HotnStinky

If you’ve found your way to this obscure corner of the web, you’ve doubtless seen Spiders on Drugs:

What you may not know was that it was made by Victoria-based filmmaker and journalist Andrew Struthers, and that its posting was the result of an experiment into the dynamics of YouTube popularity that had an outcome beyond his wildest hypotheses:

No one was more surprised than me when Spiders on Drugs became a minor hit on the film festival circuit this summer, by which I mean it was seen by tens of people at festivals all over the planet.

But the festival guides usually listed it as a “spoof,” which I thought ruined the joke. My fantasy had been to rent a slot on local TV at 2 a.m. and run it as a PSA. I imagined people getting sucked in, and their minds blowing like old nickel fuses.

That’s when I became interested in YouTube.

I made three little films, and they got a few hundred hits each. My dream was to do one a week for e-zines like, say, The Tyee or Slate.com, something like an editorial cartoon, except on video. While the Tyee showed a bit of interest but waited around to make up its mind, I ran out of money and had to write more stuff about buildings and food to pay the rent. But Christmas delayed all the cheques, and by Jan. 2 I still didn’t have my rent, for the second month in a row.

Meanwhile I had discovered the greatest thing about YouTube: you can connect with everyone on the planet, because everyone is doing it. That’s also the biggest problem. There are 65,000 videos posted a day. If you go to the videos page and click on “Most Recent,” you’ll see the newest hundred uploads have no hits at all. That’s the fate that awaits most clips, even many of the good ones. They disappear into that giant electronic hopper and vanish without trace.

This is somewhat similar to the problem writers encounter when selling a magazine article. Editors are very busy people, and unsolicited manuscripts tend to pile up on their desks like snow and sit there for a week in what’s called the “slush pile” until they get a chance to slog through them. Of course, there’s one big difference with YouTube: there’s no one checking the slush pile. No editor. No one driving the plane.

…How to stand out in all that slush? Late last Tuesday night I had an idea. A simple experiment I could run right from my desktop that very night.

In addition to generating more than a million views (and counting), Mr. Struthers has gotten his wish — a weekly slot on the relatively obscure but worthy British Columbian webzine The Tyee (where this account is published):

The funny thing is, I’ve been showing the script for Spiders On Drugs to Canadian film producers for seven years. Nobody bit. I could have made a thousand of these little films in the meantime, but I was tied up with committees and meetings.

But that’s all in the past, just like the Canadian film industry. And Hollywood, for that matter. The long dark meeting of my soul is over. I’m shooting my next film in my living room as I type, and I’ll see everyone next week, right here, with another crazy tale of YouTubular adventure.