Stevie Ryan

Stevie Ryan recently received her first Oscar, only eighteen months after moving to Los Angeles to become a movie star. She grew up in California’s high desert, in a town along the road to Las Vegas called Victorville. Her parents worked at calibrating truck scales for weigh stations on the interstate - a family business going back two generations on her mother’s side. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ryan harbored escape fantasies involving the Hollywood of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations - Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow - but she never participated in high-school theatrical productions. She did attend her high-school prom dressed as Marilyn Monroe, down to the elbow-length gloves. (Her date wore a Mohawk and muttonchops.) After a brief stint in community college, she concluded that she was “too right-brain for school,” and followed her older brother to Huntington Beach - anything to get out of Victorville. Then she decided to move to L.A. and to see what happens.

The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously - not in March, at the Academy Awards - but in August during a three and a half minutes sketch that Ryan was filming while she was acting as Little Loca, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A.. This was about the fortieth in a series of short homemade video sketches that Ryan uploaded onto the video-sharing site YouTube and had by then attracted over a million viewings.

“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.”

In fact, YouTube helped Ryan to real fame. Over the previous three months, Loca’s fans, many of them Hispanic, had warmed to her story: spunky ghetto kid with an overprotective older brother, a 4.0 grade-point average, and her innocence proudly intact. (That gang sign that she seemed to flash at the end of each video was really a sideways V, for virgin.). During a recent trip to San Francisco, she had been accosted by a group of teens at a mall, wanting to know if she was “Little Loca from YouTube”. She also was now being represented by a Hollywood agency. “Seriously, if you Googled me, like, a couple months ago, you wouldn’t get crap,” she said, typing her name into the search engine. “I’m just a normal person. And now you actually get stuff. It’s, like, crazy. That’s more than I could ever ask for, just to be on Google.” The search led to a fan site for various celebrities; Stevie Ryan’s name and head shot were featured alongside Tom Cruise, Rachel McAdams, and Johnny Depp.

Ryan's show-business career begun six months ago when she started making videos with a Sony Handycam. They were mostly vintage-style silent films which she edited, with no formal training, using Windows Movie Maker. She experimented with uploading a few of the films onto YouTube, and only then discovered the site’s ruthlessly populist ethos: what people seemed to like was not pretentious art films with obvious Hollywood aspirations but the confessional blogs of usual people. Little Loca - a composite of the tough-talking, strong-willed kind of girls Ryan used to admire during her youth - was born.

Within a few weeks, YouTube became a full-time pursuit for Ryan. “It’s basically all I do,” she says. Ryan prefers to shoot Little Loca videos straight through, without editing, to create the genuine feel of a video blog.

The quest for stardom that had led her to Hollywood now pitted her against nonprofessionals in Toronto and Pittsburgh and Tasmania. Similarly as in Hollywood's real show-business, competition on YouTube is hard. “Four months ago, when I was first on YouTube, it was not where it’s at right now,” she says. “I think Little Loca was, like, No. 5 most-subscribed, and now, like, I’m No. 15 - because why? There’s all these other people they’re featuring on there. And it’s, like, bullshit.”

According to YouTube's CEO Chad Hurley, the company wants to democratize the entertainment process. "People want to be seen, and we're providing the largest audience for that" Hurley says. An exemplary case for YouTube as a "democratizer" is Peter the geriatric. Peter, a seventy-nine-year-old widower turned up his webcam and announced: "I got addicted to YouTube". He uploaded the video under the title "First Try" and it has now been seen nearly two million times. However, Peter was not a truly democratic star. Like an aspiring model who is spotted in a drugstore by a hot-shot agent, he had been plucked from the crowd and thrust directly into the spotlight. In contrast, Ernie Rogers, may represent the ultimate realization (and corruption) of YouTube's democratic ideal. Rogers is a twenty-three-year-old guitar player. Although on his user profile he bills himself as a "typical guy", Rogers has watched more than nine hundred thousand videos on YouTube since May. That averages approximately two hundred and fifty per hour, not allowing for sleep. What he watches, primarily, is his own guitar solos (or the first few seconds of them) over and over, to boost his view counts to levels that will make others take notice. His strategy seems to have been successful: One of his solos has been viewed two hundred thousand times - and only sixty thousand of those viewings were by him.

Despite of various career opportunities through YouTube, Ryan fears that YouTube was screwing her over. She believes that YouTube artificially suppress her page views and do not "feature” her the way they had featured Peter the geriatric. “O.K., seriously? They do not like me on here,” she said. “They hate my guts. I’ve never been featured, so I don’t watch the featured videos now. I’m really angry at YouTube. I don’t care what anybody says, they’re doing it on purpose. I have written probably like, I don’t know, a million letters."

A few weeks later, Ryan posted a new Little Loca installment. Less than forty-eight hours after Ryan uploaded the video, it was removed from the site, further fuelling Ryan’s suspicions. “They removed my video because YouTube always removes my videos”.

The real reason for her video’s removal had nothing to do with any personal antipathy toward her among the YouTube staffers. YouTube had received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from a third party. Apparently, Ryan’s mistake had been to edit her sketch too ambitiously, post-dubbing the Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack that was distinct from the video recording, and therefore digitally traceable. Had she merely played the song on her stereo while shooting the scene on the sofa, there would have been no way for anyone to detect it, short of watching every video on the site.

Shortened version from "The New Yorker: it should happen to you" (2006), partially edited