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Heh, checking my old file directory for HSX info......

Byline: VALERIE TAKAHAMA

The Orange County Register
Bill Galway starts his day on the Hollywood Stock Exchange at 7:30 a.m. by logging onto the virtual stock market at www.HSX.com.
The retired life-insurance broker from Garden Grove checks his portfolio - worth $416 million at last count - and takes a quick look the weekend's big box-office winners, BLAIR +10 1/2; DBSEA + 3/8; RBRIDE -4 1/2. "My own taste runs toward the classics. I love `Some Like It Hot,' `One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. ' I like the off-the-wall movies on the Sundance Channel. This is strictly business," Galway says of the movie stocks he spends 30 hours a week trading on the virtual exchange.

As Galway knows, it's not business at all. What the Hollywood Stock Exchange is is an Internet game that some players take almost as seriously as the real thing and that blurs the line between real life and make-believe in radical new ways. The 3-year-old game is compelling - some say addictive - because it brings together a trio of obsessive pursuits in the culture today: Hollywood, Wall Street and the Internet.


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