In the minds of everyone involved, it could still go either way. Kelly had been ahead in the previous week’s voting but not by so much that a great night for Justin couldn’t tip it, and there was no telling which way Nikki McKibbin’s supporters might turn.
What uncertainty remained evaporated for most when they heard the “winner’s songs,” the two original pieces that both contestants would sing for their final showdown. Both “Before Your Love” and “A Moment Like This” seemed tailor-made for Kelly Clarkson’s voice, the latter particularly falling right into her range. Lythgoe recalls that the debate about the song became fairly heated. “There were a few arguments on that because they recorded a song that was really too high for Justin Guarini. There was a bit of a falling out over that.”
Byrd remembers at the finale, “Justin said to me, when it became song choices, he knew, ‘That song’s not for me. It’s for her.’ ”
Nikki McKibbin, who returned to participate in the finale, remembers doing the math and saying to Kelly backstage, “I told Kelly, ‘You won the show.’ She said, ‘Shut up, Nikki.’ I said, ‘A million bucks if you didn’t win this show, seriously.’ ”
Guarini himself remembers telling her after their performances the first night, “I said, ‘Honey, I tried but you know you’re going to win this, right?’ And it was with a happy heart because I just knew that song was perfect for her and she nailed it and it just was right. Everything was right. I remember being off to the side of the stage with Nigel Lythgoe when she was performing ‘A Moment Like This.’ I remember saying to him, ‘If I win this you’re going to need to hire some extra security,’ and this is while she’s singing it. He said, ‘Why is that?’ I said, ‘Because there’s going to be a riot if I win. Do you hear this?’ ”
In the first American Idol finale, 15.8 million votes were cast and 22.8 million people watched the spectacle. Kelly’s coronation became a national moment. The Idol fairy tale of the girl from nowhere transformed into a star was born.
Justin himself created another tradition, and if that night is strewn with stardust in people’s memory, his behavior would have much to do with it. Justin Guarini, without missing a single beat, joined in a gracious celebration for Kelly that set the standard forever, allowing the winners to step forward with no mixed feelings. Justin remembers, “I was up there and the possibility, of course a part of me wanted to win but a part of me really knew what the score was. When it happened I was like, ‘Yes! Yeah, babe, you did it.’ We were very close by that point. You can’t go through something like that with someone and not be close to them. It just was what it was and I was very joyous and still am to this day.”
Gail Berman recalls, “The chemistry of the whole thing was absolutely special. Not only were we on to something in terms of a successful ratings winner, but it was just a thrilling night. It somehow had captured a wave and made people feel good about homegrown talent and possibilities. It just was a moment in time.”
Chapter 8
THE EXILE
Brian Dunkleman didn’t want to talk.
It was hard to blame him. Since parting with the show at the end of season 1, Brian Dunkleman has had a dark cloud cast over his life. In the few interviews he’s given since leaving Idol, he’s tried to make light of it, embracing comparisons with the fifth Beatle and resurfacing on Howard Stern. Nevertheless, Brian Dunkleman is still regarded as a cautionary tale. Nine years after the fact, he is still known as The Man Who Left American Idol.
But after ignoring my entreaties, something happened and Dunkleman—whose existence, like Elvis, has been the subject of rumors and random sightings—was thrust back into the spotlight by no less than former partner Ryan Seacrest.
On season 9’s April 13 episode, as Seacrest told audiences of the upcoming Idol Gives Back charity special, he noted that the show was so big that it would be held from two stages and, he added with a mischievous grin, the host from the second stage would be . . . Brian Dunkleman.
The audience tittered nervously and gasped at what seemed an ungracious reference on Seacrest’s part. During the next few days the quip became a minor news item, fueling a storyline already in play about Seacrest’s seeming stumbles and missteps in Idol’s troubled ninth season. But the incident also sparked interest in Dunkleman himself, who gave his first interview in years to New York Magazine’s Vulture blog and days later, having seen the need to let his side of the story be heard, gave his second to me.
