'I 'M BORED when I see Lethal Weapon 6 or whatever the latest blockbuster is, " says Allen Coulter. "I'm bored because I don't think anything is going on, because for me if the characters have no inner life nothing is going on."

The fact that Coulter comes from TV - where he directed and produced the ground-breaking HBO series The Sopranos and Sex And The City, as well as episodes of Six Feet Under and the miniseries Rome - doesn't necessarily mean that he's biased against Hollywood. Many studio people in Hollywood agree with him.

"When I had meetings with them after The Sopranos, they said we wish we were doing what you're doing rather than being stuck with doing the next silly comedy for 14-year olds, " he says.

Now Coulter has put his career where his mouth is. He's making his big-screen directing debut with Hollywoodland, a film noir inspired by one of Hollywood's most infamous real-life mysteries.

Already it's won Ben Affleck the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival, reviving a flagging career and giving him an outside chance of hearing his name called out at Tuesday's Oscar nominations.

Affleck portrays the real-life George Reeves, a failing 1950s actor typecast in the role of Superman in the long-running TV series, who was found dead from a single gunshot wound in his Hollywood Hills home having apparently committed suicide.

"Ben understood certain things about George Reeves and about being vulnerable as an actor in Hollywood, " says Coulter. Selfdeprecating and likeable, a serious man trapped in silly tights and a cape in an age before Superman had become screen icon, Reeves and the paparazziprone Affleck clearly share certain traits.

"Such a handsome face, a movie-star face, " an agent remarks. "Why he never became one, I don't know."

Hollywoodland - the title refers to the original Hollywood hills sign before the 'land' fell off - isn't a typical Hollywood movie.

Through the investigations of a fictional headline-seeking private eye played by Adrien Brody, Coulter offers three different versions of the Reeves shooting but leaves open the question of which one is true. "A lot of the ambiguity has gone out of cinema, " he says. "There's a fear of making things less pointed, less clear, of not spelling everything out. I've had it happen with this picture. There were people who were not willing to accept that it was a movie about the emotional life of two men. They wanted more gunplay."

The private eye character is fictional, a composite created to provide a way into the world of Reeves. "Otherwise you're talking about a straight biopic. I didn't want Hollywoodland to feel like a 'period' film. I wanted to make you feel that this was life then. It was important that it happened in a context that you could believe in."

Coulter's open-ended approach allows him to engage with wider resonances and even aspects of today that were already surfacing then. "It's about the beginnings of the cult of celebrity and fame that we're now inundated with and of which Hollywood is a repository, " he says. "You go to Hollywood to be a star. You don't go there to be obscure. So George was a natural citizen of Hollywood. Even the private eye is caught up in it. He's trying to be a bit of a star. He's not paying attention to what's really there."

The sad irony for George Reeves is that he actually had the fame he craved without realising it. Having landed a studio contract and a role in Gone With the Wind, he volunteered for the second world war. By the time he returned, the studio system had changed, under pressure from television, leaving him out in the cold apart from a small role in From Here To Eternity.

With help from his mistress Toni Lanier, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl married to MGM studio manager Eddie Mannix, he landed a role as Clark Kent/Superman in a low-budget movie, Superman And The MoleMen.

On the strength of that, he was given a low-paying long-term contract for a new Kellogg'ssponsored children's afternoon series Adventures of Superman, the first TV Superman, which became an overnight hit and made him a household name. But he saw it as a humiliation.

"He was unfortunately one of the first stars of television when it meant nothing, " says Coulter. "He was a man who wanted to have respect and stardom in the legitimate world of the old Hollywood system. He saw television as a graveyard for failed movie careers, especially a TV show for children." Not like now.

"If George were around today Quentin Tarantino would be putting him in the movies. He would be signing autographs at conventions for Superman, earning millions just doing that.

He'd have lived to see himself famous as he'd hoped to be at the time."

Although Coulter won a Golden Globe Award for The Sopranos, not to mention several Directors Guild of America and Emmy nominations, he would have preferred to be directing feature movies. "Like George, in a way, " he says. "It's probably why I identified with him. I got into the business not to get into TV but to get into movies. I simply found myself in television because it was more accessible."

He was born and raised in Texas where "movies were the only entertainment in our town, a town bigger but not that different to the town in The Last Picture Show". His father was a music teacher at high school and involved in the school theatre. "So I was playing Christopher Columbus when I was eight, and I'd spend summers in North Carolina where my aunt ran an outdoor historical drama about Cherokee Indians. It wasn't until I studied theatre at college that I realised I wanted to direct, not act."

With the success of The Sopranos and Sex And The City "the notion of doing movies just kind of faded, relegated to the back burner. I wasn't tortured by having to do The Sopranos." Now that he's belatedly broken into movies, he's not planning to walk away from television.

"I'll do both. But there's a reason why directors like to be in films. You have more power than in television. After TV, it's a luxury. There's not the same tight schedule. I've got 40 days to shoot a movie. Great. What am I going to do with the last 10?"

Just as in the 1960s when John Frankenheimer and Franklyn Shaffner and other directors who'd made their names in television drama helped revitalise the film industry, directors like Coulter and JJ Abrams - creator of Lost who brought his expertise to last year's Mission: Impossible 3 - are shaking up Hollywood.

"Segregation between theatre, television and cinema was really severe for both actors and directors in America before The Sopranos. It's only now that the barriers are breaking down."

Too late for George Reeves, who felt ashamed as a legitimate actor slumming it on television. "He wanted his life to be more than it was. Now everybody seems dissatisfied with the simplicity of their lives and feels drawn to this notion that somehow their lives would be better if they were well known, " says Coulter.

It's as if life has become one vast virtual reality entertainment where everyone is acting like a star in a movie of their own lives.

"That's why you have people volunteering for Big Brother or American Idol or the Jerry Springer Show, or even just standing at the scenes of horrific crimes, waving happily at the cameras. This movie is a lot about the beginnings of that."