by Mario Lopez
This was the decade when cable, combined with VCRs, revolutionized the way America and the world consumed media. By 1989 TV watching was gauged at an average of seven hours a day for most households, and it was also a time when we finally started seeing more stars from diverse backgrounds. The eighties were the years when nerds first began to make lots of money—with computer brainiacs like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates all starting their journeys as masters of the universe. As proven by the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, you could apparently be a geek and still be cool.
As we prepared for big cultural changes coming up in the 1990s, over at NBC’s Entertainment Division the late Brandon Tartikoff was in search of a new series to help bolster the network’s Saturday morning lineup. A visionary, Tartikoff had been instrumental in turning NBC around—from last place among the major networks in the early 1980s to eventually being the top-rated network, a position it held for five consecutive seasons. Shows that proved Brandon Tartikoff famously had the Midas touch included Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Cheers, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Knight Rider, and Seinfeld. For Miami Vice, as legend has it, he saw a perfect niche to fill and pitched the network his high-concept premise with two words: “MTV cops.”
Instead of coming up with a brand-new idea that would appeal to a captive Saturday morning audience of younger viewers, Tartikoff decided to develop a spin-off of an existing show called Good Morning, Miss Bliss, about a wonderful teacher and her students. Originally developed as a pilot by NBC, the series was rejected by the network and then picked up by the Disney Channel, which ordered thirteen episodes to air in 1988. Due to poor ratings, Disney decided to drop the show before the first season was over. At that point, NBC reclaimed the series and—between Tartikoff and Peter Engel, the show’s creator and producer—it was decided to retool the story line from being about the teacher into focusing more on the high school students and their lives. At first, Engel wanted to call the spin-off When the Bell Rings, but Tartikoff suggested Saved by the Bell. And we know how that turned out.
For those who had followed the story line of Good Morning, there were some changes in store. The new series no longer featured the beloved Miss Bliss (played by the classy Hayley Mills, a former child star of Disney movie fame), and the setting had moved from a school in Indianapolis to the fictional Bayside High School in the Palisades, here in Los Angeles. For Saved by the Bell (SBTB), the producers dropped some of the characters but kept three of them: the show’s lead, Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the popular, charming kid who always gets himself in trouble with his questionable schemes that never work out; the über-nerdy Screech Powers (Dustin Diamond); and the high-energy gossip and fashionista Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies). Three new characters were added: the all-American cheerleader and girl-next-door Kelly Kapowski (a role that would go to Tiffani Thiessen); the smart, strong-willed crusader for causes like women’s lib and the environment, Jessie Spano (to be played by Elizabeth Berkley); and the transfer student, A. C. Slater, an army brat whose dad is in the military and has been relocated to the Palisades in Southern California.
When I first heard that I had an appointment to read for the role of A. C. Slater on this new NBC spin-off, to me it was just another audition. I had no concept of the magnitude of the opportunity. In general, auditions for high school–aged talent were few and far between. This was still the eighties, after all, before the heyday of Nickelodeon and smart sitcoms featuring the lives of teenagers like me and my friends. At fifteen years old, with my hormones in charge, frankly, I was more interested in chasing girls than trekking up to LA to read for a part that had barely been sketched out on paper, other than that Slater was the new kid in school.
My work ethic was more powerful than my hormones and I wasn’t going to disappoint Mom, so there was never a thought of not doing the audition. But did I care? Not so much. With twenty-twenty hindsight, I clearly didn’t have my priorities in check—although what teenager does? At that point, I was crazy for this one girl in Chula Vista, and the time away from her was almost painful! Plus, an audition meant missing practice with my wrestling team—yet another reason not to care so much about whether or not I’d get the part. Later on, when I was making the transition from child actor to adult actor and TV personality, I lost the carefree attitude and started to care much more, especially after gaining a better understanding of the stakes of each opportunity.
The SBTB audition process was a true gauntlet. Thousands of kids, all really different from one another, were up for the part of Slater. When I read for the show’s casting director, Robin Lippin, I was my usual cool self, reading the scene almost as if this guy A. C. Slater had my easygoing personality—kind of Rico Suave but with the hint of an edge thrown in for good measure.
Robin gave me the usual “That was really great, Mario. Thank you so much for coming in!” and I hightailed it out of there, forgetting anything about the part until the call arrived that I’d be meeting the NBC casting associates, and then the call after that for the next level of decision makers in the huge hierarchy. All the while, the casting for all three of the new roles was equally intense.
As far as I knew, there were no other Mexican or Latino kids who had auditioned for the part, or at least none were under consideration for it as the numbers were whittled down. The name A. C. Slater certainly didn’t have the Hispanic ring to it that many of the roles I went in on had. The good news was that, from what I saw in the process, they cast blindly for SBTB and wound up with a fairly diverse cast, especially for the time.
Once I was in the hunt, I started to become invested and soon that competitive part of me kicked in. Every time I made it to the next level, nothing was a given—only that I was alive for yet another round.
