Kevin and the Peacock – Part Five

A common misconception among those not involved in television production is that shows which air on a given network will also be produced on network property. As an NBC Page leading studio tours in Burbank, tourists would ask to see the studio where Seinfeld tapes, and I’d have to break it to them that Jerry and his gang of millionaires taped on a studio lot owned by CBS. Meanwhile, shows not owned by NBC sometimes rented space in the Burbank studio facility. When I was a page, “The Howie Mandel Show” was taped in the former Carson studio. A few months later, something new moved in… and I along with it.

Your Big Break – Season One

It was time to check in with a man I knew named Tom Patino. Tom, a former page himself, was probably the nicest man at NBC, and that isn’t just my opinion. I never came across a single soul who had a negative thing to say about Tom, and that is truly rare in this business. Tom Patino was the unit manager for the Tonight show. He was also the production manager for NBC’s coverage of the Rose Parade, a New Year’s tradition in southern California. But he was more than that. For a lot of us, Tom was the go-to guy on the lot. He was the one to call when there was no one else to call.

I asked Tom if he knew of any shows needing entry level assistants. He told me he didn’t know of any specific show, but he knew something was going in studio one. He knew Howie Mandel’s stuff had been cleared out and another show was going to be there during the summer. He gave me the name of the production company. God forgive him, he gave me the name of the company, which is one and the same with the man who runs the company.

I wanted a job, but there was more to it than that. I was in search of something. Little did I suspect that I’d wind up with Dick… Clark, that is.

I walked into the Dick Clark offices at 3003 W. Olive and was greeted by an elevator. The receptionist was actually in an adjacent room. My chosen attire was semiformal, which turned out to be too formal for the office.

In basketball, they call it a prayer shot. I placed a call to Dick Clark Productions just 24 hours prior to what would be the first of many visits to the Burbank office building. Not even knowing who to ask for, I was transferred to Evelyn Rhode, one of the assistants to one of the producers.

Television shows have many factions or divisions, if you will. There is a script department, a talent department, a writing staff, a production staff, art designers, stage crews, and about 17 dozen others, all of whom feel they are the single most important aspect of their given show. All of the factions can be reduced, however, to two camps: the creative and the practical. And each of those camps is headed by at least one producer, usually more, usually many, many more.

The creative producer is the guy who has no concept of time or budget, while the practical producer thinks of nothing but time and budget. No show could exist without both types of producers. I often referred to the practical producer as the money man, because every conversation he’d ever have with anyone concerning a show began and ended with, “well, how much would that cost?”

Evelyn was the assistant to one of Dick Clark’s money men, Jack Seifert. As it turned out, Jack had assembled a partial production crew and they were in the process of holding auditions for a new show that would be a mix of singing, dancing and dressing up like somebody famous. One of the people Jack had hired was Hugh Del Regno. Hugh was the show’s production coordinator. Evelyn transferred me to Hugh. He hired me sight unseen and asked that I start the very next day.

That was how I found myself face-to-face with an elevator and, eventually (just to the right), a receptionist. She directed me to the second floor of the three floor structure. Most of the second floor was devoted to production space. A hallway lead to an open office area which contained about a dozen or so smaller offices. I am convinced it was designed by the same person who designed the famed Winchester house. It was cluttered, all the hallways were dark and narrow, everything was in the most inconvenient place possible. There was an unrecognizable smell that lingered throughout the second floor.

“Welcome to Calcutta,” somebody said to me when I found my way to the production space. Some years ago, the area was designated Calcutta for no real reason, at least no reason anyone remembers. I met Hugh in person for the first time. He was dressed in shorts and a polo shirt. He introduced me around and set me to work calling perspective contestants and booking them to audition.

The show in question was Your Big Break, one of many shows that had recently crossed the pond due to the US’s lack of ideas for TV shows. Your Big Break pitted a series of contestants against each other, as they did everything they could to sound and look like a famous recording artist. The show was being co-produced by Endemol, the Netherlands-based company who originated the concept, and Buena Vista, a.k.a. Disney, who was in charge of syndicating/distributing the series.

