Joining ranks with the likes of Creative Planet, Filmtrust.com, and iFilmpro, new arrival FilmStew.com launched today, adding to a short but comprehensive list of business-to-business interactive resource sites for the movie, television, and visual media production industry.

Designed to serve as an interactive Rolodex of services and applications for Industry professionals, the FilmStew.com site provides information on projects, properties, employees, and productions on a daily basis. The site also features coverage of entertainment news, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and box office reports.

"We're kind of like a creative directory for the entire world," said company President J. Sperling Reich, an NYU film graduate who earned his stripes working for William Morris Agency, Creative Artists Agency, and a number of production companies, most recently Nicholas Cage's Saturn Films.

The site's interactive resources include an Availabilities section, which allows an agent or manager to manage his or her client's availability within a searchable directory. Talent or crew members can also post their job availability with a resume and contact information.

"We're not changing the protocol or power structure of Hollywood, we're just making people's jobs a little faster and more efficient," said Reich. "We pool resources that people use either in their address book or on paper and put it online so in seconds they can see if Tom Cruise or a grip is available to work next month. Getting information like that would normally require dozens of phone calls, but now you can do it relatively quickly.

Backed by a group of private angel investors who infused the small startup with $800,00 in seed money, FilmStew.com launched last year and has managed to keep its overhead and staff number to a manageable level, according to Reich. The company's site had a soft launch in December 2000, and then officially hit the online entertainment circuit today.

Executive management and board members include producers Warren Zide and Craig Perry, former Miramax distribution executive Neil Blatt, and the Editor-In-Chief of Detour magazine, Juan Morales.

But is there room in the online market for another entertainment production resource? With Filmtrust and iFilmpro rumored to be flailing, the shakeout of bigger, stronger, and better-financed competitors has been severe.

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A representative for competitor Creative Planet, one of the few remaining online production management resources that has weathered the storm so far, said the company would certainly welcome another web site into the marketplace, but openly acknowledged that the going is tough.

"Being well capitalized is critical, building the applications is a very expensive endeavor," said the Creative Planet representative. "Unless they have a huge amount of backing, it's hard to say if we would even consider FilmStew a viable player in the market. Building a new web site is a pretty sketchy endeavor at this point."

Creative Planet recently announced its newest contribution to the harried lives of production executives and producers: a mobile data-capture device that enables access to production data on the Internet by film production personnel. The device reports on how much film is shot, who is on or off the set, and other information. The device is slated for release sometime later this year.

FilmStew.com is headquartered in Culver City, California.