Mark Wahlberg looks a little haggard, but then after 2 days of doing interviews is enough to make anyone look a tad weary. "It's not too bad if you're promoting a film you're genuinely proud of", the actor says with a kind of faint energy. The film he's referring to is The Perfect Storm, in which he plays a fisherman, Bobby, torn between his love for the ocean and his bartender girlfriend. Based on the best selling book, the film chronicles Bobby's most challenging fishing trip, under the captaincy of Billy Tyne (George Clooney) "I've seen the movie twice already", the acclaimed Boogie Nights star announces with renewed boyish enthusiasm. "I can hardly wait to see it again; I think Wolfgang [Petersen] did the people in this town justice and it's a tribute to them", the native Bostonian says. The town he's referring to is Gloucester, a small fishing town about 100 miles out of Boston. We are chatting in a press tent, beautifully positioned against the calm backdrop of a ship-laden ocean. This was also the setting of the book and film The Perfect Storm. To prepare for his participation in the movie, Wahlberg insisted on staying in one of the local pubs, the Crows Nest, where his real-life character spent much of his time. "It was only $20 a night so I saved the studio a fortune in accommodation costs."

Shooting Perfect Storm was not all fun and games. It was a physically demanding shoot, utilising the realistic bombardment of water during crucial scenes, both in and out of the ship. Asked how tough it was balancing between performance and reacting to a physically tough environment, Wahlberg recalls that "developing the character and coming here and spending a lot of time with my character's family as well as a lot of other fishermen, helped a lot. As far as being reactive, that was made easy because Wolfgang did such a good job in truly recreating the elements of the storm, you didn't have to pretend. I was nervous it was going to be a blue screen where I had to pretend that I'm moving. But he brought it all to life." That of course made it a lot more dangerous and painful for Wahlberg especially, "because I ended up getting most of the beating. But it would have shown had we not done it that way", Wahlberg concedes. The actor had to become physically fit to do the film, which wasn't easy, 'because I was in the worst physical shape of my life. I was smoking 2-3 packets of cigarettes a day, plus I had to lose weight, so I wasn't eating or anything." It was no surprise that he "just had to get through the day half the time."

What was equally tough, Wahlberg adds laughingly, was doing "all that romantic stuff opposite Diane Lane. Gees, working with such an unattractive girl. Courtney Love wasn't available?" More laughter resounds. Wahlberg has had his share of onscreen sizzling moments, and is now being touted as a new sex symbol, a label he doesn't seem to unhappy with. "It's really funny if people see me as that, why not? I just have to stay in the house a lot and get a good photographer - someone who airbrushes the pictures." In Perfect Storm, he shows off a romantic side, so naturally that begs he question: Is he a romantic off screen? "Oh yes, definitely,' he responds unequivocally. "I like to take my girl out to dinner, have a couple of drinks. I just don't attack her when I first see her." Wahlberg adds that he "has this idea in my head of getting married, having children and spending he rest of my life in a good old fashioned relationship." not an easy ideal to realise in the industry in which he has found himself. "I think it's POSIBLE. People have been able to do it."

Wahlberg has been able to successfully make the transition from rap musician to movie actor, in a short period of time. It seems that the days of Marky Mark are behind him. "My music is definitely on hold for the moment" especially since just having played a heavy metal guitarist in Warner Bros' Metal God, due out next year. "I lived and breathed heavy metal for 6 months, cramming my house full of the stuff, replacing my rap CDs with the heavy metal music, and I had EVERYTHING, man. It was torture." It is no wonder that following the end of shooting Metal God, he threw a "get-rid-of-my-heavy-metal party and piled all the CDs in dozens of green trash bags. I think I'll also have to get rid of the house, which still reeks of all that", he adds laughingly. Though it might have been physically tougher to shoot Perfect Storm, Wahlberg admits that Metal God "was harder in other ways because I had greater responsibility." At least he got to work opposite Jennifer Anniston. "Yep, it's a tough job but someone's gotta do it." Mark Wahlberg continues to find success, and no longer needs to rely on his rap music. His next acting gig is part of the ensemble cast of Steven Soderbergh's Oceans 11, again pitting him opposite George Clooney, who jokingly commented that Wahlberg may be his ticket to retirement. "That might be true, though on Oceans 11, of course, I wasn't asked to be in it; Clooney TOLD me I was in it." The next Hope and Crosby perhaps? "Only cuter", Wahlberg adds with undue modesty.

George Clooney is a rugged 39, and looks as expressive as the characters he plays. Fresh from a photo shoot, he sports a beard that has been somewhat bleached for a photo shoot "and also effected by the sun, which doesn't thrill me." On screen he epitomises the staunch individual, somewhat aside from society's conventions, but in reality, he is affable, charming and exchanges the odd loving insult with co-star and now friend, Mark Wahlberg, from across the room. "Show everyone your 13" penis", he yells, (a funny reference to Wahlberg's Boogie Nights). Laughter is George's philosophy of life. "What else is there", he asks. If one looks at Clooney's recent characters, from ER's Dr Ross, to his soldier-of-fortune in Three Kings, and now to the tough sword fisherman of The Perfect Storm, the pattern seems unmistakeable: These are characters all staunchly individualistic, looking at bucking some kind of ordained set of rules. Coincidence? Maybe so, but Clooney relishes these types of roles, because they "represent great storytelling", Clooney says. We're in the small fishing town of Gloucester, about a hundred miles out of Boston, the setting for Clooney's Perfect Storm, a true-life saga about a group of fishermen combating the elements. "When I was growing up, the guys that you loved were like Humphrey Bogart, where the characters that they played stood up against that kind of convention. For me, it's very old, traditional storytelling and you see it most of the time when you see characters, but it's fun to do." Clooney adds that he doesn't think people necessarily "think that of me, but just think I'm doing my job. It's a nice place to be."

