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 real people 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.
In their first interview with the media, the three video makers said they are amazed by the reaction to their creation, 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 Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills got involved about a month ago -- well into the lonelygirl15 story -- through a friend who works at the agency. "We went 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 Creative Artists Agency 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.
