How does an obnoxiously over-the-top kid on digital helium land a feature film deal, as Fred has done, according to a casting call obtained by TubeFilter? By having the most, or now second-most, followers of anyone on Google's video site. And by playing perfectly to Hollywood's fantasy that the branded serials its traditional TV studios specialize in can be profitably replicated online: Fred, you see, earns a reported six figures off this cheaply-produced stuff.

Don't tell studio honchos that, marvels of nature like "Fred" and sharp wits like Ze Frank not withstanding, YouTube will forever be dominated by cat videos, plane crashes and other spontaneously-obtained footage. After all, we wouldn't want the "Fred"s of tomorrow to miss their big Hollywood paydays.

[via All Things D]

Until recently, Jim Wiatt served as Chairman of the venerable William Morris Agency, styling himself as a Bill Clinton BFF, savoir of the environment and aspirant to the throne of all Hollywood. That was until the Endeavor's Ari Emmanuel engineered a buyout of the agency, creating the new WME and promptly sent Wiatt hitting the bricks, hat in hand, and apparently, according to AllThingsD, headed to Google.

Sure, YouTube gets enough traffic every nanosecond to clog the Holland Tunnel from here until Armaggedon; but trading in private jet flown trips to inspect Megan Fox at work on the set in Tahiti or Reykjavík for the chance to oversee a collection cat videos is just a teeny bit of a comedown.

According to the report, Wiatt would work to convince Hollywood players to shoot videos for YouTube. So Brad and Angelina shouldn't be alarmed if a man in a Hugo Boss suit knocks on their door and asks, "Have you ever considered sharing with the world the adorable way your cat can open the refrigerator with his paws?" That man is not a salesman. He's somebody's ex-agent.

The history of Hollywood execs taking their magic online of course is a sad trail of tears. Michael Eisner parlayed his Disney chairmanship into the Executive Producers slot for web-serial Prom Queen. And Yahoo is still digging out from the damage wrought when Warner Bros. chair Terry Semel deigned to grace the portal with his star power.

But who knows, perhaps Wiatt has timed it brilliantly and for Hollywood, the web is a concept who's time has come at last.

In a one minute statement posted to the "Houstoncriminallaw" YouTube page, Murray said the following:

I want to thank all of my patients and friends who have sent such kind emails, letters and messages to let me know of your support and prayers for me and my family. Because of all that is going on, I am afraid to return phone calls or use my email. Therefore, I recorded this video to let all of you know that I have been receiving your messages. I have not been able to thank you personally, which as you know, is not normal for me. Your messages give me strength and courage and keep me going. They mean the world to me. Please don't worry — as long as I keep God in my heart and you in my life, I will be fine. I have done all I can do. I told the truth and I have faith that the truth will prevail. God bless you and thank you.

That these fans are rabid and crazed isn't exactly news. Twi-twinkers, or whatever they call themselves, are some of the most insane devotees out there. They're as fantastical and lost-in-the-clouds as Harry Potter followers, but they're also dangerously sexualized (chastely). It's a heady and potent plasma. Hell, Entertainment Weekly has built a whole wildly successful cottage industry out of the irksome phenomenon.

Which is all to say that even though we know these girls (and, yes, boys) are zealous, we had no idea just how bad it can get until we saw the above compilation video of some folks from around the world reacting—with ear-piercing abandon—to images of shirtless werewolves and sparklesuckers and frowny moon goddess girls and everything else that goes down (but doesn't, you know, go down) up in rainy Forks, WA.

Lower the volume on your speakers before viewing. Seriously.

Oh, and here's what they're all freaking out about. See if you can time why they're shrieking when! (Hint: shirtlessness).

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

This kid is the face of hip hop and we salute him for his beef-starting. Ante up. [via Adrants]

It's a Wonderful Life
A suicidal man named George Bailey is given a second chance at life after an angel shows him the good deeds of his past, including keeping people calm during a pre-Depression bank run.

Grapes of Wrath
Okies in the Dustbowl struggle to live amongst dying crops and farm foreclosures.

Ironweed (Sort of graphic, maybe NSFW)
A pair of ne'er do wells (Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson) rage and romance in Depression-era Albany.

Bonnie & Clyde
Clyde Darrow and Bonnie Parker, played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, take to the bank robbing life during the 1930's. They meet a bullety end.

Annie
A bunch of orphans struggle through the Depression, hoping for rescue. Songs include "The Hardknock Life" and "We Would Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover."

Paper Moon
A grifter and his precocious young daughter con their way through 1930's America.

Road to Perdition
A stoic hitman for the Chicagoland mob, Tom Hanks, takes to the road after his associates turn on him. Really a stunningly beautiful film, the last shot by the great cinematographer Conrad Hall. A modern classic.

Of Mice and Men
From the Steinbeck novel about a pair of migrant farmers roaming 1930's California.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coen brothers' Depression-set adaptation of 'Ulysses,' about prison escapees and the music they make.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
A grueling dance marathon contest is held during the Depression, in which desperate people compete for hours and days while a cruel emcee manipulates them.

