Me@The Zoo.

Me@The Zoo.

By columnist Erica Adams
Photo credit: Tony Powell

The story of a cross-gender homosexual from a small town in Tennessee, the HBO documentary Me @ the Zoo explores the tale of Chris Crocker, one of the first “Internet celebrities,” known for his 2007 YouTube video “Leave Britney Alone.” This enticing short film was screened in Washington, DC on Thursday night at The Hirshhorn Museum.

The title of the documentary “Me @ The Zoo” is based on the video that started it all, the first video ever posted on YouTube in 2005.

The filmmaker admits that at first they were looking to interview Chris for another movie. In the process they made friends and they decided to “switch gears” and make the movie about Chris’ life.

The 2007 YouTube sensation “Leave Britney Alone” involves a sobbing Chris Crocker, with woman’s (obviously non-waterproof) makeup, demanding that Britney’s “haters” leave her alone. Crocker explains in the short film that Britney reminded him of his own mother, and that the pop star’s situation felt familiar to him. He felt a sort of “responsibility” to defend her and all that she had been through, admitting that he never really “understood why a video like that had never been made before.”

After millions of views, Crocker’s 15 minutes of fame landed him an online video interview with Jimmy Kimmel and an LA reality television pilot. The pilot was never aired and the show canceled, but the young “Britney lover” recorded his very own single “Freak of Nature,” becoming the second most downloaded song on iTunes at the time.

Now, Crocker says he is “still doing music and things of different natures that he can’t talk about in Washington” and has “actually done 100,000 songs with no labels so far.”

Crocker tells Hollywood on the Potomac why he started making videos in the first place.

“I know that I have never really been comfortable with people, so it really was my only way of feeling understood, and that’s why I grew an attachment with it because the camera won’t talk back to you.”

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