Everyone I knew asked me what the show was like, and my usual response was that it was like “Star Search,” only different. It was a variety show in every sense of the word, with elements of a game show and a reality show mixed in for flavor. Each contestant was featured in a small video package as themselves before appearing on stage in costume. They were given professional vocal training, choreography lessons, makeup, hair and wardrobe to make themselves sound and look like somebody else. Background dancers, lights and camera trickery were all added to make it appear like the contestants were performing in their own concert. Then the audience voted and the winner moved onto a semifinal, then final round. And every time I’d finish my description of the show, whoever I’d described it to would say, “oh, so it’s televised karaoke.” We weren’t allowed to call it that, despite the fact we held most of our auditions at karaoke bars across the country.

I hate karaoke. I have been to a few karaoke bars in my time, and never enjoyed the experience. I don’t mind the drunk singers half as much as I mind those who take it seriously. There are karaoke enthusiasts who refer to singing at karaoke bars as “gigs.” Like people come to the bar just to see them. It’s silly and cliche, and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of karaoke enthusiasts.

I pictured little, old, blue haired ladies watching the show surrounded by 20 or 30 cats. The benefit of doing a show like “Your Big Break” was that the first show aired about the same time the final show was being taped, so even if the show tanked, I would still have been paid for the full season. The drawback was that the pay was laughable.

I get accused of biting the hand that feeds me an awful lot. Maybe I have issues accepting what life hands me… I don’t know. I do know that I am not alone in my belief that Dick Clark Productions is amongst the cheapest, if not THE cheapest production company in the industry today. My first day with the company, I walked across the street to NBC and visited with some people I’d gotten to know while working as a page. When I mentioned working for Dick Clark, the veteran TV crew members gasped collective gasps of shock and horror. They each proceeded to tell their respective tales of “how Dick screwed me.” To tell you the truth, I laughed it all off at the time. I was earning a steady paycheck. I was earning a small paycheck, but a steady one and that was alright by me.

As the show made the transition from preproduction to full-scale production, my job description changed. My main selling point as an employee of the show was my familiarity with NBC studios. As a former page, I knew the studio inside and out, and knew who to ask for specific things like security clearance and parking spaces.

The unit manager for studio one was a woman named Jeri Fowle, who acted like she ran the place. She probably did, before I entered the picture. She wanted all studio-related requests to go through her, but she was hardly ever at her desk. Well, TV is an immediate industry, meaning people don’t like to wait for things. So when the producers wanted to tour the studio and Jeri wasn’t answering her phone, I’d simply call one of my friends in security and get permission to bring them onto the lot. Jeri had put so many stops in place to prevent people like me from doing the things I did. I don’t think she ever really found out I was the person undermining her authority and violating her established protocol.

I was placed in charge of escorting the contestants to and from all the people and things they came across while rehearsing for the show. I immediately claimed the studio one green room as my office and central holding area. I was issued keys that opened 90% of the doors in the entire studio complex, and if it weren’t for the person who was actually supposed to run the talent department, I would have loved damn near every minute of it.

It was told to me that a deal had been struck between the head of the talent department and the producers that she would locate most, if not all of the talent for the season prior to the first day of taping. That would’ve allowed her to focus on the contestants who arrived and make them feel appreciated and special. I was not hired to make anyone feel appreciated or special. My job was to herd them like cattle from the rehearsal hall to the stage or from their dressing room to the wardrobe room, etc.

When the first day of taping came, we had maybe a third of our contestants booked. The entire talent department vanished for days at a time, traveling to karaoke bars across the country in a frantic search to find contestants. This left me doing their jobs at the studio as well as my own, but their jobs really weren’t that tough. Without their nurturing, brown nosing attitudes, I simply toned down my own attitude to compensate. Instead of saying to a contestant, “move it, asshole,” I’d say, “please move it, asshole.”

All this worked like a charm until towards the end of the season when the talent department finally finished booking the contestants. At that point, the head of the department realized I was more or less doing her job, and she took offense to it. There was no offense intended. Coming from a background of college TV, I learned that when something wasn’t getting done, it was more productive to just do it yourself rather than wait for whomever was supposed to do it. I befriended the contestants, settled their petty differences and soothed their fragile nerves. The head of the talent department asked to have me fired because I was doing the job she, up until that point, had failed to do. The producers sided with me. She dedicated herself to making my life miserable for the rest of the season, with moderate success.