When I went to network, finally, I knew the job to play A. C. Slater was down to the two of us left standing: me and one other teen actor who was more of a Dustin Diamond sort of nerd type than a street-smart bad-boy type. One of the producers really liked the other guy. But it appeared the network could be leaning toward me. As in the past, I hoped that my cool attitude was going to tip the scales in my favor. Plus, as an athlete in good shape from years of competitive wrestling, I had the right stature and build to play a traditional jock. There wasn’t one yet on the show.
Still, even with those things going for me, when I walked out of the reading for the network, I knew there was a possibility they would test other actors or ask me to come back to read for them again. You just never knew.
“C’mon, mijo,” Mom said, after the audition. “We have a long ride home.”
On what was normally at least a two-hour drive—at times twice that long—we found ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This was going to be a long ride.
“You hungry?” Mom asked after we stopped to fill up with gas.
Sounded good to me. The traffic had given me a headache and the change of scenery helped break up the trip.
Once we’d settled into our booth in the diner just off the freeway, Mom thought it might be worth it to go to the pay phone and see what the feedback was and find out whether I needed to come back for another audition. Five minutes later, my mother came back with a blank look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Then she cracked up and gave me the news. My agent told Mom she had just heard from Robin Lippin, the casting director.
“You got the part! You are going to be A. C. Slater on Saved by the Bell.”
As they say in Hollywood, good news travels fast.
We hugged and high-fived, finished up our meal, and drove the rest of the way home. As cool as we all were, that’s when I started to get excited about the prospect of being part of something of this scope. But I could not have fathomed how it was going to change my life in the ways that it would. The money was great, for sure, more than ever before—three thousand dollars an episode was damn good for a fifteen-year-old. It was
n’t Friends money, by any means. And as before, we had to cover all of our own expenses, including lodging and gas. A prime-time sitcom would have been different. Since it was a Saturday morning show, the series had limited reach and sponsor opportunities. If my agent in that era had been more savvy—or if we’d had any guess about how popular the show was going to be—I would have tried to avoid signing a ridiculous contract that stipulated we couldn’t make any money off merchandising or endorsements. The show was the first of its kind and we didn’t really know how much pull we had as actors. File this lesson under the heading of “Live and learn.”
A.C. wasn’t originally slated to be Latino or a wrestler. The producers hadn’t planned for him to be a drummer either, or a break dancer. He wasn’t supposed to be any of these things that I already had under my belt. His ethnicity may have once been conceived as Italian, like Vinnie on Welcome Back, Kotter, but when I was cast, that went out the window. That was when the producers did something I’d never before encountered.
When I went in to shake hands with the powers that be, I was invited into a meeting with the writers and asked about some of my interests. After I started mentioning a few, one of the writers asked, “Would you mind writing down everything you like to do, any special skills, extracurricular activities, or after-school involvement?” This was what they did with all the leads and, as we would discover, it yielded great storytelling results.
Once again, my mother’s master plan was paying off. When I finished, I had one hell of a long list, thanks to Mom. Lo and behold, the producers decided to incorporate many of my real-life skills and interests into the fictional character of A. C. Slater. As I found out, before I was their guy, the vision for Slater as a new kid in school was seen as a teenage boy with a lot of street smarts because of having to move a lot as an army brat. Kind of shady. Scrawny. Very mysterious. I imagine they were aiming for a bad boy like Judd Nelson’s character from The Breakfast Club. But Slater turned into a jock because that’s what I was. And that’s what they built the story lines around.
When our first episode aired in August 1989, we were shown on prime time that week and the next before moving to our Saturday morning slot. Right away NBC knew that Brandon Tartikoff had another winner on his hands. And they hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
• • •
The summer schedule for shooting the show became second nature to me, but in the early stages required a learning curve as we went through the script in different ways throughout the week in preparation to film on Fridays. We would do the table read on Monday—where we would actually sit around a table in a room with all the actors, writers, directors, producers, and some other important network execs. We would go through the script, making the dialogue our own as the writers invariably laughed at their own jokes. On cue! As the week progressed, the director would start blocking and rehearsing the scenes as the show began to take form. By the second day we’d be given a new script with various line and structural changes and go on to rehearse that at the end of the day. The day after that, there’d be even more changes and we’d work up to another run-through. Then, on Thursday, we had camera blocking. On Friday during the daytime, we had more rehearsal and we taped some scenes on a closed set, just to have them in the can or to add in later.
Finally, Friday night was showtime—complete with a live audience of more than two hundred people. After we wrapped set, we’d hurry out of there to enjoy the weekend off and on Monday we started it all over again.
The appeal of the show was evident to me early in the process. Shooting in front of a live audience is an adrenaline rush. The energy from fans is so powerful, and at the start I couldn’t believe it when I heard they were screaming for me. When producers introduced me that very first time, right before we taped our first episode, I had a truly out-of-body experience.
The announcer’s voice proclaimed, “And playing Slater . . . Mario Lopez!” as I ran out, hit my mark in front of the set, and greeted the audience.
“Mario!” Girls in the audience shrieked, calling my real name, and “Slater!” all while screaming and waving their arms. The audience was full of girls, lots of girls, including girls who knew me from other shows and girls who had never seen me before. Wow! As Slater, the new kid, I definitely was given a full-on welcome.