It’s almost impossible to recall, viewing the vast landscape of Seacrest, Inc., today, that the golden-haired boy didn’t always have the stage to himself, that he had shared it with a laconic wiseacre, the buddy act that briefly guided the Idol show. But by season 2, for reasons that have never been entirely spelled out, Brian Dunkleman disappeared from the screen and the building of two empires began in earnest—that of Idol and of its now solo host.
Waiting to meet Brian Dunkleman, I’m unsure who I’ll be seeing. The year before he filmed a short comedic video, a pilot for a proposed series entitled American Dunkleman that was posted on the Web—a pitch for a series about the foibles of a man who walked away from untold riches and success and who is seen by many as one of the biggest schmucks in entertainment history. In the video, Dunkleman sits at a bus stop absorbing catcalls from passing cars. Looming overhead is the mocking face of Ryan Seacrest advertising a “We Pay Your Bills” promotion for his radio show. The video’s courage in making light of Dunkleman’s misfortune causes viewers to gasp, but leaves him wondering about the man at the center of it all. After eight years, the horrors are clearly still fresh.
In person, Dunkleman shows little hint of the dark drama his name is associated with. He arrives at Barney’s Beanery wearing a polo shirt and baseball cap, like any actor on his day off. He’s friendly, if somewhat cautious, his northeastern accent stronger than I remember from TV. The talk is a bit awkward at first, but sitting back, looking through Barney’s extensive selection of burgers, Brian’s shyness evaporates and he quickly jokes about the Seacrest moment of the previous week. It’s impossible to discern the slightest trace of bitterness.
“He made a joke,” he says of Ryan. “No big deal. It was funny. It got me more attention than I’ve gotten in years. They might pick up the pilot now. I was hoping Ryan might have me on his radio show,” he says, and we talk over the chances of that happening.
And then, taking a breath, we step back in time.
The road to Idol infamy, Brian Dunkleman tells me, began in the one-stoplight town of Ellicottville, New York, where he grew up the youngest of ten children. While attending college at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he began to perform stand-up at a local bar.
“I was always kind of the class clown,” he remembers. “And so I thought, I could probably do this. So I said to the owners, ‘Think about the next time you do a show, maybe I can emcee it.’ Then, a week later, they said, ‘You’re on next Saturday.’ . . . Everybody in town came, our family and everybody. So I actually ended up doing really well. It was a really supportive environment, and so I started getting booked by one of the guys. . . . He owned one of the clubs in Buffalo and he had me come up there and I just started getting work. I was like, ‘You’re actually going to pay me money to do this?’ I decided that I would do the smart thing, drop out of college and start doing this.”
He moved not quite to Hollywood, but closer to it, to Denver, where he had a brother in the air force academy. “I’d play a round of golf and then go straight to the comedy club and just kind of watch and meet everybody that came through. That’s where I really developed.”
After a few years of touring the country playing comedy clubs, Dunkleman was spotted by an agent for Disney/Touchstone, who encouraged him to come out to Los Angeles, getting him a spot at the Improv Comedy Club, where a good percent of America’s comedy careers begin.
“I found a place and actually moved to Los Angeles on my twenty-fifth birthday. I spent my twenty-fifth birthday in an apart
ment . . . my electricity hadn’t been turned on yet . . . with a boom box, batteries, and some candles, and was gently weeping, ‘Why am I here right now?’ That’s how I started.”
Dunkleman took the traditional stand-up route of performing wherever, whenever he could. “Sometimes,” he said, “it was just a couple of other comics and the waitstaff cleaning the glasses, but you’re onstage at the Improv.” After a few years, he finally signed with a manager and an agent, won a slot at the star-making HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and things started to click. His first acting role soon materialized, as Customer #2 on an episode of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, followed by a three-episode arc as a tangential character on Friends. Soon enough, Brian had appeared on a dozen TV shows and was making his living as an actor and stand-up.
