Lonelygirl? Not any longer
By Richard Rushfield
Times Staff Writer
September 16, 2006
For the last few months, Jessica Rose only dared leave her house in a huge floppy hat and sunglasses, "pretending I'm Madonna," she said. She was afraid she'd be recognized, her real identity revealed and the lonelygirl15 Web-mystery project ruined.
Fans of the YouTube phenomenon finally did track down the identity of the New Zealand-raised actress, after the project's creators confessed that the story told through brief video blog postings was fictional, not the real-life confessions of "Bree," a sheltered home-schooled girl who is possibly in some kind of danger.
It remains to be seen whether fans will stick around now that they know it's fictional — a "new art form," as the creators called it. But in the meantime, on Day 1 of her public life as an actress, the 19-year-old Rose was put through an immersion course in being a traditional celebrity.
Thursday morning, she found herself on the fifth floor of a Sunset Boulevard high-rise, doing nine back-to-back TV interviews in the offices of Revver, the Internet company that now hosts the lonelygirl videos. Then she headed next door to CNN. Then it was on to "The Tonight Show," where she "confessed" her real identity to Jay Leno and then danced with Tucker Carlson. Later came a meeting at Hollywood's powerful Creative Artists Agency.
At 7:30 a.m., the sun was just peeking through the dense haze outside. In glass-walled offices across the Revver suite, crews from the morning news shows scrambled to set up their cameras and lights. In a small office apart from the hubbub, the lonelygirl creators, Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried, huddled around a computer poring through the e-mail arriving by the second from fans.
The night before, they had posted a new video, in which Bree sneaks out to attend a party with her friend Daniel. Already, they have received more than a thousand comments on the new piece, including a handful that insist the recent revelations are themselves a hoax and that lonelygirl is in fact real.
Next door, in a large corner office, Jessica and her costar, Yousef Abu-Taleb, sprawled on a canvas-draped table while a photographer snapped away.
She may not be a shy home-schooled girl, but as the petite Rose waited for instructions in a purple top, jeans and black leather shoes with 2-inch heels, she seemed almost too small and fragile a figure to have provoked such a frenzy.
Emerging from the shoot, she admitted to a case of nerves. "I'm really overwhelmed," Rose said. "It's all wonderful, but I'm just not used to this much attention."
For the previous 48 hours, every friend she ever had back in New Zealand, where, Rose said, "they don't have MySpace, AIM or YouTube," had called, asking, "What is this thing you're in?" Rose was forced to tell them all, "It's really hard to explain. Can I talk to you in a few days?"
Having slept all of an hour before facing the first press interviews of her life, Rose confessed to pangs of fear. "You know all these images of reporters, like really vicious. I'm just praying, don't be mean to me. I'm not even rich!"
Just before 8 a.m., a publicist appeared to march Rose down the hall for her first media interview, a phone call with the Associated Press. Placed in an ergonomic executive chair behind a wide desk, Rose responded politely to each question, battling her nervousness and an abundance of what she calls "goofy energy" by hugging her arms tight to her sides, moving her feet in telltale little circles and dances. A nervous giggle punctuated most of her sentences.
Telling her tale for the first of many times that day, Rose explained how after answering an ambiguous casting call posted on Craigs List, she almost turned down the role when it was explained to her she had won the lead in a series of Internet videos. "I'm not very good at hiding my disappointment. So I was like, oh, OK … the Internet," she said.
She revealed that she has a boyfriend with whom she lives, that her favorite actress is Nicole Kidman and that she would love to play "funny, goofy roles" like Cameron Diaz does.
In her first TV interview, with local Fox News, she once again told the story of her disappointment on learning the nature of the part, this time adding that her acting teacher told her, "You don't have a career! What do you have to lose!"
After the interview, the camera crew herded Rose, Abu-Taleb and the creators over to the coffee table, instructing them to act naturally while "we shoot some B-roll" of incidental shots to splice into the report. They glanced at each other in exhausted silence. Finally someone broke in with "I have no idea what to say."
By the time Rose sat down with MTV about 10 a.m., with filmmaker Mesh Flinders at her side, she was positively at ease. When the camera paused for a moment, the pair wrapped their arms around each other for a quick "can you believe we're here" hug. Camera rolling, the reporter posed a question, "So how is your life different than it was —" "Three days ago?" Jessica broke in. They all shared a laugh.
The group paraded down the street to the offices of CNN, where they were interviewed for a segment to be aired on "Paula Zahn Live."
