There was nothing like No Good TV at the time, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was some apprehension about what we were doing. Given what E! had done a couple of years back with their show Celebrities Uncensored, it would not have been crazy for reps to think we might be trying to ambush their celebrity clients. But E!’s show was based on paparazzi footage and gotcha journalism, which was the furthest thing from what we were doing. It was never our goal to ambush anyone. Our motto was more “Fuck yeah!” than “Fuck you!” We wanted the celebs to be in on the joke, not the butt of the joke. You’ll recall that I was bullied as a kid, so the last thing I wanted to do was make anyone feel bushwhacked. Our goal was to create a friendly, party atmosphere that would lead to candid moments with the stars. It was unheard of at the time, so it made us different.
That simple motto would enable me to create an atmosphere where big celebrities would push all kinds of boundaries, and sometimes, lead the charge. Like when I met up with Gerard Butler to interview him for P.S. I Love You. He and I had crossed paths a few times before, and he really enjoyed the insanity of my interviews. So it was no surprise that, on that occasion, he took the lead, and I played along with what ended up being a ridiculously sexually charged interview. (Emphasis on ridiculous. When he saw me walk into the room, he started pretend-tweaking his nipples in preparation for the interview, and I knew it was on! We definitely pushed a few boundaries that day!)
Gerard: I was playing with my nipples. (Acting out rubbing his nipples with his fingers.)
Me: That was the move I showed you, like the week before … right … that was the one.
Gerard: Ohh … you did that really well.
Me: Thanks, man! I tried.
Gerard: Not as good as … the other things you did.
Me: Well, yeah … right … thanks! Now, there’s this thing you guys do [in the movie] … this look that you supposedly have that can get girls to kiss you … is that true?
Gerard: You ready?
Me: Uh-huh.
Gerard: (Proceeds to cross his eyes and slowly nod his head left to right.) How’s that?
Me: (I pretend to completely lose myself in a state of bliss and fall forward from weakness with my hand on his knee and scream:) OH MY GOD!
Gerard: You’re not kissing me; you’re grabbing my leg.
Me: (So I get up and go in for a passionate kiss—at least that’s what it looked like on camera—then return to my seat.) I can’t even tell you how fuckin’ hot that was!
Gerard: (Giving me an overtly sexy look.) You are!
Me: (Giving him an overtly sexy look back.) No, you are! (Then I aggressively and loudly shake and sigh in a sexual manner … a little bit like the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally but more like 20 percent orgasm … you can never go full orgasm … it’s not professional.)
Gerard: I just came! (To camera with a playful grin on his face.) I did!
Me: (Laughing in disbelief.)
Gerard: And again … wooooh! (Loudly, with big eyes and a smile.) … And again!
Me: Weeeeeeee! (Loudly.)
Gerard: Multiple!!!!!
Me: This is where the happy endings just keep cumming!!!
(Both laughing.)
I mean, come on, when in the hell has something like this ever happened in a junket interview—or in any interview! After which Gerard and his reps thank me while laughing uncontrollably. This was special.
It didn’t stop there; this motto created a world where even the most serious and revered celebrities would unwind. I don’t know what other journalists’ experiences have been like with Denzel Washington, but from what I’ve seen he’s a pretty no nonsense guy who takes his craft seriously and does not suffer fools gladly. He’s also surrounded by tough reps who are not there to fuck around. Now, the Denzel I know, from our several encounters over the years, is playful, funny, edgy, witty, and loves to laugh! Some of our exchanges are legendary (see Chapter 12: The Lap Dance). He’s not a potty mouth in the typical sense, but he knows a thing or two and—man, oh man—does he know how to work an innuendo.
When I interviewed him at the junket for The Taking of Pelham 123, Denzel was jokingly explaining to me how, even though there was nothing but nonstop cursing in the film, he, personally, didn’t like to curse. But in true Denzel fashion, he then proceeded to teach me something far worse … you see, one way or another we all curse.
