American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  “I started to get shredded in the press, all these leaks, like, ‘He’s going to get let go.’ ” When Brian’s people called the show, they were told “no decision had been made.”

  What’s more, with the move to the spring schedule, many had doubts whether Idol’s summer success would be able to be replicated. The question hung over Brian whether he would be forever mortgaging his acting career for an awkward spot atop a game show he had never quite felt comfortable with, and one with an uncertain future.

  Looking for a hint, with Fox seemingly ambivalent and the press practically writing him off, Brian took these harbingers as his sign and made his fateful decision. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replayed it in my head, if I’d waited another day, another week, two weeks, another month maybe it would be different. I released a statement. I just said, ‘I’m grateful for the opportunity. I’m moving on.’ ”

  Based on discussions with the Idol team, it’s clear that a decision had been made and just not yet broken to Dunkleman. The show was not planning to bring him back. At that moment, however, and in the years since, having made the jump before he was given the word, he created a void into which a thousand what-ifs leaped every day of his life.

  At this point, the conversation got more intense. I asked Brian how he felt after finally making up his mind. “Not good. I mean, obviously, I thought that I made the biggest mistake that anyone has ever made. Everything started going wrong. I actually ended up firing my manager. In reflecting on it none of it was his fault. I had to go in a different direction.”

  While he had been on Idol, Brian had talked with another manager who had expressed interest in working with him. Brian now approached that manager, who told him, “Before I can take you on, you need to sever your ties with your old manager.” Brian duly cut the cord, and then checked back with his agent about making the leap to manager number two official.

  “She said, ‘Actually, he just called and he said now he doesn’t think you’re right.’ I was like, ‘I just fired my manager.’ She said, ‘There are a lot of other managers out there. Don’t worry about it.’ Okay. . . . So then I pitched to a pretty reputable management company. I went to the Improv to perform. They brought the whole company down to see me. Fifteen minutes and it was the best I’ve ever done in my life.

  “Two days later, the girl at the firm, my point person, said, ‘You know what, I just couldn’t get everybody onboard.’ I was devastated. That was the first time I realized it doesn’t matter what I do. . . .

  “I had called a manager who had really pursued me heavily way before Idol, thinking, Well, I’m available now. He said, ‘Listen, there’s not one person in this town who believes in you . . . you may get to its being between you and another guy for a pilot or a sitcom and they’re not going to really believe and they’re not going to know what happened and so they’re going to err on the side that’s safe. My advice to you is to get out of town for a while.’ Get out of town, I thought. Well, that’s crazy talk.”

  The town, he was to discover, didn’t believe he had quit Idol and not been fired. Or if they did believe it, that made him all the crazier. And then, after the doubts about whether Idol could make it in the spring lineup, season 2 debuted without Brian Dunkleman. The new season launched to 33 million viewers, an audience surpassing the Oscars and second only to the Super Bowl in annual viewing.

  At that point, the bottom dropped out. Completely. If American Idol had suddenly become the nation’s epic, there was little room left for the man who turned his back on it.

  “My booking agent dropped me. I couldn’t do stand-up on the road for four years. I had four or five weeks with one particular booker and he canceled on me because, in his words, bad press. . . .

  “Nobody wanted to touch me. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if I got bad-mouthed. I don’t know if people were pissed off because I left. They probably were. I wish I could go back and change it but I can’t. My manager actually described it as, ‘You have the stink on you. You have the stink on you in this business.’ ”

  The legend of “you’ll never eat in this town again” rarely affects entertainers so immediately. When careers fade, there’s typically a decline; the clubs get smaller, as do the paychecks. There is a long way down the Hollywood food chain before you hit bottom. Brian Dunkleman fell that full distance overnight.

  “I went through such a severe period of depression I don’t know how I pulled through it. The girl who’s now my wife is the only reason I survived. . . . There was a period of time where I couldn’t get out of bed. It was that bad.

  “There was a period there—I think I went two years after that not working. Two years. Not a voice-over. Not a commercial. I try to look back and keep it in perspective but something that’s so ingrained in the collective consciousness is kind of hard to shake. I think that’s what happened. You’ve got to have an agent and a manager selling you. It’s the hardest thing in the world to call yourself. That guy canceled all that work on me and that spread. I couldn’t stop it once it started. Just to be in the position that I am right now and actually have people interested in me again, it kind of stumps me because I don’t know how I got through it. I don’t know how I survived.”

  The years passed, and slowly, in tiny drips and drabs, the ice began to thaw and things began to happen again. Ironically, the first break in the freeze came from Idol itself, when producers from FremantleMedia called as they were putting together the Idol retrospective show, Idol Rewind, and asked Brian to serve as narrator. After that, he shot a pilot for Fox, of all places, and did a couple of appearances on the Spike Feresten talk show. And finally, the reality era that Idol had helped begin grew far enough to call Brian back onto its shores. “I did Celebrity Fit Club, which at first I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ And then, ‘How much? All right, I’ll do it.’ ”

  Once Idol Rewind aired, reps appeared willing to take him on and he began to work again. “I got a new booking agent and he got me out and I was like, ‘Wow, it’s been so long.’ You go back to the beginning and I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’ll be so grateful to be able to do this again.’ Some of the road gigs are pretty rough but I was just so excited to be able to do it again. I have a totally fresh perspective about any time I get to work because I had it taken away from me for a long time.”