The Purple Rose of Cairo
A bored and sort of sad 1930's gal (Mia Farrow) enjoys a romance with a movie character come to life (Jeff Daniels) in this Woody Allen comedy.

Cradle Will Rock
A truly beautiful film about art and censorship, "Cradle Will Rock" tells the story of a controversial play and the artists who struggled to keep it running. Please watch.

Modern Times
The Charlie Chaplin silent classic about his famous Tramp character navigating a troubled modern world.

Dogville
A disturbing but compelling film, Danish director Lars von Trier strips away all the scenery to tell the story of a Depression-era daughter of the mob (Nicole Kidman) who is first welcomed, then exploited by the denizens of a small Colorado town. Not for the faint of heart.

Hallelujah I'm a Bum
An Al Jolson musical about hobos.

Hard Times
A Charles Bronson rock 'em sock 'em about a street fightin' drifter during the Depression.

The Color Purple
The story of a kept woman, Celie, and her struggles to find her inner strength in the Depression-era Deep South.

Angela's Ashes
It went to Europe, too! The movie adaptation of Frank McCourt's memoir about his youth in Ireland.

Rambling Rose
Laura Dern's daddy, Robert Duvall, sells her into prostitution. Basically.

Gold Diggers of 1933
A silly musical about actresses. Features the Depression classic "We're In The Money."

The NY Daily News is reporting that Gomez, the sultry-ish star of The Wizards Of Waverly Place, has been dating yet another 15-year old, singer Nick Jonas. As many of you may know (however embarrassing it is to admit), Jonas is the rumored intended recipient of most of Cyrus' kissy-face iPhone photos and pouty shower shots that hit the Internets recently. While Jonas is admittedly cute in an adolescent John Mayer sort of way, we don't see why a break-up with the kid should prompt Miley into such bitter antics. Making fun of Gomez and her alarmingly sexy best friend / fellow Disney star Demi Lovato in this clip, Cyrus drops some low-blows about the gap in Lovato's teeth (one that has since been fixed) and the fact that Lovato wears a touch of black make-up (and looks just fine in it). However, the attack seems to be backfiringl, mainly because Miley — who frequently succumbs to giggle attacks and slurring throughout the vid — made her rep as the good girl next door and not as a conniving backstabber (or, for that matter, as an burgeoning anti-Semite with her use of the word "scheisty"). Fasten your seatbelts, it looks like we have another Lohan vs. Duff feud brewing as we type.

• MILEY CYRUS MOCKS SELENA GOMEZ ON YOUTUBE [Us]
• MILEY CYRUS EX NICK JONAS DATING SELENA GOMEZ, THE 'NEXT MILEY CYRUS' [NYDN]

• Rest In Peace Estelle Getty [YouTube via The WOW Report]

Viacom wanted to carve out the records of YouTube employees' video views to show that they knowingly viewed copyrighted content — and in some cases, uploaded it. But Google could easily use its records to show Viacom employees doing exactly the same thing. It would hardly be a shocker: Viacom's Ifilm site is rife with pirated videos, but the site's traffic is too insignificant for copyright holders to get fussed.

Showing Viacom's double standards is an obvious move. What Google's lawyers are probably too naive to contemplate: Scouring YouTube's video logs for truly embarrassing videos viewed by Viacom employees, and leaking them to gossip blogs. That would be a dreadful invasion of privacy, of course — exactly what Viacom was asking for, before it finally backed down.

But a rip-off and a cover-up? After the jump, check out the video alleging Wipeout's fairly obvious theft — banned from YouTube, no less, thanks to ABC.

It would be easy enough to say what comes around goes around: MXC itself is a hyperedited mess of Japanese game show clips, recut and dubbed to mimic "a parody of over-produced network reality shows," notes co-creator and executive producer Larry Strawther — except the clips are licensed and have been running on Spike for almost five years now. Strawther apparently fought back after seeing Wipeout for the first time; you can imagine how poorly that went:

Within five days, ABC lawyers induced YouTube to block the video for copyright infringement. The video is obviously covered by the copyright act's fair use provision (Section 107) which explicitly allows usage for criticism, comment and parody. ...

YouTube did not once notify me or ask for a response before taking action to block the video. Even more disturbing to me is they have apparently altered the search results algorithm to benefit ABC and punish MXC. Whereas before Tuesday, June 24, if you typed in both "MXC" and "Wipeout" you would have seen at least hundreds of fan-generated videos showing clips from our show MXC. Now if you type in MXC and Wipeout, you are taken to results for motocross — which uses MX as an acronym.

Le scandal! Strawther is pretty classic, though, essentially claiming on his site that Spike isn't paying him for MXC reruns and implying that ABC might be worthy of picking up the slack. We see a cease-and-desist in his future long before any settlement, but it's a valuable object lesson to you network execs out there: If you must steal, keep it to talent shows and crime franchises. Falling idiots in helmets are way, way too easy to trace.

• 'MXC' creator says 'Wipeout' yanked YouTube video [The Live Feed]
• MXC vs. Wipeout - a comparison [LocalSports.Biz]

One of YouTube's selling points is the ability to embed its videos on other pages. This allows free discussion of those videos, just like excerpting an image or text. But the Church turned off embedding in their clips. In fact, you can't link to just one video by clicking from the Church's official channel. You have to search for their videos.

