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Brandon Hardesty sat so close to his video camera that only the top three-quarters of his enormous head was in the frame. As he stared into the lens of his camera, he clasped his chubby fingers this way and that around his big cranium. He adopted an expression of amazement, as if he were seeing himself for the very first time.
“Oh! Oh, no!” Brandon said. “Look at the size of my head!”
Suddenly, Brandon pulled back and let the camera capture his hands dangling limply in front of him. He twiddled his fingers and made nonsensical sounds as if he were trying to entertain a fussy baby. “Had-i-lay, did-i-lay, had-i-lay, pood-i-lay,” he intoned as he twiddled.
It was Jan. 1, 2007. Brandon, then a shy 19-year-old grocery clerk and college student who sometimes stuttered, was in his parents’ basement in Baltimore goofing off. He didn’t have anything better to do. So he was making another video to upload on YouTube.
Fifteen minutes after Brandon stopped mugging and hooting, he uploaded his newest video, which he titled: “Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make III,” because this wasn’t the first time he’d entertained himself with this foolishness, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Brandon wasn’t just entertaining himself. Anyone with Internet access, and 1 minute 39 seconds to kill, could watch his goofing. By the next morning, Brandon recalled, a few hundred people had. Within days, Brandon’s video had thousands of hits.
Every time Brandon logged on to YouTube, which he did three or four times daily, viewership for his video had skyrocketed: thousands, then ten thousands, then millions. Brandon’s fame was spreading. Brandon’s video spread until, before long, more than 4.7 million people had watched Brandon all alone in his parents’ basement being silly.
It looked as if Brandon might be going viral. How weird was that?
It wasn’t any weirder, as it turns out, than a University of Minnesota graduate student named Tay Zonday casually uploading a video of himself singing a catchy little tune he wrote – “Chocolate Rain” – which has been viewed more than 37 million times since 2007. Or, more recently, the phenomenon of millions of people worldwide watching and listening as Susan Boyle – an unemployed church volunteer from a village in Scotland – sang a triumphant rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on the reality show “Britain’s Got Talent.”
Tay Zonday, Susan Boyle and Brandon Hardesty have more in common than finding fame on the Internet. People who watch any of their videos over and over might not be behaving that differently from rats in a lab clicking on a bar repeatedly to release a dose of dopamine. They want a shot of feel-good.
Fighting boredom in the summer of 2005, Brandon shot five videos re-enacting scenes from some of his favorite movies, including “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” “The Breakfast Club,” “As Good As It Gets” and “Star Trek: First Contact.” Brandon made the videos alone in his basement. He played every character in each scene. He took care to mimic the vocal inflections and facial expressions of the original movie actors, talents he turned out to have in surprising abundance.
Brandon thought about uploading his movie tributes on the Internet, but he had no idea how or where to do that until early 2006, when a friend told him about the new video-sharing forum called YouTube. By then, Brandon was a community-college freshman studying film. He was still living at home, working part time at the grocery store and hanging out in the basement.
Over four days in March 2006, Brandon uploaded his five movie re-enactments. He created a screen name in honor of one of his favorite childhood Nickelodeon characters: Artie, the Strongest Man in the World. Each morning, Brandon, aka ArtieTSMITW, logged onto YouTube to see whether anyone had stumbled over his videos yet. A few people had watched at least one of them, and Brandon thought that was pretty cool.
Then one of Brandon’s new fans posted a link to his “Star Trek” homage on a popular Internet forum, SomethingAwful.com. The link went up on a message board. Suddenly, each of Brandon’s YouTube videos had been viewed 5,000 times.
By March 2006, YouTube was growing exponentially. Users were soon uploading 65,000 new videos to the site daily. There was no way YouTube’s young, tech-savvy staff could watch all that video. But they developed computer programs to track which videos were rising in popularity.
On March 25, Brandon uploaded what he thought was his best work thus far. He’d spent hours down in the basement watching the same scene from his “Princess Bride” DVD on his widescreen TV. It was the scene where the brainiac villain played by Wallace Shawn matches wits with his nemesis over which of two glasses of wine contains poison. Brandon was determined to get Shawn’s vocal mannerisms and facial expressions just right. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!” Brandon said to himself over and over before laughing maniacally and falling sideways off his chair, theatrically dead.
At YouTube’s headquarters, certain employees were assigned to monitor spikes in video ratings and view counts. When new videos prompted high marks, the team selected their favorites to promote on the site’s home page. “We saw it had become somewhat popular – but not overly so – and thought it was funny and interesting and something our users would get a kick out of,” Aaron Zamost, spokesman for YouTube, said of Brandon’s “Princess Bride” video.