Asked how she feels about going forward on the project and with her career, Rose admitted to some nervousness: "Now that people know it's not real, I'll really be judged on my acting." She's been getting a lot of advice, she said, on what turn to take now. "Some people are saying you need a huge agent. Some people are saying you don't want to be a little fish in a big pond." She took a deep breath.
"I don't want somebody else to do all the work for me," she said. "I'm used to being in control of my career and my life. I don't want to give that all up." Her biggest worry, she said, "is that people won't see that I can do other things, that I can play more than just Bree."
The Lessons of 'Lonelygirl': We Can Be Fooled, And We Probably Don't Care
By Frank Ahrens
Sunday, September 17, 2006; F07
Three months and millions of page views after lonelygirl15's debut, the most recent Internet phenomenon turned into a detective story and came to a conclusion last week.
A teenage girl calling herself Bree posted her first video blog (vlog) on YouTube over the summer. She said she was 16 years old, was home-schooled and liked all sorts of geeky stuff. Which, because she is attractive, instantly got her tons of male fans. Her first video, all 1 minute, 35 seconds of it, has been viewed more than 350,000 times. Bree's "channel" -- her collection of films -- is the most-subscribed-to in the history of YouTube.
In subsequent weeks, Bree posted 29 more vlogs, mainly of her talking to a webcam in what appeared to be her bedroom, mainly about her life. A few times, she went on location, such as to a swimming hole with her friend Daniel. There were narrative strings -- she told YouTubers in successive videos that she'd been invited to a party, her father had said no, and she'd gone anyway and then had been punished for it. She hinted at occultist rituals and other spooky stuff, a strange counterpoint to her fresh-scrubbed appearance.
Nobody self-polices like the wiki world of the Internet. Something about Bree and the whole lonelygirl15 shtick smelled fishy to some Web sleuths. They baited a sting and lured her via e-mail to a MySpace page that had tracking software installed. It traced the origin of lonelygirl15's e-mail to Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood talent powerhouse once run by Michael Ovitz. This led the sleuths to suspect -- and post on the Internet -- that lonelygirl15 was not a real lonely girl in a bedroom but actually a marketing device.
It turned out, they're sort of right.
Recent reports revealed that lonleygirl15 is Jessica Rose, 19, an accent-hiding actress from New Zealand living in Los Angeles. The YouTube vlogs -- which seemed of suspiciously high quality -- were created by filmmakers Ramesh Flinders and Miles Beckett. In the aftermath of the exposure, Flinders and Beckett said that they never intended to portray Bree as a real person and that the films are not a promotional gimmick for a Hollywood studio. However, the filmmakers are now represented by CAA and say they will continue to make the vlogs.
The lonelygirl15 arc was predicted by cyberpunk author William Gibson in his excellent 2003 novel, "Pattern Recognition." The plot centers on mysterious bits of video posted anonymously on the Internet. The shadowy black-and-white videos, called "the footage," appear to feature a pair of lovers and hint deliciously at a larger, magnetically compelling story. The footage inspires a cultish following on the Web, including chat rooms, parodies and investigations -- just like those created around lonelygirl15 -- and the novel's hero is dispatched by an advertising wizard to track down the filmmakers so the phenomenon can be monetized.
The case of lonelygirl15 tells us a few things.
Chiefly, people hunger for stories. Unlike Emmalina, a summer YouTube phenom who had tons of fans but no point, Bree's vlogs have a story. What will happen to Bree? Will she get to the party?
Also, the power to create popular content is shifting from the entertainment industry to anybody with a digital camera, high-speed Internet and a story idea. The tools have been around for years, but the establishment still held the hole card: distribution, in the form of movie theaters, television networks and Wal-Marts.
In theory, the Internet should have bypassed traditional distribution, enabling content creators to get their product directly to viewers. But it didn't. Instead, the Web created a massive, churning ocean of content with no easy way to find things you'd like to see.
Sites such as YouTube provide what was missing: a menu and an infrastructure where users can vote the best content to the top.
Finally, the Bree vlogs powerfully illustrate the Internet's infuriating, entrancing ability to warp reality. And to question whether we even care, as long as it puts on a good show.
As a coda to this whole episode, I look forward to the time when the Internet throws up a phenomenon that is not an attractive young woman behaving in a semi-provocative manner. Up until then, the popularity of every lonelygirl15 will only remind us of the Internet's dark underside. Proof enough comes from Emmalina, who pulled her videos from YouTube last month after someone hacked her computer.
