a swanky Los Angeles hotel waiting for either Spacey or Brody to appear, and caught a glimpse of Nicki Minaj in another suite, similarly ensconced within a legion of courtiers and thus inaccessible to anyone without the right social and professional passwords.Part of Brody's reason for doing the First Shot gig was to help fresh, unusual storytellers duck beneath this cat's yarn of hierarchy and red tape. In previous years Uma Thurman, Willem Defoe and Kevin Spacey have taken the lead role."I gravitate toward something odd and complex within stories," said Brody. "There is humour but also something about the frailty, flaws and the indifference of life. These are all stories and themes that I think should be more prevalent in feature films." For Spacey, this is where the internet, presumably riding a large black and green steed made of binary code, has come to save the day - by demonopolising storytelling, especially in television."About a decade ago all the major studios started to focus on comic-book characters and the big thrill-ride-on-a-Friday-night kind of movies. That pushed all the great filmmakers, actors, directors and writers into the incredibly fertile ground called television, which (thanks in part to the advent of streaming) was also going through some changes," said Spacey.The biggest such change was effected by Netflix, whose ability to give viewers entire seasons of compelling content in one go hit the market like a flood of industrial-strength heroin. Netflix had executives in mainstream television tearing their hair out as they struggled to keep up with the change in viewing habits. The dam had burst, and it wasn't long before any number of streaming services were crashing around the marketplace, upending received ideas of what and who should be on TV, and how it should be aired."There used to be a time when the executives in television thought all of the characters in a TV show have to be likable, good at their job, be good family people and inoffensive and then suddenly that changed. Had we followed all of the rules they wanted to impose, we would have never had The Sopranos - and we would have never had the last 15 years of remarkable anti-heroes that have emerged as audience favourites," said Spacey.story_article_right2Since then, every writer and his or her tech-savvy grandmother has loudly proclaimed the death of old-school TV. The internet, however, has done more than just turn us all into gluttonous series addicts. Increased access to broadband is radically democratising storytelling, and giving anyone with a data plan the chance to tell their tale to a potential audience of millions."We are constantly seeing people building audiences, whether it's through six-second Vines [Vine is a social media service that allows users to create and share short videos] or other social media. People are finding platforms to show their work and build audiences. You don't need to be in Hollywood knocking on doors and that's an exciting thing now."The world of technology is opening it up so that if you're ambitious enough and exciting enough, you can make a splash," said Spacey.A magnificently insane example of this is Who Killed Captain Alex, a low-budget Ugandan action movie by Isaac Nabwana, the country's version of big-budget action director Michael Bay. Produced for the rough equivalent of a return flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town, the film tells the nutty story of commandos tasked with thwarting a ruthless gang of drug dealers, dramatically named the Tiger Mafia, using heavy weaponry and dodgy martial arts.So far the movie's trailer (watch it here) has racked up more than two million YouTube hits and the full-length feature has been viewed more than 200 000 times. Nabwana is one of many in a mushrooming African film industry who are side-stepping budget and distribution issues using little more than old cameras, food colouring and internet cafés. Similarly, in the past four years the 12 winners of Jameson First Shot have racked up close to 20 million views between them. What makes this remarkable is the range of stories that are being told. This year's winning tales veered from an ostensibly funny but ultimately melancholy story about rejection to existential musings on growing up to a feel-good flick about a secret millionaire.Brody is thrilled by the project. "I love the experimental aspect of this," he said. "I really admire the objective here, because it is purely supportive of their [the directors'] artistic endeavour. If I can be a small part of young people finding their voice then that is a blessing for me as well."In South Africa, we often hear the complaint that not enough of us are telling our own stories and that we seldom get enough funding to bring our ideas to fruition. These are valid complaints. One only needs to pop into your local Ster-Kinekor to see that a diversity of voices in commercial film is not a top priority. Even platforms that seemingly air fresh local content, such as DStv's Mzansi Magic, are generally targeting the lowest common denominator, much as SABC 1 does.Movie and television executives must view every decision through the prism of recouping an investment and making a profit. As such they generally take as many risks as a health-and-safety inspector in a room full of knives. They fund the tried, tested and lucrative.story_article_left3But untested forms and ideas are on the march, undeterred by high data costs. It's a maxim of the internet that "if you can think of it, there is probably a pornographic version of it". The lesson of this is that almost anything can pull eyeballs. Shooting and publishing a film with global reach is now not much harder than doing six pull-ups - and seemingly all that it takes to build a steady audience is a consistent flow of content.As any number of YouTube stars, bloggers and other internet-preneurs can attest, all one needs is a reasonably sized pool of attentive spectators for the advertising money to start flowing like fine whiskey at an ANC party.Like a man in the throes of a mid-life crisis, film and television's traditional iterations are in a pitched battle to remain relevant. They're unlikely to enter retirement without one or two grandiose displays of importance.But they are increasingly surrounded by a mass of digital dissidents that have wrapped a chain around the ankles of the edifice of mainstream film and TV - and they will not relent until it crumbles to the ground.Mkele went to Los Angeles as a guest of Jameson Irish Whiskey...