Charles Austin Miller

Trivia: After its release in 1999, "The Blair Witch Project" went on to make a fantastic $250 million profit on its lowly $64,000 budget, largely due to the film's realism; audiences were chilled by the possibility that this "found footage" was the real thing. But any cable viewers who followed the Independent Film Channel (IFC) knew very well that "The Blair Witch Project" was a purely scripted work as far back as 1997, when "The Blair Witch Project" writer/director Daniel Myrick previewed a segment of the work-in-progress featuring an 8-minute "pitch" (comprised mainly of voice-overs and edited footage) on IFC's specialty program, "Split Screens." Audience feedback was later gathered through traditional test-screenings.

Charles Austin Miller