Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age

by Mathew Klickstein

  HARVEY: It’s pretty astounding that a guy with OCD ended up on one of the messiest shows to date on television. Is that irony or what?

  ROBIN RUSSO: Everyone always said, “How did you not know he had OCD?” Back then, we didn’t call it OCD. I just knew that he was “neat.” He would iron his pants before he would go on stage. I traveled with him when we were doing the road shows, so I probably knew him better than anybody. And he never once got upset about getting messy.

  MARC SUMMERS: Nobody understands. First of all, the whole thing has been blown so far out of proportion—that I had this horrible time, that I couldn’t deal with it . . . Bullshit! I never had one bit of a problem. And if I had, I could’ve talked to anybody on the set about it.

  DANA CALDERWOOD: I asked him about it later, and he said he would just have to wait until he could get out of there and go to the hotel to take a hot shower. He said, “It was terrible for me sometimes, but I did it because I knew that’s what the show was and I wanted to make the show good.”

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: I mean, that’s extraordinary that he would be part of such a messy show and have this medical condition. He was always helpful, always participated in anything we wanted to do on the network, any Big Help or initiatives that we had.

  MARC SUMMERS: After it came out and I talked about it, Gerry Laybourne called me to apologize. I said, “Apologize for what?” And she went, “I had no idea.” And I said, “You know what? Neither did I.”

  WENDY LITWACK: There are certain things that you do where you make a lot of money, and then there are certain things you do for the art. The most attractive thing about jumping into a project at Nickelodeon was they gave you the freedom to create. You didn’t know if it would really ever bring you monetary rewards, but it would certainly be creatively fulfilling.

  HARVEY: When I auditioned it was 1986, and I remember asking if Double Dare was a union show. And they said no. Word got back to me that if I wanted to do it union, they would cast somebody else. “Well, I’m not doing anything else at the moment. Fine!”

  DAMIAN YOUNG: This was one of the first TV gigs I had. I’d done some equity regional theater, but mostly what I was doing was for free. I didn’t care at that point. “Somebody wants me? Fantastic.”

  ABBY HAGYARD: Most actors would work for food. I didn’t have a problem with the money. Les was happy. The kids didn’t have a problem with the money. They were all ten. They were making better money than they could’ve hoped for from a paper route, that’s for sure.

  ROGER PRICE: I know some parents thought we were paying the kids too much money. But we paid them the union rate plus 10 percent. This was a requirement of Canadian law.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: It was probably $260 a week. We didn’t know any different, and we were having fun.

  JOE O’CONNOR: In terms of negotiating what we made, our contract was so confusing our agents had a hard time of understanding it.

  MICHAEL KOEGEL: Rich Ross and I would be sitting in our offices making up numbers to pay these kids. “What should we offer Melissa for a third year of Clarissa? Is $150 an episode enough of a bump?” We were making it up! There was no template. We were completely on our own, non-union, and there was no Big Brother to ask questions of. Once the contracts were signed, we went ahead and did it.

  ANNETTE LESURE: Everybody would be complaining because of the pay scale, but I was thinking, “Holy crap, it pays!” It was, like, my first big job, so it was exciting.

  TIM LAGASSE: Nickelodeon likes young people who don’t have much experience, because they’re cheap.

  JOE O’CONNOR: I have to say Nickelodeon did and continues to do a brilliant job of sort of masking that fact. Not that anybody really cares anymore, because it doesn’t matter anymore. But Nickelodeon has always done a wonderful job of making it seem like they were some benign almost nonprofit. It’s really brilliant marketing. It just becomes, Gosh darn it, they’re really interested in kids!

  MICHAEL BOWER: We didn’t get nothing. We were really, really screwed. Looking back on it now—especially in comparison to working at NBC—we really worked for free. When they were going to do a third or fourth season, all of the actors said we needed more money. Nickelodeon wasn’t having it. Steve Slavkin stood up for everyone, saying we weren’t asking for that much more. He walked off set in protest about two weeks early, and I guess Nick wasn’t happy. It just ended. We knew something was up, because the creator of the show wasn’t on set for three weeks.

