Samuel L. Jackson in 'Snakes on a Plane' Wrangler corrals film's slithering stars

SAN DIEGO -- Here's a frightening proposition for the producers of Snakes on a Plane: What if everyone is so busy laughing at the name of your movie, they forget to go see it?

Or worse, they skip it altogether because they know it's going to, pun intended, bite?

An unlikely scenario we know -- the Samuel L. Jackson starrer is expected to sink its fangs convincingly into the box office this Friday -- but nevertheless, cult audiences, particularly those found slithering around the Internet, are a notoriously slippery lot. After all, for every Blair Witch Project that embeds itself into the mass consciousness, there's a Serenity that sputters to find a larger following.

So, while New Line has cannily courted the cyberspace junkies erecting countless digital shrines to Snakes, the studio's TV ads tell a different story -- selling the movie as a straight-ahead thriller, rather than the campfest most website denizens, stoked by the on-the-nose title have been salivating for.

The message? The studio isn't resting on its snakesonablog.com laurels. And it even wants to make it appear like Snakes on a Plane -- brace yourself -- isn't total crap, but redeemable, even well-crafted, crap.

As you'd expect, no one is more eager to promote this line of thinking than director David R. Ellis, who -- while clearly thrilled to be at the helm of this year's out-there pop culture phenomenon -- also wouldn't mind if Snakes shed its B-as-in-bad movie rep.

"I'll be happiest on Aug. 18 when people get to see the film," Ellis says. "People are like, 'Oh, it's going to be the best worst movie ever made,' but it rocks. It definitely delivers."

(Unfortunately no one can independently confirm this since New Line isn't screening the film in advance for critics.)

Should Snakes deliver -- budgeted at a mere $30 million US, it could gross that in its opening weekend -- the thriller's impact won't be limited to the box office.

Already many expect it to mark a seismic shift in how Hollywood makes and markets its films, auguring a future in which blockbusters are hyped and shaped, not by executives, but by bloggers and Internet-powered fanbases.

Renowned, for one, is the story of how, when online fans protested a possible name change from Snakes on a Plane to the woefully generic Pacific Air 121, the studio blinked, opting to stick with the original title.

Another example of this geek-to-Hollywood interactivity? When bloggers balked at the movie's aimed-for PG-13 rating, demanding R-rated horror, the studio coughed up cash for reshoots to magnify the flick's quotient of bloodshed, sex and profanity. In particular, fans will hear Jackson bark perhaps the most-requested line of dialogue in cinematic history: "I want these mother#$&*%+g snakes off this mother#$&*%+g plane!"

And Jackson, Academy Award nominee though he may be, makes no pretense about Snakes. "This is the kind of movie I would've went to when I was a kid," he says. "It's not a great story and there's not a great character inside of it. And there's nothing wrong with doing that, even though a lot of people might think so."

Nor is Jackson, ever the snake charmer, about to chomp the mouse-clicking fingers that feed him. Rather than complain about how their creative control was infringed upon, both he and Ellis credit their online followers for making the flick better.

"It's called Snakes on a Plane -- what are you trying to hide?" Ellis remembers telling studio executives when they wanted a kinder, gentler PG-13-friendly Snakes. "You've got to go for it."

Ellis, whose credits include Final Destination 2, was approached to helm Snakes after Hong Kong filmmaker Ronny Yu dropped out. By then Jackson, a friend of Yu's, was already attached to play an FBI agent trying to keep a federal witness alive after the mob boss he's testifying against unleashes the murderous serpents on their plane.

Among the passengers and flight crew trying, with Jackson, to escape the jaws of death are Julianna Margulies (ER), Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live) and Canadian Rachel Blanchard (from last year's Where The Truth Lies).

But landing a cast -- any cast -- wasn't easy with a name like Snakes on a Plane, Ellis admits. "We were going around to locations and we'd tell them our movie is Snakes on a Plane, and they'd go, 'Oh, that's great.' Even when we were going out to (audition) actors, they weren't taking it seriously."

At least they had arms and legs. That wasn't true of the majority of the cast. More than 500 snakes were corralled into service to slither about the film's Vancouver set, although they rarely interacted with their warm-blooded co-stars. Turns out snakes aren't believable actors.

"There's no such thing as a snake trainer," Jackson says. "They can't be told what to do. They're lazy and they don't want to be bothered with people."

So while the movie's second unit dealt with the real-life snakes, the stars fended for their lives opposite their imaginations.

"For any specific behaviour, you have to have a computer-generated snake," says Ellis, who reports many of the cast and crew were nevertheless "freaked out" by the titular reptiles. "It was cool, too, because I had this baby rattle I'd keep in my pocket. I'd hit a guy in the leg with a stick and then rattle."

Not that we're suggesting Jackson was afraid of his co-stars, although his agent did negotiate a 20-ft. clause in his contract that kept the actor away from the critters.

With the movie about to uncoil and critical hisses silenced (at least until opening day), Jackson says he's proud of the unabashedly hokey end product.

"I hope I did a movie people will enjoy and go, 'That was wild.' That's all I need from this. I don't expect the Hollywood Foreign Press to call me up to the podium for this," he says. "But the MTV Movie Awards -- they might create a category for this movie."

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Other examples of how Hollywood has interacted -- successfully and not-so successfully -- with bloggers and online fans over the past decade: