Reply All - #6 This Proves Everything

Episode Date: December 21, 2014

Depending on who you ask, Keith Calder is either a 35-year old film producer, or one of the players in a vast international conspiracy designed to conceal the greatest love story never told. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Depending on who you ask, Keith Calder is either a 35-year-old film producer who lives in L.A. Or he's a player in a vast international conspiracy designed to conceal the greatest love story never told. Both stories start at the same time and place. On Twitter, two years ago, when a bunch of random teenagers started asking Keith if he had a sister. At Keith Calder, do you have a sister? And what is her name, Smiley emoticon? January 2013, at Keith Calder, do you have a sister? Do you have a sister? Do you have a sister? Do you have a sister? Do you have a sister? And don't just RT this shit and not answer my question. Just tell me. So this went on, I'm scrolling down. It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets. For what it's worth, Keith does have a sister. She works for an NGO in New York. Keith couldn't imagine anything she would have done to provoke the attention of a crowd of online strangers. And then I realized something is up. I don't know exactly what, but something's up. I started doing some research. And I realized that there was this woman, young woman, called Eleanor Calder and that she was dating a member of One Direction.

One Direction, of course, is the boy band of the moment. There's five of them. One of them, Louis, has a girlfriend, a model named Eleanor Calder. Same last name is Keith. So now it seems clear to Keith what's going on. Oh, they think that because my name is Calder, that I must be related to this, Eleanor Calder. They must think she's my sister.

But why would they just, I mean, surely they're, are like a lot of Calder's in the world. Right. What I later found out is that they've done this to many people called Calder. I'm not the only person. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. And I'm PJ Vote. Keith didn't tell the fans that Eleanor wasn't his sister.

In his mind, the questions they were asking were just none of their business. What he didn't know, what he couldn't have known, was that there's a deeper reason for these fans' interest in Eleanor Calder. They believed, they still believe. believe that Eleanor Calder is a cover. A cover foisted on One Direction by their evil corporate management to disguise the true story. The two members of One Direction, Harry and Louis, are actually secretly in love with each other. So back in X Factor, a couple of people seemed to notice a relationship between the two members.

X Factor was like the reality TV show where the band sort of got their start. right? Yes. This is Victoria, a One Direction fan who calls herself a Larry Shipper. Larry, because it's a mash-up of Louis and Harry, and Shipper because she wants them to be in a relationship. And with Victoria, as is the case with many Larry Shippers, she's actually pretty sure that they already are. She says the evidence has been there since the beginning. They used to make video diaries for the TV show, and we just saw that they were always very close to each other a lot closer than the rest of the members. They've been like that ever since. So, I mean, it just caught on to a lot of people. And when you say closeness, I mean, they looked at each other like, I don't know, like they loved

each other a lot. This is Eli, another shipper. What was it? What was it that I heard? The management was scared if they came out that sales would go down, which is like the main thing that they said is why they're not together, like in the public eye. There are hundreds of thousands of Larry Shippers online. For obvious reasons, they're suspicious about this woman who claims to be Louis's girlfriend. What can you tell me about Eleanor Calder? There's not a lot I can tell you because she doesn't really do social media that much. But if I had to characterize the way you said that, I would say that you say that suspiciously.

Yes, very suspicious. Why is that very suspicious? You know, if you've been going out with someone for as long as those, two have been going out, you'd think that they would show a lot of them being together and doing things, but there's no pictures of them ever. And so it makes you wonder. Do you think it's possible she could just be like a shy person? It's definitely possible. But we actually, we just don't think that they genuinely are together at all. Shippers find each other online in all the usual places that teens do. Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook. The Facebook groups all seem to be

We had to request and be granted access to a Shipper Facebook group called Larry Shippers, Smiley Face, Smiley Face to do these interviews. And it's in groups like this one that the Shippers compare notes, rundown evidence, anything that'll prove conclusively that this theory is correct. For example, they pay a lot of attention to Harry and Louis tattoos. They have a lot of matching tattoos that apparently they think it's very subtle, but it's not. Give me an example of one of the ones that they think is a subtle matching tattoo, but you can tell the story behind it.

Okay. Louie has a tattoo that says, oops, on his arm. And Harry has one that says hi, but they're in each other's handwriting. And so what we can conclude from that is that those were their first words to each other. And they said that in an interview during X Factor. So that's one. So the way that that piece of evidence gets interpreted then is like usually getting matching tattoos with someone from the first time you met is something that like couples do more than friends do.

