It Should Happen to You

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061016fa_fact

IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU

The anxieties of YouTube fame.

by BEN McGRATH

Issue of 2006-10-16
Posted 2006-10-09

Stevie Ryan received her first Oscar, after a fashion, this year, at the age of twenty-two, only eighteen months after moving to Los Angeles to become a movie star. She grew up in California’s high desert, a couple of hours to the east, in a town along the road to Las Vegas called Victorville. Her parents worked at calibrating truck scales for weigh stations on the interstate—a family business going back two generations on her mom’s side. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ryan harbored escape fantasies involving the Hollywood of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations—Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow—but she never participated in high-school theatrical productions. She did attend her high-school prom dressed as Marilyn Monroe, down to the elbow-length gloves. (Her date wore a Mohawk and muttonchops.) After a brief stint in community college, she concluded that she was “too right-brain for school,” and followed an older brother to Huntington Beach—anything to get out of Victorville. “Then I thought, Screw these people—I’ll just go to L.A., see what happens,” she said recently.

The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously—not in March, at the Academy Awards, but in August, three and a half minutes into a sketch Ryan was filming, while she was still in character as Cynthia, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A. who is better known as Little Loca, after the handle Ryan uses when she uploads some of her homemade sketches onto the video-sharing site YouTube. This was about the fortieth in a series of short Little Loca videos that had by then attracted over a million viewings, thanks to Loca’s “big old mouth” (both literally—her heavily outlined lips command attention—and figuratively) and her irreverent putdowns (“You better watch out, fool, because God’s gonna come around and strike you down with some lightning if you don’t be careful”). Loca was wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings, and sitting on a sofa, against a plain white wall, between two women who were known to regular viewers as Smiley (a friend of Ryan’s) and Silent Girl (Ryan’s cousin). Rap music was playing in the background.

“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette from Smiley and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.”

It seemed to be a genuine Oscar—stolen from a bar by a friend of Ryan’s—and the moment was rich with postmodern significance. Over the previous three months, Loca’s fans, many of them Hispanic, had warmed to her story: spunky ghetto kid—a chola—with an overprotective older brother, a 4.0 grade-point average, and her innocence proudly intact. (That gang sign that she seemed to flash at the end of each video was really a sideways V, for virgin.) They knew she’d been prom queen, and they had met her onetime boyfriend Raúl. They’d learned that Silent Girl went mute after the death of her brother, an innocent bystander in a botched robbery. And they’d grown accustomed to Loca’s distinctive, almost bewitching screen presence—the way her dark eyebrows and pursed lips slide effortlessly from a knowing smile to an outraged glare. At the same time, they’d begun noticing suspicious details that called into question the diary’s authenticity: the mole on Loca’s right cheek seemed to vary in size and placement; Raúl bore a striking resemblance to Drake Bell, the co-star of Nickelodeon’s “Drake and Josh,” a teen sitcom; and didn’t Loca resemble a young woman—a white woman—named Stevie Ryan, who’d been photographed with Drake Bell at the MTV Movie Awards, in June? Accepting the Oscar as Loca was Stevie Ryan’s tacit way of acknowledging the act while also congratulating herself on having legitimately achieved a kind of alternate-reality stardom. Smiley and Silent Girl wore black Little Loca T-shirts they’d bought on the Web from a total stranger.

Loca’s outing mirrored, in some ways, that of the season’s most famous Internet adolescent, LonelyGirl15, whose homespun, if sharply edited, tales of science projects, boy troubles, and religion captivated millions of YouTube viewers before she was exposed as the creation of filmmakers represented by the Creative Artists Agency on Wilshire Boulevard, instead of, say, a girl in her bedroom on some sleepy Midwestern Main Street. But whereas the people behind LonelyGirl15 were interested, from the outset, in exploring the possibilities of a “new art form,” as they called it, unfolding in two-minute episodes, Stevie Ryan came by her YouTube celebrity accidentally, while killing time between auditions and acting classes.

