http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... &cset=true
Lonelygirl15: The Creators Revealed
The aspiring filmmakers behind the YouTube sensation reveal the truth about "Bree" and "Daniel."
By Richard Rushfield and Claire Hoffman, Times Staff Writers
7:05 PM PDT, September 12, 2006
It turns out the people behind the wildly popular website lonelygirl15 are not studio executives, Internet moguls or, as some suspected, Satanists. Instead, they are aspiring filmmakers who met at a mutual friend's birthday party in April: Miles Beckett, 28, a Web-obsessed medical school dropout, Mesh Flinders, 26, a screenwriter, and Greg Goodfried, a 27-year-old lawyer.
The lonelygirl15 story unfolded in a series of confessional video blogs, supposedly made by a home-schooled girl named "Bree," Since June, viewers have questioned whether "Bree" and her friend "Daniel," who also appeared in the videos, were for real or part of some larger project or promotional scheme. An ominous hint of a satanic plotline to come suggested a horror film in the making.
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In their first press interview, the three said they are amazed by the reaction they have gotten, with audiences in the hundreds of thousands for each episode of their story, which was posted on websites such as YouTube.
"We did this with zero resources. Anybody could do what we did," Flinders said Tuesday. The sum total of the equipment they used to create a sensation on the Internet, as well as perhaps the Web's biggest homegrown mystery: "Two desk lamps, one broken, an open window and a $130 camera."
Goodfried said the CAA connection came about a month ago -- well into the lonelygirl15 story -- through a friend who works at the agency. "We get in there one afternoon. I walked around the place, and met some cool young guys that got the idea and said they would help us," he said.
A CAA spokesman said Tuesday that the filmmakers are now agency clients.
The lonelygirl15 story began early this year, when Beckett hatched the idea of creating a mystery story online, one that could roll out small mock-confessional bites in real time.
"Our goal was to tell a very realistic fictional story in this medium," Beckett said. He dreamed of using the various technologies of the Web, from comment boards to social networking sites, to both build a rich identity for a character and to let fans influence the story's direction.
In April, at a karaoke-bar birthday party, Beckett met Flinders, who had been struggling in Hollywood as an assistant and maker of short films. Flinders' recent screenwriting efforts had been focused on a recurring character, a shy but precocious teenage girl. "It was like I had found my creative mate," Flinders said. "We spent the entire night talking about the idea, the next day we talked on the phone, and the day after that." The pair then joined forces with Goodfried, who supplied the know-how to make the shoot happen.
Through a casting director friend, they quickly met with potential actors, using a borrowed room at the offices of Film Independent to shoot the auditions.
The filmmakers declined to identify the actress who played Bree. However, in the past day, various websites have identified her as Jessica Rose, a 19-year-old New Zealand native who is in Los Angeles to attend acting school. Rose could not be reached for comment.
The videos were shot on a shoestring at the bedroom of a home "in the Greater Los Angeles area," said Goodfried. Contrary to Internet speculation that the videos were all shot at once and rolled out in drips and drabs, the team revealed that each installment was filmed only after the previous one had been posted. The intent was to allow fan response posted in the comment section of lonelygirl15's YouTube and MySpace pages to determine the direction of each subsequent episode.
As an example of fans' influence over the story line, what the team calls "collaborative storytelling," they point to an episode in which Daniel reveals his romantic feelings to Bree. According to Beckett, "In the 'Hiking' video, where Daniel filmed her, there were a ton of comments saying, Daniel likes you, it's obvious that the cameraman was completely in love with you. We saw the comments and said this is the perfect opportunity to address this."
But as the mystery unfolded on computer screens, fans who became obsessed with the series took the investigation in a direction the filmmakers had not expected, searching for their identities and the true nature of the production itself. Having decided to keep themselves anonymous, they found themselves unprepared.
"Our hats are off to the really impressive investigators," said Goodfried, who found himself on the hot seat when the news swept the Internet that a copyright on the lonelygirl15 name had been filed by his father, Kenneth Goodfried, an Encino lawyer. "We really didn't know what to do," Greg Goodfried said.
As to where the story is going now that the curtain has been lifted, the team said the story of lonelygirl15 will continue, with the hope that the focus can now return to the onscreen mystery. They would not comment on whether the lonelygirl serial might someday leap to other mediums.
As for the actress' ability to remain undiscovered until now, the team says they took precautions such as removing pictures of the actress from MySpace and the Internet, But throughout the furor, they said, she has been living openly in Los Angeles. "There is no place better to hide then right in the middle of L.A.," Goodfried said. "Everyone is so focused on themselves that I guess they don't even notice."