That 'nice place' of course was initiated from the stardom generated as antiauthoritarian Doug Ross, whom he played in the hit series ER for five seasons. Asked what he learnt from that experience, Clooney admits that it was far from easy. "It's hard to do an hour's show for five years and sort of reinvent yourself a lot. So I think people should do a series for 3, because then you can still keep on doing new things. By the fourth year, I was so BAD, I would do things just not to do the same thing; I'd do things that were completely wrong for the character in order to avoid repeating myself. Not being frivolous, it was to keep me awake." He left ER retaining the friendships he forged, and so it more than a pleasant surprise when Clooney turned up in Julianna Marguiles' farewell episode of the series. Clooney managed to take part in TV's best-kept secret, he recalls laughingly. "Not even Julianna knew, because we figured she wouldn't be able to keep quiet about it. She has a lot of agents and people around her, so we figured: She'll tell somebody, and agents can't keep their mouths shut." So giving her a week's notice, and agreeing to be paid scale rates (around $400), Clooney and Marguiles were finally reunited "It was great, because by paying me scale, nobody could complain that we weren't publicising it, they'd lock the footage away and just tack it on at the end. If they'd publicised it, everyone would have been pissed off, because I was there for that brief moment. It was fun to do, and I love working with her."

Clooney's big-screen career took longer to truly take off. Critics and audiences were dismissive of his Batman and Robin, and the romantic comedy One Fine Day, that he did with Michelle Pfeiffer. Then critics took him more seriously as the laconic crim in Out of Sight, and heaped further praise on him in last year's Three Kings. That praise is likely to continue for his role as the individualistic fisherman desperate for one large catch in The Perfect Storm. Based on the best-selling non-fiction book, it was the latter that Clooney first read prior to its publication. "I knew I wanted to do it even before Warner Bros had the movie and thought the script was great. I wanted to do it for a long time." The trouble was, Mel Gibson became attached to it: "so I said that I'd play Bobby" [the character now played by Mark Wahlberg]. Gibson dropped out and Clooney landed the role of sea captain Billy Tyne. "I would have played Diane Lane's role if I had to, just to do the movie", he says laughingly. Shooting Perfect Storm was hard work, and for Clooney and the rest of the cast, there are times when they had to react to a very harsh physical environment. "It's a lot easier doing it the way we did it, as against doing it against a blue screen. When you're getting pummelled with water, it's pretty easy just to react. Some of the more emotional stuff at the end makes it very difficult, as every five seconds you're getting hit with a wave in between a straight scene, so THAT was tougher to do." Clooney adds, "The hardest part was not to react BEFORE the water hits you, because it's a dump tank and you know that when that water hits you, it will knock you around. So we had to try not to react before the water got us, and that was the challenge."

Clooney wanted to ensure that this would not be another Twister, a special effects film with little else going on. When one sees the film, there's seamlessness in the way effects and narrative come together, and Clooney is happy the way the movie turned out. "In the first 45 minutes there are simply no effects and no action at all; there IS no formula to this. It isn't the old-time Hollywood. We do take a long time to set up the story, to the point where you start going: Let's go already. Then just before people would start to get a little ticked off, we'd really start the story going. It just means you have to have the patience to watch a movie again, which is what we used to do: Care about the characters then put them in jeopardy, which is old-fashioned storytelling." The actor feels that "we've gotten to this MTV generation where you want everything to happen immediately." Clooney went from shooting the antithesis of studio formulae, the Depression-set comedy O Brother Where Art Thou, from the Coen Brothers to the more mainstream Perfect Storm. It was an easy leap to make, and both as rewarding, the actor feels. "They were both well-written scripts and both highly talented directors, so all you have to do is show up and say: Now what do you want me to do? With the Coens, you sort have an idea immediately of what you want to do, because their characters are so well written. These are both writer and director-driven; you don't have to think much, which is good for me [it keeps me out of trouble]."

While most actors reach their peak in Hollywood these days while in their twenties, Clooney is something of an oxymoron in youth-obsessed Hollywood: A major player at 39. He says that he's grateful that he wasn't allowed the opportunity to be a star at 20. Maturity in this business has its rewards. "It's honestly better to have gone through ups and downs before you hit a place of success that could throw you a little. It's always best to have had quite a few failures along the way, so that you understand what the event is." That event, Clooney, claims, "is very little to do with you usually. The truth is, I'm the same actor who was in Batman and Robin, and the same actor who was in all those old bad TV series. That means I wasn't as bad as people would think, in some of them and I wasn't as good as people would say I was in other jobs. You're somewhere in the middle and being older you're more in a position to identify that, and not think, when things are going well, 'Oh, I'm so brilliant', which can happen, especially when you're young, because you don't have anything to measure it against."

These days, Clooney enjoys the status of movie star measured against his maturity as an actor. Clooney shies away from the star tag, admitting, "Stardom is a dangerous place to be." He has a clear aim as age finally catches up with him. "Ultimately, if you're smart, your goal is to be Paul Newman. That's what every guy should try to be. He's had a long lasting career, and started it the right way. That was, he was a great looking guy in The Silver Chalice when he wasn't much of an actor, he became an incredible actor by the time he did stuff like Hud and The Hustler, then bit by bit he developed into this incredible character actor, who's still sort of a leading man, but a character actor. So what you want to do, is just show up and work, and if you can manage to do that for HALF as long as Paul Newman, then you win and try to survive as long as you can." Next up, Clooney will reteam with his Out of Sight director, Steven Soderbergh, to shoot the anticipated ensemble comedy, Ocean's 11, again featuring Mark Wahlberg. "Yeah, we're the new dynamic duo."