Ryan’s show-business career started when she landed a bit part in a Hilary Duff video (playing Marilyn Monroe) as a result of her first audition, while still living in Victorville. That was all the encouragement she needed, and before long she was dating Bell, whom she met in Huntington Beach. But steady work proved hard to come by, and her reel, after more than a year in L.A., was a typically mixed bag: another music gig (a Billy Idol video), a Japanese commercial, modelling for a fashion startup. She got a job working at a Levi’s store in Beverly Hills.

Six months ago, she borrowed Bell’s Sony Handycam and started making videos. They were mostly vintage-style silent films, with names like “Beyond the Sea . . .” and “Satin Doll,” which she edited, with no formal training, using Windows Movie Maker. She experimented with uploading a few of the films onto YouTube, and only then discovered the site’s ruthlessly populist ethos: what people seemed to like was not pretentious art films with obvious Hollywood aspirations but the confessional blogs of young girls in their bedrooms. Little Loca—a composite of the tough-talking, strong-willed cholas Ryan used to admire in Victorville—was born.

Within a few weeks, YouTube became a full-time pursuit for Ryan. “It’s basically all I do,” she told me. In addition to Loca, she began doing spoofs and impressions of established YouTube bloggers (a surefire way of getting attention), and kept up, sporadically, with the artsy silent films. The quest for stardom that had led her to Hollywood now pitted her against nonprofessionals in Toronto and Pittsburgh and Tasmania.

Three days after Little Loca’s Oscar speech, a seventy-nine-year-old widower named Peter turned on his Web-cam, in the English countryside, and announced, “I got addicted to YouTube. It’s a fascinating place to go to see all the wonderful videos that you young people have produced, so I thought I’d have a go at doing one myself.” (About half of all registered YouTube users are said to be under twenty.) He was wearing a beige V-neck sweater and glasses, and sat in front of nineteen-seventies-era wallpaper and a small painting of a motorcycle. “Oh, yes, and, incidentally, I really am as old as I look,” he said. “What I hope I’ll be able to do is just bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person who’s been there and done that.”

Peter called himself geriatric1927, after the year of his birth, and uploaded the video, which was two minutes long, under the title “First Try.” It had been viewed scarcely more than three hundred times when it came to the attention of a staffer at YouTube headquarters, in San Mateo, California, who showed it to Maryrose Dunton, YouTube’s director of product management. She is one of the people in charge of selecting videos to feature on the YouTube home page, which serves as an informal recommendation list. Of the seventy thousand videos added to the site every day, fewer than a dozen receive this special treatment. Dunton, who says she is “totally fascinated by old people and tech,” put Peter’s video at the top of the featured list. The YouTube audience, bombarded by frenetic, attention-seeking teens, immediately warmed to Peter’s reserve. By the following week, geriatric1927, who had begun narrating his life story, from primary school through the Blitz and on into health-department work in Leicestershire, without ever leaving his chair, had more subscribers than any other user in YouTube’s history. “First Try” has now been seen nearly two million times.

One hesitates to cite these statistics, because the story of YouTube, since its launch, ten months ago, has been one of exponential growth, at times challenging the company’s abilities to cope with the demand on its servers. (Bandwidth costs are thought to exceed a million dollars a month.) Last week, according to Alexa, a Web-traffic monitor, it was the tenth-biggest site on the Internet, drawing more visits than eBay, Amazon, or Wikipedia. By late summer, there were approximately six million videos archived on the site, and daily viewings had crossed the hundred-million mark, a great many of them devoted not to original content, such as Peter’s or Stevie Ryan’s, but to preëxisting footage in a wide range of genres: weird home movies (an old woman punching another old woman in the face), sports (Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt), music (Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”), and politics (Senator George Allen referring to a rival’s campaign worker as macaca; Bill Clinton attacking Fox News on Fox News).