Another challenge I had to face was dealing with an incompetent employee. I was in charge of escorting talent and I was given a staff of four other people to aid me in the process. One of them was an overly perfumed woman with no sense of direction. After two months of working inside the studio, she would get herself and the contestants she was escorting lost. I asked Hugh if we could drop her or at least transfer her to the office where she was less likely to disappear for hours at a stretch. He told me to just work around it. Frankly, she made us all look bad, because she was never where she was supposed to be and she never responded when someone called her on the walkie-talkies. Her coworkers approached me saying they had come to the conclusion a trained seal could do the job, and they were tired of picking up her slack.

Hugh finally confronted her and she exploded, claiming it was everyone else around her that was screwing up. I thought they were going to have a fist fight. The look of frustration on Hugh’s face was memorable. She was ultimately let go, never to be seen or heard from in the industry again.

The main issue at Your Big Break came down to money. As talent escorts, we were usually the first ones in and the last ones out (with the possible exception of the script department) every day we worked, which was six out of every seven days. Our days were longer than everyone else’s, but we were the lowest paid people on staff. We were paid a flat day rate, meaning we made the same whether we worked a 15 hour day or an eight hour day. Most of our days began at 7:00 a.m. and ended well after 8:00 p.m. If our pay was broken down by the hour, we were making a dollar less than minimum wage for our time.

With one week left to go before the end of the season, the unpaid overtime, people trying to get me fired, employees who couldn’t do the simplest of jobs, and unsupportive producers brought me to the edge.

That isn’t to say the show didn’t have its high points, the main high point being the dancers. I was surrounded daily by some of the most beautiful women in the world. They were all incurable flirts and although I knew I didn’t stand a chance in hell with any of them, I flirted with each and every one of them at each and every opportunity. Two dancers in particular stole my heart at each and every opportunity. Diane and Elaine were identical twins. They were blonde, they were cute, they were blonde and they were cute, they were cute blondes. I proposed marriage to the both of them on more than one occasion. I’d just get on one knee and ask, “will either of you marry me?” They’d giggle and kiss me on the cheek. I lived for that sort of stuff.

Another high point was the caliber of talent assembled to make the show happen. The director, Barry Glazer, previously directed American Bandstand for years. Bill Belew, the wardrobe designer, worked with people like Elvis and Cher. Damita Jo Freeman, the choreographer, and John DeLuise, the vocal coach, were some of the best in the industry.

At the top of the heap was the creative producer, Larry Klein, who was responsible for shows like the American Music Awards and Live Aid. Larry Klein was one of the most interesting people I had ever met. Completely lacking in subtlety, Larry said and did as he pleased. He’d pull his shirt over his head during meetings. He’d scream obscenities at someone one minute, and laugh with them the next. In my estimation, Larry knew how to get what he wanted using diplomacy, motivation and persuasion, but yelling proved a faster method, so that’s what he used.

Dick Clark himself, or “Famous Face” as Larry often called him, made occasional appearances as well, but Larry ran the show.

It came down to exactly how much misery I was willing to subject myself to at any given time. I got a call from a man named Chris Cavarozi. His company was in charge of booking the paid audiences on the Howie Mandel show. He needed someone to handle ticket requests for a show out of New York City. I wasn’t being asked to go to NYC. I was asked to work the phones and faxes in his office, compile some lists and mail some tickets. The job would only last a few weeks, but it paid slightly better than Your Big Break, and the hours were much more reasonable. So, with a heavy heart, I left YBB with one week of production still to go.

I returned to the YBB gang for the show’s wrap party, held in a rehearsal hall adjacent to studio one at NBC. While I was there, the contestant who portrayed Janis Joplin pulled me aside and predicted my future. I laughed it off, but it really creeped me out. She knew the names of people I knew and other details people didn’t know. To this day, the only thing I can figure is that she must have taken one of my tours when I was an NBC page. The creepiness only subsided when everything she predicted failed to come true.