The ship wasn't the only thing to get tossed during the filming of The Perfect Storm, the story of fishermen who face a life-threatening storm, coming to movie theaters June 30.

Dozens of crew members and actors succumbed to severe seasickness during the three weeks of shooting on a fishing vessel off the coast of Gloucester, Mass.

"The crew was constantly seasick. Half of them were kind of paralyzed," director Wolfgang Petersen says. "It was awful."

During one scene, stars Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney were supposed to be at each other's throats. But something else came up Wahlberg's throat.

"Mark was totally seasick, and after each take, he ran out to the landing and was throwing up," Petersen says. "We had to do the scene over about 30 times, but Mark didn't give up."

Clooney may have wished Wahlberg hadn't been so determined.

"Once, he got sick in the middle of a take, and Mark was throwing up at George's feet," Petersen says. "You should have seen the look on George's face. He just jumped back and looked at him and said, 'Get the hell out of here,' and Mark stumbled out. We all felt so sorry for Mark."

The person who had it the roughest, Petersen says, was the film shoot's medic.

"He had to handle all these sick people, and you know what happens when you see people all around you getting sick. "

The mass queasiness underscored Petersen's decision to create much of the watery turbulence, including a gigantic wave, with computer-generated (CG) special effects rather than the real thing.

"I think it was the right decision to do as much as we possibly could with the help of CG," he says.

Time for a history lesson, kids: before his acclaimed performances in "Boogie Nights," "Three Kings," and "The Perfect Storm," actor Mark Wahlberg was hitmaker Marky Mark.

Aided by his Funky Bunch (and the high visibility that comes with modeling underwear for Calvin Klein), Marky Mark scored with the chart-topper "Good Vibrations" and released two albums in the early '90s.

Wahlberg's critically acclaimed acting resume has almost erased his pop-rap past from cultural memory, but Wahlberg recently told MTV News that there has been talk about resurrecting his music career, revealing that he recently met with Interscope Records, but that he doesn't want to jump back into the music scene just yet.

"I don't want to do a record right now and try to push something because the record company has shown interest," Wahlberg told MTV News. "They didn't show interest five years ago, and they're showing interest now." [RealAudio]

Given the pop music roller coaster that Mark and his brother Donnie (a member of New Kids On The Block) rode in years past, Wahlberg urges today's current crop of pop stars to be grateful for their success and warns that it's ultimately up to record companies whether or not they'll be hot tomorrow, as labels tend to make idle promises and comparisons to great artists with little sincerity.
-- An MTV News staff report

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Talks that would have placed Mark Wahlberg in Paramount's ``Criminal Conversation'' have collapsed.

Execs at both Paramount and studio-based producer C/W Prods., which is headed by Tom Cruise, say they have rescinded their offer to Wahlberg. Iain Softley, however, remains attached to direct.

Having drawn acclaim for starring in ``Boogie Nights,'' Wahlberg has since toplined 1999's ``Three Kings,'' with George Clooney and reteamed with him in the Warner Bros. actioner, ``The Perfect Storm'' which bows June 30.

GLOUCESTER – When Roberta Tyne goes to the local premiere of "The Perfect Storm" next Wednesday night, it's going to be hard for her to watch George Clooney, who portrays her 37-year-old brother, Billy, the captain of the ill-fated Andrea Gail.

Tyne lost her only other brother in Vietnam, long before the monstrous storm took Billy’s life nine years ago. And watching "Billy" die on-screen will likely reopen wounds that have never really healed.

But she will have help: when the lights go dim and the movie starts, the famous actor from ER will be in the audience with her.

Clooney’s friendship might make it a little easier for her to watch the final moments of her brother’s life as a 120-foot wave crumples the fishing boat on the silver screen.

“In a lot of ways, it doesn’t seem like he’s a movie star,” said Tyne, who was reassured by Clooney once again yesterday that the film is true to life. “He’s so natural and down to earth. He’s just him. He doesn’t have to impress anyone.”

In an interview on the stern of a replica of the boat, Clooney said he feels a special responsibility toward the community -- and especially to Roberta Tyne.

“She’s always tense and on the edge of crying,” he said. So ever since he came to town last summer, Clooney has made a point of including Roberta in his free time.

“Step by step, he helped me through it,” she said today in an interview with Boston.com “He always tells me to come down and make sure I look him up. No matter how busy he is he always has time. He’s just a really sweet person.”

During five hours of interviews, Clooney and other members of the cast yesterday said their goal in the film was to portray the courage and commitment of the fishermen from this small New England town in a realistic manner.

“This happened to be a storm with a 120-foot face,” Clooney said. “The crew of the Andrew Gail made the right decision, but they had bad luck. We didn’t make these guys out to be the bad guys.”

Before he began filming "The Perfect Storm" last summer, “I didn’t know anything about long-line fishing or this life,” Clooney said. “I certainly didn’t know about the danger. I’m not a big boating guy. But I love this boat. It’s a big tub.”

As the 72-foot replica of the Andrea Gail swayed gently beside the dock and sea gulls squawked overhead, it became clear that most of the cast had developed a deep respect for fishing and an attachment to this rough-and-tumble town, despite the initial skepticism of its residents toward Hollywood.