YouTube was founded in February of 2005, in a Silicon Valley garage, by a couple of former PayPal employees, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Their background was technological, not visionary. They aimed to provide an easy interface for storing, sorting, and sharing the kinds of digital videos that, thanks to cell-phone cameras and Web-cams, have become more and more prevalent. When, in late August, I visited the YouTube offices, which sit above a pizza parlor on the main commercial strip in downtown San Mateo, several of the sixty or so employees had just finished watching clips of a dance number from the previous night’s Emmy Awards show, in which the host, Conan O’Brien, sang, “At this very moment your kids are on YouTube watching a cat on a toilet.” Julie Supan, YouTube’s senior director of marketing, handed me a copy of a recent People Hollywood Daily. Its cover read, “Television’s Brave New World: How the YouTube Revolution Is Changing Everything You Knew About the Industry.” She was unclear about what, specifically, the YouTube revolution is, however. “We don’t have time to stop and think a lot,” she said.

Hurley, the company’s C.E.O., told me that he wanted to “democratize the entertainment process,” but YouTube’s business model remains somewhat undefined. The found footage that generates the bulk of its traffic is, in many cases, subject to copyright restrictions, leaving YouTube vulnerable to lawsuits. (“The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue,” Mark Cuban, the co-founder of HDNet, said recently.) Networks like NBC and Fox have intervened to request that particular clips—“Lazy Sunday,” from “Saturday Night Live,” or Clinton’s Fox appearance—be taken down. (Fox later relented, possibly because of complaints of censorship; NBC has begun uploading promotional spots, if not actual footage.)

YouTube’s long-term strength seems to lie in the devoted community of users and bloggers (or “broadcasters,” as the company likes to call them), some of whom turn out to have crossover potential. Brooke Brodack, a skinny, gap-toothed, twenty-year-old receptionist from western Massachusetts, became, in effect, the first real YouTube star, when she was hired in June by Carson Daly to develop content for his production company on the basis of her defiantly madcap skits and lip-synching.

“They want to be seen, and we’re providing the largest audience for that,” Hurley said. “But I think the stars on the site don’t necessarily translate to television.” His plan is to develop a new advertising model that’s “not forced on the user.” Yet the site’s popularity stems from its openness—anyone can upload a video—which makes much of the content difficult to monitor and target ads for. Hurley has therefore begun experimenting with “branded channels,” and he pointed to the recently launched Paris Hilton channel as an example. In a joint arrangement with Warner Bros., Hilton’s record label, and Fox, which sponsored her channel to promote one of its new shows, her videos—Paris waving at fans in Tokyo, Paris having her hair done—received front-page placement, just like the featured spots. YouTube has also agreed to provide the Warner Music Group with “fingerprinting” technology that will help locate its copyrighted material on the site, which it will be free to authorize or remove as it chooses. Warner will upload its own music-video library, and will share the revenues from advertising targeted at its content.

Perhaps the best case for YouTube as a “democratizer” is Peter the geriatric. “What’s interesting to me is he doesn’t really have a different story,” Maryrose Dunton said. “He wasn’t famous. He’s just this average old guy, like, telling his story. That’s so endearing.”

But geriatric1927 was not, in an important sense, a truly democratic star. Like an aspiring model who is spotted in a drugstore by a hot-shot agent, he’d been plucked from the crowd and thrust directly into the spotlight. Ernie Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old guitar player in San Bernardino, may represent the ultimate realization—and corruption—of YouTube’s democratic ideal. Although on his user profile he bills himself as a “typical guy,” Rogers, who goes by the name lamo1234, has watched more than nine hundred thousand videos on YouTube since May. That averages out to approximately two hundred and fifty per hour, not allowing for sleep. What he watches, primarily, is his own guitar solos (or the first few seconds of them), over and over, to boost his view counts to levels that will make others take notice. His strategy seems to have been successful: one of his solos, a medley of Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and Beethoven licks, has been viewed two hundred thousand times—and only sixty thousand of those viewings were by him. Unfortunately, this strategy leaves little time for actually playing music. “Next year, the No. 1 spot on YouTube is going to be me, every day,” he told me. “I just need to make my band.”