And that’s just what I did; I would produce the show in seasons six and seven and direct five episodes in each of those seasons as well. Those were busy seasons. I would lighten the load in season eight, only executive producing the show alongside Aaron.
Van Nuys
91411
While I was acting as producer, one of my duties involved sitting in on casting meetings for the extensive list of guest stars who came through the show. Years before, I’d been the one to campaign for Stephanie Beacham to play Dylan’s mother. Now I brought in my old buddy, Paul Johansson, to play John Sears, the head of a fraternity that Ian’s character, Steve, was trying to join. He was perfect for this role: a big jock, just like he was in real life. Pauly Shore stopped by for a flash, playing an unruly bar patron—just like when we were kids on 21 Jump Street. Was this typecasting?
One day we sat in a long casting session for the part of Carly Reynolds, a single mother of a young son to play Ian’s love interest. A young woman named Hilary Swank was by far the best actress in the room; she was head and shoulders above everybody else we saw that day. I knew she would be the right fit, so it was surprising to me that I had to fight to have her brought back for a callback. Nobody else seemed to have seen what I saw. I forced the issue, and she came back to read for us again.
After her callback, the other producers still weren’t convinced. We had seen every young actress in town, and, as far as I was concerned, it had been a waste of time. We had the perfect person ready and waiting. Finally, I convinced everybody—including Aaron. Besides being a very sweet girl, Hilary was extremely committed to her craft. Right from the start, her character was written for a one-season arc, so she left us after sixteen or so episodes. As devastating to her at the time as leaving the show might have been, it was obviously no reflection on her talent. She went right from us to the independent film Boys Don’t Cry, and we all know what happened next.
Now that I was a producer on the show, I also wasn’t afraid to take more chances as a director as well. Aaron had very specific tastes and liked things a certain way. But I was a young director, and I was trying to find my way and play with all the toys that were at my disposal. So I would imagine scenes and allow myself total creative freedom, and that would lead me to requesting all kinds of crazy equipment from our production manager, JP. Techno cranes, hot heads, huge packages of prime lenses, Cartoni heads—I would ask for them all.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down there. What do you think this is?” I was definitely that guy on the show. JP would call me into his office and say, very confidentially, “Jason, the Cartoni head? Aaron doesn’t like that. He hates Dutch angles—so don’t do it.”
“Trust me. I got this, I got this.” I wasn’t worried; I had my vision. I did a few Dutch angles—turning the camera to a 30- or 45-degree angle—only when I felt they were really needed for very specific shots. I loved them; they were popular back in the film noir days of the ’30s and ’40s. The first time I ever put a Dutch angle in, Aaron and I were sitting in his office together, side by side as usual, screening my episode. He did a double take when he saw that shot, then cocked his head and gave me a look.
“Hey, Jason . . . something’s wrong with the TV!”
“Ahh, come on, Aaron. That worked!”
He shook his head, but he trusted me. He must have, because at the end of season seven, I directed probably the most famous episode in the history of 90210, when Donna Martin finally lost her virginity. Awkward! I just looked at Aaron when he gave me the news. “Really, Aaron? Really? You’re giving me this episode to direct?”
“Who else? Who else am I going to give it to?”
Oh, man. Kid gloves dealing with that situation! I was hyperconscious that this was Aaron’s daughter, Aaron was my boss, and I must handle the situation respectfully. I did my best, even as I did such tasks as choosing Tori’s costume, which was a bustier with garter belts . . . she put on quite a show for her “first time”!
Donna losing her virginity was a national obsession; the story line had taken on a life of its own. To be in charge of this particular episode was more ironic than anything else, as I had never figured out the huge fuss that Americans made about anything and everything to do with sex. Canada, along with the entire rest of the world, was far more open and liberal in this regard than the puritanical States. I could not relate at all to the big deal young people here made of losing their virginity. My bigger challenge was to figure out a way to make the encounter as erotic as possible without really showing anything. 90210 was seen by millions of young people and aired at 8:00 P.M., so its content had to be G-rated. Sexual activity could only be implied.
As was our tradition, I took my director’s cut over to Aaron’s office to discuss it. I sat next to him and tried not to squirm as we watched an episode featuring his only daughter losing her virginity on-screen. I was beyond nervous. Aaron chewed on his pipe the whole time but said nothing. Finally, we came to the end—Donna and David are really going to do it! I cut to candles burning and the screen goes black for a moment before the titles started rolling. I waited with bated breath for Aaron to speak.
“Very tasteful, Jason, very tasteful,” Aaron finally pronounced. And that was that. He signed off on it. I was very glad that particular directing gig was over.
Aaron was a great showman. He taught me so many things, and one was the value of keeping it simple. That’s where some of his greatest successes lay. He told simple stories, with pretty people in beautiful clothing, in aspirational locations . . . he had a regular formula he followed, and it worked for him. He lived by his rules producing television, and there was no arguing with his success.
Aaron had come back big. He was well into his sixties and already insanely rich when 90210 began, a time when I think a lot of industry people expected him to just hang up his hat. He had made one hell of a comeback, and I was honored to be a small part of it.
