The answer they came up with -- along with their partners, Miramax Films, HBO and Live Planet, an entertainment-related Internet site -- is Project Greenlight. Although it was partly created, its founders say, to attract an online group of aspiring filmmakers and help break down barriers that keep them from finding work, at its heart Project Greenlight is a contest. And the prize is spectacular: the winner will get at least $1 million to prepare, shoot and polish the movie, all of which will be the subject of an HBO series documenting the production process, after which the movie will be released in movie theaters by Miramax.

Contests are nothing new on the World Wide Web. They have been used frequently, along with phony polls and trivia quizzes, to get people to stick to a site longer and return to it later. And there have been dozens of screenwriting contests on the Web in the last couple of years.

Nor is Project Greenlight the only one to offer such a prize. Another contest promises the winner the services of a Hollywood agent and makes this sound like a good thing. Still another, a collaboration between Universal Pictures and a Web site called Hypnotic, includes $1 million in production money for its winner, though it stops short of offering full-blown theatrical distribution of the finished film.

"The Hollywood studios were slow to get involved in the Internet, partly because they were nervous about putting their content out on the Web, where it is too easy to copy," said Gordon Einstein, a Los Angeles lawyer who specializes in entertainment on the Web. "What you're seeing now is that the prizes being offered in these contests are becoming more concrete, because a lot more Hollywood heavy hitters are getting involved, and they have the resources."

There are skeptics, of course. Hollywood executives as well as aspiring filmmakers, at least as reflected in Web chat rooms, express concerns about how much Mr. Affleck and Mr. Damon will be involved in making the winning film and whether the struggling scriptwriters will be forced to give up too many of their rights as they progress through the contest's six-month winnowing process. Some wonder whether it will be, in the end, anything more than a publicity ploy to draw eyes to the Web site and to the HBO series.

"No one will be happier than us when we actually start making this movie," said Keith Quinn, Live Planet's vice president for marketing. "Because then all the people who are saying, 'Hey are you really going to be making this movie?' will see that we really are."

Skepticism is understandable, said Chris Moore, a co-producer of "Good Will Hunting" and the chairman of Live Planet. But in this case, he said, it is unfounded, adding that he or Mr. Affleck or Mr. Damon or some combination of the three would produce the winning film, and all three would be as involved as their schedules allowed.

"Ben is going onto the Web site all the time," Mr. Moore said. "Check into some of the chat rooms and message boards. People will post questions to him and he'll answer. We're all very involved."

And despite the legal language in the contest rules -- language, Mr. Moore said, designed to protect the contest sponsors from lawsuits from those who feel their ideas were purloined -- it is not the intention of Project Greenlight principals, he said, to steal ideas from aspiring filmmakers. In fact, he said, Mr. Affleck and the others are not even allowed to read submitted screenplays until later in the winnowing process, when their input is needed to pare down the contestants to the final 10, then 3, then 1.

He said the idea was to use the power gained from making "Good Will Hunting" to help other people make movies. "This comes from our suspicion that the next Steven Spielberg is a kid sitting at home out there, somewhere around the country, who has the talent but doesn't quite know how to make it happen, " Mr. Moore said.

Hollywood and the Internet have been warily circling each other for a couple of years. It has been a turbulent process. Dozens of hungry executives were lured away from studios and production companies by the effervescent promise of creative -- and actual -- gold in the new world of online entertainment sites. But many of them watched as their sites withered and succumbed. No one seemed able to find the sure-fire formula that would make an online site cross over from geek phenomenon to pop-culture mainstream.
The answer, many have come to believe, is to use the Internet not so much to provide packaged entertainment as to create virtual communities of like-minded, culture-hungry Web heads, and then synergize them six ways from Sunday. Internet strategists dream of an effect much like the Napster phenomenon or the unexpected success of "The Blair Witch Project," in which Web users flock to sites that empower them to create their own pop-culture connections.

"The idea here is to segue from the traditional client-server structure of Web sites to this new kind of evolving peer-to-peer structure," Mr. Affleck said. "A structure that truly utilizes the power of the Web, which in the end really works much better as a tool to hook people up with one another."