Yes. Interesting. Give me another one. Okay, there's a ship and a compass matching tattoo that they have together. Who's got the ship? Who's got the compass? Harry has the ship and Louis has the compass. To fans who believe in the conspiracy, the symbolism of the ship and the compass is obvious.

The ship needs the compass. Plus, a couple One Direction fans went to a tattoo artist in Los Angeles. Angeles and ask him to see his sheet of tattoos that he suggests for couples, and they found that very ship and compass. There's also a lot of YouTube theorizing. The videos are called Larry Proofs. They'll show some small moment between Harry and Louis. They'll play it, they'll slow it down, they'll repeat it. Eli said she watches for these tiny, telling moments. It'll be either like a look one of them gives to the other during, like, when a comments made, or like, it'll be like kind of a touch when they were able to sit next to each other.

It'll just kind of be like those kind of small things that you wouldn't really notice. Will they show the clip like the second time in slow motion? Sometimes. Sometimes it's like something really quick. Or if it's like kind of hidden, they'll like slow it down and like search like trying. They're good. The fandom is amazing at edits.

There's a montage of the top 30 iconic Larry moments on YouTube with over a million views. In one of the moments, the band's being interviewed for a German TV and the host asks Harry about a mark on his neck. that she thinks might be a hickie. Did somebody kiss you there? No, it's a scar. It's a sker. Uh-oh.

I thought it's a Knut Fleck, you say, in German. That's Louis, slightly off mic, saying, I gave him it. The filmmaker provides a subtitle for that, in case you missed it. And then this music plays, and there's a super slow-motion zoom of Harry. He's smiling and looking wistfully towards Louis. There are 29 more moments like this. This was the world that Keith Calder had bumped up against,

because of his last name. Take these two girls who are kind, smart, and thoughtful, but very all in on the conspiracy worldview. Multiply them by the hundreds of thousands. But Keith didn't know any of this when the questions about his sister started. If he had, he almost certainly would not have done this. I thought it would be fun to play with it a little bit. And so I tweeted that I can neither confirm nor deny the rumors

that my sister is dating a member of One Direction. Keith published a few more tweets, vaguely hinting that he might know something, something he couldn't say. The fans ate it up. The original people that asked me if I have a sister wrote a blog entry on Tumblr that is exhaustive about proving that I am related to Eleanor Calder. Can you like bring it up right now, actually? Does it still exist? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's been reblogged.

It's all over the place. What do I search for to find it? Oh, I'm sure if you just search for Keith Calder, Eleanor. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. Coming up, what that Tumblr page looks like. And the greatest love story ever trolled. After a word from our sponsor.

Welcome back to reply all. So after Keith Calder ill-advisedly joked that he was part of the conspiracy, the shippers went to work making him part of the conspiracy. The most reblogged Tumblr post about Keith looks like the crazy wall you see in any FBI crime drama. Lots of red lines and arrows, linking Keith to Eleanor by way of a bunch of other seemingly random people. Part of what makes these diagrams convincing for the people who believe them

is that like any good slander, they're chock full of damning half-truths. For instance, Keith's dad actually does work in the music industry, and he even co-founded Jive Records, which was a boy band label, although not One Directions boy band label. Oh, yeah, no, listen, that's the thing that why this will never die is that there's a lot of vague conspiracy theory aspects here that are impossible to deny. One of them being that I produced a movie with Morgan Spurlock and Morgan made the One Direction documentary. If I were looking for proof, I would point at that as proof, but it's not proof.

It just means that people that are in the film industry work together. People would send me a screen grab of the credits from the trailer for the movie I produced and they would say, look at this, you produce the One Direction movie. And I would reply, it says right there, this is the movie called The Greatest Movie ever sold. This is not the One Direction movie. And what would they say? They would say, that proves everything. No matter what I say, it proves everything.

There are One Direction fans all over the world. And the conspiracy posts, I think, get translated into other languages. So yesterday, it became a big thing in Brazil. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mentions. I was blocking, literally I ended up blocking hundreds. of people, maybe I think thousands of people. And it got to the point where they noticed I was blocking them. So what they started messaging me was, block me if you believe Larry is real.

And so then, yeah, they're very resourceful. Mainly, this is just a minor annoyance for Keith. He spends a couple more hours a week blocking people than he'd like. But occasionally, it affects his actual life in a real way. You know, I'm a film producer. I have an actual career. And when I have meetings with other people in Hollywood, the meetings begin with, so what's, what's the story with you in One Direction?