Sunset Strip
West Hollywood
90069
Christine and I had been fortunate for nearly five years to actually live a pretty normal life in our house in the hills. Everyone at the local grocery store knew me; same with the local deli and wine store. All the stores plus a dry cleaner were in one convenient location. It was a great little neighborhood, and when I stuck close to home I was in my own space, where no one cared who I was or what I did. There didn’t tend to be packs of paparazzi chasing people around and camping outside their homes in those days, at least not outside our home. They would be at the clubs and restaurants, but they didn’t stake people out the way photographers and TMZ do now.
The seventh season was ending—along with what had been a happy and rewarding relationship between Christine and me. Things had been unraveling for a while. It was clear we were drifting in opposite directions. Ultimately, Christine and I just wanted different things out of life. She was perfectly content with our arrangement—and don’t get me wrong, we had a great life. Still, I knew that someday I wanted to have kids, and that was something she was not interested in. I knew I had to make some changes to my life in order to eventually have a family life, and while I was nowhere near ready for kids, I was ready to at least start considering the possibility.
A conversation I’d recently had with my friend Michael Budman was on my mind. Michael is one of the owners of the Canadian clothing company Roots and a brilliant businessman. He, like many of my friends, was considerably older than I; he told me one day that the best move he’d ever made was to wait until he was forty to have kids. “Your twenties are for fucking around; your thirties are for making money; your forties are for raising a family and devoting your life to your children,” he told me. Wow, write that one down and remember it. A road map to life right there . . . if you don’t get derailed somewhere having too much fun.
The actual split with Christine happened just as summer hiatus began on 90210, and it was extremely unsettling for me. She remained in our house for a few months until she could find som
ething new, so I moved out and rented Peter Weller’s place on the Sunset Strip while he was in Italy making a movie. I was living in this rented bachelor pad alone and starring on a hit TV show. This was really the first time I took advantage of that situation vis-à-vis dating, because up to that point I usually had a steady girlfriend. I didn’t do a film on hiatus that summer. Instead, I found quite a few short-term girlfriends at the SkyBar in the Mondrian Hotel, which was very handily within walking distance.
My life on the eighth season of 90210 was quite active, to say the least, and for a while I was out every night. I can’t lie—it was fun as hell, at least until the novelty wore off. But underneath all the fun and nights out and beautiful faces, I felt adrift. At sea. No bearings in this rented house and no one to come home to. I was searching for something new that year, and it was more than a bit unnerving. I had no compass. Eventually, Swifty and I returned to our house in the hills, but it wasn’t the same. We were leading the bachelor life, but the reality wasn’t as enjoyable as the idea of it.
At one point I flew to Las Vegas to see the guys from Barenaked Ladies play at the Hard Rock Hotel. After their performance, I jumped on the bus with them and rode with the band to San Francisco, where they had another gig. I slept in one of the coffins on the bus and had a great time catching up with everybody.
When we arrived in San Francisco, we pulled up in front of the Phoenix, a very rock-and-roll ’50s-style hotel located in the heart of the Tenderloin District. I got off the bus and stood in front of the building with the driver, waiting for the rest of the guys. Ed, the lead singer, got off the bus and nodded approvingly. “Cool! The Phoenix! I fuckin’ love this place!” he said, and hurried around the corner and into the lobby to register. Then Steven, the other lead singer, came off the bus. He took one look around the funky neighborhood and the old hotel and said, “The Phoenix. The charms of this place are lost on me.” He shuffled dispiritedly around the corner and out of sight.
There’s a movie, right there! is what I thought. I wished I had a camera. These two guys, who have known each other since high school, had been on the road together for fifteen years, and they could not be more diametrically opposed in everything . . . except for their music.
The seed of an idea was planted. Over the months it would change, grow, and expand and become close to an obsession.
Spelling Manor
Holmby Hills
90024
Actors,” Aaron Spelling used to lament. “I put shoes on their feet and they walk away from me.” Aaron was very much a father figure. He had nurtured me and supported me and been my champion from day one; I knew I owed him a lot. We had been working together for years, extremely closely for the last three while I attended his impromptu “production school.” I was well aware of his feelings about the actors he had cast over the years, often in star-making roles, who left his shows to pursue other projects.
Still, it now felt inevitable that I, too, would leave Beverly Hills 90210. I loved and respected Aaron with all my heart, but I had to go. I’d gotten my first television series, Sister Kate, when I was nineteen years old, a time when most kids are fooling around in college. The kind of sudden and unexpected fame I achieved just a few years later on 90210 was a trauma. The potential was there to really harm me later in life, because fame can stop cold much of a person’s development.
My experience on 90210 is why I think I got along so well with race car drivers and other professional athletes. We were all approaching thirty years old, but acted and felt as if we were eighteen. Professional athletes tend to be very young in many ways, and I’m not just talking about their chronological age. They’ve been big stars since their teens, and that’s just about where much of their growth and education stopped. It’s the same thing with many musicians and actors. I fit in great with my actor friends and athlete friends, but as far as being a real live regular human being—no. I had a lot of catching up and growing up to do.
