[Infowarrior] - Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn ¹ t

[Richard Forno]

September 13, 2006
Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn¹t
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN and TOM ZELLER Jr.

A nearly four-month-old Internet drama in which the cryptic video musings of
a fresh-faced teenager became the obsession of millions of devotees ‹
themselves divided over the very authenticity of the videos, or who was
behind them or why ‹ appears to be in its final act.

The woman who plays Lonelygirl15 on the video-sharing site YouTube.com has
been identified as Jessica Rose, a 20-ish resident of New Zealand and Los
Angeles and a graduate of the New York Film Academy. And the whole project
appears to be the early serialized version of what eventually will become a
movie.

Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog
Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of
the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the
videos. The episodes suggested Bree was the home-schooled daughter of
strictly religious parents who improbably stole time to upload video blogs
of her innermost thoughts.

The discovery and the swift and subsequent revelation of other details
surrounding the perpetrators of the videos and the fake fan site that
accompanied it are bringing to an end one of the Internet¹s more elaborately
constructed mysteries. The fans¹ disbelief in Lonelygirl15 was not willingly
suspended, but rather teased and toyed with. Whether they will embrace the
project as a new narrative form, condemn it or simply walk away remains to
be seen.

The masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a
screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a
doctor turned filmmaker. The high quality of the videos caused many users to
suspect a script and production crew, but Bree¹s bedroom scenes were shot in
Mr. Flinders¹s home, in his actual bedroom, typically using nothing more
than a Logitech QuickCam, a Web camera that retails for about $150.

Together with Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer in San Francisco, Mr.
Flinders contrived to produce and distribute the videos to pique maximum
curiosity about them.

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