Brian Atene

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Brian Atene, born August 16, 1963, is a former student in the Juilliard School of performing arts, who became an Internet phenomenon in 2006 when an audition tape he had made in 1984 for the film Full Metal Jacket was posted on YouTube. The video attracted considerable attention because of the apparent hubris ("You will find in me the finest actor of the lot, the most beautifully trained, the most capable"), and comical over-acting displayed by the 20-year-old aspiring actor while attempting to attract the attention of director Stanley Kubrick. The video features Atene performing a "cutting" loosely based on S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Atene acts out the role of Johnny Cade, whose back has been broken.

The video was mentioned on prominent web sites such as Boing Boing, Gawker, and Defamer, and spread in classic viral fashion, inspiring numerous remixes.

Three days after the breakout of the video, an individual posted a video response on YouTube, claiming to be Atene, now 43 years old, heavier and "still acting". A debate broke out, within the comment sections of YouTube, and on many other blogs and sites hosting the two videos, as to whether or not this was in fact the "real Atene." Since the man in question had blue eyes in contrast to Atene's brown ones, it is unlikely that they are the same.

Further confusing matters, a number of days later, another individual claiming to be Atene created a user ID on YouTube called "juilliardropout". He claimed that he would post a video sometime in the near future and that the original video, although real, was done partly tongue-in-cheek. On November 17, 2006 juilliardropout posted a video on YouTube where he said he is Brian Atene and said that the original tape was one of two and it was the other one that was actually sent to Stanley Kubrick; he also asked people to visit christopherreeve.org and buy Superman items to support "The search for truth and justice" and promised to post new videos on YouTube. While Atene explains the choice of this charity with a story about how Reeve (a former student of Julliard himself) visited the school while Atene was a student there, some YouTube commenters wondered whether this was a sly reference to his "I ain't gonna walk again-- not even on crut-chessssss!" audition for Kubrick from The Outsiders.

On November 30, 2006, Yahoo! Current Buzz announced that they had had contact with Brian Atene, naming the man calling himself Juilliardropout as the real Brian Atene.