by Craig Marks
DOUG HERZOG: One reason we did a game show was because Nickelodeon had put on Double Dare, which was a huge success. And the Nickelodeon people were smug about it. We really wanted to one-up them. And we were very pleased when we did.
TOM FRESTON: Remote Control was a cheeky send-up of a game show. Ken Ober, a comedian, hosted. It cost $15,000 an episode, and became an instant hit.
DOUG HERZOG: Danny Bonaduce auditioned to host Remote Control. He almost got the gig. We offered it to Ben Stiller, who auditioned and then turned it down.
COLIN QUINN, comedian: Ken Ober and I were embarrassed to be on a game show. I was this hip comedian, and we were afraid our comedian friends were going to look down on us, because Brady Bunch jokes were for hacks. We thought that was beneath us. From day one, I had an attitude.
DENIS LEARY, comedian/actor: Anybody who knows the standup world from that time will tell you, Colin and Kenny were absolute originals. On Remote Control they were flying by the seat of their pants, and they were brilliant at it. Smart people could watch for the banter between those two guys, and dumb people could watch it because they thought it was just a stupid game show.
JOE DAVOLA: Ken and Colin weren’t sure what this was gonna do for their careers, and they were bitching a bit during the first season.
MIKE DUGAN: They started to change their tune once women were throwing pussy at them. Then they said, “You know, it’s not so bad, being on a game show.”
COLIN QUINN: One night I went through a particularly bad rant with Kenny. I was like, “This show is fucking bullshit, man.” The next day we were taping a show, and a girl came over and took out her tits. A beautiful girl. She said, “Will you sign my tit?” Kenny was signing somebody else’s ass. He looks over at me and says, “What do you have to say now?”
BETH McCARTHY: I was an AD on Remote Control. MTV was non-Guild, so I was directing when I was twenty-five years old. In the real world, I would never be directing at age twenty-five. We got paid no money and worked ridiculous hours. The studio started at eight-thirty in the morning and there were days that we were there until midnight. But we were all there together, we were all friends, and we learned a ton.
COLIN QUINN: The money was horrible. I got $100 a show to start. I’d already made $4,000 for a Burger King commercial, so I was like, “These motherfuckers are ripping me off,” which of course they were. I was angry the whole time. When I read ad copy, I was obnoxious and insulting, I’d mispronounce the names of advertisers: Chrysalis, Mitsubishi. The companies were complaining: “He’s insulting our product.” I was like, “What am I, a fucking shill for your product? Fuck you.” MTV wanted to fire me. Doug Herzog was like, “This guy is a prick.” I wanted out from day one. We didn’t give a fuck, which the kids loved, of course.
MICHAEL IAN BLACK: Remote Control was a comedy show much more than a game show. It was an excuse to do jokes. Remote Control was deconstructing game shows in the way that David Letterman, in the early days, was deconstructing talk shows. It was kind of a meta exploration of the form. Now everything is so meta and self-referential, but back then, it wasn’t. There was nothing else like it on television.
As a viewer, MTV felt like a place that fostered an anarchic spirit, run by people who maybe didn’t know what they were doing. In a good way. It was a place to throw shit against the wall, similar to what CollegeHumor does now, or Funny or Die.
JOE DAVOLA: We knew Colin was a horrible singer, so we started a bit called “Singalong with Colin.”
COLIN QUINN: I had an easy job. I just had to smoke cigarettes, do “Singalong with Colin,” and be my miserable self.
MIKE DUGAN: Did Colin talk to you about how much he showed people his penis? Oh, he loved showing people his dick. It came out at all sorts of occasions. We were having dinner one time at a fairly fancy restaurant, and he said, “I’ll take it out right now.” And he actually put his dick in Lauren Corrao’s chocolate mousse. It was just an average-sized dick. I mean, for an Irishman, it wasn’t bad. I probably saw it twenty times. We did a Christmas show, and I played the Three Wise Men, along with two of the writers, Chris Kresti and John Ten Eyck. Kresti was strapped into one of the chairs and he couldn’t move until the stagehands removed him. Colin told the stagehands to leave him in the chair, and he took that opportunity to take out his dick and slap it against poor Kresti’s head while he was strapped into a chair, upside down. There were no adults whatsoever. Colin would drum with his dick against the metal locker to a beat, and say, “Hey, Kari, guess what song I’m playing.”
