If your career is going down the YouTube, just film your baby's birth, writes Sean O'Driscollin New York.
This week, a video of a piano-playing cat was watched by more than 2 million people, while trashy talk show host Ricki Lake released a film of herself giving birth.
The two events are not unrelated.
What, in the age of YouTube, do you do if you're a downmarket former chat show host and a cat playing bad piano can outgun you for entertainment value? In Lake's case, you get naked, have a baby in front of a documentary crew, get your personal assistant to clean up the afterbirth and then present the results at a film festival.
It's all about the art.
Lake stars in her own self-produced documentary in which she gives birth to her second child in a bath of sea water. Faster than you can teach a cat to play Chopsticks, she has rushed it out for its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival tomorrow.
For a woman who once revealed that she and her husband were ripping each others' clothes off within an hour of their first meeting, sex has become a passé revelation. After the Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton sex tapes went global, it would be difficult to compete.
Popping a blood-covered baby in front of a packed cinema, however, still has impact.
The documentary, The Business of Being Born, raises some serious questions about the Caesarean industry, but the camera stays firmly on Lake and the tribulations of a millionaire talk-show host whose personal assistant slops out the bathtub mess.
There is something distinctly YouTube about the video footage of the home birth. If you cannot compete with a dog catching a Frisbee or a dancing pig, celebrity revelation is a good fallback plan. Lake talks of her hurt, her concerns, her fears, just as Anna Nicole Smith did last year when she sold video footage of her Caesarean section to the Entertainment Channel, which broadcast the entire event, almost unedited.
If it wasn't for Smith's recent death, the footage would make for beautifully unintentional comedy.
"Only we can take you inside the delivery room" boasts the Entertainment Tonight host before we are shown close-up footage of blood reminiscent of Platoon or The Deer Hunter.
"Strapped down and in agony," runs the voiceover, before it cuts to Smith slurring her way through her own commentary: "It felt like God and Jesus were, like, ripping my insides out of my body," she says, as the piano music goes all soft and concerned.
In her moment of agony, her partner, Howard K Stern, narrates that she wants the Caesarean cut above her tattoo but low enough so she can wear a bikini.
Then we see a doctor try to use his hands to reach in and grab the unfortunate baby, before she is forced into Smith's arms with the aid of a bloodied forceps.
And the revelations haven't finished, at least not until the next instalment of Entertainment Tonight.As Smith cuddles her baby, the voiceover commentary ends on a cliffhanger, with her saying: "Who is the father?"
But for indulgent YouTube-topping self-revelation, it's hard to beat supermodel turned chat-show host, Tyra Banks, in what has become an ironic cult classic.
To understand what it's like to be a 350-pound (159kg) woman, Banks takes one day off from her sexy, glamorous life to wander around a city centre in a fat costume."And there's no excuse for nastiness and that's what I experienced," she tells two genuinely obese women, who comfort her as she breaks down and cries about her one day of the fabulous life.
Fat suits, Caesarean sections, birth in a bath - breaking the taste barrier is becoming de rigeur if you want to stay ahead of Nora the piano-playing cat and the hordes of feline Beethovens following in her wake. But what of sex? How can you grab national attention not already eviscerated by the internet proliferation of Paris Hilton's grainy, night-vision sex with a D-list actor?
For boundary-pushing sex revelation, look no farther than the most-discussed film of this year's Sundance film festival, a documentary about a businessman who was killed having sex with a horse.
Far from hiding in the stables, his comrades come forward to share the joy of saddle-less horse riding. Like Ricki and Banks, this isn't about self-promotion, it's about humanity. "This was a guy who was a conservative man at one point, and those ideas started breaking down for him. I think that 9/11 triggered a lot of it," says the director in the press notes.
Are these people serious?
The best line from the documentary comes from one of the horse fanciers. Speaking of his equine encounters, he deadpans: "Someone actually stood there and gave me some kind of attention."
If Ricki Lake hadn't run off to have kids, she'd have loved this guy.