  Soon enough, the Howard Stern Show came calling, finding Brian now able to make light of his experiences. Stern’s producer called and sheepishly told him about a contest they were having of men in their thirties who still lived with their parents they were calling The Biggest Loser. “And he said, ‘We want you to be a judge, we’ve got Pete Best—’ I said, ‘Wait a second, you’ve got Pete Best?!’ I’ve been referring to myself as the Pete Best of American Idol this whole time. I get to meet the Brian Dunkleman of the Beatles? I’m in, man!”

  His ability to make light of what he had gone through won Brian a bit of an underground following, which led to a call from a producer who had an idea for a pilot built around his traumas. The video, which would be that one active trace of him out there when Seacrest made his jab in season 9, was entitled American Dunkleman. It was released on the Web as a five-minute pilot presentation featuring a Charlie Brown–like star wandering the city in the shadow of his former partner, the image of a grinning, tanned Seacrest always looming nearby.

  The video received a bit of attention when first posted online in 2009 and then largely sat without any bites from the networks. Until, that is, a year later, when once again, help came from the unlikeliest quarter and Seacrest’s joke revived interest, garnering a flurry of calls to the producers and sending its view count soaring.

  “Honestly, it feels like destiny. Honestly. I don’t know why I had to go through this and there’s nobody to blame but myself. That’s the thing, people were like, ‘You got fired.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that would be so much easier to live with.’ But I have to live with the fact that I did this to myself. I’ve got nobody to
focus my anger at. I made my decision and I still think I would’ve even with hindsight, but I wanted to follow my dream. But if I had to do it all over again I think I probably wouldn’t have done the same thing. With the benefit of hindsight, obviously I wouldn’t.”

  It remains amazing how he seems free of bitterness toward the Goliath he left behind. Talking about it all, he displays a fragility, a sense that all this is still something very raw, something he lives with every day of his life. But it’s also very clear that whatever the road he went down that got him here, through depression, anger, and every other toxic emotion that must overwhelm during such trials, he has stepped away from the worst of it and is now, just as he once was before American Idol came into his life, a performer, looking for a chance to entertain people.

  “If by some ironic twist of fate through all of this I get to go on and do great things still, great. But my attitude is, I can go back in the corner and cry or I can suck it up and just do what I did before and keep doing that. There’s something like a hundred thousand actor wannabes who move to this city every year and I think a thousand move out. It’s a numbers game. I exceeded my expectations when I did Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. If you would’ve told me that this would’ve happened to me when I first moved out here in my two-door Cavalier I would’ve told you that you were nuts. I guess you could say that this experience has built character coming out of my ass, trust me. Every year gets a little easier.”

  Chapter 9

  GOLIATH

  After the euphoria of the season 1 finale, Idol rolled out to meet America face-to-face, heralded by an avalanche of merchandise and tie-in events beyond anything that had ever been created for a TV show. After a two-hour televised reunion special, the contestants embarked on a forty-city concert tour. The top four were signed by Fuller’s 19 Entertainment and put to work on albums. There was a DVD, T-shirts, tote bags, and baseball caps. A feature film was in the works.

  It was an empire like no television show had ever produced overnight.

  “We were a little bit aggressive, I guess,” Cecile Frot-Coutaz recalls. “We were trying to do what we normally do, which is monetize the show as quickly as possible. I remember doing a business plan for my boss at the time. We’d just finished one season. I put three more seasons in the plan. He said, ‘Well, that’s too bullish. Put just one more.’ We weren’t in that mind-set. We never imagined the show would become the phenomenon it is now.”

  Today, Idol is one of the most meticulously managed brands in the world. But there would be a long period of trial and error before that took shape. As season 1 wound down, a bigger challenge loomed before the team: the little matter of season 2.

  But the sensation of that first season would not vanish without one more conspiracy to see it off.

  Three months after the finale, “A Moment Like This” still hung in the air. The winner’s single had become a humongous hit, becoming the first single in over two years to sell over 200,000 copies in a week. Sam Goody sold more copies of “A Moment” in one day than they had of anything in over three years, the store told Billboard. “We’re in uncharted territory,” said the magazine’s director of charts, reacting to a television show’s ability to move that much music.

  But with success came the inevitable downside of fame. In season 1, the tabloids had scrambled to catch up with the game, delivering one little scooplet on Nikki McKibbin’s former exotic dancing life. But now they were in it to stay, and the tabloids and scandal would forevermore be a part of the Idol story.

  After her great triumph, there was no bigger target than America’s newest sweetheart, Kelly Clarkson. And now, it appeared, there was a bit more than the public had known. According to the Star, Kelly’s amateur status was a ploy, and she had, in fact, been recording an album for three producers, including Carole King’s ex-husband, before she auditioned for Idol.