And I have to have this conversation. And I'm meeting with an agent for the first time. And I have to have a 15-minute conversation about One Direction at the start of the meeting. There are a lot of communities online where people gather to believe something impossible. There are the ones you've heard of, like the people who believe Obama is a secret Muslim. And there are the ones that maybe you haven't, like the people who believe that Stevie Wonder isn't really blind. But as far as conspiracy theories that I don't believe go, the one direction Harry and Louis are secretly in love one might be my favorite.

Here's why. For years, boy bands have sold teenage girls on the fantasy that these hot musicians could be their boyfriend. But now, legions of teenage girls are saying, I'd rather imagine a record company is forcing you to say that, and that really, you're in love with the cute guy standing next to you. It's romantic, it's hopeful, it's pro-gay, It's a love story.

When they come out, it'll be the love story of a century because of all the stuff they had to go through and it still stayed strong. What makes it better than any other love stories is that they met before they became a band and they became best friends. And best friends genuinely, you know, even if it's boy and boy or girl and boy, sometimes they'll fall in love. And we can just see that with Harry and Louis. and that's what makes it so special because you can just see how much they love each other. It's hard to explain. I think I know what you mean. And I think it's also, it's like you know so much more about that relationship than other relationships that they say that they're in.

Right. And it's not big, and you know, you would think, oh, well, you only know so much about them because they're so famous. And Eleanor isn't that famous, so they don't talk about it. But it's really not like that because when the cameras are off and when everyone is gone, you still see them together. You see pictures that are leaked online. You don't see leaked pictures of Louis and Eleanor together at all. So, you know, you know what I mean?

I think Victoria is noticing something real, although I disagree with the conclusion it brings her to. What I think is that when you're a teenager, particularly a younger one, you're more likely to have experienced the rush of overwhelming best friend love than you to have experienced romantic love. When I was a kid, I only saw my best friend Duncan over the summer, plus one additional weekend a year when he'd come down to Philadelphia to stay over for a weekend. When he left, I remember crying inconsolably, like heartbroken, lying on the ground, facing the carpet, crying, and my dad saying, look, you got to keep it together if you want your friend to keep visiting. I think an alternate theory for what could be going on here is that these two guys could be straight

and yet still love each other more than they love the girls they date. And that all this is a pruder or YouTube filmmaking could be fueled by this truth. Maybe. Have you heard anything about Keith Calder? I actually have, I just read something on Twitter about that. How he is, he had something to do with management, I think. Am I correct? Well, there's rumors that he does.

I don't think, I think he just sort of has been caught up. I think people think that he's related to Eleanor Calder, that, you know, he's sort of part of this conspiracy, and he was kind of a jerk about it. He, like, made jokes about it, and people took it seriously. So he gets a lot of messages every day from people who think that, you know, he's in on it. Well, there are a lot of rumors, and there's a lot of things that go around on Twitter. This whole situation with Keith, that could be one of the fake ones that we can rule out, but it also could be real. don't really know what to say about that because I don't have a lot of information, but...

I appreciate that. Mm-hmm. Like a cop talking about an open case, you get the sense Victoria just wants to know a little bit more. Maybe she'll just do the tiny, reasonable thing and ask Keith about the rumors. He's on Twitter. But that's the problem. When things scale on the internet, as it's easy for them to do, it can take a perfectly lovely, normal human impulse, and it can turn it into a force of nature. on bad days, when there are hundreds or thousands of tweets, Keith has to block them all. But during the quieter lulls, he tries to engage.

He really thinks it's worth it. You know, human beings are human beings. They actually, I've found that when you engage with someone directly like that, usually, if they're coming from a good place, they'll understand and adjust their behavior. And I actually, there are followers that I have on Twitter that are One Direction fans that started following me two years ago or a year and a half ago because of this. nonsense and now just chat with me. They chat and crack jokes. They give him music recommendations, mostly One Direction songs or bands that have opened

for One Direction. But Keith likes it. He was the first person he knew in his age bracket to hear about Ed Sheeran, another teen pop star who's rising quickly. It's fun to know about stuff like that, before all the old people do. Apply All is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman, our producers, Lena Masitis. We were edited this week by Alex Bloomberg, Alex Kaplan,

Starly Kine and Caitlin Roberts. Matt Lieber keeps this thing in the sky. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is from Build Build Buildings. Replyall is on the internet at replyall.diams. We're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. We have a newsletter if anybody wants to read it. We'll be back next Wednesday. See you then.