In April, the precocious tot made a huge and wholly unanticipated splash when she appeared with Ferrell in a megapopular short film called "The Landlord" on McKay and Ferrell's fledgling comedy site "I guess we knew that it would get noticed, but then it went sort of crazy," Shira says via phone while en route to JPiv's Malibu manse. "That was never what we set out to do. But the thing that keeps it OK is that she's 2 and she has no idea what's going on.
" A widely watched follow-up, "Good Cop, Baby Cop," was posted late last month and features Pearl repeatedly clobbering Ferrell (who plays a murderous perp) with a phone book to coerce his confession. "The Landlord," however, made far more waves. In it, Pearl is a cranky and occasionally foul-mouthed building owner who threatens to evict her deadbeat tenant (Ferrell in full afro mode) if he doesn't pay the rent.
Way before it logged 35 million-plus hits, the cyber phenom prompted talk show hosts such as Ellen DeGeneres to invite Pearl on as a guest (she declined). On the down side, "Today," "The O'Reilly Factor" and other programs ran segments that questioned the appropriateness of a toddler uttering such lines as "You pay now, bitch!" and "I need to get my drink on.
" McKay was surprised by the onslaught of attention. O'Reilly and the others, he says, "can't admit they're just entertainment shows, so they re-create this lame little story around it like, 'Oh, my God! Is Will Ferrell abusing a child?
' It's their method now." And it nearly crimped his style. "We talked about maybe not doing the second video because we just didn't want any of that kind of creepiness to get near her," he says.
"But on a certain level I felt like, 'Screw them! We're having fun, we're laughing, this is what we do.' And we knew there was absolutely nothing bad about it for her, so why even honor them by changing our behavior at all?
" Shira was equally struck by the ridiculousness of it all. "She's just a baby, so people don't really recognize her," she says. "But one time a guy delivered food to our house from a restaurant and he did recognize her and he wanted to take his picture with her, and that was sort of the craziest it got.
He's like, 'I deliver food to a lot of celebrities out here, but Pearl is my favorite.' " How does Uncle Jeremy feel about his 2-year-old niece achieving widespread fame in a tiny fraction of the time it took him? "I am not a hater," he jokes from the "Entourage" set.
"I have nothing but love for baby Pearl. She is the most famous one in the family, she happens to be the funniest, and from what I can see the most talented." "That little kid, my little granddaughter, could be an actor," Joyce Piven says.
But Pearl's once bright future has been dimmed, for she recently announced her retirement. "My ventures as an actor on the Internet have been rewarding and spiritually fulfilling, but now I must look to broader challenges as I approach my 26th month," she said in a press statement. Mom and Dad think it's for the best.
"People sort of take someone's image and create a whole buzz around it," Shira says. "It has nothing to do with the real person. At home Pearl's running around naked and sometimes peeing on the floor, so that's the reality.
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