“This harbor was one of the most special parts of making the movie,” said John C. Reilly, who plays Murph in the film. “There’s a real presence here: the smells, the wood, and the lights that twinkle at night.

"So many souls have passed through here," Reilly said. "So many people have lived and died here.”

Reilly said the film took on special meaning for him because he learned that his great-great grandfather perished aboard a fishing boat in 1907 on the Grand Banks in a storm like the one that stole the Andrea Gail in 1991.

“When I found that out, I felt like I was paying tribute to much more than my character,” Reilly said.

Even Mark Wahlberg, the Dorchester native who played a porn star in “Boogie Nights,” said he felt a strong sense of responsibility toward the community and its fishermen.

“This is a tribute to them,” Wahlberg said, noting that he “almost drowned” three or four times during the filming. “If not done the right way, there would be serious problems. There’s a lot of pride here.”

To prepare for his role as Bobby Shatford, one of the crew members who died in the storm, Wahlberg came to Gloucester a month ahead of filming.

He wound up living above the Crow’s Nest, the bar that became famous from Sebastian Junger's portrayal of it in his best-selling book, “The Perfect Storm.”

Wahlberg remembers the day he walked into the Crow’s Nest.

“They said, ‘You’re all right. You’re one of us,’” he recalled. “They said, 'Why don’t you take Bobby’s room,’” the same spot where he stayed between fishing trips.

“So I did. I ended up sleeping in the same room, and Bobby’s brother came in every morning and poured a bucket of water on my head, just like he used to do to wake up his brother.”

Wahlberg said the 100 days of filming for “The Perfect Storm” got under his skin. He used to have nightmares about being swallowed by the sea. “I get these films in my head.” he said.

Wahlberg, who worked with Clooney on "Three Kings" and hopes to work with him on future film projects, said he still lives in Braintree to maintain his ties to the area.

“There’s nothing like being at home,” he said, noting that the pace of his career has astonished him. “I don’t want to pinch myself. Maybe it is a dream.”

For Roberta Tyne, it was a dream come true to meet Clooney. But the circumstances that brought that about were a nightmare that has resurfaced as the film's June 30 nationwide opening approaches.

"It made a real big difference meeting the cast, everyone was so nice," she said, weeping gently as she spoke. "It has made it a lot easier. But it's still very hard."

Tyne said that Clooney has already told her the movie will be tough to watch.

"He told me it’s going to be really rough, the last half hour," she said. "But he said he would be there and would help us get through."

Warner Bros., which is distributing “The Perfect Storm,” starring Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney, are worried that if people find out the ending of the film, they won’t want to see it, says a source. “Don’t tell them that the plot was revealed in the book,” chuckles the insider, referring to the best-selling tome. “More than a few people have already read it.”

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- Like a pilot at his controls, Stefen Fangmeier sat at the video console in a darkened meeting room at Industrial Light and Magic, a pioneer in the business of creating special effects for movies. Arrayed behind him on four rows of ratty couches and metal chairs were a dozen or so computer animators and engineers.

Scenes appeared one after another on the room's oversize monitors, some just a few seconds long, others perhaps 30 seconds: huge ships lumbering through heavy seas, impossible waves washing across colossal decks, flashes of lightning, roaring torrents of wind and mist. Watching the same scenes on a satellite video hookup at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, the director Wolfgang Petersen and the cinematographer John Seale saw the parade of visual-effects images slide soundlessly past.

"That shot, I don't know," Mr. Petersen said. "It's a lot of flashing lightning in a very short time. It's too much. Maybe you can tone it down or take that second flash out."

Mr. Fangmeier is the visual effects supervisor on Mr. Petersen's new film, "The Perfect Storm," which is to open on June 30. It is the largest and most ambitious computer-effects project Mr. Fangmeier has undertaken at Industrial Light and Magic, part of George Lucas's moviemaking empire. With its complex fluid dynamics and computer-intensive water effects, the film is even more demanding than "Jurassic Park," with its digital dinosaurs, or "Twister," with its virtual cyclones.

Computer-generated special effects have been at the center of moviemaking for more than two decades now, especially in the kind of thunderous blockbusters that tend to dominate the summer.

Even so, this is turning out to be a particularly ambitious and perhaps pivotal summer for them. Never have so many big summer movies been so centered on such effects.

Ridley Scott has said that one of the chief reasons he decided to direct "Gladiator" was that the latest generation of sophisticated effects made it possible to recreate second-century Rome in towering and vivid detail. Disney's "Dinosaur," with its groundbreaking combination of realistic, computer-generated creatures and live-action backgrounds, is a showcase for sophisticated effects.

Roland Emmerich's Revolutionary War drama, "The Patriot," can spread itself across a broad canvas, with flotillas of masted ships and spectacular armies of thousands, by relying technology that can transform a few hundred redcoats into a horizon-choking multitude. And Sony's Digital Human Project, an attempt to push and dissolve the boundaries of computer animation, was what made it possible for the director Paul Verhoeven to attempt, in the forthcoming "Hollow Man," to bring an invisible man to the screen in a way, beg your pardon, that has never been seen before.

"Using computer effects just for the sake of using them is not very interesting," said Mr. Emmerich. "But where they are very useful is in helping you to make things very big, or to do things like make your skies match in shots that were filmed on different days. We could not have done 'The Patriot' the way we did it without the computers."

A growing number of filmmakers, it seems, have gone beyond big stunts and bigger explosions and have awakened to the newfound ability of computer-effects specialists to transport audiences to dazzling places, be it some vanished historical epoch or the swelling crest of a 100-foot wave.

