In what sounds like a kind of StarPolish for film, Kevin Spacey's TriggerStreet.com debuts today:

Trigger Street Productions, Inc., was formed in 1997 by Kevin Spacey to develop and produce entertainment in a variety of mediums. Realizing that the path to his own success would have been much rockier without the support and encouragement of many outstanding mentors, Spacey has sought out a way to inspire, nurture, and help bring exposure to new and undiscovered talent. If you are in a position to help others, if you find yourself in the building of life and you can send the elevator back down, that becomes your earnest duty. This philosophy has become the catalyst for the second step of his vision - TriggerStreet.com.

TriggerStreet.com was founded in January 2002 as the web-based filmmaker and screenwriter's community of record - an interactive mechanism for the purpose of discovering and showcasing new and unique talent. Based on the principles of creative excellence, it provides industry access and exposure to help build the careers of notable new filmmakers and screenwriters of our day.

Our mission is to encourage the creative process of filmmaking and screenwriting by providing hands on, peer-to-peer, objective criticism and letting the material be judged on its own merit. We offer an engaging avenue of exploration for both first time and veteran film directors, writers, and enthusiasts, anyone at all, who is attempting to bring his or her vision to the screen.

Our team has been extensively researching and designing TriggerStreet.com to ensure that it encapsulates every aspect of the user's desires and needs. We are using the Internet with its initial intention and design in mind: a tool to communicate. As such a constructive tool, we hope that it will be an inventive, productive, and exciting experience for all.

Welcome to TriggerStreet.com

a collection of early short films by Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis, the late Ted Demme, Bill Paxton and others.

The collection of shorts will be available exclusively on Yahoo! Movies, part of TriggerStreet's collection of material designed to provide guidance and career development opportunities for new filmmakers.

The TriggerStreet site also includes interviews with Mike Myers, Billy Crystal, Ed Norton and Sean Penn on the nature of mentorship, and an area where makers of short films can submit their work for review and ratings by other site visitors. The site will sponsor a short-film contest three times a year among those submissions, with a celebrity panel judging among 10 finalists picked from the most popular shorts on the site. [from Variety]