As was de rigueur for comics in the Seinfeld era, Dunkleman fleshed out the pilot for a sitcom vehicle for himself, in an eerie foreshadowing, the story of a child star who has lost everything and has to move back home. The concept won him a development deal with Castle Rock and he began pitching it around town.
“I’d always joked that I’d get a deal for my own show and the world would end. Well, I got my deal on September 9, 2001.”
Forty-eight hours later, the networks had lost every bit of their appetite for new comedies. The Seinfeld era of scripted network television had abruptly come to an end and the pilot was dead in the water. While pitching, however, Brian had hawked his pilot to Fox. The following year he “got a call about this show, American Idol. They wanted me to come in and audition and it was real late in the process.”
Brian was stepping into the whirlwind of a show being rushed to air; the audition process certainly reflected that chaos. “I got hooked up with another guy and they basically said, ‘It’s a singing competition. You’re in New York City. It’s one of the judges’ birthdays. Just go.’ ”
The group was winnowed down to six or seven young men, mostly in their early twenties, mostly younger than Brian, then twenty-nine. “So they just kept pairing us up, one at a time. I went in with another guy who had already gone in and it was just one of those magical days where my first time in, there’s fifteen people there with stadium seating and I got one laugh and I had them. Every time I went back in I had them. . . . Then I got a call to come in again and have breakfast at 7:00 A.M. with this guy Ryan Seacrest.”
When asked how much he wanted the job, Brian explains that in order to audition and screen test he had to sign a “test deal,” which included the salary he would ultimately be paid if he got the part. So, having seen the amount of money on the line, Brian wanted the job “pretty fucking bad. I mean, obviously I was an actor and I wanted to act, but being a struggling actor in Los Angeles is pretty rough.”
Nerves mounting, Brian went on his arranged date with his potential partner, meeting Seacrest and season 1 producer Brian Gadinsky at Nate ’n Al’s deli in Beverly Hills. “It was like, ‘Where are you from,’ and just very casual. He seemed like a really cool guy.”
They returned again to the studio for one last team audition in front of the cameras. Before they could tape, however, Seacrest began to haggle over a sticking point in the contract, showing a bit of the cutthroat businessman that would later emerge, playing hardball before this crucial final audition. “I waited so long. I was so nervous, like, ‘Please, just let it go.’ I just remember people running up and down the hallways and I’m sitting there, trying to keep to myself, trying not to go nuts while he and his father—I think his father is an attorney—are haggling.
“But finally that all got squared away and so we went into the room together and it just worked.”
Seacrest was an experienced host who had fronted several shows in the previous years. Dunkelman, a stand-up, had never hosted anything in his life. “The first day on the set was a little bit weird because I’d never done anything like this and it was a little intimidating, but it was actually really fun. It was just kind of figuring out how we were going to do this and so it was really just kind of like the audition.”
Then the judges arrived, and with them the American debut of Simon Cowell. “That’s kind of when I first saw what the show was. I just didn’t have any idea of the honesty of the critiques, let’s put it that way. So I was really affected that first day because you’re spending all day with these kids, you’re getting to know them and you’re getting to know their parents. Then after a few hours they come out and . . . you know how it works. . . .
“In the second season, the kids knew that it was coming. They’d seen the show and they knew what it was about. On the original season it was just awful. ‘You’re telling me that I suck? That I should never sing again?’ That’s the thing that I think people need to sit back and try to visualize. That’s why I had a hard time. And I couldn’t shake it for the whole season. That said, I was the one who had a problem with it. Nobody else did.”
With a director assigned to shoot segments around the Seacrest-Dunkleman duo, they ventured out in each city in search of comic bits. “The three of us really had a great time because every city was like, ‘All right, let’s just go around the city and find funny stuff to do.’ That’s my favorite thing in the world, ‘Let’s just go find it.’ A lot of that stuff unfortunately didn’t make it into the show because they just needed, ‘Hey, we’re in Miami. Let’s check out the auditions.’ ”
In contrast to today’s nine two-hour episodes, the first season’s auditions were squeezed into a mere two one-hour episodes. Only a few of the segments ultimately made it to air. In one, Dunkleman is seen hopping into a limo and ordering it to drive away without Seacrest. In another, the pair are arrested and dragged off in handcuffs.
