Buy It Now On DVD

Chelsea Magan (Chelsea Logan) is your average gossip-spreading, party-going, boy-chasing 16 year-old. With the admitted convenience of being a flush Manhattanite, she would comfortably tell you that she enjoys a “night out on the town” with her girlfriends; expensive clothes and designer accessories; “hot guys” and Britney Spears.

What she probably wouldn’t tell you is that she uses eBay. What she certainly wouldn’t tell you is what exactly she uses it to do. Chelsea’s first foray into the world of online trading is an altogether personal affair. The bidders are all wealthy males. The item in question is her virginity.

BUY IT NOW is not just the story of a girl selling her virginity online. The film deals with familial structures that have all but eliminated open dialogue, and technology that have made our desires incredibly easy to fulfill. Chelsea winding up in some dive motel room with the man who has purchased her “product” online is just a tragic result of these circumstances.

SPECIAL NOTES

• The film was made over the course of 3 days - shooting the documentary and narrative simultaneously- with an additional 3 days of shooting two months later to complete the documentary.

• The entire documentary was shot with a small Sony Mini-DV camera for about $250.

• In addition to the crew being current NYU Tisch undergrads, three of the actresses, Chelsea Logan, Tiffany Yaraghi, and Stacey Jordan, are students at NYU.

• The shooting script was only 10 pages long. The documentary outline was 2 pages. Both films together are a little over an hour in length.

• I came up with the idea for the film at a barbecue at a friend’s house. I said, “What if a girl sold her virginity on eBay?” I worked from there, always with Chelsea in mind for the lead actress. It wasn’t until I finished the script and began making the film that I realized people were actually selling their virginity online.

• We did actually place the auction on eBay. I have all the screenshots of the actual page and some of people’s questions. We were kicked off after a little over a day and a half. In that time, we had over 3,000 hits, and had received over 350 e-mails. The starting bid was $1,500. We were up to almost $1,800 by the next day, looking as though it would go up to over $2,000 by night. It was then that I received the e-mail saying that eBay had to kick me off. That time, their reasoning was that you could not have an item for sale that was not a physical item. If it could not be pictured, then it was not a real “item”. We actually put the auction up again three months later, and that time it only lasted for a little less than a day. And that time we were kicked off because the item in question was of a sexual nature and that was not allowed. When Chelsea reads the e-mail in the film, it is the actual letter she’s reading from.

• The film was rejected from the Tribeca Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the GenArt Film Festival, as well as a few others I can’t remember, before I got a letter from CineVegas asking if I would like to premiere the film there, where they wanted to screen both the doc and narrative versions side by side. And then two weeks later I received my acceptance to Cannes Cinefondation for the narrative version.