  TREVOR EYSTER: Cable television contracts are very different than network, so this idea that all of us got rich is certainly unfounded.

  MICHAEL KOEGEL: Residuals was something we never could have afforded. If someone was union and wanted to work non-union, that was a different thing. But we couldn’t give them a union contract. If you work with union actors, you acknowledge unions exist, and if you acknowledge this, unions come and force you to work with them all of the time. Financially, we could have never done that.

  COURTNEY CONTE: One time, we had the teamsters try to strike us. They heard we were non-union, so they started honking their horns on their trucks so we couldn’t roll audio. I had to go talk to them. Thank God I’m third-generation show business; I knew most of these goombahs. They went peacefully, but do you know what a teamster contract would do to an $180,000-an-episode show? It would have killed the show.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: John Kricfalusi complained to some reporter at Variety or something that the only creative thing Nickelodeon ever did was create a deal where they owned the product. And they challenged me with that and my answer was, “Look, I’m the Devil.” It’s really simple: You can do the deal with me and have your series made, or there’s a person standing behind you who will do it. It’s very simple. I’m the Devil. I’d admit it. I’m the Devil, okay? Do the deal with the Devil: It’s your choice. And if I’m the Devil, fine!

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: I just wish I could get a cut of it all.

  ANDY BAMBERGER: Within three years of leaving Nickelodeon, I made maybe $50,000 more a year. We all were completely underpaid for what we did. I don’t know what Gerry got, but I saw all the budgets, and it was pretty much the same amount of money. There was a bump up when we became successful in 1994/95 doing All That and those kinds of shows. But before then, as far as I know, nobody was pocketing a big salary at Nickelodeon.

  ROBIN RUSSO: Things got really big on Double Dare. When we were doing our live shows, it was like a concert, so security was right in front of us. People would run up, and whether it was a kid or parent handing us boxes or flowers, we were never allowed to touch that stuff. Security had to look through it all. One guy did get upset when he was trying to give me flowers and he kept going, Well, what do you think I’m like? And I’m like, “You don’t understand. They have to check everything that comes through!” I was escorted off the live shows numerous times because there was something going on in the audience.

  FRED KELLER: We had fans of Hey Dude, and there was a report of some guy who was sending inappropriate notes.

  KELLY BROWN: I left the business because of these stalker situations. It scared me too much. It was very strange.

  FRED KELLER: We were fortunate because we were isolated: Anyone approaching the sets could be seen pretty clearly, if they were part of the crew or not. We had to be a bit more conscious about security, that kind of thing. It never got in the way of shooting. The actors were all wanting to do their best. There may have been some stressful times back at the hotel, but certainly not when we were shooting.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: I knew about Kelly’s stalkers and then had to deal with it from New York and not from Arizona, so that was a problem. We had to deal with police and that kind of stuff. But I had to deal with it as a television executive and not as a person on the ground at the Tanque Verde Ranch.

  JACOB TIERNEY: I had gotten these weird stalker notes on Facebook from people who liked Are You Afraid of the
Dark?, which is why I changed my page name. But it took me half the day to figure out that it was Rachel Blanchard, because I wasn’t expecting that from her.

  ANDREA LIVELY: We only did two seasons of Nick Arcade, but even so, there were a lot of little kids who grew up on it. Karim Miteff called me and asked if I knew a person who had contacted him about me. I told him the guy was someone who had watched Nick Arcade and would call in to the radio station where I worked. Then Karim said, “He’s a grown man now, and he’s calling me asking about private information about you.” Years later, a lot of these kids grow up and become weirdos. It doesn’t matter if you’re über-famous or not. So I’m thinking, “Thank goodness people don’t know what I look like!”

  KELLY BROWN: I would come home every summer and work in my family business, and it was very strange to have people come up: “Can I have your autograph?” You can’t shut it off. You can’t be a normal person and then be that person who walked the red carpet. I didn’t like the attention on me. I wasn’t comfortable with that. It wasn’t going to be a lifestyle for me.

