The Secret World of Lonelygirl 

How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers took on TV. A Wired exclusive.

By Joshua Davis«  back Page 4 of 4 

The proof was in the numbers. Videos after the outing benefited from the publicity surge and pushed a few of Lonelygirl15's clips close to the million-viewer mark. Emails flooded in – Amanda now responds to roughly 500 a day. The show has a reliable viewership of 300,000 per video, and the team posts two, sometimes more, each week. Lonelygirl15.com, the site Beckett and Flinders maintain as the center of Bree's universe, generates about $10,000 a month in ad revenue by attaching commercials to the end of the videos they stream. (Most viewers still see the clips ad-free on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.) It's enough to keep the operation afloat until they can find a way to take serialized online entertainment to the next level.

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SO FAR, HOLLYWOOD HAS NOT EXACTLY EMBRACED Beckett and Flinders. With CAA's help, they landed meetings with studios and TV networks. But their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, Goodfried says, an "exercise in futility." Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network's Web site had great supplemental video material for the season's upcoming shows.

Beckett is clearly frustrated. "The Web isn't just a support system for hit TV shows," he says. "It's a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring."

What's needed, he says, is content that's built specifically for the Web. It doesn't need to be lit like a film – that would make it feel less real. The camera work should be simple. There shouldn't be a disembodied third-person camera – a character is always filming the action. Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. "You wouldn't show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?" Beckett says. "You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That's the lesson of Lonelygirl15."

This Web series not only looks different, it's made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree's universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can't write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.

It's a concept that the Internet portals understand better. "Yahoo says it wants to be the network of the 21st century," Beckett says. "And we're the production company of the 21st century." Still, an early sticking point in the search for online investors was exclusivity – each portal wanted the series to stream on its site only. Beckett and Flinders balked. It was anathema to the whole concept of the Web. If it couldn't be shared – if hard borders were put around it – how different was it from TV? If this was going to be the first successful Internet TV show, they felt it needed to embrace the medium. As a result, they still don't have a deal.

ROSE IS DANCING AROUND THE BEDROOM, waltzing with Purple Monkey and singing into the floor lamp like Elvis. Beckett and Flinders are crammed in a corner, cracking up, while the webcam on the desk captures her clowning. They don't have a big TV deal, or even a big Internet deal, but they're convinced that what they're doing is important anyway.

And they're still here, in Flinders' bedroom. Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: "It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom." 

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