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marclafountain.com: Ellen Feiss, Apple's "Stoner", Five Years Later
marclafountain.com
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Ellen Feiss, Apple's "Stoner",
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The year was 2002 and her name was Ellen Feiss.
Ellen was a 14-year-old student.The father of one of her friends was filming TV ads for Apple's "Switch" campaign at the time and so she happened to go to the filming set.The rest is history.Ellen was asked to film an ad and the resulting video was pure magic.As she told the story of a Windows PC eating her school paper, she spoke in a slow, slurred voice and her eyes seemed red.The assumption made by many was that Ellen was stoned and the ad became a sensation.
Ellen claimed her behavior in the ad was due to a combination of taking Benadryl for allergies and filming the spot late at night.But, the pot rumor persisted and a star was born.Ellen's face was put on everything from t-shirts to frisbees.Parodies of the ad went up everywhere online.Ellen got offers to go on Leno and Letterman.Hollywood started calling her.And, to this day, a Google search for "Ellen Feiss" gets 189,000 hits, including a page on Wikipedia.
I know this may seem a strange story to blog about.But, I love bizarre stuff about popular culture and I love bizarre stuff about Apple.So, this was just too good to resist.And, Macenstein just posted the text of a recent interview with Ellen, done nearly five years after her celebrity moment.
Ellen sounds like an interesting person and a fairly grounded one given what happened to her after the Switch ad.As I read her interview, I thought about a book I mentioned in an earlier post, Fame Junkies.
In the book, the author tells the stories of aspiring child actors and models who crave fame and will do anything to get it.I've read page after page about kids (and their parents) throwing themselves at agents and going into massive debt in misguided quests for celebrity.
They're sad stories.So, it's refreshing to hear that Ellen (and her parents) were centered enough to not be seduced by Ellen's 15 minutes of fame.She turned down Letterman and Leno because she didn't want to be exploited as the stoner computer chick.In fact, she didn't do any entertainment industry work until a recent independent film she made after graduating from high school.And, she has no concrete plans to pursue acting.
Kind of surprising, right?Most of today's child actors and reality TV "stars" would probably kill to have the opportunity at fame that Ellen has largely rejected.Maybe they could learn a thing or two from a "stoned" 14-year-old girl. (Photo from Macenstein.)
Technorati Tags: Apple, Celebrity, Ellen Feiss, Fame Junkies, Macenstein, Switch
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