Hollywood Online

In summertime, a young man’s fancy turns to giant fireballs and gruff cops who don’t play by the rules (a young woman’s fancy turns to Sandra Bullock backlighted by sunset, but you get the idea). My question is this: Do you just enjoy movies, or do you really love them? Would it excite you to know what animated films Disney is developing for the next century? Did the Avengers trailer leave you certain you could do a better job than the morons who approved this turkey?

If you’re film-crazy like me, then the Web is your promised land. The following four sites will keep you as wired with movie gossip and lore as any Armani-clad studio sleazeball.

The early Web’s greatest virtue may be its ability to bombard us with insane amounts of useless but entertaining data. Enter Harry Knowles, the Gen X proprietor of Ain’t It Cool News, a unique repository of movie scuttlebutt and opinion. Every day Harry’s spy network e-mails in reports on future projects (Will Titanic director Jim Cameron’s next picture be Spiderman or the remake of Forbidden Planet?), casting news (Knowles knew that Ewan McGregor would play Obi-Wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars trilogy weeks before I read it anywhere else) and sneak reviews of upcoming films (Knowles was running Titanic raves while the mainstream media still considered it an Ishtar in the making). New stories last week included: “20th Century Fox’s Pinball City” (people sucked into a miniature pinball universe. Cool); “Robin Williams’ What Dreams May Come!!” (Robin searches hell for his dead wife in one of this fall’s likely hits); and “What one 15-year-old kid thinks about the Psycho remake.” If you want to talk like a Hollywood insider, Ain’t It Cool News is a daily must-visit.

Speaking of which: we all know Robert Duvall starred in The Godfather and The Great Santini. True movie freaks, though, will be even more intrigued by his turn as Motorcyclist in the 1965 crime drama Nightmare in the Sun. We learn about this role from the Internet Movie Database, an astonishing site that hyperlinks cast and crew lists for more than 150,000 films, allowing surfers who peruse Duvall’s career to detour into the Ursula Andress oeuvre when they reach the cast of Nightmare in the Sun.

And if (probably for Ursula Andress-related reasons) you actually want to see Nightmare, try reel.com a video site with 85,000 titles arranged into wittily searchable hierarchies like “Horror/Blood ‘n Guts/Subhumanoid Meltdown.” A copy of Nightmare costs $8.99 ($6.99 for a used tape). They’ll even send you a three-day rental for $4.50, including a stamped envelope for the return trip.

Still burning with conviction that you too could be a movie mogul? Prove yourself on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, an online market that lets you invest 2 million “Hollywood dollars” in Movie Stocks and Star Bonds and measure your bets as they rise and fall with each week’s box-office grosses against a pool of investors that apparently includes a fair number of Hollywood luminaries.

Last Thursday two imminent openings were trading as follows: Disturbing Behavior–$24.25; Mafia!–$23.20. That means HSX players expect each film to gross that many millions in the U.S. Most of my HSX stake, however, is on Stanley Kubrick’s sex thriller Eyes Wide Shut. It stars Tom Cruise, and as every movie nut knows, you never want to bet against him.

Krantz is a TIME staff writer; Josh Quittner returns to this page next week. For more cool movie websites, see time.com/personal