You Tube celebrities

I guess Justin Beiber is the only You Tube celebrity to hit it really big thus far.

There were others. Tay Zonday sang "Chocolate Rain" on You Tube and went on to do a Dr Pepper commercial. Chris Crocker, after the success of his "Leave Brittney Alone" video, has done some things, or they've talked about him doing some things. I don't know what. I haven't seen him in anything.

Low budget filmmakers used to get John Carradine or some other aging star to appear in their movies. Rory Calhoun started doing the same thing late in his life. Ernest Borgnine appeared in movies you wouldn't expect to see an Oscar-winner in.

Maybe it's time to turn to You Tube celebrities. Use their star power to sell DVDs.

It may be a bad idea. Few are actual actors. I don't know about the singers like Zonday and Beiber, but most of the others seem to be egomaniacs. Are narcissists easy to manipulate or just hard to work with?

Maybe you can go the other way. Pick your star then put them on You Tube to turn them into phony celebrities. Like the way John Waters used to make his own stars.

This one You Tube guy

There was one You Tube celebrity. Someone I know had "friended" him on My Space.

"Who's that guy?" I said.

"I don't know. He wanted to be my friend so I clicked 'okay'."

I won't say who the You Tube celebrity was. I don't think I want him googling himself and finding his way here. He argued at length on his My Space page that he wasn't a narcissist.

He was the second most popular "director" on You Tube at the time. He had millions of hits. I watched some of his videos. They were terrible. The only one that stands out in my mind showed him drinking a bottle of Snapple. He drinks some of it. He stops and smiles. He drinks the rest of it. The end.

Snapple was donating money to some environmental cause, so he claimed he was saving a tree.

His followers were all teenage girls. Girls get crushes on teen idols they know they would never meet as a safe way to explore romantic feelings. With this guy, they had an extra buffer. They'd never meet him and he was openly gay.

He was banned from Wikipedia---it turns out you're not allowed to make a page about yourself.

At one point, he called on his fans----he has tens of thousands of them----to send donations. He needed help with his rent. He raised eighteen dollars.

Poor kid. People don't realize that narcissism is a serious, debilitating psychiatric condition.

There are others who are more interesting. There's a young fellow called Dylan. He has a scripted series where he tells plausible-sounding anecdotes about life as a teenager.

At least it's voluntary. Not like that poor Canadian kid. He was taking a video class in school. Everyone was gone. He went into the studio and made a tape of himself with a broomstick re-enacting a fight scene from a Star Wars movie. Some classmates found the tape, posted it on line and ruined his life.