Last night in New York, filmmaker Spike Lee joined the LiveMansion.com team live to offer support and criticism to the five directing finalists.

Whittled down from some 250 entrants, the five directors from around the country – Rich Greenberg, Noah Ehlert, and Mitch Gettleman from Los Angeles, Stan Arthur from Florida, and Daniel Buonsanto from New Jersey – were each given $1,000 to direct the same two scenes from a script.

The shorts were screened to a packed crowd in Tribeca Cinemas in Lower Manhattan yesterday with Spike Lee, actor Al Palagonia and financier Bruce Meyers offering feedback. The shorts will soon be available, along with the panelists' comments, on LiveMansion.com for the site's 100,000 community members to vote on and choose the winning director.

The results of the final round of competition were decidedly mixed, with Stan Arthur's Tarantino-inspired installment going over like the B-movie bomb it intended to be; while Greenberg's underlit unique locations got big kudos ("You took advantage of production values," said Lee), while Gettleman's innovative choices in setting and sound design were also heralded.

But with script pages that include lines like "I don't have your USB drive!" not even Spike Lee could do much with the hackneyed material. Maybe next time, LiveMansion.com organizers should also solicit screenplays from users. Unfortunately for the winning filmmaker, "LiveMansion:The Movie" has been dubbed a "thriller set in a mega-mansion."

LiveMansion is owned by Ckrush Digital Media, Inc. responsible for such undistinguished feature films as "Beer League, "TV the Movie," National Lampoon's "Pledge This," starring Paris Hilton.