HOW THE ONLINE GIANT WILL TAKE ON TINSELTOWN

By MICHAEL KRANTZ/LOS ANGELES

On a clear day you can just make out the Hollywood sign from Scott Zakarin's office. It's an upbeat omen for the 34-year-old president of programming of Entertainment Asylum, AOL's upcoming "entertainment network." Set to debut late next month on AOL and the Web asylum.com) the site unites pop culture with the mass computer audience in what the company hopes will be the Web's top-rated show. "This could change the world. This could become interactive television. We're on the verge of a Golden Age," spouts Zakarin, with typical Tinseltown understatement.

If so, it's one he helped build. Zakarin, who has made films and directed television commercials, has one of the hottest gigs on the Internet. In 1993 he was inspired by AOL's often anonymously populated chat rooms to invent the Spot, a Real World-esque Web drama whose stars' lives unfolded via daily diary entries, snapshots and relentless E-mail and message-board exchanges with the show's obsessive fans. The Spot was an instant hit, but Zakarin sold it to an ad agency and then formed LightSpeed Media, a Web developer that AOL bought last March. AOL renamed it Entertainment Asylum and moved it to a hip, exposed-beam building in Culver City. AOL also provided EA with a mentor: the late Brandon Tartikoff, the TV-programming legend who spent much of his final year consulting with AOL and Asylum.

What have the 50-odd Asylumites created? Something big, anyway. The site will offer pretty much every online content idea that's ever worked and several that haven't been tried yet, from interviews with stars and the usual news, reviews and video clips to cool stuff like customizable TV listings. Members of the Screen Team, a handful of video-worthy young hosts, will report in from movie premieres, sitcom sets and innumerable other shameless junkets while presiding over the site's message boards and chat rooms with, it is hoped, a certain Spot-like je ne sais quoi. Will Zakarin eventually conquer such stodgy brethren as E.T. and E.W.? Like CEO Steve Case, Zakarin has no fear of prediction. Says he: "It's a foregone conclusion."

--By Michael Krantz/Los Angeles