Pauly Shore in the Shining? You decide online

Maybe you found Vivien Leigh a bad Scarlett O'Hara. Maybe you found Tom Hanks ill-advised for "The DaVinci Code." Or maybe you've been drinking and wonder how Pauly Shore would do in "The Shining." Cinephiles, bookworms and Hollywood second-guessers can rejoice today: A Mesa man's Web site has made us all casting directors.

"It's called storycasting.com," Jeff Reid says. "It lets you cast the movie the way you want." Storycasting.com is a free Web site for folks who love literature - and know Hollywood's propensity for messing it up. (Kevin Costner is Robin Hood? Really?) Reid's creation allows users to tap their inner casting director.

"You go to the site, log in, then select a (book)," he says. Storycasting.com has a database of 70,000 works, from classical literature to contemporary fiction. "Then you go by role and select the actors you'd like." The Web site currently has 5,000 actors to choose from, with more being added all the time. Your dream cast is posted on the site, where you can comment on others' choices and defend your own. "It's film casting the way Joe Six-Pack would do it," Reid says. "We opened the site just this past May, and in the first two months got 30,000 page views from 6,700 visitors in 76 different countries."

Reid sees Storycasting.com as an entertaining "what-if" bridge between literature and pop culture. "It's great fun if you have a book you feel strongly about and see it cast a certain way," he explains. "But it can work the other way, too. Say you're reading a book and you look on the Web site and someone has cast Matt Damon in the lead. It can be fun to go back and visualize the story with certain actors in your head."

Storycasting.com's current repertoire tilts heavily toward classic stories and contemporary actors. "Right now, the Stephanie Meyer book ("Twilight") gets the most attention," he says. "But one of our most popular works to cast is 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Can you imagine? A lot of people see ('Little Miss Sunshine's') Abigail Breslin as Scout." Each cast acts as a vote for the actor in that role. Consensus casts are displayed on the home page. "If people don't find an actor they want, they can e-mail us, and we get them up there as soon as we can. Right now, we're (capturing) actors from every TV show - 'Heroes,' 'Lost,' and the 'CSI' shows."

An admitted film and book enthusiast, Reid, 57, got the idea for the site after reading Michael Connelly's detective novels. "He has this detective named Harry Bosch, and I thought: 'Who would play this character?' Clint Eastwood came to mind, but he was too old. And I wished I had someone to talk to about it."

The question "Who would play them in the movie?" pops up frequently on author Web sites, Reid says, but he found no satisfying online casting forum. "I thought, 'If someone makes a site like this, I'll be a member.' But there was nothing out there. Zero." So, Reid consulted with his family - including his older son, a software engineer, and his youngest son, a graphic design student. They created the site themselves.

As Storycasting expands, Reid sees it as a resource for authors who want to see how their book is perceived, for studios mulling casting ideas, and for schools, too. "Say you're teaching 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' to a high school class. You can send them to the Web site and have them cast it," he explains. "Then you could say, 'Hmmm, Gwyneth Paltrow - you'd cast a blond girl like that in a story set in Italy?' It gives people new ways of seeing the classics and opens new doors for discussion."