American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  Chapter 12

  THE ANTI-CHRIST

  If American Idol were America itself, Dave Della Terza would be officially classified as an enemy of the state.

  After he finishes his job each day as an IT professional, the twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan takes to the Internet, where he clocks in as Idol’s unappointed heckler-in-chief. The leading antagonist of the country’s most beloved pastime, Della Terza searches for the singer who will star in his alternate reality version of Idol, the young man or woman whose tortured journey will be chronicled by Dave’s Web site, votefortheworst.com. Della Terza’s mission: to undermine Idol from within by backing each season’s most preposterous contestant.

  Since the show’s second season, Della Terza has bestowed upon a string of hapless contenders his badge of dishonor, encouraging an army of Idol haters to subvert the show from within by propping up the most ill-suited contenders. Della Terza has been denounced by Idol champions, waved to by contestants from the Idol stage, and reviled by the show’s producers. He’s been held responsible for some of Idol’s most unfortunate soap operas, and has been accused of rewriting the show’s history in his own mischievous image.

  Messing with a show considered by many to be only slightly removed from mom and apple pie is not for the faint of heart. But for Della Terza, it’s all in a night’s work. A sampling of e-mails from his in-box:

  * * *

  Mr. Dave Della Terza,

  You are such great guy, you work so hard for a living. You are so great . . . not. You are an idiot that does not have a real job. Maybe instead of your stupid Web site, you should be focusing on doing something worthwhile, such as focusing on crime in your shithole suburb of Chicago . . .

  Fuck you assholes.

  From: “billy bob”

  * * *

  Dear Funny stone,

  You are such a deluesional creep. You need to seek psycohiatric help is your life so empty and worthless that you dedciate it to screwing with a tv show, and destorying people’s dreams. You live in a dream world if you think a little bitty group actually fucks with the votes. It doesn’t creep you have no control over the votes at all!!!NONE AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!

  —Lady Kerns

  When American Idol was created in the waning days of the last century, the term “blogosphere” had yet to be coined and Vote for the Worst and its chorus of catcalls it summoned could hardly have been imagined. But Della Terza’s story is the story of the Internet media in which it grew up, as much as it’s the story of Idol.

  In the early days of the Internet, most of the meteoric ascents to glory, from Facebook to Perez Hilton, seemed parables to the importance of being in the right place at the right time. It was a new kind of democracy and it would call for a new breed of antagonists, more creative, daring, and foul-mouthed than anything that came before. At the dawn of both American Idol and the Internet, Vote for the Worst filled that void.

  When Idol announced its plans to turn the controls over to its viewers, it had fairly straightforward intentions: Let the viewers, rather than cultural arbiters, decide what makes a star. But once invited into the room, armed with the new tools of the Internet, the audience soon claimed the show as its own property. Hence the outrage about “ringers,” about accusations of vote tampering, about every tweak and adjustment to the format of what millions in America consider “their show.” Idol’s viewers would make their feelings about the show known in every possible way.

  When American Idol premiered, Dave Della Terza was an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University. An early Internet geek, he began his career as a pop culture pundit posting notes on the Survivor Sucks message boards that lived on various services circa 2000–2002, dedicated to mocking CBS’s island adventure reality show. In the summer of 2002, the board hosted a thread about the new singing competition premiering on Fox.

  As he tells it, Della Terza didn’t start out to be Idol’s public enemy number one. “I said, ‘Let me give it a shot and see how bad it is.’ I watched the finale of season 1 and I remember saying, ‘God, this Justin guy is such shit. If he wins that’s going to be terrible. It’s going to ruin the entire show.’ And then he lost and I thought, Oh, okay . . .

  “So I watched the next season and I kind of got into it. I didn’t really vote, I wasn’t that into it, but it was kind of funny to see all these weird characters. I thought the show was interesting. And as the season went on, I thought, There are so many people on the show who just aren’t that good. This isn’t really a talent competition.