Back in the meeting room Mr. Fangmeier ran the "Perfect Storm" scene again, stopping and starting, the digital boat jerking back and forth in the roiling seas until the image was frozen at last on the second flash of lightning.

"You mean this one?" Mr. Fangmeier asked. Mr. Seale, sitting next to Mr. Petersen in Burbank, leaned forward and studied the screen. "Yes, yes," he said, "the one where it looks like it has legs."

The problem, Mr. Petersen and Mr. Seale said, was that the shot did not look real: it was too bright, too vivid. It would break the audience's concentration, pull them out of the movie.

Mr. Fangmeier studied the shot. There were no voices of objection from the technicians and animators in the room behind him. Finally he nodded. "Yes, we can take that out if you like," he said.

After the viewing session Mr. Petersen said: "The computer effects in 'Perfect Storm' were the most important thing in the telling of this story. Otherwise we never could have done it. We could never have shown what it was like to be in 100-foot seas, not in a way that would satisfy audiences in the year 2000. Who can go out and shoot in 100-foot waves? We all would have been killed. And that good old device of using water tanks and miniatures? No way. Audiences just will not buy it in the year 2000."

The enormous success, creative and financial, of "Titanic" in 1997 has been the prime generator for this boom in realistic effects.

Those dozens of people falling off the back of the upended ocean liner -- some real actors on wires, some digital creations, crashing and tumbling together in the same shot -- brought a vividness to visual effects that filmmakers have been expanding and improving upon ever since.

"What this does is, it allows you to create more spectacular images and more spectacular combinations of things," said Andrew Millstein, who heads Disney's Secret Lab, the studio's in-house computer animation and effects unit where "Dinosaur" was born. "I think there are some filmmakers, more and more of them, who fully understand the power of the tools. Our job, in a way, is to create a new way to view reality."

The process of creating the water effects for "The Perfect Storm" began with John Anderson of Industrial Light and Magic, an expert in fluid dynamics, using new software that effectively builds a virtual ocean, many miles wide, inside the computer. Computer-generated ships were later added to the seas and given various weights and physical characteristics. As the animators worked with the new software and tried to make the results look realistic, they quickly realized that water behaved very differently at different points on the wave and under different circumstances.

They created and named more than a dozen different kinds of water, from crest foam (the white churn at the top of a wave) to chopper wash (the pebble-in-a-pond circles created by a helicopter hovering above the water).

"Every one of these behave very differently," said Habib Zargarpour, assistant visual effects supervisor on the film. "You have waves that turn into foaming, blobby chunks, then into sea foam, then into mist. To me that's the most difficult thing to come up with, the look of a splash."

Many of the live-action sequences were shot in an enormous water tank on the Warner Brothers lot. The actors (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and others) were atop a re-creation of the Andrea Gail, the doomed vessel featured in the best-selling book, built on the true story on which the film is based.

The boat sat on gimbals that could toss, turn and upend it while several cameras filmed the tumult from fingerlike cranes around the periphery. Thousands of gallons of water could be spilled from overhead tanks while wind machines raged and the actors were blasted across the deck.

A computer in the gimbals, meanwhile, recorded every inch of the ship's movement and relayed it to the computers at Industrial Light and Magic. Visual effects technicians there could attempt to match the real ship's movement to the roster of waves they had in their virtual ocean. Then they could tweak the effect even more. Does the wave not look terrifying enough at 60 feet? O.K., make it 75.

Then the visual effects shots -- there are about 336 in the film -- were shown to the director and cinematographer at the daily satellite conferences known as "the transmission," at which everyone discussed whether a shot seemed to be working.

"In his comments Wolfgang will often say things like, oh, this looks too computer-generated, or it looks like a model, or it doesn't somehow look real," Mr. Fangmeier said. "So we go back and we fix it. It's my job to figure out how to change it to make it look real."

For Mr. Petersen, the world of filmmaking has changed so much since he shot some of the water scenes in his 1981 submarine adventure, "Das Boot," in a water tank with miniatures.

"The progress they have made in generating totally believable environments and people, it's all so vastly improved," he said. "I have no idea how they do it. It's a mystery to me. In this film some of the shots are of actors on the set, and some are of computer-generated actors on a computer-generated ship. Sometimes I look at a shot, and I have to ask them, is this something we shot, or is this you?"

All of which has spurred him creatively, Mr. Petersen said, forcing him to enlarge his ambitions and rethink his vision for this film and for films he hopes to make in the future.

"If you feed the computer, it's basically limitless what you can do nowadays," Mr. Petersen said. "You can create worlds. You can do whatever you want." 

OTTAWA - Hollywood came calling once again to a local Web development agency for help with a blockbuster preview via webcast.

Ottawa-based non-linear creations inc. brought to life a live webcast preview for the new Warner Bros. film The Perfect Storm, scheduled to hit theatres June 30.

"These requests are very rare for an e-business," said Don Twerdun, marketing director for non-linear creations, which regularly handles Web designs for clients such as Nortel, JetForm, Cognos, AT&T and BridgeWater.

"But we're quite excited when they do come along. We just broke out the champagne a few moments ago."

REAL-TIME INTERVIEW

The preview, held yesterday at non-linear creations' Byward Market head office, came courtesy of a satellite feed through www.perfectstorm.com, which linked to a special event site in Gloucester, Mass. Perfect Storm star Mark Wahlberg provided a real-time interview, along with a tour of the Lady Grace, a sister ship of the boat featured in the film. As well, viewers could see a video for a John Mellencamp number, Yours Forever.

