BREAKING: U.S. DOLLAR IS AT *RISK*… (you are in trouble)
In september 2005, a fun film editor named Robert Ryang took The Shining and cut together a new trailer for it, making the axe-driven horror flick seem like a sweetheart family movie. YouTube hadn’t broken out of beta yet, so Ryang posted his humor gem to a private quarter of his employer’s website and gave some friends a dotmov link. One of them posted the link to his blog, and Ryang was an overnight sensation.
The New York Times took notice, observing with awe: “His secret site got 12,000 hits.” Ryang also achieved the highest goal of 20th-century humankind: He started getting calls from Hollywood. HELLO, IT’S HOLLYWOOD.
I was a TV critic in those days, and when I first saw Ryang’s masterwork—buffering, buffering—I wasn’t sure if I was eligible to review it. Was this digital item a show, a movie, an ad, maybe a web page? While I mulled the question, I created a…
