Right to the Top

If you haven't yet seen the "Saturday Night Live" short "Lazy Sunday," you probably weren't checking your e-mail over the holidays. The two-and-a-half-minute video clip features "SNL" cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg rapping with gangsta gusto about eating cupcakes and taking a cab to the Upper West Side to see a "Narnia" matinee. It aired on Dec. 17 to 7.2 million television viewers--but that was only the beginning. Almost immediately and without NBC's permission, viewers sent copies of the clip to sites like the free video-sharing service YouTube.com, where it was downloaded millions of times. Bloggers dissected the video, fans transcribed the lyrics and millions more e-mailed links to friends and family. NBC, recognizing that the clip had struck the raw, collective funny bone of Internet users, quickly began offering free downloads on its own site and through Apple's iTunes. "On a certain level, this is star-making," says "SNL" honcho Lorne Michaels of the actors and writers who produced it. "Now any time they show up with something else, the audience will trust them."

The Net success of "Lazy Sunday" also represents a defining moment for the film and television business. Advances in digital video and broadband have vastly lowered the cost of production and distribution. Filmmakers are now following the path blazed by bloggers and musicians, cheaply creating and uploading their work to the Web. If it appeals to any of the Net's niches, millions of users will pass along their films through e-mail, downloads or links. It's the dawn of the democratization of the TV and film business--even unknown personalities are being propelled by the enthusiasm of their fans into pop-culture prominence, sometimes without even traditional intermediaries like talent agents or film festivals. "This is like bypass surgery," says Dan Harmon, a filmmaker whose monthly L.A.-based film club and Web site, Channel 101, lets members submit short videos, such as the recent '70s music mockumentary "Yacht Rock," and vote on which they like best. "Finally we have a new golden age where the artist has a direct connection to the audience."

The auteurs behind "Lazy Sunday" embody the phenomenon. When the shaggy- haired Samberg, 27, graduated from NYU Film School in 2001, he faced the conventional challenge of crashing the gates of Hollywood. With his two childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, he came up with an unconventional solution: they started recording music parodies and comic videos, and posting them to their Web site, TheLonelyisland.com.

The material got the attention of producers at the old ABC sitcom "Spin City," where Samberg and Taccone worked as low-level assistants; the producers sent a compilation to a talent agency. The friends got an agent, made a couple of pilot TV sketch shows for Comedy Central and Fox, featuring themselves hamming it up in nearly all the roles, and wrote jokes for the MTV Movie Awards. Even when the networks passed on their pilots, Samberg and his pals simply posted the episodes online and their fan base--at 40,000 unique visitors a month earlier this year--grew larger. Last August, Samberg joined the "SNL" cast, and Schaffer and Taccone became writers. Now they share an office in Rockefeller Center and "are a little too cute for everyone," Samberg says. "We are friends living our dream."

Short, funny videos like "Lazy Sunday" happen to translate online, but not everything works as well. Bite-size films are more practical than longer ones; comedy plays better than drama. But almost everything is worth trying, since the tools to create and post video are now so cheap, and ad hoc audiences can form around any sensibility, however eccentric.

It helps, of course, to have talent and some youthful, Web-savvy insouciance. Amanda Congdon has both, and her daily videocast, Rocketboom, is another breakout Web hit. Congdon, 24, was a struggling actress in late 2004 when she answered an Internet ad by Web entrepreneur Andrew Michael Baron, who was looking to start a newsy Webcast. Today their edgy two-minute episodes, starring and co-written by Congdon, riff off things ranging from White House scandals to the new Web-browser wars. With 130,000 daily viewers, Congdon is now getting approached by book and TV agents. "One of the best pieces of advice I ever received from an acting coach was to go out there and create your own vehicle," she says. "The Internet allows you to do that."

It has also allowed Sanjay Shah, 28, and his friends to find an audience unserved by traditional TV. For the last few years, their weekly South Asian-themed animations--like an Indian spoof of "The Simpsons" 's opening theme--have drawn millions of visitors to his site, Badmash.org. "I look at the Internet right now as the incubator, the R D department for traditional channels," Shah says. Their success has led to consulting work for MTV, New Line Cinema and Sony.

All this rich opportunity for young creators poses a formidable challenge to established Hollywood players. If watching video on the Internet becomes as easy and visually satisfying as watching television, consumers won't need traditional distribution networks like cable and satellite. That possibility is forcing the networks to think differently. ABC's and NBC's three-month-old relationships with Apple, to put shows like "Lost" and "The Office" on iTunes, were a start. According to "SNL" 's Michaels, NBC will soon put new and classic "Saturday Night Live" clips for sale on iTunes. "The one thing the Internet suffers from is that there's very little editorial control over quality," Michaels says.

As "Lazy Sunday" showed, there's certainly an audience. But "SNL" will be competing with an almost limitless universe of user-generated creativity, uploaded by young filmmakers with little respect for old notions about what's possible. On the Internet, no one knows or cares if you're ready for prime time.