L.A. Weekly profiled YouTube star Jenna Marbles for our 2012 People Issue. Here are more excerpts from our interview:
From Jenna's video "How to trick people into thinking you're good looking"
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See also: Jenna Marbles: Outtakes from our People Issue interview
One Friday in July 2010, Jenna Mourey drove home from her job at a tanning salon in Boston; she had to shower and change for her night gig as a go-go dancer. As she walked into her apartment, she decided to film herself getting ready.
She enjoyed go-go dancing (getting paid to dance -- in flats!). But she had a master's degree from Boston University in sports psychology and counseling. Her life was, as she says, "ridiculous."
"I went to school, tried really hard, did everything I was supposed to do, and now, like, what the fuck is this mess I'm in right now?" the 25-year-old recalls thinking. "I'm going to work dancing in my underwear, making myself look like a whore on purpose."
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Courtesy of DanceOn Elle Walker burning the floor with Bryan Tanaka
Take a look at Dance Showdown, the first original show created for the YouTube channel DanceOn. This is reality-style, competition dance crossing easily to an online format -- and doing it better than network television, frankly.
It's pretty hilarious.
Launched in April, Dance Showdown is a cross between So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars, with a little Charlie's Angels thrown in (the Charlie character being the show's host, hip-hop crew star D-trix). Individual episodes have topped more than 500,000 views, with series' totals of more than 6 million.
The show pairs YouTube "stars" with a slate of "superstar" choreographers -- best to ignore the hyperbole because there is a lot of youth and inexperience here. But that is part of the charm. You, dear Internet voters, are the judges, and you will determine the final winner of the $25,000 prize, to be announced on May 31.
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"These people don't have friends, Angel. They have interests, and don't you forget it," Tanya tells her co-conspirator in the opening sequence of artist Laura Parnes' new film County Down. Angel, the precocious rebel-genius played by Stephanie Vella, has just designed a pink hallucinogenic called Quix, packaged in baby bottles and distributed to other teens in their posh gated community. Her popularity has skyrocketed, especially since all the adults in the neighborhood seem to be going slowly mad and anxiety among teens is at a high point. "Right now, it's in their interests to respect us," Tanya adds.
Courtesy the artist, Participant Inc.
and LAXARTInstallation view of Laura Parnes' County Down
County Down, feature-length and animated using rotoscoping, a technique that turns live action into cartoon, is screening now at LAXART in Culver City amidst paraphernalia from its making, and it's set to be released as a series of webisodes once the LAXART show closes.
The whole thing is very '90s -- it looks like a video game informed by rave culture, anime, McMansions and Clinton-era oblivion. Its protagonist, Angel, could be a composite of a slightly snazzed-up Daria from MTV and Christina Ricci's Wendy from The Ice Storm -- she's different, dark, sassy, smart and maybe dangerous. She has heavy blue eye makeup and a vintage schoolgirl wardrobe, and she's in over her head.
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Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.
Screenshots courtesy of Starcast The "best performances" screen on Starcast
OK, fine, maybe you've got the chops and you've got the looks, but you've missed the fame boat five times over. Your clean-cut mug and obvious talent got you out of Skokie, but you're still slinging pizza shooters six nights a week at TGI Mulligans in Studio City. Why won't anyone let you become the new flash in the Hollywood frying pan? Why doesn't anyone notice your raw talent and chiseled visage? You're destined to be the modern reincarnation of Cary Grant, clearly, if only someone would notice.
Cue StarcastAuditions.com, the Internet-based casting startup that will get you noticed -- if, of course, you deserve to be. Starcast is not a bunch of guys on a couch mocking videos of your craft for their own entertainment. It is serious business.
Founded by Gary Beer, the man behind cable TV's Smithsonian Channel and Sundance Channel, Starcast takes your craft as seriously as possible. The setup is pretty simple -- you log on and pay a nominal fee (right now it's about $10 and supposedly won't go much higher [Update: it's now free]). Then you pick a professionally crafted script, videotape yourself performing it, and voilà ! Your video will be seen by legitimate high-level casting agents, reviewing Starcast footage in hopes of finding the next Tom Cruise. If you're truly gifted, they may rate you as one of their "Best Performances," marking you for further attention.
Robbie Shaw and Stephanie Nugent Stephanie Nugent feathering her nest
It's like a reality game show crossed with an MFA program -- to put it crassly.
