The era of 'You' stardom

Hollywood always has been full of Cinderella stories, so it wasn't exactly a shock to see Jennifer Hudson go from singing on a Disney cruise ship to showing up in a Vera Wang dress at the Golden Globes recently, where she took home a best supporting actress trophy.

And now she has an Oscar nomination, quite a turnaround for someone who was ignominiously booted off American Idol, with Simon Cowell telling her she was "out of her league''.

If Hudson goes on to win a best supporting actress Oscar, it will be another landmark moment in the breakdown between America's pop culture's major and minor leagues.

If anything bridges the chasm between amateur and professional, between crass and class, it would be a performer bouncing from the raucous populism of American Idol to the solemn elitism of the Academy Awards.

Seen through the prism of what's happening on the internet, American Idol is a classic example of user-generated content, being at its heart an event propelled by nonprofessional talent and a rabidly involved audience that has more of the shared community feeling of a web phenomenon than a TV show.

Whether it's Hudson, lonelygirl15 or Jade Goody, the foul-mouthed ex-nurse who, thanks to her antics on Celebrity Big Brother, is just as celebrated in England as Posh Spice, celebrity has been rudely down-marketed and democratised.

As Aaron Sorkin so eloquently put it the other day, complaining about the blogger influence on media coverage of his Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip TV drama: "We live in the age of amateurs.''

Sorkin may spend much of his show exploring the conflict between artistes such as himself and soulless media conglomerates, but in the new era of You Stardom, Sorkin and GE are in the same leaky boat.

Just as the music industry saw its business crumble as children began sharing songs from unauthorised downloading services, media behemoths are scrambling to protect their content as it migrates to YouTube.com and other fan-driven video sites.

Internet project

"Ultimately these big media companies are all wrestling with the same thing - the power is being taken out of their hands,'' says Jordan Levin, the one-time WB network chief who helps run Generate, a production and management company active in internet projects.

"This is an industry that for its entire history has imposed its model on consumers. They've always said, 'We'll tell you when you'll watch our TV show or see our movie.' But that's fundamentally changing. The whole structure of people who control content is being supplanted by the content users themselves.''

For web junkies like me, YouTube is a TV network unto itself. If I missed Bill O'Reilly's visit to The Colbert Report, I can watch it on YouTube. No one limits my choices.

YouTube's content is shaped by enthusiasts, not a network programmer who thinks a clip would be a lot more relatable to women older than 30 if only it had a likable next-door neighbour in it.

If you're running an old-school media company, it doesn't take a weatherman to see where the wind's blowing. In England recently, an unsigned band scored a Top 40 hit for the first time, all of its sales from digital downloads, mostly to children using mobile phones.

"We've got to get the creativity to stand up against user-created content, because that's what people are watching at my house,'' MGM chief Harry Sloan told Variety last autumn.

Describing his 17-year-old son's viewing habits, Sloan said that while the TV was on behind him, "he's got two screens in front of him, one connected to friends and the other to play World of Warcraft''.

The day isn't far away when some studio executive, instead of buying a bestseller, will acquire the rights to a Web thriller that's become a lonelygirl-style phenomenon.

"The problem for us will be that people are going to create a movie character on the Web and they'll own the content - we'll end up just renting it,'' Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal says.

"We'll buy the movie rights, but they'll own everything else. We haven't bought anything from YouTube yet, but it's going to happen. Trust me, when 'lonelygirl' was happening, everyone was asking, 'Is that a movie?'"

Media companies aren't willing to sit back and watch their content - and, more important, the advertising their content attracts - migrate to internet rivals.

One of the worst-guarded secrets in recent months involves the efforts of News Corp and NBC Universal to create a web site to distribute TV clips as a way of attracting the advertising that is going to YouTube and other sources.

Networks

In the past, networks have tried to squash YouTube's access to their clips. Before the relaunch of the Viacom-owned iFilm site last autumn, lawyers had YouTube take down thousands of clips from popular Viacom-owned Comedy Central shows, hoping to steer fans to iFilm or Comedy Central's site.

Yet the morning after O'Reilly visited The Colbert Report, YouTube was full of clips of the appearance.

At a site like iFilm, the hope is to attract viewers by offering a more streamlined experience than YouTube, which is often a chaotic jumble of clips.

"We're betting that people do want a guide to help show them what's cool,'' iTunes chief executive Blair Harrison says. "But we want to allow our community to do that, so that it's indistinguishable whether the content that's elevated on our site is from our staff or our active audience members.''

But will this audience want a new kind of entertainment? Will the art created on the web have a different aesthetic than the kind of storytelling forms we watch on TV and film? Internet enthusiasts think so.

United Talent Agency digital media chief Brent Weinstein, who heads UTA's groundbreaking unit devoted to scouting online talent, is convinced that the Web's interactivity will usher in a new kind of shared creativity.

One of UTA's discoveries is a filmmaking collective called Big Fantastic that recently produced 80 episodes of a Web murder mystery called Sam Has 7 Friends.

Designed as a video podcast that ran in 90-second daily instalments last autumn, it had an irresistible hook: "Samantha Breslow had seven friends. On December 15, one of them killed her.''

In keeping with the ethos of the web, the story is slyly voyeuristic, exploiting our inexhaustible fascination with other people's lives. We are cast as eavesdroppers in Breslow's life, seeing her avoid her ex-boyfriend and quarrel with her agent - her character, of course, being an actress.

The five members of Big Fantastic all have Hollywood day jobs, but they clearly believe in a Web-fuelled form of storytelling. "Short and sweet is the way to go,'' says Chris Hampel, who worked as Michael Mann's assistant on Collateral and Miami Vice.

Because their story unfolded on the web, they received instant feedback from message boards.

No one has yet stepped up to fund a new batch of shows, but the show's buzz earned the group meetings with various young studio executives.

"We think this is the year people start jumping in the pool,'' Hampel says. "But at most of our meetings, people said, 'Come back and see us in a year. I get it, but my boss doesn't.'"

Hampel and his buddies shouldn't worry. In Hollywood, big changes are afoot. And the bosses are always the last to know.