The Ottawa company provided all the digital video and audio recording, satellite hookup and transfer, which could be viewed on Windows Media Player. (Unfortunately, a few attempts at the Sun to view the webcast failed.)

This is not the first time Warner Bros. has approached non-linear creations for live webcasts of film previews. During the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, Tom Cruise spoke online about his film Without Limits, joined by filmmaker Robert Towne.

"At that time, a representative from the film was saying how they'd love to do a webcast in Canada and where can they do one," Twerdun said. "Someone had mentioned us. We got the call right away.

"Initally it was supposed to be a deal with Rogers Television."

Warner Bros. Online was so pleased with the results of the Cruise and Towne webcast, they phoned non-linear solutions less than a week after with The Perfect Storm request.

Actors are not, by definition, hardy seafaring types, and George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, stars of ''The Perfect Storm,'' don't pretend otherwise. ''Everybody got sick,'' Clooney said, back in Gloucester, the site of the shoot, Saturday for the prerelease movie junket. ''Mark got sick, sick as a dog. I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen anybody throw up like that. Mark and I got pretty bad sinus infections. We were gettin' hit with lots of water ... getting hammered with really hard water cannons and dump tanks.'' ''I am not a water guy,'' added former Dorchester homeboy Wahlberg, ''and anybody who was wouldn't be after this movie. It was very wet and that water hurts. They were shooting it at us from every direction. They had cannons that blasted off 3,000 gallons and this other thing had 10,000 pounds of pressure.''

Clooney plays the captain, Billy Tyne, and Wahlberg his fisherman and protege Bobby Shatford. Off camera, Clooney seems to be taking Wahlberg under his wing, as well. They starred in ''Three Kings;'' Clooney suggested Wahlberg for the ''Storm'' role; and hired him for a film Clooney just produced, ''Metal God.'' And, he signed Wahlberg for the remake of ''Oceans 11'' he's filming with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

''Are Mark and I the new Tracy and Hepburn?'' says Clooney, with a laugh, referring to the famed movie couple of Spencer and Katherine. ''Yeah, Dick Tracy and Audrey Hepburn, maybe the new Kukla, Fran and Ollie, hold the Kukla.''

Clooney and Wahlberg say they got on well with the families and friends of the characters they played and shared a more than a few drinks at the Crow's Nest bar. Clooney: ''We got here a couple of weeks before we started shooting and I met some of the families and they were all very welcoming, inviting. ... Their concern, of course, was that we were going to betray them or the memory of their family. Our job was to assure them that we wouldn't. My fear was of course that in a film this size, we wouldn't be able to keep our word. Once I got to know Wolfgang[ Petersen, the director], I was assured that his intention was to take very good care of them. It was something we were very proud of.''

GLOUCESTER - Mother Nature not Warner Bros. was behind the Storm that yesterday blew through this seaside town where Hollywood's hunkiest fishermen - George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg - were holed up doing press interviews for "The Perfect Storm."

The Perfect-ly hellish driving rain and wind forced the studio to stop the rounds of back-to-back TV interviews being held under tents on the dock where the soon-to-be-released flick was filmed last fall.

Fortunately, the Warner Bros. publicity machine had 7News meteorologist Todd Gross on the scene providing pop forecasts!

"He's a very popular guy right now," said 7News entertainment gal Sara Edwards about her colleague who is a character in the movie about the tragic no-name storm back in 1991.

Earlier in the day, the steamy sun shone on the docks where Clooney, clad in a ratty black T-shirt, gray khaki pants and a blue "Perfect Storm" baseball cap, flashed his 1,000-watt smile at broadcast types flown in by the studio to get sound bytes from the movie's Billy Tyne.

"Entertainment Tonight" gal Julie Moran and her camera crew, along with CNN, the local affiliates and even the Weather Channel, rolled on the docks where Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Diane Lane, director Wolfgang Petersen and author Sebastian Junger joined Clooney and Wahlberg for what appeared to be a game of Hollywood musical chairs. With Evian breaks, of course.

The Actor Formerly Known As Marky Mark, looking mighty fine in a dark designer suit and open-collared French blue shirt, scored the best spot to rap with reporters - against the backdrop of picturesque Gloucester Harbor. Which was also a Perfect place for gawkers to wave and snap pics with their disposable cameras.

"We're thrill-seekers," said Mike Harvey, a manufacturer from York, Pa., who timed his family's Rockport vacation to coincide with the movie's press junket.

"We're all mesmerized by the book," he said, thumbing through his dog-earred paperback. "And we've have managed to go to many places in the book while we've been here like the Cape Pond Ice Company and the Crow's Nest."

And speaking of the fisherman's watering hole where Billy Tyne, Bobby Shatford and the rest of the doomed Andrea Gail crew hung out, it was packed at lunchtime yesterday.

However, domestic beer appeared to be out-selling the $8.95 lobster roll and creamy fish chowder made by the lady barkeep.

"It's been like this since they filmed the movie," said contractor Lenny Richard, a Nest regular, sitting on a stool in front of the wall papered with snapshots of the toothsome Tinseltown twosome with various and sundry Shatfords. "It's only going to get worse. Or maybe it'll die down."

Don't bet a bottle of Bud on the latter, Len.

On Friday night, Wahlberg and his long, dark-haired honey flocked back to the Nest shortly after midnight to shoot some pool and have a couple of beers. And they were expected to return this weekend.

As for the Shatfords, Bobby's brothers, Rusty and Brian, and sister, Mary Anne, hung out at the Harbor Loop yesterday before the Air National Guard and U.S. Coast Guard demonstrated their search and rescue schtick.

