![]() And as a person who works on the creative side of marketing, I can tell you it’s a lot cheaper to purchase advertising packages from YouTubers and Instagram stars than it is A-list celebrities and the effect it has can be enormous. There was a hole in the media landscape to be filled, an opportunity to squeeze money out of an untapped resource. And that’s the truth Bilton is getting at, too. “As media expanded and needed more and more material for its 24-hours of entertainment, it opened a lot more avenues for fame,” says Bateman. This “profession” was not created in a vacuum and it was not created by the young people on social media themselves. In fact, it’s Bateman who acknowledges the truth about influencers we so often ignore. The collection of talking heads he chooses to fill in interviews are absolutely spot on and include not just other influencers (like Liz Eswein, who runs the famous Instagram account), but the marketers that hire these influencers and even Justine Bateman, whose memoir Fame provides more insight into the celebrity these kids are after and what its detrimental effects can be. What sets Fake Famous apart is Bilton’s journalistic eye for context. ![]() And yet Bilton is careful to never make them appear foolish for wanting it. The choices end up being absolutely perfect for examining the range of people who might be suckered into the influencer lifestyle. Rather than choose anyone who might find success with an audience because of their talent, he goes for what seem like the three unlikeliest candidates: Dominique, your seemingly run-of-the-mill actress looking for success Chris, a stylish young man who claims to “deserve fame” and Wylie, a young gay kid from Atlanta who doesn’t appear to have any idea why he wants to be famous at all. But Bilton is committed to something like purity in this experiment. We see dancers, roller-skaters, musicians, and a lot of model/actresses. He starts by putting out a casting call that asks simply, “Do you want to be famous?” More than 4,000 people respond. ![]() Can you buy your way to influencer-dom? Can you influence your way to fame? (Remember that ban of cell phones and Kindles that used to exist on airplanes? Yeah, you can thank Bilton for getting rid of that.) But in Fake Famous, he doesn’t want to just examine influencers, he wants to create one.įollowing in the footsteps of films like Super Size Me far more than Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Bilton is explicit about the experiment he wants to conduct. For nearly 20 years, Bilton has been knee-deep in the ever-changing world of tech. It’s directed and narrated by former New York Times technology reporter, Nick Bilton. It’s the perfect opening for Fake Famous’s peek inside the world of influencers. Not a wall like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall, but the wall of a Paul Smith, a boutique that sells $700 blazers and $150 T-shirts. Narration lets us know that all these people snapping all these pics in front of the perfect Pepto-Bismol pink wall have made it one of the single most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles. Young millennials and xennials appear in slow motion, one after another, in front of a bright pink wall-tossing their heads back in faux laughter, leaping into the air, resting hands on their hips-all to capture the perfect pic for the ‘gram.
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