[RonTheLogician]

Hey Danny,

I'm gonna float a wild movie idea about whose true merits I confess ignorance. The reason that I am offering it here is that, by your preparation and visual appearance, casting you in the lead role might be a GREAT choice!

During 1996, when you were but a girl in Europe (albeit already masturbating!), and preoccupied with growing up in a crazy world, back here in the States we saw the debut of the first Webcam girl on the Net. In those days, the mass-market Internet was a breaking wave. No one but a handful of academics and similar folks had high-speed connections; you were happy if your modem could receive data at the "blinding" speed of 28.8 kilobits per second! It would be two years yet before a couple young guys would start up a company with the silly name of Google. Into this primordial stew stepped a brave 19-year-old college junior named Jennifer Ringley. She had the bright idea to update a somewhat-grainy digital snapshot of her room on a Web page every three minutes, and modern Reality-genre television was born! (The idea would only come to conventional European TV the next year and to conventional US TV three years after that.)

But the coolest thing about what she called the JenniCam was that it was live and completely unedited, unlike a pre-recorded TV show. And she would ultimately abstain from obscuring even intimate activities like changing clothes, masturbating and coitus - something then unheard of on television, even cable. This was to be the first completely frank documentation of someone's life at home!

Eventually, she would supplement her continuous snapshot parade with short (10 minute-ish) video logs, called the JenniShow, which subscribers could download at length and then watch offline in those pig-slow dial-up-connection days. These would be choreographed, if not scripted. Having a moving medium, with sound, added a whole new dimension to her story. About a dozen such shows have been republished as a YouTube playlist here.

And while not running a porn site per se, Jenni eventually generated lots of erotic imagery, as documented in a 2005 forum thread here.

All this made Jenni as big an Internet sensation as a new online bookseller named Amazon, itself only a year old when the JenniCam debuted. By the time you turned ten years old, she was so famous, she'd appear on a popular nationally-syndicated TV show hosted by David Letterman, which episode you can today watch on YouTube here. And cable TV felt so threatened by her brilliant success that the CEO of a giant cable firm denounced her in a speech to a congress of Roman Catholic bishops!

But sadly, at the end of 2003, the JenniCam went dark forever and entered the pages of history - supposedly because of the difficulty of arranging a payment scheme for a service that included images of nudity. Then 27, Jenni herself retreated from the limelight and has largely remained there ever since.

Perhaps now is the time to weigh the production of a biopic documenting this breakthrough episode in human culture! It is not so distant in the past as to be unfamiliar to everyone, but far enough in the past so that it is not simply yesterday's news. It might be especially interesting to young adults like yourself, Danny, who perhaps were not yet aware of what was happening back then!

While you guys are hardly identical twins, you physically resemble Jennifer Ringley in several important ways, which would make you a great choice to portray her in a biopic. You are far from unwilling to do nude and sex scenes, and you are already very familiar with the business sector she created. Hollywood has made several mainstream films about the porn industry over the years, like Boogie Nights, Rated X, and Lovelace. Isn't it about time they made one showing the birth of erotic Web-camming?

How good a business idea would a biopic of Ringley be? Would it be competitive with alternative uses of the money and other resources? Who would finance a script and all the other up-front production costs? Would Ringley agree to such an enterprise? And if you or your friends tried to pitch the idea, would you - rather than someone else - actually be cast in the lead? I have no idea about the answers to these questions. Does anyone reading this?

Danny, if you have any interest in this idea, perhaps you might like to contact Ringley. Even if she said no, I think your thoughtful interview of her would be fascinating in itself!

Jennifer Ringley on Jennicam near the height of its fame