"Everyone's been real supportive, but I have to admit I'm a little apprehensive to see the movie," Rusty told the Track.

His sister, however, appeared more receptive to seeing the movie during a special premiere for the Gloucester locals in Danvers June 28, two days before it opens nationwide.

"It will be a real tribute to my brother," she said. "So that's why I'm looking forward to seeing it. But he would have been totally ovewhelmed by all of this attention."

Before the Storm tore through the North Shore late yesterday afternoon, the TV types were treated to an air and water show by a Coast Guard Jayhawk and a Blackhawk helicopter, co-piloted by the ANG's Graham Buschor, who actually went out on a rescue mission during the 1991 storm, but not for the crew of the Andrea Gail. His chopper crashed while trying to pick up someone from a sailboat and he ended up being rescued by the Coast Guard.

"It was the most traumatic event I've ever experienced," said Buschor, who mourns for the parajumper Rick Smith who was lost at sea. "Losing Rick was the hardest part."

Tomorrow, the ink-stained wretches and their cyberjournalist compatriots get treated to the George and Mark Show. But the locals will get their chance to see the Hollywood hunks again when the duo returns June 28 for two local premieres. Which is just too, too Perfect!

And finally, 7News gal Sara Edwards reports she'll be doing "The Perfect Storm" cyber thing tomorrow when she films a live tour of the Andrea Gail replica. Her Webcast guide is none other than Mark Wahlberg, who we understand got rather sea sick during filming of the flick! The streaming video begins at 11:30 a.m. on the Dorchester homey's Website - markwahlberg.com - as well as perfectstorm.com. So log on!

Town weathered the attention with appreciation by Kay Lazar

GLOUCESTER - For a fishing town that's used to storms, the one that blew in here yesterday was pretty tame.

But then Gloucester residents are getting mighty used to Hollywood-style storms ever since the best-selling book, ``The Perfect Storm,'' about six Gloucester fishermen lost at sea, came out three years ago.

Yesterday, camera-toting media from across the country were bused here for a blitz of interviews with stars from the movie that has been made about the book. The movie, which is scheduled to open June 30, was filmed here in Gloucester last summer. And many residents got used to seeing the likes of stars George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg shooting hoops with the locals.

``I've got tickets to the premier at Cape Ann Marina,'' said Pat Falasca, whose husband is a lobsterman out of Gloucester. ``I was one of those crazies that paid $150 a ticket.''

Falasca was one of a handful of people who came down to Gloucester's waterfront yesterday, hoping to getting another glimpse of Clooney and crew. When they were filming here last year, Falasca visited often, and managed to get some prime snaps of the stars, including one of Clooney with Falasca's 13-year-old daughter. Now Falasca is hoping to get that picture autographed by the star himself.

Yet many in the sparse crowd along the waterfront did not even know that top Hollywood stars were in town yesterday, because they, and the national media interviewing them, were whisked out to boats in the harbor, away from curious eyes.

``I had no idea this was going on,'' said Carrie Todd, 24, a Boston computer specialist who came up to Gloucester for the day with a friend for a whale watch. ``If you said Mel Gibson was here, then my ears would have perked up,'' she said (Gibson is not in the movie).

Down the street at the Building Center, a variety and hardware store, workers have gotten used to the Hollywood drill. Last summer, when the movie was filming here, crew members would regularly run in to buy materials for the set, fans would dash in to get more batteries for their cameras, and parking was always a nightmare.

So when Hollywood trailers started pulling in again last week, to get ready for this weekend's blitz, Jim Morris just shrugged.

``They are the ones tying up all the free parking, so I have had to park at a meter and keep pumping it with quarters,'' he said.

``Everything we lost in personal parking we have more than made up in business, and those kinds of things pay our Christmas bonus,'' Morris added. ``It makes me able to give my kids a happy Christmas, so I'm not going to grumble about my parking space.''

Fight club: L.A. finally has a major championship boxing match, and it's Saturday at the Staples Center. Major names are paying $900 a head to see hometown boys Oscar de la Hoya and ''Sugar'' Shane Mosley duke it out. Mel Gibson, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Denzel Washington, Sylvester Stallone, Drew Carey, Edward Norton, Adam Sandler, Pamela Anderson Lee, Sean ''Puffy'' Combs and Jennifer Lopez, Mark Wahlberg, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and Mark McGwire are just some of the VIPs confirmed. They also will attend receptions before and after the fight hosted at the Staples Center Grand Reserve Club by center prez Tim Leiweke and Pat O'Brien of Access Hollywood.

BURBANK, Calif.--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--June 15, 2000-- Gearing up for the June 30 release of Warner Bros. Pictures' epic adventure ``The Perfect Storm,'' the Studio has scheduled a live 30-minute web event hosted by the film's star, Mark Wahlberg, at 11:30 AM, EST on Monday, June 19, to be followed by the worldwide online debut of John Mellencamp's soundtrack single ``Yours Forever'' (theme from ``The Perfect Storm'').

Wahlberg and co-host Richard Hawarth, former captain of the fishing boat the Andrea Gail (featured in ``The Perfect Storm''), will take visitors on a virtual tour of the Lady Grace, sister vessel to the Andrea Gail and the boat actually used to depict her in the film, from her home dock in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Together they will answer questions gathered from web surfers at the film's website over the previous week.

Immediately following this live webcast, soundtrack single ``Yours Forever,'' performed by John Mellencamp, will be broadcast as a one-time-only all-media worldwide exclusive.

The Lady Grace will be available for auction on eBay beginning June 28.