Then you can find this creepy clip of a ceremony celebrating the Church's "International Way To Happiness Foundation." A South African dignitary thanks the Church (or more precisely, a supposedly secular wing of the Church) for starting a program in his country's prisons. An Israeli publisher thanks the Church for healing the Middle East, as does a Palestinian education official.

In another video, a narrator explains how you are a thetan, not a body or mind. Another clip introduces the auditing process. In that clip, it sounds weirdly like the therapeutic process in the psychiatric field that Scientologists like Tom Cruise have publicly denounced.

But most of the clips are innocent slideshows with a narrator gently listing beliefs that would fit with mainstream Christianity. Every clip has a cheesy grocery-store soundtrack. The net effect is to make the Church look like another dull religion or self-help class and not, as some critics label it, a murderous cult.

Either way, because the Church disabled the option to embed their videos, I can't show you the clips here but can only link to them. I've downloaded some copies, but uploading them here might violate copyright law as long as there's another copy on the Church's channel.

The Church paid for its special channel. Anyone can disable embeds, but a specially formatted user page doesn't come free. YouTube helped the Church integrate its custom menu into the channel, though of course it didn't create any of the content. Nor did YouTube endorse the Church or give it control over other users' videos, and all such accusations I saw provided no evidence.

But I'm baffled why the Church, after putting together such a friendly little propaganda channel, not only disabled all comments (a reasonable way to avoid actually diving into two-way conversation) but disabled embedding and turned its channel into a tidy menu. That guarantees that hardly anyone will stumble onto the videos. I guess the rest of the world should be glad that the Church doesn't get the Internet.

What may piss off some viewers is that the Church is advertising their channel all over YouTube. This might explain the no-embed rule; the Church is specifically targeting YouTube users, not the Internet at large, though I see no reason to specifically hide from everyone outside of the video site. But one user was creeped out by Church ads appearing on popular channels like Smosh, Awkward Pictures, and Playboy, even though any creator can ask YouTube to keep certain advertisers off its page. Guess everyone just needed the money. At least I can still show you the anti-Church videos.

The vast majority of YouTube partners haven't talked about what they're pulling in. Neither has the company. And there's really no incentive to; revealing the pay would only make users more agitated when they're not at the top of the list. So we're not sure how much Tay Zonday or Chris Crocker are making. But I can tell you this about the Internet stars that South Park killed off:

1. Tay Zonday, "Chocolate Rain": Unknown, but possibly a good amount. Probably made more from his Dr. Pepper commercial.
2. Tron Guy: Probably nothing; he was only part of other people's videos
3. Gary Brolsma, "Numa Numa": Maybe a little from his uncomfortably bad sequel that racked up nine million views, though this was before the partner program officially launched. But the original Numa Numa, which got eleven million views, was just someone else's copy; remember that Gary was the last huge video hit before YouTube, back when everyone had to download Windows Media and Quicktime files.
4. Star Wars Kid: Nothing. Settled a lawsuit against the kids who put his video online (again pre-YouTube though copies are up at the site), and some bloggers raised money for him out of sympathy.
5. Sneezing Panda: Nothing.
6. Dramatic Prairie Dog: Nothing. Apparently taken from CollegeHumor.com, where someone took a clip from a Japanese show and added the dramatic sound. One site claims it was an animated GIF long before it became a video.
7. Chris Crocker, "Leave Britney Alone": Probably nothing; he doesn't have ads on his channel so he must not be a partner. And I haven't heard anything new about the reality show he was supposed to star in.
8. Chinese Back Street Boys: Almost certainly nothing; the clips seem to have been uploaded by someone else, and no ads appear near them.
9. Laughing Baby: Nothing. No ads. A shame too, cause this video got over 45 million views.
10. Afroninja: Nothing. The clip wasn't his.

The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional. Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual "film festival" with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work.

Don't get your hopes up for prize hardware or other material glory, Reznor adds; the most you can win is some schlubby YouTube love and maybe, if you're lucky, a spot in the backdrop at a one-time-only NIN performance of Ghosts. But the more ambitious among you can always take solace in your role as a grass-roots shill pushing the phenomenon as far into the dyed black as it can go, with only a couple hundred grainy cell-phone movies, some musty, goth-chick nostalgia and Mark Romanek's all-time great "Closer" video standing between you and cinematic immortality. Or you could always, you know, just watchalong with the rest of us. We're just saying.

• Ghosts Film Festival [Nine Inch Nails]

Trailer For The Film "Teenage Mother" (1967) [Feminist Law Professors, via YouTube]
Teenage Mother [IMDB]

Ughhh. We have always been the biggest YouTube supporter and fan. We're heartbroken by their mismanagement of this whole situation ... Note to anyone creating videos and using video networking sites: don't keep all your eggs in one basket! You may get burned!

Hilton did not mention what caused his suspension, aside from the critical video. YouTube did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but then again, when do they?

More: The fatal misstep that got Perez Hilton banned