  RITA HESTER: While we were on the air with Roundhouse, we had to replace Crystal Lewis, who went back to her gospel career. And then Dominic Lucero died, which was so tragic.

  BENNY HESTER: Dominic was one of our favorites, and was just great in Florida. When he got sick, it was kind of a mystery for a long time. We kept thinking he’d be coming back. Rita and I were the first to realize that that wasn’t going to happen. It affected everybody.

  DAVID SIDONI: We were roommates in Florida together. Before Roundhouse, we’d gotten really close doing Newsies. He was one of, if not my best, friend. I knew he wanted to do Roundhouse; I was there with him in his house when Michael Jackson called and asked him to come back on the road with him because Dominic had been a backup dancer on the Bad tour. He was getting a chance to have his talents on display with our show. And now it was cut short, along with everything else in his life. He had gotten some kind of virus infection or something that was cancerous. When we came back and did the next episodes, we tried to honor him as much as we could. But it was tough. I’d lost a dear, dear friend. Every week, I wanted to make him proud.

  JULENE RENEE-PRECIADO: He was twenty-five. My daughter was born after he passed away, so I named her middle name—Dominique—after him. It was a huge loss for the Roundhouse family.

  HEATHER SHEFFIELD: When we lost Dominic, the heart of the show was gone. We’d been through so many wars with the network, and it got harder to do budget-wise. And from a logistical standpoint of doing a live show every week. Had they renewed the show for another season, we would have found a way to make it continue, but at his memorial, we all felt that this was the end of things.

  ALBIE HECHT: When I came aboard, Roundhouse was still in production and was having a pretty turbulent production. The staff there was in turmoil. I think they had internal problems between the producers.

  SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ: It really wasn’t like that. On a professional level, it really worked well.

  SHEILA LAWRENCE: Whenever someone new joined the show, there was definitely a raised eyebrow when they heard about the Buddy-Benny-Rita triangle, but it was never ever a problem in terms of getting a show done.

  HEATHER SHEFFIELD: At times it was contentious—as it would be with any three producers—but my parents are who they are, and all three of them brought a piece of the puzzle to the show. I don’t know that I’d do it again in a professional capacity, but at the time it was pretty unique.

  HERB SCANNELL: We dealt with all of them, but Rita and Buddy primarily. It was a tough production. When you have an ex-wife and her current husband writing the music, her ex-husband writing the comedy . . . and she has to pull it all together . . . She had a tough job. Did they all like each other? Probably not. But they put on a show each week, which was kind of remarkable.

  JOHN CRANE: It was a double-edged sword. Rita and Buddy and Benny were so protective of that show that I don’t think they were willing to compromise its creative integrity. This may have hastened the demise of the show.

  MARK SCHULTZ: Roundhouse was the only show I asked to be excused from while working at Nick. It became clear to me early on that I didn’t have anything in common with the people producing the show. The pilot episode had so much promise with the band, the dancers, and it was so electric with the glow of a supernova . . . But from that point forward, it didn’t sustain for me. And I was anxious to get off it.

  ALBIE HECHT: The show was constantly over budget and behind schedule. That, combined with the rating, which was not overwhelming, led us to think we would move on to something else that might achieve better results.

  RITA HESTER: When they cut us off at fifty-two episodes and replaced us with All That, it was difficult for us. Right at the end of our last season, record executives had been showing up. We had four albums in the works with Giant Records. They even put a poster inside a cereal box of the Roundhouse cast with a big sticker on it that said the date of the record release. Suddenly, Nick canceled the show and said no to the record deal. I’m not bitter, because I love the fact Nick gave us the opportunity to do something on TV that might never have been done. But we had a clothing line all ready to go called Rebel Tags. We had an agreement with Pace Management to do a thirty-city tour with a huge advance, and everything went away when the show got canceled.

  HERB SCANNELL: All that stuff had been talked about, but I didn’t know if it was actually going to happen.

  BENNY HESTER: The tour was already sold in advance and the record contracts were already issued. We’d named the first cast album. Howard Benson, who’s a very well-known record producer, worked with me on it for weeks.

