Interview With "Switcher Girl" Ellen Feiss

Ed over in Accounting writes in with a Macinstein interview with Ellen Feiss, an Internet cult figure of a bygone era. Back in 2002, in the heyday of Apple's "Switcher" ads, the 14-year-old Feiss garnered a bit more than 15 minutes of fame. Her Switcher ad became an instant classic — partly because of the widespread belief that she was stoned while filming it, which she says was not the case. In the interview Feiss, who is now a college student with one movie behind her, talks about pseudo Internet fame, drugs, and acting. She says she's still using the same G4 she had when the ad ran. Nostalgia bonus: the ad is embedded at the end of the interview.

There is another . . .

[GMontag]

Another interview [theflux.tv], with audio, is linked in the responses to the story.

Re:Apple's Demographic? - lesbian

[Anonymous Coward]

She is dating a female. So any takers would have to be lez.

Re:pupils

[lysergic.acid]

she said she was hired for the role because her character goes on a shroom trip. and shrooms do make your pupils dilate.

Re:pupils

[fafalone]

It could simply be that she had a crush on the camera person. Pupils dialate for all manner of reason.

When filming a scene, there's all sorts of lights pointed at the set, and you can see there's a light pointed right at her face. Natural causes of pupil dilation simply don't dilate THAT much when there's a light of any noticeable intensity on the eye. To have eyes like that without a chemical influence, she'd have to be in dim light AND having a physiological response, or complete darkness, to get that wide.
That said, the chemical influence causing it isn't necessarily a hallucinogen (or a stimulant), it could be the same stuff the optometrist uses, to simulate the effect of drugs. The actors in drug movies don't really take drugs in front of the camera, most of the time anyway.

Re:pupils

[Dunbal]

That said, the chemical influence causing it isn't necessarily a hallucinogen (or a stimulant), it could be the same stuff the optometrist uses, to simulate the effect of drugs.

      Atropine is available in eye-drops, it blocks muscarinic receptors and causes pupillary dilation. It has been used for hundreds of years by women because they thought dilated pupils make them look "sexy". In fact atropine is derived from the "belladonna" plant, bella donna meaning "beautiful woman" in latin.

      There are other antimuscarinincs that can be used by hollywood to acheive this effect, since atropine can dilate pupils for weeks at a time which is not a good thing if you plan to be outside once in a while...

Re:Apple ads

[ZachPruckowski]

The only single difference being the DRM chip they use to lock OSX, and the EFI (versus the classic BIOS)

There is no DRM chip. I have a Mac less than 6 months old. I've spent some time looking for the chip, and I used Amit Singh's software to try to find it. It's only on some models, and is inactive. It's basically only present if it happened to be on the motherboard they use. There's not even an OS X driver for it.

Re:On BMW

[Anonymous Coward]

The european focus is a different car than the American focus. Completely different.

Don't ask me why they don't sell the Euro version here. The current focus here is tired and old. Same model for at least 5 years now. '07 has sheet metal changes but that's it.

Your point remains, I'm just fyi'ing...

Re:Apple ads

[screeble]

if I want to watch anything in fullscreen in Quicktime I need to buy a £20 pro update, or import them into iTunes (not iMovie) and watch them in front row.

Not true... Open up AppleScript Editor, type...

tell application "QuickTime Player"
present front movie scale screen
end tell

...and save as application. Drag into user scripts folder.

The next time you want fullscreen just use the script.

Re:Apple ads

[soft_guy]

I'm -really- tired of people saying how well OpenOffice works when it doesn't. Just because it -is- an alternative doesn't mean it's superior, or even on an even footing with its competition.

Open Office works fine for me. My company switched to it over a year ago because they didn't want to pay for MS Office and I haven't heard any complaints.

Re:Is there nothing better to read?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a good shot -- most of the time, she still looks wasted: http://www.ellenfeiss.net/?p=19 [ellenfeiss.net].

Still would though*.

AC.

* but, like the rest of you, I'm a geek and can't afford to be fussy.

All Switch ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a website with all the switch ads http://plex.us/videos/switch.html [plex.us]