Whether you’re a five-year-old kid, a teen actor, or a middle-aged guy on the set, if it’s a big successful show, people do things for you. There’s always somebody there to feed you, to fetch your car, to find your clothes, to throw out your garbage. You simply don’t have to take care of yourself. All the mundane daily stuff is done for you. That isn’t real life, and I was savvy enough to realize that. I knew I needed to break out of what was, in many ways, a gilded cage.
I had been working on the show for so long and hard that most of day-to-day life had passed me by. I had no idea what was going on in the greater culture. Work was how I clocked everything . . . in terms of what episode I was on, which show I was directing, what film set I was on. I had worked close to twenty hours a day for years.
Those years went by in a blur. We were shooting what we called “double-ups.” Three times a year, we brought in an entire second crew to shoot two episodes simultaneously. The actors bounced back and forth between the two sets. This resulted in our whopping thirty-two shows per season, an unheard-of amount of material. This was why the cast and crew affectionately referred to the show as the Sausage Factory. We churned out tons of sausage, efficiently and fast.
Plus, I was racing—I was still under contract to Ford and MCI. I was very seriously burning the candle at both ends. 90210 and racing and red-eyes and travel and promotion and casual dates. There was a swirl of activity around me all the time. Still, I knew there was another world out there. Some of my friends had regular, nonindustry jobs and were climbing the corporate ladder. They had all read books I hadn’t read and argued passionately about politics I didn’t understand. I wanted to rejoin the rest of the human race. I was a part of everyone else’s pop culture, but I had no idea what was going on. Staring thirty in the face, I knew it was time to make a change.
On a purely practical day-to-day level, I also didn’t like what the show had become. The plots had become quite nonsensical. I had begged Aaron to stop the show. It was way past time to marry everyone off and pull the plug, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I made up my mind. The show could go on forever, but I was leaving. By that time I was on a one-year contract, and when my contract expired at the end of the eighth year, this time I was going to go. I set up a feature film to direct about Barenaked Ladies that would occupy the entire next year of my life. When he got the news, Peter Roth, who was the head of FOX at the time, tried hard to get me to stick around for the ninth season. I resisted, which wasn’t hard. It was much tougher when I had to talk to Aaron face-to-face.
Aaron summoned me over to the Manor on a weekend to discuss my decision. He had just undergone double hernia surgery, so he was in bed, and I actually had to sit at his bedside for this very difficult conversation. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach the entire time, as it was a painful discussion for me to have with a man who had treated me so well. I felt so guilty that I wound up making quite a few concessions. He talked me into staying for the first four episodes of the ninth season. But that was as far as I was willing to go.
With 90210, Aaron and I had created something great together. Now here I was, telling him I didn’t want to do it anymore. That I, too, was walking away. It breaks my heart, looking back, that I was so insensitive. It’s hard for me to have to face the fact that I hurt someone who was so good to me. I can’t even try to fix it, as he’s no longer here. I wish I could talk to Aaron one more time, and tell him how sorry I am that I left, but, more important, that I’m sorry I let him down personally and hurt his feelings.
Aaron had been through this scene many times before; he took my leaving well and didn’t reproach me. He stayed my friend, of course, and we continued to see each other quite a bit. But our relationship was never the same. It couldn’t be. That was my fault. At that time and that age, I was just too focused on my own wants and needs. It is only now, as an older man looking back, that I can understand how much my defection must have hurt him. To have caused that man one minute of pain is one of the biggest regrets of my life.
Beverly Hills
9021OUT
In retrospect, I should have stayed on that show until they dragged me off in a body bag. Until Brandon died in the Beverly Hills Nursing Home of old age. I was a complete dumbass not to stay until the bitter end. Whatever damage was done to my acting career in terms of typecasting was irrevocable. A year or two more of playing Brandon would not have mattered in the least. I should have socked away as much money as I could before transitioning into the next phase of my career. By the way, that’s what I would tell any actor, ever, period. No discussion: if you’re lucky enough to be on a hit TV show, don’t leave until they kill you off. You never know when, or if, the next one’s coming.
I also wish I had stayed because I believe the show should have ended differently. I think we owed the fans the ending many wanted and seemed to think was coming. There had been a classic episode where faced with a choice between Dylan and Brandon, Kelly said, “I choose me!”—which led to endless hours of comedy between Jennie, Luke, and me afterward. However, in the intervening years, particularly after Dylan left the show, the story arc made it pretty clear that Brandon and Kelly were written in the stars. Meant to be. Now, of course, given the benefit of hindsight, I should absolutely have stayed on the show and had Brandon and Kelly live together happily ever after. That’s the way it should have ended.
Aaron was a good guy and he stayed on good terms with most of the actors who left the show, myself included. My leaving was a big blow; having Luke return a few months later for the last two seasons gave the show a much-needed boost after eight years. Our great friend Paul Wagner had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and Luke was particularly close to him; I believe that the chance to spend time working closely with him was a large factor in Luke’s decision to return. Paul was a great man whom we sadly lost a few years later.
Jason Priestley Page 11