LonelyGirl15 is no mystery, just a YouTube formula

CHICAGO—There’s a formula for YouTube “stardom”: video camera, bedroom, cute young woman, confessional style.

Even ahead of this week’s It Girl, “LonelyGirl15,” there was “Brookers,” from western Massachusetts. She employed this formula to earn a development deal with a Hollywood production company, an outfit that will, presumably, want something more from her than the bedroom effusions that satisfied YouTubers.

“Emmalina,” from Tasmania—whose bedroom video blogs covered dancing, yoga and her guinea pigs—was huge on YouTube. She recently took all her content down after someone apparently hacked into her computer and grabbed and disseminated private data, a demonstration of the dangers of becoming too attractive to people who spend a lot of time around computers.

There are others too. Why go through the bother of auditioning for a reality TV show, when you can toss on a tank top, turn on the camcorder and throw yourself up on the Internet according to your own rules? If you’re really successful, you’ll have a viewership that rivals basic-cable audience figures, at least, and only you can kick you off the island.

Plus, you’ll have the pleasure of confounding mainstream critics like me, who look at these videos and wonder if the lure of the amateur is stronger than that of having a virtual girlfriend and, in either case, ask, why?

We may be, as the creators of LonelyGirl15 said in a statement, witnessing a “new art form’s” birth, the video chopped up and presented in three-minute chapters, doled out to the public in little pieces like a contemporary Dickens novel. But never mind that the level of storytelling doesn’t reach Dickens in Cliffs Notes; if it depends on cheap flirtation, with the audience itself and with the line between truth and fiction, it seems destined to remain closer to stunt than to art.

No “YouTube” story has been more indicative of the power and perils of this format than that of LonelyGirl15, who was transformed this week by some nifty detective work this week from a mystery Web girl into just another L.A. actress trying to get noticed, the accomplice of just another L.A. filmmaking team trying to get noticed.

LonelyGirl, aka a.k.a. “Bree,” presented herself as a home-schooled California high schooler with strict, religious parents. If only, it was left to the imagination of computer geeks the world over, a sensitive boy could take her away from all of that.

Given that a photo of Satanist Aleister Crowley also occupied her bedroom, some were led to think she was more complicated than she first appeared. Some speculated she may have been promoting a movie in the vein of “Blair Witch Project,” especially after an E-mail from her was traced to Hollywood’s giant dealmaker Creative Artists Agency.

Others, noting the quality of lighting and editing, the careful avoidance of mainstream (copyrighted) music and the fact that her Web site had been registered before the first video went up, figured she was some kind of hoaxer. They even observed that, when she yawned, she had wisdom teeth, unusual for a 16-year-old. All of this sparked vigorous debates on YouTube, in the comments space beneath each new video, and at the inevitable fan and detractor sites.

LonelyGirl was an enigma wrapped in a mystery disseminated via e-mail, hyperlinks and RSS (a format that sends news to websites Web sites) feeds. Yet her story, which few of the hundreds of thousands who made her “channel” a YouTube top 10 destination seemed to notice, was kind of a bore, as it had been with Brookers and Emmalina before her: a little bit of teenage ennui and rebellion, a lot of charm and intimacy, real or fabricated, and, always, the gentle suggestion of sex.

This week, however, the enigma code was broken, and LonelyGirl was revealed to be Jessica Rose, a New Zealand native living in the Los Angeles area, probably in her late teens. She was outed in a cascading series of revelations, beginning with a publicly posted note from “The Creators” of LonelyGirl admitting it wasn’t real and claiming they’d invented a “new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story, a story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the Internet.”

The discovery of the actress Monday had to do with a blogger’s son, Google’s stored copies of old MySpace pages and the contemporary truth that a person seeking a public career leaves public traces.

Matt Foremski, 18-year-old son of Silicon Valley Watcher blogger Tom, is no hacker. “I have mediocre computer skills,” he says. “I just kind of stumbled upon links, and I just followed it through a Byzantine conduit.” Yes, he said “Byzantine conduit.”

More specifically, he says he was something of a LonelyGirl fan, even going so far as to register the domain name LG15.com. Reading the gossip blog TMZ’s comment on the LonelyGirl saga over the weekend, he saw one of the commenters had posted the following: “wow i cant believe tmz would put this on the front page, thats PUKE!.. i think ive seen this chick before on myspace through a friend heres her link…although its set on private.”

Foremski clicked on it and, indeed, it was set to private, meaning non-“friends” could not view it. But there was a name, “Jess Rose,” and a picture, not of her, but of a dog. Her MySpace user name, “jeessss426,” was there, too. Foremski looked that up on Google, clicked on “Cached results,” and found one of Google’s copies of the page when it was public, before the LonelyGirl story started four months ago.

From there he plugged in her name and hometown, Mt. Maunganui, Maunaugui, New Zealand, and did a Google image search. That one, again, turned up some old evidence, publicity stills or modeling shots that made it pretty clear “Bree’s” name was Jessica Rose.

“I believe fervently that nobody can hide on the Internet,” said Matt Foremski.

“To me this is a peek into the future,” said his dad, a former Financial Times reporter. “There’s going to be these kind of minor explosions of information that we don’t know if it’s real or not. . . . On the one hand, it’s a good thing if it gets people to question their media. On the other hand, everything’s going to be questioned.”

As for the aspiring filmmakers, revealed Wednesday as Ramesh Flinders, Miles Beckett, and Greg Goodfried, they wrote in their creators’ note, “We hope that you will join us in the continuing story of Lonelygirl15, and help us usher in an era of interactive storytelling where the line between `fan’ and `star’ has been removed.”

But most of the fans, it seems, weren’t buying the removal of the line between probably-fictional-pretending-to-be-real and definitely-fictional. The LonelyGirl discussion areas were full of the kind of anger that people display when, for instance, they learn that a girlfriend is not who she pretended to be.

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