Voice-over work in Indiana wasn't too lucrative, so Daniel Geduld made a classic actor's move: He headed for Los Angeles. And like most Hollywood dreamers, Geduld did not get hired for much.
So Geduld combined his creative talents with his abundance of free time. He took footage from the 1980s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoons, re-edited it and redubbed it to make the evil Skeletor and his cronies into a bumbling gang of losers. Geduld added incongruously peppy jazz by Django Reinhardt, called his farce The Skeletor Show and posted episodes on Google Inc's YouTube.
Geduld added his e-mail address to the credits, along with this line: "Please give me a job. I'm talented."
Actually, that was a joke. Geduld did not think much could come of it.
But he was underestimating how much the Internet has broadened the ways people get discovered today, often for jobs in the entertainment industry that didn't exist until a few years ago.
Enough people liked The Skeletor Show that it got mentioned on some popular blogs. Before long, several Web sites were paying Geduld to do similar comedic "mash-ups" for them. Video portal Heavy.com hired Geduld to be a voice for its new horror channel.
When he got the first e-mail inquiring about his services, Geduld, 30, was shocked.
"Oh my God, this actually worked!" he thought.
The first few gigs paid only around US$500. But now he's making "enough to support myself," and offers keep coming. A tech company asked if he'd do promotional material. He got invited to a sci-fi convention.
"It just gets better and better," Geduld says. "I'm thinking of getting an agent."
One of Hollywood's animating legends is the story of the ingenue who got discovered by a studio honcho while she sipped a soda in a drugstore. The myth spoke to the lightning-strike luck that making it big generally took in a system controlled by a few big studios.
Now, the Web has blown things open. It is easier than ever to get discovered. Web sites trying to develop into entertainment hubs are hungry for people to write, shoot or star in new content, so its representatives scan for talent in the piles of homemade videos on MySpace, YouTube, Revver and personal blogs.
It's certainly no secret that the Web can launch new faces. The medium already has its tales of regular Janes who made it big, like Lisa Donovan, who leaped from YouTube to the cast of Fox's MadTV, and Brooke Brodack, a Net video character signed to a TV production deal by Carson Daly. This is the vision that drove the creators of YouTube's LonelyGirl15 faux-reality videos.
But the lesser-known story is of non-stars like Geduld, riding the Web's radical openness to find new kinds of online entertainment work.
Often these online jobs are with sites that may be a step above the user-generated schlock of YouTube, but still are sorting out the economics of attracting advertising. As a result, discovery sometimes comes with modest trappings. And it often extends to people who wouldn't have made it through Hollywood's old-school gatekeepers -- or even tried.
Consider the experience of Jessica Hagy, a 29-year-old freelance advertising copywriter in Ohio.
Last fall she started a blog that commented on the world through clever diagrams. (You have to see it to get it -- check out indexed.blogspot.com) After brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis encountered the blog in LA, they e-mailed Hagy and eventually asked her to produce diagrams for content debuting this fall on their growing comedy site, JibJab.com. There aren't big bucks involved, maybe a few thousand, depending on how much advertising the segments attract.
"It just seems to be the new modus operandi for creative people," says Hagy, who has yet to meet the Spiridellis brothers in person. "There are so many more people out there than you could find before. ... I was just a random kid in Columbus, Ohio. How was I supposed to find anybody under the old way?"
This is not to say everyone who airs dumb stunts or lip-synchs on YouTube has a chance of landing real work. Representatives of professionally produced content sites who pore through user-generated videos see more rough than diamonds. When there are decent finds, competition can be intense.
Jason Marks, a former MTV executive who oversees programming and development for Heavy.com, swears this story is true, and that similar things happen several times a month:
A while back he came across a YouTube video of some young guys "in their dorm room, flicking boogers on their wall." Marks was only mildly amused, but he sensed there might be something in these kids, so he figured he'd scope them out. Marks says he left a message for them -- and got his call returned by someone in a very prominent talent agency.
"They refer us to their agent!" Marks says. "I'm not even kidding, man."
In many ways, today's talent search is a reprise of the height of the dot-com boom. Then, sites such as AntEye, Icebox, Mediatrip and Z.com cast themselves as "incubators" and served as scouts for film studios and television networks, essentially producing low-cost pilots and hoping for a hit.
That model has resurfaced. Last year, UTA, one of Hollywood's biggest talent agencies, launched an online division to scout for people who could be in videos for ad agencies, Web sites and traditional media outlets. While most agencies refuse unsolicited work, UTA encourages online submissions.
But Steven Starr, a former talent agent who heads the Web video site Revver, says what he sees emerging is "a creator economy online" whereby the Internet will carve out its own slice of the action, rather than just serving as a development league for TV and film.
"That will start to make it possible for any creator to develop income and careers online and not just be fodder for large media enterprises that are looking to move them off onto other platforms," Starr says.
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