The general idea of the Seacrest-Dunkleman pairing was that Seacrest would take the foreground as the straightforward, information-giving host, while Dunkleman would hang back and jump in with wisecracks. “We were all trying to figure it out but we had this thing that we developed, this bickering thing I thought was funny and we played it up.” But as the show evolved, the pair on the sidelines only found the occasional chance to develop their on-screen dynamic. Seacrest seized the mike at every opportunity and focused on playing off the judges, Cowell in particular, rather than sparring with his cohost.
After the auditions and Hollywood week, the live episodes began, and with them Brian’s first moment helming a show that was quickly becoming a major hit. “I can’t possibly convey how nervous I was. I actually thought that my head was going to come off my fucking body. Both Ryan and I . . . we’re both standing there and shaking. They’re counting down, ‘Five! Four—,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m going to throw up and shit my pants at the same time.’ He was the same way. We did our first thing. If you go back and watch that first moment, my voice is like an octave higher than it normally is. ‘HEY, EVERYBODY, WELCOME TO—’ and then we got done with our little thing. They were like, ‘Okay, and out.’ The graphics went up, and we were both like ahhhhh . . . and then we went to our next spot. It was an out-of-body experience I can’t possibly explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, and that was the first few live shows. By the end of it, it was like, ‘All right, this is kind of cool.’ It’s exhilarating, but you’re still scared as hell, but you almost know what you’re doing. That’s the part I miss the most about it, the live TV.”
By this time, the show was taking off beyond all expectations. “When I really started to feel the size of it, every time I’d leave the house I would get recognized, which I wasn’t used to. I went to a USC game . . . and people start recognizing me and they were rabid about this show. ‘Dunkleman! Fucking Dunkleman!’ ”
Dunkleman’s empathy for the contestants continued to tear at him, as did the difficulty finding his way alongside a highly competitive partner. “There were a few times where I had a hard time controlling my emotions about it and I look back and wish that I could’ve, but it was a long time ago. It was years ago. I had a lot of trouble just being upset when the kids were upset.
I got a lot of, ‘Your eyebrows are a little wrinkled,’ because I’d really be bummed out, but that was my fault. That was my problem. I needed to be able to think, Well, you’re an actor, right? Act like you’re not bummed out.”
Despite it all, Brian realized he had been a part of something out of the ordinary, something that had changed his life forever. He recalls standing onstage during the massive finale at the Kodak Theatre and looking out into the frenzied crowd. “There was a moment when I was just standing there and I see all these people. I lean over to Justin. I said, ‘Take a minute. Take this in.’ That’s what I did.”
When the confetti settled, Brian finally had time to step back and look at what he was a part of. He thought about not only his ambivalence about American Idol and its format, but what it would mean to continue as a host, a role that in entertainment history has traditionally meant the end of an acting career for all who come to be known as a genial front man. But with the show having just finished its summer run and about to be raced back into production in time to make it to its new home on the spring schedule, there would be little time to weigh options.
As he begins to tell of the decision, his joviality fades. A seriousness sets in. His jaw clenches just a little. “I’ll tell you what happened exactly,” he says. “I went to Hawaii, my girlfriend and I, after the show had ended. It was the first time I had really just been able to breathe, sit, and take it all in. I was really conflicted and I didn’t know what to do because I knew that if this show was as big as it was just that summer I wasn’t going to have any chance at an acting career.
“But then I’m sitting on this amazing beach in Hawaii and I thought, What, am I stupid? I thought, You know what, something will show me the way. I’ll figure it out when I get back.” When he got back, he returned to the news that almost immediately after the season ended, Fox announced that they would be bringing back first Cowell and then Seacrest.
American Idol Page 12