Denzel: I don’t have to stoop to that level. I’m an artist!! I’m … I’m an AC-TOR!! (Moving his hands like a conductor and doing his best flagrant Marlon Brando impression.)
Me: You have the voice. That’s all you need.
Denzel: That’s what it is?
Me: Yes. And he [John Travolta in the movie] said, you know, because of your smooth voice you’d be actually a bitch in prison!
Then there was a very, very pregnant pause. Let’s face it, I had just, indirectly, called Denzel a bitch … hmm … Now I was in for a game of Who Blinks First. He looked at me with those intense Denzel eyes that either end in someone getting killed or being made love to. I stayed right there with him, eye-to-eye, keeping a subtle, friendly smile on my face. If he sensed weakness in me, I’d be dead. He kept rubbing his chin … and then he broke and took a left turn…’cause why…’cause he’s Denzel “Motherfucking” Washington … that’s why!
Denzel: They used to call it a Maytag. You ever hearda that?
Me: No.
Denzel: Be a Maytag!
Me: Why? What does that mean?
Denzel: Aahhhhh. (With a wry smile on his face.) You’ll find out!
Me: (I turn to my friend who was running the room and ask:) Tony, what does that mean?
Denzel: Go to No Good TV! Maytag! (Laughing.)
Me: (Tony’s waving me off like he doesn’t want to touch this.) He’s [Tony] staying out of it! (Laughing.)
Denzel: Maytag. Wash the clothes!… Maytag. Cook the food! Hahaha, haaaaa!! (Laughing loudly … just lovin’ it.)
Me: Lead dog! (Pointing into the camera.)
Denzel: Das right! Nah … Maytag is sore. Sore behind! Maytag on the top bunk! Maytag!
Me: We’re in trouble!
Denzel: (Big smile on his face.) Not talking about the dishwasher! But he does wash the dishes!! (WIDE GRIN!)
He is, without a doubt, one of the most intelligent and fun celebrities I have ever had the pleasure of playing with, and he wasn’t done. Before it was over he decided to promote the film with the newest word on my naughty list, “Go see the movie or you might end up being a MAYTAG!” Damn!
Witnessing Denzel and other A-listers embrace what I was doing was an incredible feeling. Watching them let go, run with the moment, then laugh and enjoy this guilty pleasure called No Good TV made me realize that what we had created was a bit like a roller coaster. Here’s Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell taking a few loop-de-loops:
Mark: Get the dick out of your butt and go see the movie!
Will: Please … please just get the dick out of your butt!
Mark: After two hours, you can put it right back in.
Will: You don’t even have to see the movie. Just get the dick out of your butt!
Mark: Yeah!
Me: Or just for like a minute while you’re driving.
Will: Yeah, yeah … just long enough.
Me: To get to the theater.
Will: Just long enough to see the movie. Once you see the movie you can put the dick back in your butt.
Mark: If you go early in the day or late enough at night, you can put it on the seat.
Will: Go see the movie then you can put the dick back in your butt!
Mark: You could be the other guy.
At some point, even the coolest and most reserved cats are compelled to put their hands up and cuss for joy. Fuck yeah! Like when Robert Downey, Jr., felt compelled to share a very special story about how he fucked with director and co-star Ben Stiller on the set of their hit comedy classic Tropic Thunder.
All I was trying to do was t
o make either Ben feel disgusted or make him feel like I’d said the strangest thing he’s heard all day: “I’m like the little boy who’s playing with his dick when he’s nervous. You should come over to my village for dinner. I would serve you rotten donkey vagina. A slithering hot broken donkey vagina.” A rotting donkey vagina. God I still love that line. I’m glad it has somewhere to live.
Now, my entry into this world wasn’t without a failed stage dive or two, which I’ll get to in later chapters, but an institution that should have rejected me accepted me with open arms. Like a dirty Tron, I was a rogue program in a finite system, making changes, stirring up trouble, and getting away with it. I credit that to not really knowing what the hell I was doing or how I was expected to behave. If I had, I probably would have been too afraid to challenge the media industrial complex known as the press junket.