Dances Made to Order, a pay-to-watch, curated, online, dance film festival, is the brainchild of Los Angeles choreographer Kingsley Irons and filmmaker Bryan Koch. The site, going national this year, features movies created by choreographers from 11 different cities, beginning with L.A. The site will post three original, five-minute movies each month.
The filmmakers gave Irons a list of inspirational creative topics, but then the audience (i.e., subscribers to www.dancesmadetoorder.com, paying $10 a month or $50 for the season) voted for their favorites. The top three themes must be used in each dance, no matter how wacky a combination. This rare interaction between audience and filmmakers is what distinguishes the site -- and makes it fun, Irons said.
The three subjects/themes/adjectives/ for the L.A. films were:
(1) Sugary/salty. (2) A film within a film. (3) Would you be better off if you hadn't...
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In 1972 Asco spray-painted their signatures onto the walls of LACMA, asserting themselves as active members of the art community despite the fact that LACMA wasn't yet willing to show their work. 
Special Entertainment The iconic "What" zeppelin, projected onto MOCA downtown
Last Wednesday night, Milwaukee-based Special Entertainment, the partnership between artists Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo, also inserted their signature into the L.A. art world. Swant and Ciraldo, creators of Samwell's "What What (In the Butt)" viral video, which has gotten 45 million views since it was posted to YouTube five years ago, projected the video's iconic zeppelin with the word "What" on it onto MOCA downtown, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Scientology Center and various other cultural institutions and locations around Los Angeles.
Then, on Thursday, the duo presented video footage of the drive-by projection event at Nate Page's Machine Overnight Guerrilla Project at Storefront Plaza, hosted by Machine Project.
Special Entertainment's trip out West and its series of projections was organized in part by Sara Daleiden's MKE-LAX program, promoting artistic exchange between Milwaukee and L.A., fostered in celebration of the five-year anniversary of "What What (In the Butt)."
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Producer-director Justin Tanner
The call is for 11 a.m. at a quaint clapboard house on a quiet, suburban cul de sac in Highland Park just off the Avenue 43 exit of the Pasadena Freeway. I arrive at the set to find the crew in a blur of activity in a tastefully kitsch-festooned living room. The production is AVE 43, the most jaw-dropping, taboo-twisted and outrageously funny soap opera satire I've seen on the internet. The entire 25-actor shoot must wrap by 4 p.m.
By "crew," I mean the show's creator and one-man movie studio Justin Tanner. By "set" I mean AVE 43's permanent sound stage, the home he shares with his husband of 13 years, artist-composer Kristian Hoffman, the founder of NYC punk-rock legends The Mumps. In the course of the day, Tanner will shoot 14 scenes and convincingly create the illusion of as many locations without ever leaving the property.
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Rachel and Carlyle brainstorm the next Couple Time vignette
There are few Internet series that have me itching for the next installment, checking the Vimeo page for new videos several times a week and squealing with delight when one's posted. But that embarrassing behavior is exactly what I do with Couple Time. Comedians Patrick Carlyle and Allyn Rachel, who have been a real life couple for coming on eight years, write and star in the series of 90-second vignettes that explore, in their words, "weird stuff couples do when no one else is around."
No! Not kinky weird stuff! Silly weird stuff. Things we all do when we feel so close to someone that it's almost like they're part of us. Like singing the full Ally McBeal theme song in the middle of breakfast, or having a serious debate about what percentage of pumpkin carving is scooping, or making up fantastical bribes to convince your partner be the one to crawl out of bed and feed the cat .
These moments might fall flat when described in words, but Rachel and Carlyle bring them to life with such honesty, love, and pitch perfect comedic timing, that each vignette leaves you not only in stitches but also with the odd, poignant feeling that you will now appreciate the small joys of life a little bit more.
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Zachary Pincus-Roth The line to meet the online comedy duo Smosh
An army of teens sporting Justin Bieber haircuts, donning animal hoods and wielding Flip cameras invaded the Hyatt Century Plaza in Century City Thursday through Saturday for the second annual Vidcon, which is making a push to become the Comic-Con for the online video world.
The crowd was mainly high and middle schoolers, some dragging their parents, all there to meet, take photos with, listen to or just get a glimpse of YouTube celebrities that people even five years older have probably never heard of, some who make six figures through revenue-sharing deals and get more regular viewers than Mad Men.
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