So the YouTube team picked Brandon’s death scene to highlight. Within 24 hours of appearing on YouTube’s front page, Brandon’s video had been viewed 50,000 times and was on its way to 250,000 viewings.
Brandon’s regular viewers came to know him both as an ever-more confident actor and an irrepressible goof.
Coming home tired from the grocery store on New Year’s Day in 2007, Brandon dashed off “Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make III.” When it went viral, it made Brandon nervous.
“I don’t want to be famous just for the sake of being famous,” he said. “I didn’t want to be walking down the street somewhere and have people say: ‘Hey, aren’t you the guy who makes those strange faces? Make a strange face.’ I don’t want to be one of those people. It’s just not my thing. I want to be big, but big in my own way. I want to be taken seriously as an actor.”
In late 2007, someone from YouTube e-mailed Brandon asking him to telephone YouTube’s home office. When he did, Brandon was invited to join the company’s Partner Program and share in revenue from ads placed on his videos.
Brandon’s share of the ad revenue trickled in slowly at first: $129 one month, $143 the next. But the numbers grew as Brandon’s audience did.
Then, a Hollywood producer searching for Joe Pesci impersonations found Brandon’s re-enactment of a scene from “Goodfellas” on YouTube. That led to Brandon being asked to audition for a role in a full-length independent movie, “Bart Got a Room,” that was shooting in Florida, starring William H. Macy and Cheryl Hines. Brandon made audition tapes and e-mailed them to the director. He won a supporting part, playing a jaded teen.
Brandon was leaving the basement, for a little while. He asked his manager at the grocery store if he could take three weeks off to shoot a movie. The film producers were paying Brandon only $2,000. After buying his own plane ticket to Florida and paying for meals, he’d barely break even. He was too excited to care.
There was nothing Brandon wanted more than to be an actor. But after the film wrapped, he went back to work at the grocery store. He needed the money.
Soon, Brandon punched his golden ticket again. Early last year, producers at “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” – aware of Brandon’s work since his “Princess Bride” video landed on YouTube’s front page – invited Brandon to make videos to air on the TV show. They asked Brandon to re-enact one scene from each of the year’s best picture nominees, so they could air them on consecutive nights leading up to the 2008 Academy Awards. The producers gave Brandon 48 hours’ notice before he had to deliver the first video.
They aired his scenes just as he’d shot and edited them and paid him $4,000, enough to pay off his old broken-down car and finance a two-week trip to Hollywood.
Suddenly, agents from some big talent agencies were willing to take a meeting with Brandon. He went with Endeavor, a smaller agency where he felt more comfortable “instead of sitting across from Dr. Evil and his henchmen or something, where they push a button and I get knocked out of the chair into a fire pit,” he said.
Then Brandon flew home. He couldn’t afford to stay in Hollywood.
Early this year, for the first time, Brandon began earning more each month from his YouTube ad revenue – about $1,500 – than he earned at the grocery store. He saved every penny. He was trying to stash away enough money to quit the grocery store for good and move to Hollywood this summer.
Brandon waited all of January and half of February, hoping that someone from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would call and ask him to make videos for this year’s Academy Awards. The call never came.
A few days after the Academy Awards, Brandon was working at the grocery store when his cell phone rang. His agent was calling to let him know that he’d just landed a leading role in an “American Pie” sequel. The role would pay $10,000, enough for Brandon to finally quit the grocery store and move to Hollywood. Brandon hugged the kid working next to him. When a guy from high school wandered into the store later, Brandon hugged him, too.
Brandon was in a rush to move to California before the film began shooting in Canada. Still, he gave two weeks’ notice before quitting his grocery job. Anything less, he reasoned, would be rude.
Brandon kept punching his golden ticket. After he’d arrived in Canada to begin weeks of filming “American Pie: Book of Love,” Hollywood called again. The makers of comedian Adam Sandler’s latest movie – “Born to Be a Star” – needed Brandon to finagle a three-day weekend off immediately to fly back to Los Angeles and play the role of an innocent young man with a comically exaggerated Minnesota accent. “It was like William H. Macy in ‘Fargo,’ times five,” Brandon said. “I can tell already that movie is going to be hilarious.”
On April 16, Brandon posted on YouTube the last video he had made in his basement before leaving home. It was a re-enactment of a scene from the “The Devil’s Advocate.” Brandon had borrowed his dad’s tuxedo shirt and drawn on cartoonishly heavy eyebrows to portray Al Pacino as the devil ranting against God. “I’m peaking,” Brandon-as-the-devil said into his video camera. “It’s my time now.”