Website visitors will also catch a brand-new trailer now appearing in theatres, plus exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with the cast and filmmakers, and a look at some of the groundbreaking state-of-the art visual effects created specifically for the film by leading software designers at Industrial Light & Magic. The site, which can be accessed three different ways, via www.perfectstorm.com, www.markwahlberg.com or www.warnerbros.com, offers historic background, facts about storm research and actual video coverage of the devastating 1991 Halloween storm that inspired the movie along with authentic Coast Guard footage of real rescues at sea.

``The Perfect Storm'' tells of the courageous men and women who risk their lives every working day, pitting their fishing boats and rescue vessels against the capricious forces of nature. Their worst fears are realized at sea one fateful autumn, when they are confronted by three raging weather fronts which collide to produce the greatest, fiercest and most destructive storm in modern history.

Warner Bros. Pictures Presents a Baltimore Spring Creek Pictures production in association with Radiant Productions, a Wolfgang Petersen film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, ``The Perfect Storm.'' The film also stars Diane Lane, William Fichtner, Karen Allen, Allen Payne, Bob Gunton, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and John C. Reilly. Music is by James Horner. The film is edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, A.C.E. William Sandell is the Production Designer. John Seale, ACS, ASC, is the Director of Photography. The Executive Producers are Barry Levinson and Duncan Henderson. Based on the book by Sebastian Junger, the screenplay is by Bill Wittliff. Paula Weinstein, Wolfgang Petersen and Gail Katz produced ``The Perfect Storm,'' which is directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

www.perfectstorm.com

Copyright(c)2000 Warner Bros. Pictures (All rights reserved). This material is to be used solely for advertising, promotion, publicity or reviews of this specific motion picture and to remain the property of Warner Bros. Pictures. Not for sale or redistribution.

BETHESDA, Md., June 15 /PRNewswire/ -- THE STORM chronicles the '91 tempest that become known as the storm of the century, and it was detailed in the best seller The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, basis of the film, THE PERFECT STORM starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, opening June 30

In the Fall of 1991, a freak storm hit the North Atlantic and wreaked havoc in its wake. Its apocalyptic power surprised and overwhelmed fishermen and sailors -- and only some lived to tell the tale. THE STORM tells their stories in a full documentary account of what it was like to be caught in the storm, stronger than any in recorded history.

THE STORM has its U.S. Premiere on Monday, June 26 from 9-10 PM. It repeats from 12-1 AM (all times ET/PT). Discovery continues the meteorological mayhem with an encore performance of RAGING PLANET: TIDAL WAVE, filled with footage of disastrous tidal waves and tsunamis that have afflicted sailors and shorelines around the world. RAGING PLANET: TIDAL WAVE airs from 10-11 PM and 1-2 AM (ET/PT).

THE STORM includes interviews with Sebastian Junger, author of the 1997 best seller, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea; with friends and families of those who experienced the storm; and with Coast Guard rescuers who saved others but also had to save themselves, trapped as they were in the fury of what many call the storm of the century. Viewers travel to Gloucester, Massachusetts to see the docks from which the fishermen sail and visit the bar at which they congregate.

The October 28 - November 1, 1991 Nor'Easter, far fiercer than any other hurricane or tornado, inspired Sebastian Junger to write his best-selling non- fiction account, on which Warner Bros. Pictures based its upcoming epic adventure film, THE PERFECT STORM, opening Friday, June 30. Starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, the film is directed by Wolfgang Petersen (AIR FORCE ONE) with a screenplay by Bill Wittliff.

THE STORM recounts the final voyage of the Andrea Gail, the commercial swordfishing boat from Gloucester, Mass. that mysteriously disappeared in the storm. Its six-crew members were all lost 500 miles from home, in a storm deemed ``perfect'' because it resulted from such a rare confluence of forces.

In THE STORM, viewers will hear from the meteorologists who tracked this storm and tried to stay on top of its every move. The experts explain how this storm developed from three weather systems that, together, powered the worst storm of the 20th century. The tale combines science with the human struggle for survival, detailing how a ferocious tempest began with a suspicious calm and exploded into 100-mile an hour winds and 100-foot waves that swallowed up even the hardiest ships. The storm did $2 billion of damage along the American coastline; had it hit land, it would have been even more devastating.

THE STORM is produced by ABC News Productions; Lisa Zeff is executive producer. For Discovery Channel, Sean Gallagher is executive producer and Michael Quattrone is the executive in charge of production.

Discovery Channel is one of the United States' two largest cable television networks, serving 78.6 million households across the nation with the finest in informative entertainment. Discovery Networks, a division of Discovery Communications, Inc., operates and manages Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health Channel, Discovery People, Discovery Kids Channel, Discovery Science Channel, Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, Discovery Civilization Channel, Discovery Wings Channel, and Discovery en Espanol. The unit also markets and distributes BBC America.

Warner Bros. Pictures Presents A Baltimore Spring Creek Pictures Production In Association with Radiant Productions, A Wolfgang Petersen Film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, ``The Perfect Storm.'' The film also stars Diane Lane, William Fichtner, Karen Allen, Allen Payne, Bob Gunton, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and John C. Reilly. Music is by James Horner. The film is edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, A.C.E. William Sandell is the Production Designer. John Seale, ACS, ASC, is the Director of Photography. The Executive Producers are Barry Levinson and Duncan Henderson. Based on the book by Sebastian Junger, the screenplay is by Bill Wittliff. Paula Weinstein, Wolfgang Petersen and Gail Katz produced ``The Perfect Storm,'' which is directed by Wolfgang Petersen.