Of course, it was really Zack’s show. Each episode was seen through his character’s perspective, with dialogue that he would deliver straight to the camera—like Ferris Bueller in a comedy context or, in drama, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (a favorite of mine), where the protagonist breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience. That aspect of the show really lent a quirky, ahead-of-the-curve feeling to a Saturday morning time slot, setting trends in TV that still sometimes seem fresh today.
Meanwhile, our costume, hair, and makeup departments saw to it that we all looked like trendy teenagers, adorning us in the fashion style of the late 1980s and early 1990s as we moved into a new decade. When I first sat down with the team in hair and makeup, they showed me their ideas for A. C. Slater.
Hairstyles—or wigs, as I refer to them—can define a character’s image or ruin it. The wig is a key element that has always been important to me as a performer. My motto that I love to quote before stepping foot on set for the camera: “If the wig’s tight, the show’s tight.” So, when the hair and makeup people showed me their drawings for Slater’s hair, I loved the action-adventure tough-guy look they were going for. Kind of like Steven Seagal of that era (without the little ponytail) or Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies.
“Let’s do it,” I agreed, thinking the wig would be tight.
Only later did I figure out that unintentionally my wig for SBTB was a Jheri curl mullet. I didn’t even know I had a mullet. It was just the style of the era, like Seagal and Gibson, and I liked looking like them, but getting my hair to obey the laws of mulletdom was a major undertaking.
First of all, unlike both of my parents, who have curly hair, mine is naturally straight. My mom—whose hair is super curly, almost kinky—looked at me one day when I was beginning my acting career, pointed to a chair in the kitchen, and said, “Come here, mijo.”
Up until that time period, my hair had been kind of wavy. Not exactly curly like hers, but not what you’d call straight. But over time the waves slowly vanished and my hair straightened out on its own.
So that day Mom, who must have been some kind of closet stylist, decided to try out an “at home” perm on me. The smell was horrible and it burned my scalp, but I blindly trusted her to know what she was doing. In fact, the classic curl worked on me—so much so that later on, when she stopped the perms, casting people would ask if I could curl it again so that, in their words, I could be “more ethnic,” which tended to mean more Puerto Rican.
Having had to curl it so many times during my career as a child actor, I had no problem with getting regular salon perms for Saved by the Bell—although once I left the show, that was it for me and curling my hair. For good.
To keep my already permed and mullet-cut wig tight for SBTB, I had to get into hair and makeup before anyone else in the cast could—just so they didn’t die of asphyxiation. Once the hairdresser finished the styling, our mission was to keep it that way. In theory, this should not have been so daunting. All the classic entertainers—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra—used tons of hair product. But I doubt they came close to what my damn hair required. Besides a cauldron of hairspray, I supplemented with every product on the shelf: gels, more sprays, mousse, anything I could find. I even tried old-school products like Brylcreem and something called Tres Flores.
“What the . . . ?” began one of the hairdressers on the show when she saw me open it up and smelled the petroleum aroma reeking out of it.
“Tres Flores,” I explained. “It’s what all the cholos wear—even my dad used to use it on his hair to keep it in place.” Then I fessed up, admitting that Tre
s Flores is, basically, Mexican Vaseline.
I’m glad I didn’t walk near any open flames or I would have caught on fire. The only real problem was that my hair would get a little too sticky and wet from all the product and would drip, leaving stains on the back of my silk-collared shirts.
Other than all that, the wig was tight. Before long, salons for boys and men were being deluged with requests for the A. C. Slater look.
My wardrobe on the show—never chosen by me—was also intended to reflect trends that high school kids would care about. For Slater, that translated to Z. Cavaricci parachute pants. I’ve never worn so many pleated baggy jeans with double buckles in my life. I was the king of Z. Cavariccis and rayon shirts, as well as neon tank tops. Everyone had their own signature look that fit the times and their character. As preppy Zack, Mark-Paul wore a lot of sweaters with some crazy eighties patterns on them, like Ferris Bueller, and he was always pushing up the sleeves. Tiffani, as Kelly, was dressed classically as the sporty, all-American cheerleader. As Lisa, our resident fashion know-it-all, Lark became the hat maven, while Elizabeth, as the intellectual Jessie, was the queen of vests. Let’s not even get started on Dustin as Screech. Between his mismatched colors and patterns and his suspenders, he was a poster boy for fashion misses—Revenge of the Nerds all the way.
These details helped to make SBTB a different kind of high school show. In that time period, it was almost unheard of for actual teenagers to play teenagers on television. In contrast, the hit series Beverly Hills, 90210 used twentysomethings to play teenagers. SBTB’s realness resonated with our fans.
Another trend that worked to our benefit was that when we went on the air, Hollywood was enjoying the heyday of the new Brat Pack—Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Tom Cruise, and Matt Dillon. We all looked up to those cool young guns, practically worshipping this group of actors, then in their twenties, as they came into their prime. As a new generation of young entertainers, we were positioned to follow in their footsteps and thought of as being on the rise—fresh blood with lots of potential. And like the Brat Pack gang, our group of SBTB leads was pretty tight.