This magical realm is governed by mystical beings called studio reps but is populated by junketeers, who are truly magical creatures. There is no more rare or privileged soul in the world than the junketeer, and to become one with them is a rare blessing that should never be taken for granted. For the most part, they are an extremely friendly group of people stuck in a strange but celebratory never-ending hamster wheel. Week in, week out, flying around the country and sometimes the world, staying in amazing hotels, eating great food, and having the same conversations over and over again with the same celebrities. It is the classic Groundhog Day experience and a great gig if you can get it.
Some have been doing it for years, some for decades, and some of the reporters have been doing these since the Stone Age. There are those that take it super seriously and consider each interview to be a celebration of the gospel. There are others who are just enjoying the ride and getting their shit done. And of course, there are always a few who are only interested in the buffet and the swag. Altogether, they are an incredible cast of characters who make up this crazy subculture at the junkets that would make for a great Christopher Guest movie. I consider myself lucky to call many of them my good friends and to have joined their happy crew. They have never been anything but kind and accepting of me. Nobody knows how to party like the junketeers. Nobody!
These two factions, publicists and journalists, are the cornerstones of a quintessential symbiotic relationship that governs entertainment promotions. Everything in entertainment, no matter if it’s related to television, music, movies, or what have you, is a bit of a circle jerk. Everybody’s JO’ing each other for something. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that it’s more business than show, but in reality, it’s more about show me your business. In politics, one hand washes the other, but in entertainment it’s more of a rub’n’tug. And entertainment PR is the constant tug between journalists and publicists. Journalists who want to get one off and publicists who ultimately decide who cums … and who goes.
Most entertainment news shows tend to place celebrities on a pedestal and surround them with a buffer zone that makes them unattainable. Our goal was the complete opposite. We wanted to give the audience a connection to the stars built on a bridge of relatability. We wanted to hang with them, not on them. For me, this always presented the challenge of walking a fine line between being fun & friendly, flirty & filthy, all while maintaining my respectability. After all, I didn’t want to be just another faceless, sycophantic journalist to the talent I was interviewing. While I was being R-rated, the goal for me and my writers was to do it with humor, intelligence, and precision. More Howard Stern than Stuttering John.
We continually challenged ourselves to write smart comedy. So on those occasions where everything came together, it was bawdy but clever. I knew if I wanted to stand out, the key was to define who I was and stay true to it. Be different, be consistent, and be fearless. That way I wouldn’t run the risk of getting sucked into the butt-kissing bonanza that a press junket can become. There would be no future for me in that. Trust me when I tell you all lips feel the same against a celebrity’s ass. It comforts them for a moment, and then they are on to the next pucker!
Coming out of the anarchy of the press and promotions in the music world, I was always quite taken with the whole pomp and circumstance of the movie press junket. Like the hushed, proper vibe and total reverence for the talent. And the generous and respectful way the press was treated. All of which was in stark contrast to my prior experiences with bands. In the music world, the schedule was whenever and the interview was a clusterfuck. We had fun, but we wasted so much time waiting around and were often treated like rats fighting over the last crumb. I can’t even begin to tell you how we killed days waiting for talent to show up. That was our norm. So when the band sucked, it was such a colossal waste, but when they were good, it was magical.
I once waited for six hours for The Black Eyed Peas to show up for a scheduled interview. But unlike some artists who’ll show up super late and play the “aloof” card, these guys were very considerate. Will.i.am, Taboo, and apl.de.ap were super apologetic and overly kind about the whole thing. It says a lot about someone when they don’t need to be nice to you but they are anyway. So right away, I didn’t even care about the wait. Just about ten minutes into the interview, a fuse box blew out, killing the power in the entire facility, which included the dressing room we were in. We lost all of our lights and were left with just our cameras rolling on battery packs.