  “And, funny enough, I was wishing for those semifinal weeks because there are so many bad people. I thought they were so funny. When it got to the finals, I wasn’t really enjoying it as much, because I thought, These people are bad but they’re not funny-bad. I thought it would be funny to keep them around week after week. So I started a thread in Survivor Sucks saying, ‘Everyone take the Vote for the Worst pledge and let’s all vote for the worst next season.’ ”

  Thus are great movements born.

  During season 3, the cause lived on as a thread on the Survivor Sucks board, urging people to vote for baby-faced singer John Stevens. A friend of Della Terza’s moved the thread to its own site, setting up a page on the Geocities service, which was dubbed generically “Vote for the Worst” so the movement could continue with other shows when American Idol was canceled. “So we put it up and it was the most ghetto version of a Web site ever. It was like two pages and it just had a giant picture of John Stevens on it, saying vote for him. And then it has ‘e-mail us’ and it had a tag board on it where you could put comments. And that was the entire Web site.”

  The site received little attention through season 3. Meanwhile, Della Terza graduated college with a degree in television production and moved to Los Angeles, where he found work in the reality TV industry at Bunim/Murray Productions, makers of The Real World.

  If you had to point to a moment when the Internet took off as a media source unto itself, the day was somewhere in the neighborhood of Idol’s fourth season. In 2005, blogging expanded its reach from tech and political topics to make itself felt in pop culture. In 2005, Perez Hilton’s Hollywood gossip blog first gained a popular following, TMZ was founded, and Vote for the Worst took off and an entirely different kind of Idol-watcher was born.

  In season 5, the site endorsed the show’s least likely superstar to date, the pudgy, awkward Scott “Scotty the Body” Savol, who, much to the viewership’s ongoing shock, survived elimination after elimination, progressing high into the ranks of the top ten. Seeking an explanation, the press dug up the little guerrilla Web site that had been promoting him. “I started having reporters call me and say, ‘What’s the Web site doing? Why are you voting for Scott Savol?’ ” It started with a small article in a newspaper in Kentucky and spread. “Why Is Scott Still on Idol? Chubby Singer’s Online ‘Fan Club,’ ” ran the New York Post’s headline. By the end of the season, there were few media outlets not covering the Internet phenomenon that was perhaps—without public vote totals, all the media could do was wildly speculate—upsetting the results of the biggest show on television.

  So great was the outcry that Fox and FremantleMedia felt compelled to issue a statement dismissing the site’s influence: “While it is unfortunate that a small group of people are so caustic that they believe it would be humorous to negatively sway the voting on American Idol, the number of purported visits to the Web site would have no impact on voting.”

  While the furor was breaking out, Della Terza continued to show up at his day job at the bottom rungs of the entertainment industry. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m ruining a television show on this Web site.’ I thought, Is this going to play out poorly for me? I didn’t want to mention it at work.”

  The week Constantine Maroulis was eliminated, Della Terza made his first television appearance on Access Hollywood. The site, which had moved off Geocities, crashed from the incoming traffic. “So the site was down for five days. Scott Savol got voted
off and we thought, This sucks. I didn’t know how to run a Web site. I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I got a letter from FremantleMedia saying cease and desist. We had audio clips of American Idol and half the content from the show. And of course that’s illegal.”

  Then the hate mail began, e-mail by the truckload. “These days we have a message board where people can come on and get mad. But back then there was nowhere to really interact. In a normal day, I would get hundreds and hundreds of letters. That kind of freaked me out a little. TMZ—I didn’t even know who TMZ was—but they asked to interview me in my apartment. And one of the shots they had was outside of my building. I had people writing to me saying, ‘I’m going to find out where you live.’ I thought, Maybe I don’t like this. I’m a very private person. I’m not a very outgoing, crazy, I-want-attention-for-myself person. That’s not why I started the Web site. I guess I have to deal with it because I’m the face of the Web site, but it still makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like it.”