Project Greenlight is one of the efforts under way on the Web to do just that, and to figure out a way to make it pay. Universal Pictures and Hypnotic, a new media company formerly known as Reelshort.com, for example, have called their contest the Million Dollar Film Festival.

"We're sort of like a farm club for talent," said Jeremy Bernard, president of Hypnotic. Kevin Misher, Universal's president for production, said the farm system was already beginning to bear fruit. "What we have done is that I have many executives, including myself, who look at a lot of the films that are on the Hypnotic site," Mr. Misher said. "We are constantly looking at their programming, hoping to see what kind of new talent is out there."

The two contests, though offering the same cash prize, are structured very differently.

Project Greenlight began on Sept. 25, when aspiring filmmakers could first send their screenplays to the contest's Web site: (www.projectgreenlight.com). Participants had to be at least 18 and have no previous Hollywood connections.

"We're not going to be a filter for all the bad scripts that are already running around Hollywood," Mr. Moore said. By the Oct. 22 deadline, just under 8,000 scripts had been received. Other people, who had not written screenplays but still wanted to take part, could sign up as official reviewers. About 40,000 did. Each contestant was required to read and review at least three scripts, each reviewer at least one. The deadline for reviews was last Wednesday.

On Friday, once the voting has been tabulated, the submissions will be culled to 250. None of the scripts, up to this point, will have been read by Mr. Affleck or any of the contest organizers, largely for legal reasons. (They are restricted to the site's chat rooms and message boards.)

"Miramax is owned by Disney, and Disney has so many lawyers you wouldn't believe it," Mr. Affleck said. "When we began talking about doing this, those people sent over so many rules and regulations that, frankly, I'm terrified that if I ever so much as log onto the Web site, I will be sued immediately. And it's killing me, because when I look at the message board on the site, people are talking about this great script and that great script, and I'm dying to read them."

Each of the 250 chosen writers will be asked to make a three-minute video autobiography. On Jan. 6 or thereabouts, Mr. Moore and the other contest organizers will announce a second cut to 30, and their video biographies and scripts will be posted on the Web site. The next cut, to 10 semifinalists on Feb. 1, will be made by the contest organizers.

Those 10 will be given video equipment and asked to shoot a short scene from their script. Each scene will be posted on the Web site, followed by more discussion on the Project Greenlight message boards and chat rooms. On Feb. 28, the sponsors will announce the three finalists, who will be flown to Los Angeles to be interviewed. At this point, the making of the HBO series will begin. The million-dollar winner will be announced in early March.

"A million dollars sounds like a lot of money to make a movie," Mr. Moore said. "But it isn't. We will be looking for people who have a story that looks like it will fit in that budget and who seem like they will be able to get it done."

A documentary team from HBO will follow the winner through pre-production, casting, shooting and postproduction, all the way to the red-carpet premiere. The record of the making of the film will be cut into a 13-part series on HBO set to begin in early 2002.

The Hypnotic-Universal contest, the Million Dollar Film Festival, is substantially different. It asked aspiring moviemakers to send in films of less than 40 minutes. Of the several hundred received, organizers culled 25 finalists this month. Until the end of December, five of the films will be available each week on the contest Web site (www.hypnotic .com). Visitors to the site are asked to rate the films, with the top five passing into the next round. Only at this point will the final five be asked to submit a pitch or script for the feature film they hope to make.

Each pitch will be posted on the Web site, and the finalists' five short films will be shown during the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January. A panel of experts will choose the winner, who will get the $1 million production deal with Universal.

The sponsors of both contests say they hope they become regular events.

"Maybe everyone will just cluck their tongues and smirk at us behind our backs," Mr. Affleck said. "I guess that's the risk we run by lending our names. But we are not going to make a dime out of this. I really do believe that it is a grand experiment, an effort to democratize the process, to affect the way it is decided which movies get to be made."

Photos: Ben Affleck, left, and Matt Damon, who had early success as screenwriters, and the home page of Project Greenlight, their effort to help others. (Top, Miramax Films/Live Planet; above, Associated Press); Michael Maronna, a spokesman for a film contest on the Hypnotic Web site, shows this week's entries. (Fourfront/SJI Associates/Hypnotic)