So there we were, sitting in the dark with the band, not knowing what the fuck to do. We waited for a few minutes, hoping it would come back on, but it wasn’t happening. There are plenty of artists who would have called it a night and nobody would’ve blamed them, but not these guys. Will and the boys felt so bad about making us wait, and they wanted to keep going. “You got flashlights? Get ’em out; let’s keep rolling.” So try to get your heads around this scene: one of the biggest bands in the world snuggled up closely with me, like we were in a bomb shelter, while Kourosh held one weak-ass flashlight over us and Ken rolled blindly with his camera because nobody could see a fucking thing in the room. I had a hand mic I would move around, and they would take turns holding the other flashlight under their chins when they spoke. If you didn’t know better, you’d think we were telling ghost stories around a campfire. Half the interview was just all of us acting like idiots and laughing our asses off. Clearly, they were getting a kick out of this whole shit-show, as were their people, who were also standing around in the dark. When I run into the guys every now and then, like when Taboo appeared on In Bed With, we reminisce about what it was like to be there on the darkest day in the history of The Black Eyed Peas!
“Wassup motherfuckers out there in the motherfuckin’ Internet!”
—will.i.am
I would’ve waited twenty hours for them, but then not every interview was The Black Eyed Peas. Half the time, it was some band I’d never heard of getting a little ahead of themselves and acting like a bunch of prima donna wild banshee assholes before their first record had come out. Back then we’d hang out with them on their bus or backstage. I even did an interview in a bathroom once! Occasionally the interviews were really interesting, some were just us fucking off, and some were simply introverted musicians who didn’t know how to do anything other than play their instruments. It was a little bit of a crapshoot. We would usually get about thirty minutes with them, which was just enough time to rile them up and get a few stories. So the overall conditions were crap, but you had plenty of time with the talent to mine for gold.
The movie promotions were a whole other beast. I have to admit though, at first, the junkets were a bit scary. The studios treated you well and everything ran on schedule, but once you’re in the room you’ve got exactly four minutes for your interview. WHAT??!!?? What the fuck was I going to do in four fucking minutes? Believe me when I tell you, those four minutes fly by so fast, I swear if you fart, you’ll miss it. To make matters worse, it was timed on a stopwatch, with twelve to fifteen people watching every word coming out of your mouth like a hawk. It was intimidating to say the least
. Sometimes the talent’s publicist will sit right in your line of vision or right behind you, purposefully making it really uncomfortable. On one particular occasion, it got even weirder.
I remember at a junket many years ago for a big summer tent-pole movie, where the high-profile lead actor was embroiled in a very public relationship with an equally if not more famous actress/singer, and things, allegedly, got a little out of hand. Security was off the charts in the hotel and everyone was on high alert. Then she showed up in a crowd of chaos in what can be best described as the Tasmanian devil landing in a Ping-Pong factory. Yep, there were so many balls flying everywhere, you’d think you were in a Tijuana strip club on Horchata night. Anyway, she proceeded to walk into the interview room and sit behind the journalists and make faces at her boyfriend during their interviews.
From that point on, no one was getting usable interviews, and an already complicated situation turned into theater of the absurd. I suppose there’s an element of fun to playing Pickle in the Middle, but when you’re the pickle, it’s a mindfuck-and-a-half to get through. You just have to shut out all the noise and distractions and get about your business. Out of the gate you’ve got to be charming, graceful, funny, intriguing, and brilliant. You basically have to find the sweet spot within the first sixty seconds and bring it out over the next three minutes. This shit ain’t easy. Just imagine sitting across from your favorite star and having to become their BFF in one minute. It takes a cool head and killer instincts; otherwise you walk out with nothing.
So picture this intense, pressure-filled vibe when I first strolled in with my norks and potty mouth. It was a knock for six on every level. We really had to earn our way into the world, and we earned it by being up front that we were uncensored and, more than anything, entertaining. Who wouldn’t find Andy Samberg discussing merkins and mustache rides fun? Well, he did it while promoting Hot Rod.
Everybody Curses, I Swear! Page 15