  On top of the hate mail, the hassles of dealing with the site made Della Terza wonder, “Is this worth doing?” Then he was approached by an advertising company that offered to manage the site for him in exchange for a cut of the ad revenues. That took just enough off his plate to keep him in the game.

  In season 5, the site continued to grow, its selections regularly noted in the press. The site backed Kevin “Chicken Little” Covais before turning to gray-haired soul singer Taylor Hicks. “I didn’t think he was going to win. I picked Taylor because I thought Chris Daughtry was going to win. And I wanted Taylor to get second, and I thought that would be really funny.”

  Season 6, however, was to be the golden age of Vote for the Worst—the year of Sanjaya. Even before the ponyhawked boy entered their ken, the season started off with a bang of publicity. When sultry young singer Antonella Barba first appeared in the top twenty-four, the Internet quickly swirled with rumors that unclothed photos of her or, worse, pictures of her engaged in a sex act, existed somewhere out there. This was a potentially explosive issue, as one of the few Idol disqualifications to date—that of Frenchie Davis in season 2—had occurred over the issues of racy photos in her closet. Vote for the Worst began to post some of the pictures, sent in by Idol gadflies who had unearthed them around the Internet in an early example of crowdsourcing. Suprisingly, the shots ended up helping the soon-to-be-embattled singer by proving she was guilty only of R-rated crimes, not, as had been rumored, of more risqué and potentially disqualifying misdeeds. When the pictures first appeared online, there seemed to be an image not just of a semiclad Barba, but of Barba performing fellatio, an R-rated/X-rated line that in light of the Frenchie Davis precedent could prove critical to whether the show would be able to keep her in the competition. In the end, after examining the evidence, “We were the first site to say those photos weren’t real, after which a lot of other sites started saying it too.” Barba was allowed to stay in the competiton, ultimately falling to popular vote in the semifinals.

  After Antonella and VFTW’s next choice, Sundance Head, were eliminated, the site finally focused on the season’s emerging plotline involving the emotional, exotically named singer from Seattle. Having initially missed the boat, Della Terza thought, “We’d better vote for Sanjaya because everyone hates him. So we put him up on the site. The first week he came out singing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and then he was in the bottom two and I thought they were going to send him home. Because when a Vote for the Worster is in the bottom two, they always go home. And then Sanjaya stayed, and we were like, wow, that’s never happened. And then he came out the next week and did ‘You Really Got Me’ with the crying girl, and I thought, ‘This is awesome.’ This is my favorite moment on American Idol ever.”

  After the performance and VFTW’s endorsement, the site exploded as never before. “What happened was we were voting for Sanjaya and Howard Stern wanted everyone to vote for Sanjaya too because he thought it was funny. He got everyone to vote for Sanjaya too. And he saw that we were doing it too, so he said, ‘Everyone go to Vote for the Worst.’ As soon as he said something, our Web site was flooded with Howard Stern fans. Sanjaya would not have lasted as long as he did if Howard Stern hadn’t said something.”

  To the pundits’ dismay, Sanjaya continued to survive, his run overshadowing the “serious” contestants as the year’s major conversation topic. While other antiheroes had emerged in the past, none so thoroughly overshadowed their seasons as Sanjaya did. Savol, who finished in fourth place, went farther than Sanjaya ultimately, but his impact was minuscule compared to young Malakar’s.

  “Season 6 got so crazy. I was doing interviews every day, to the point where I was getting sick of American Idol. I didn’t even want to watch it anymore. These two idiot radio personalities were like, do you want to be on our show? So I was on their show one week, and from then on they would call me like at five in the morning every day and ask ‘Hey, do you want to be on our show?’ After a while, I just stopped picking up. And I heard, on the show, they were like ‘Dave didn’t pick up.’ It’s five in the morning. Go away, I want to fucking sleep.

  “It got really obnoxious and I wasn’t having fun with it. It was stressing me out. If it wasn’t fun, I didn’t want to do it. So eventually I decided to cut back some of the stuff I was doing. If I’m not having fun, why the hell am I doing it? I’m not making that much money off it.” Della Terza was perhaps the first of the legions to come who would discover that online fame does not instantly translate into offline riches, or even a sustainable career.

