Twitter superstar goes Hollywood
Making it in Hollywood takes quite a bit of a leap of faith. For every Brad Pitt that graduated from wearing chicken suits to becoming a global cinematic superstar, there is an army of obscure, forgotten actors, screenwriters and directors busing tables, doing construction work and working wide-range of less than glamorous day jobs just to finance their Tinseltown dreams. Hollywood, with its mish-mash of competing egos and competing agencies and antagonistic and backbiting subculture of “frenemies”, is hardly a comforting environment for an upcoming talent. You really have to elbow, claw and fight your way to getting a decent shot in Hollywood, which is what makes Kelly Oxford’s journey from obscure Alberta, Canada housewife and mother of three to Hollywood screenwriter such an amazing story.
Kelly did not set foot in Hollywood and pay her dues the old-fashioned way. She did not bus tables. She did not live in the Los Angeles area and shop her screenplay around in order to get attention within the Hollywood machinery. Instead, this writer conquered Hollywood in a revolutionary new way: she tweeted. Using 140 characters at a time, Kelly Oxford garnered a huge following the world over for her irreverent wry observations about daily life and her life as a mother. She has attracted the attention of famous movie critic, Roger Ebert and was befriended by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel based solely on the strength of her Twitter tweets. All told, she has tweeted over 2,900 times on the service throughout the three-year life of her account. Prior to her Twitter notoriety, Oxford was an unpublished author that all changed last fall, when the network NBC hired her to write a pilot. Also, publisher Harper Collins will be releasing her first book, her first essay compilation called, “Everything’s Perfect When You’re a Liar” April next year. If all these developments weren’t enough, last April, Oxford sold her first film script to Warner Brothers.
At Ereviewguide.com, we’ve always been harping on the power of Twitter and Facebook for exploding each individual’s fear of influence. We’ve previously used the example of Arab Spring as a vivid demonstration of how previously obscure idea if presented to a small but influential group of people can quickly mushroom into a social movement. This is what happened to Kelly Oxford. She was just twilling along as an unrecognized blogger when she discovered Twitter and she started posting her witty observations and just really her personality shine through. Friends began to tell friends and all of a sudden, she gained the attention of really influential people like Jimmy Kimmel and Roger Ebert. Kimmel even retweeted her tweets extensively further exposing her to a wider audience. Oxford’s story is just the latest example of how powerful Twitter can be. Whether you are an obscure writer, an underground political activist, or points in between, Twitter can explode your circle of influence and can take you to places you’ve never imagined you’d reach.