  HERB SCANNELL: The ratings for Roundhouse were never as high as the other shows’.

  BUDDY SHEFFIELD: The ratings were always good; I don’t think it was that. I never understood the politics going on there and why certain decisions were made, why the show was canceled.

  BENNY HESTER: Robbie Rowe had ambitions other than being a Nickelodeon executive . . . and eventually her husband put All That into our time slot—which kind of speaks for itself.

  JOHN CRANE: Always hovering over us was the idea that Nick would rather have a sketch show with kids as the stars. When it happened, it wasn’t a surprise. We knew that was always the case.

  HERB SCANNELL: We felt like we’d fulfilled what we said we would do, which was getting to a certain number of shows and either move on or spin off. That was our business model: fifty-two or sixty-five, then move on and try something else.

  RITA HESTER: It was a difficult pill to swallow for us.

  JOE ANSOLABEHERE: When I came onto Rugrats, Steve Viksten and I wrote the second episode together. We didn’t really know what was going on, but very quickly it became clear that there was a problem in a way, a disconnect between Paul, Gabor, and Arlene. That triangle.

  PAUL GERMAIN: I’m a strong personality, and as far as I’m concerned, Rugrats was my show that I would force my will on to push it in directions I wanted it to go. First of all, Arlene did not like Angelica. She thought the character was too mean and too cruel. That was a fight we had for a few months.

  CHUCK SWENSON: Arlene didn’t like her because Angelica was mean and was teaching kids meanness. The story guys’ point of view was they we were using her as a foil for meanness.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: You need that foil. You can’t have everybody be nice, because then it’s just pabulum. And we wanted it to be their world and didn’t want to make it so it was a negative adult foil. It needed to be a peer group foil.

  CHERYL CHASE: I guess it wasn’t any of my business. In the New Yorker, Arlene said how she hated this character. I didn’t know that. Angelica was meaner in the Paul Germain era, and after he left, Arlene made Angelica sweeter and nicer. She didn’t want the character to be a role model for her children. Personally, I think Angelica should have been the littl
e brat, because you need to stir things up.

  MELANIE CHARTOFF: Having known narcissistic kids of both genders, I felt the little bitch was pretty true to life and that Cheryl did a great job.

  MARY HARRINGTON: It was really important to do research groups with Rugrats, and the moderator asked, “Should we take Angelica off of the show? Is she too mean?” And the kids absolutely loved her! It was a love-hate situation, the fantasy of getting back at the bullies. She’s one of the most loved characters on the show, and we tested that time and time again.

  CHERYL CHASE: Susan Sarandon was in the Rugrats in Paris movie and said on Rosie O’Donnell’s show that Angelica was her favorite character. I found out from a friend doing makeup at a press junket that somebody asked Clint Eastwood if he watched his own movies at home. “Heck no. At my house, it’s Rugrats. They’re on all day. And Angelica’s my favorite character.” Everybody has an Angelica in their lives.

  VANESSA COFFEY: If I’m not mistaken, she could be mean and conniving, but she would typically get in trouble for it.

  CHERYL CHASE: I didn’t think she was influencing kids the wrong way. Parents would tell me they used Angelica as an example of how not to behave.

  STEVE VIKSTEN: Arlene would come in every morning at nine and leave every day at noon exactly. There was a maintenance guy at Klasky-Csupo—long-haired hippie guy in a tank top—whose job was to come in at noon and say, “Arlene, it’s noon. It’s time to go.” We all started coming in later and later: I’d get there at ten thirty, eleven sometimes, hoping someone else would get in there first and have to deal with Arlene. She’d have all these notes, and it was usually, “Why are the babies fighting with each other? Why does Angelica say, ‘You dumb babies’?” Which is a line I wrote. “Arlene, any TV show needs conflict; otherwise the audience gets bored.” “I don’t see why the babies can’t just get along.”

  CHERYL CHASE: People wanted me to say it all the time when I’d sign autographs. They’d want me to put it on the autograph. It’s her tagline. It’s iconic. Whenever I say it, it just brings people back.