  By the end of season 5, he had tired of trying to break into the entertainment business and moved back to Chicago, getting part-time work teaching at a local college. Even as its traffic exploded and it became perhaps the most celebrated upstart Web site in America, the site never brought in anything more than pocket change.

  “The most money I ever made off the site was the Sanjaya season and it was not even nearly enough to support myself. I made a decent amount of money. I had some health problems a couple years ago and I took care of them with some money I made off the Web site. But it was never a full-time job or anything.

  “I took a completely different attitude after season 6, and was just doing it for fun. I thought, If the news doesn’t get up on the site the second it happens, I don’t care. It’s just a hobby and I like it that way.”

  The hobby, however, expanded its scope in the coming seasons, like much of the Web itself, moving beyond mere commentary into citizen journalism, attempting to uncover what it saw as the sins, hypocrisies, and downright lies of American Idol. Their greatest mission was uncovering the “plants”on the show, those singers’ supposed secret professional pasts.

  “Season 7 was funny because we said there are plants on the show who all have previous recording experience. Carly Smithson was the biggest one of all.”

  Michael Johns and Kristy Lee Cook also, he points out, had made records. “David Archuleta’s family knew people on the show. Jason Castro had done stuff in show business before. After Ramiele went home, I think every other contestant had had previous recording experience except David Cook. So when he won, we were like, at least he wasn’t one of the plants. In the first two seasons, they said we’re trying to find America’s biggest undiscovered talent. You notice they’ve stopped saying ‘undiscovered.’ Of course, if you’re a legitimate singer and you go on American Idol, you’ve probably sang somewhere before or attempted to get a record deal. That’s fine. But don’t lie about it is what we’re saying.”

  With the tips pouring in, season 7 saw VFTW once again play a critical role in Idol’s scandal of the year, the controversy over David Hernandez’s past work as an exotic dancer at a Phoenix men’s club. “People were coming to our Web site and saying, ‘David Hernandez is a stripper.’ ‘Okay,’ we said, ‘well, where’s the proof?’ They said his stripper name was Kayden, so we started looking around trying to find this information. And we found pictures of him at this gay
club working. We thought at least we were on the right track, so we found out from one person that he’d stripped at this place called Dick’s Cabaret. So I called Dick’s Cabaret and I ended up e-mailing with this guy, and I said, ‘Did David Hernandez work there?’ He said, ‘I can’t discuss that.’ Well, that means yes, then.

  “There was a reporter for the Associated Press doing an article at the time about Danny Noriega and if a gay person could ever win American Idol. And I told him, ‘You need to call Dick’s Cabaret’ and I gave him the contact information. The next week it was all over that David Hernandez was a stripper. I told him to make sure to quote Vote for the Worst, so we were all over the article. Because clearly I couldn’t go to Arizona and try to find out what this Dick’s Cabaret thing is about but someone else can.”

  In the following seasons, the VFTW empire kept growing. Although the official line of Idol contestants is always that they never ever look at the Internet, enough have later come clean that it can be safely said that nowhere on Earth are the Vote for the Worst endorsements followed more closely than the backstage at American Idol. A subterranean tradition began in season 6 of giving winking-on-air acknowledgments of the site, when Chris Sligh that year called out, “Hi, Dave,” during one postperformance moment with Seacrest. The tradition has continued all the way down to season 9, when Crystal Bowersox gave Della Terza an on-air nod.

  Idol’s producers have consistently dismissed VFTW’s effect on the show, comparing the vast millions who watch Idol with the relatively small number who visit Vote for the Worst. Della Terza states that he doesn’t monitor the site’s traffic numbers. (Sixty thousand monthly visitors during season 9, according to Internet ratings site Quantcast.) But the site has attained notoriety, if not respectability. The announcements of his latest endorsement are heralded in the major news organs of the country, and Idol alumni flock to appear on his weekly Web radio show.