The cyberschmoozer

The only rule in Hollywood, so the adage goes, is that there are no rules. You simply do whatever it takes to break in. Some have fudged resumes, crashed parties or (as Steven Spielberg claims he did) sneaked onto a studio lot and occupied an empty office. Like a latter-day Sammy Glick, Heather Robinson did it through the Internet.

As a $6-an-hour customer service rep at America Online, she discovered that she could access the member database for the e-mail addresses of celebrities. Going by the screen name “HooterR,� and identifying herself as a single wine lover, she took advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to become the confidante of screenwriters, producers and even some major stars. HooterR’s contacts, she says, included Goldie Hawn, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Eight years after Robinson made her first online Hollywood overture, the cyberschmoozing seems to have paid off. “The Perfect Man�--which opened last month and stars teen idol Hilary Duff--is based on her idea for a movie about her real-life creation of a fictitious suitor for her mother. She also is one of the producers of “E-Girl,� which tells the tale of how she made it from AOL to Hollywood. She and her partners are looking for a production financing deal.

“No matter where you live or what you do, if you have a dream, you can do it,� says the 27-year-old Tucson resident.

Robinson’s heartwarming, go-for-your-dreams take on her own life story isn’t the universal reaction, though. Judging by some of the vitriol aimed in her direction, she is the poster girl for Hollywood amorality. “Hollywood, Interrupted� co-author Mark Ebner, whose book devotes most of a chapter to Robinson’s exploits, called her “at best, a scam artist� in an interview with Wired News, which ran an April 2004 story about her with the headline “Hack Your Way to Hollywood.�

Robinson doesn’t come across as a slick hustler. She is tenacious and brassy, but in a small-town, unaffected way. Her resilience already has been tested by the divorce of her parents when she was about 9 and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer when she was 22. The illness is in remission, but she says that medical bills have eaten up what she has earned so far in the film business. “I haven’t been able to enjoy the money from all the hard work.�

Back in 1997, when Robinson began working for the nation’s largest Internet provider, online privacy was not the issue it is now. Her supervisor, she says, did not object when she asked about accessing the database. “He said [I] could as long as the celebrity was in a chat room or had an online profile,� she recalls.

Robinson insists she was only hoping, like so many e-mailers, to make friends online. But she was systematic in mining the AOL database. After collecting the names of celebrities from magazines such as Premiere and Entertainment Weekly, she would go into the database and find their personal e-mail addresses. If she typed in a movie studio’s main phone number, the database would cough up every AOL subscriber working at that studio. She even designed a spreadsheet to keep track of all the information. AOL has said that Robinson’s actions violated company policy, and that it has tightened internal security since she worked there.

Her first overture was an instant message to a screenwriter. They hit it off, in part because, knowing from his AOL profile that he was an avid mountain biker, Robinson had found out what the hot bike models were. Those she contacted knew her only as HooterR; they didn’t know that, with her access to the AOL database, she knew who they really were.

She says she became romantically involved with four men she met online, one of them a well-known actor whom she will not identify. A former online buddy says she is not a cyber-seductress. “Heather doesn’t use sex,� says Tyler St. Mark, who produced the first national AIDS awareness public service announcements. “Heather uses humor.�

Robinson quit AOL after eight months, several celebrity friendships established. She wanted to pursue a writing career and had an idea--the story of the imaginary suitor, an officer at Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, whom she and a girlfriend devised to cheer up her single mother when Robinson was 16. As part of the scheme, Robinson wrote letters to her mother in “Colonel Ed’s� name, using letterhead she had taken from Davis-Monthan. She arranged a date between them, but then told Mom he had been deployed suddenly on a classified mission. The truth only came out when her accomplice bought an engagement ring on the suitor’s behalf with a stolen credit card. The girls spent a night in juvenile hall and were put on probation.

To some of Robinson’s online pals, the “Colonel Ed� caper seemed like a movie natural. They helped her put together a treatment and then, with writer Michael McQuown, she drafted the original script for “The Perfect Man.� In the Universal Pictures release, Duff plays the scheming teenager and Heather Locklear is her dateless mother.

As Robinson tells it, what she did at AOL is more nuanced than a simple case of hacking. “AOL was my resource,� she explains during an interview at her mother’s house. “I was not born into a family of filmmakers, I did not go to college for it, I did not live in L.A.� She continues, her voice rising: “Anyone in that call center could have done what I did, but I had the initiative and determination to do it.�

The Hollywood morality monitors, however, have been onto Robinson since before “The Perfect Man� began filming, much of the flak, ironically, flying around online message boards. Some of it may reflect envy--after all, the western arm of Writers Guild of America registers tens of thousands of screenplays every year, of which only about 200 will be produced. There’s also a strain of the privacy paranoia now raging across the Internet. Referring to the “E-Girl� project, one prominent blog complained that “not even your [instant message] conversations . . . are safe from the movie development process.�

Having come so far since her days answering phones at AOL, Robinson won’t let the critics knock her off track. “Those people don’t get to me at all,� she says. “If you’re going to be successful in any business, you’re going to have to work your [butt] off.�

You can call Robinson brazen, certainly, but she’s hardly more so than Spielberg, who, according to biographer Joseph McBride, actually invented the tale about sneaking onto the Universal lot and helping himself to an office rather than admit that he performed menial office duties as a summer job assistant with the purchasing agent. As with Spielberg, what Robinson does with her Hollywood access is what will really matter.