  The rest of the media wasted no time piling onto the tabloid allegation. “Idol Title in Dispute,” blared the Chicago Tribune. “Did We Worship a False Idol?” asked the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Jumping in with both feet was the New York Post with a story about the Star’s claims: “If true, that means Clarkson may have violated the show’s rule about being an amateur with no prior professional singing experience.”

  It wouldn’t be the last time the media, and the public in general, would be confused on this point. Conflating the requirements for Idol with the Olympics, many assume that contestants are required to certify that they have never been paid a nickel for singing before coming to Idol. This confusion that Idol demands absolute snow-white amateurism from its singers is more wishful thinking by the audience, arising out of Idol’s diamond-in-the-rough mythology, than an actual requirement of the competition. The Idol contract states simply that contestants not be under any current obligation to any management or record company. As the firestorm blared, Idol reps patiently explained this point. Kelly might have worked with professionals before, but she was not under any active ties and thus had broken no rules. But the explanation was lost under the cries of outrage that the fairy tale was not true.

  Ultimately, whatever the truth of Kelly’s past, this was a case where the story didn’t match the picture. Whether she had recorded demos, worked with Hollywood pros, printed head shots, or headlined at the Roxy, Kelly Clarkson, with her pigtails, her accent, her infectious squeals, and her no-nonsense tone, felt like America, not Hollywood, and in the end that wildly appealing manner created a Teflon coating to which no dirt could or would ever stick. By Christmastime, the firestorm had blown over, and then it was gone, leaving not a trace on Kelly.

  Now it was time to find a new Idol.

  Generating a hit in the summer, when the networks had little on the air but reruns and low-cost game shows, was one thing. Survival in the fall or spring would be another matter entirely. History did not bode well for the second season of reality shows. Shows such as Temptation Island and Joe Millionaire had demonstrated how quickly novelty could fade in this new era. Few would make it past their second seasons.

  Would Idol?

  There was little time to entertain such a question. The Idol team was occupied with getting the show to the airwaves in time for the spring schedule. It would be tough, but a January debut fit Fox’s schedule perfectly. At that time, each fall was dominated by Fox’s contract with Major League Baseball. The play-offs and World Series broke into the networks’ September/October lineup, causing preempts and shuffles of the regularly scheduled shows, making it difficult to sustain an audience for a new show. A January premiere might have meant a clean slate for the show—and a postholiday audience ready to hunker down for some cozy and wholesome entertainment—but it also meant that the moment the curtain fell on season 1, the crew had to spring into action for season 2.

  The contracts were quickly re-signed. Cowell’s deal had been closed the night of the finale, one more season for one million dollars. Seacrest was the next brought back, for a reported figure just south of Cowell’s million. When Randy and Paula confirmed that they too would be coming back, the team was in place.

  But first just a little R & R. Clearly settling in with his new Idol family, Cowell traveled twice to the favored vacation spot of the British elite, the Bahamas, once with his new BFF Ryan Seacrest, who duly reported the journey to People magazine, saying that he was “tanner, skinnier, younger, and faster than [Cowell] and he was very upset about that.” And again with Lythgoe. “We got along fantastically well in those days,” Lythgoe recalls.

  Before they could launch, however, there were to be changes, or at least attempts at changes. The first was a return to the dream of that fourth judge to fill that elusive “DJ’s” seat.

  Idol execs settled on one Angie Martinez, a well-known New York music scenester who, the producers thought, would lend a bit of youth and urban credibility to the somewhat middle-aged, middlebrow panel. Her hiring had been announced to the media: “Hot 97 DJ to Be New Idol Judge,” reported t
he Daily News. But inside the audition room, it was another story altogether. Martinez was largely silent during the auditions, hanging back as though too cool to dive into the fray. “It’s much harder to be a judge on these shows than people think,” says Cecile Frot-Coutaz. “You have to kind of criticize people who walk in and tell you they’re a big fan of yours; and you have to kill their dream. It’s really tough especially from an artist’s perspective when you’ve been in their shoes.” She lasted all of two cities before, by mutual agreement, it was decided that it was not working out.

  The dream of a fourth judge was tabled for now, but would live to fight another day. And despite the departure of Brian Dunkleman, the show was not ready to give up on the two-host format either.

  Kristin Holt had made it as far as the semifinals on season 1. To Idol audiences, the former cheerleader and beauty queen had been distinguished for sliding under the judges’ desk when she raced to hug them after her audition. After being eliminated, Holt did some on-air work with a local TV news show, getting a taste for hosting. When she read that Dunkleman would not be returning, she called up Lythgoe and requested his slot. “Come on the road with us, cohost,” he told her. “We’ll see how you do.”

  There’s some confusion, a decade later, what role Holt was signed on for, but media reports at the time make clear that she was brought aboard as the new cohost. After shooting some initial segments wearing the cohost’s hat, when the audition episodes aired, Holt was relegated to the role of correspondent, filing occasional pieces on life at the Idol mansion.

  In season 1, Idol execs and staffers had desperately passed out flyers to recruit contestants. In season 2, local newspapers and TV stations ran stories announcing the circus was coming to town, covering the events like Woodstock was springing up in their backyards.