Voice-over work in Indiana wasn’t too lucrative, so Daniel Geduld made a classic actor’s move: He headed for Los Angeles, Califronia. And like most Hollywood dreamers Geduld didn’t 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.”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 $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.
One of Hollywood’s animating legends is the story of the actor 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.
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.
Even if untapped talent is not necessarily easy to find, the economics of Web entertainment startups dictates that they try hard to do it. Old-school casting calls — and Hollywood’s union contracts — wouldn’t work for digital media that comes together quickly and relatively cheaply.
Stevens, 33, says he lives pretty well on what he gets paid to do two of the online episodes every week — which sometimes amazes him.
“The guy who was buying his coffees with nickels and dimes in 2003 and having beans on toast for lunch is very thankful,” he says. “The Web is great. The single greatest distraction from employment is also the single greatest enabler of employment.”
Want some work; Go ahead and post a dumb video online
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