COLIN QUINN: Kids would come up to us on the street, as young as eleven years old, screaming. Kenny came to me two months after we shot the first bunch of episodes, and he goes, “We are fucking famous.” We went to Spring Break at Daytona Beach in ’88, and one night we went to a strip club. The strippers ran from their customers, paying customers, and surrounded us.
KARI WUHRER, actress: I used to roller-skate from my apartment on East Eighty-second Street to the studio at Seventy-fourth Street. Ken and Colin walked me to the back door, where there was a huge group of fans waiting. They held the crowd back so I could get a head start. It was awesome. MTV sent us to Puerto Rico for a media event, and as we drove through San Juan, kids attacked the limo. It was like Elvis.
COLIN QUINN: I smoked on the first season, then they said I couldn’t anymore, which was fine. I had kids come up to me and say, “You’re the reason I started smoking.”
MIKE DUGAN: After the first season, we started getting really ridiculous. We wanted to do something called “Roll the Pope,” and our legal department told us we couldn’t, because there’s only one pope, and it’s offensive to people, and who knows, the pope could sue. So we turned it into “Beat the Bishop.” We had a guy come out dressed like a bishop, he would run around the audience, and contestants had to figure out a math problem before he got back. “Beat the Bishop” was a euphemism for jerking off, which standards and practices apparently didn’t know.
We got tired of doing “Beat the Bishop,” so we did “Beat the Bologna.” One of the writers dressed in a giant bologna suit, and he’d run through the studio while audience members threw mayonnaise on him. By the way, I don’t know if I mentioned this before: We didn’t know how to make television. Amateurism was part of the appeal of the show.
KARI WUHRER: I was a born-again Christian, getting baptized in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. My audition for Remote Control was April 28, 1988—my twenty-first birthday. I wasn’t watching MTV because I was living a sort of biblical life. I talked to Ken and Colin about Jesus. Once I started at MTV, that lasted six months.
I was wearing a sherbet-colored spandex tank top every day, without a bra. Not that I needed one. Even though I didn’t have a voluptuous body, I unabashedly used it. I didn’t really understand the power of it at that point.
What was I? I was fluff. My career launched on fluff, and of course, it dissipated in the wind.
COLIN QUINN: Every guy was obsessed with Kari. She brought sex appeal to Remote Control. To this day, everyone talks about her stomach. She had great abs.
MIKE DUGAN: Basically, Kari was there to keep the boys in the audience interested.
KARI WUHRER: I got paid about $10,000 a season. If you worked for MTV, you were MTV’s bitch. This is before they committed to making any one person a star. Now everybody who appears on MTV has their own conglomerate.
BETH McCARTHY: I think there was a fistfight between two girls in the talent department who were both dating Ken Ober.
KARI WUHRER: Oh my god, women were crazy for Ken and Colin. Ken got most of it. He had an on-off girlfriend, so Colin picked up the slack.
MIKE ARMSTRONG: I became best friends with Ken, and he remained my closest friend. He turned into a rock star. For a short period, Ken and Colin were Elvis and Jim Morrison, only on a smaller scale and to a specific audience of college kids. And Ken took advantage of the situation. He had a great girlfriend, Sue Kolinsky, a New York comic, and I d
on’t think his hosting gig helped their relationship in any way, to put it mildly.
KARI WUHRER: I kissed Ken once. We were drunk, we went back to his apartment, and I kissed him. The Deliverance theme played in my head.
MIKE DUGAN: The story I heard is that Kari, Ken, and Colin were in a hot tub together, and she kissed them both. I heard that from Kenny.
COLIN QUINN: There was always some sex going on. Sometimes we’d have sex between tapings. It was crazy. There were always girls coming over to us. I used to tell girls, “I need to see your ID, I’m sorry.”
JOE DAVOLA: There was a bet about who would come back after work and have sex on the Craftmatic bed in the middle of the stage. I think maybe Kenny won.
MIKE DUGAN: As far as I know, Davola’s the only one who had sex on the Craftmatic bed. After we found out about that, nobody else wanted to have sex on the Craftmatic bed. How did I hear about it? From Joe. He was very proud of it.
DOUG HERZOG: I went to the Comic Strip on the Upper East Side, to see a comedian named Rhonda Shear. Adam Sandler was one of the opening acts. He was still a student at NYU. He got onstage in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. He was incredibly charming and funny. This was the time of the Beastie Boys, and I thought he was part Beastie Boy. My favorite bit, which he did for years, was “Here’s my imitation of Wilt Chamberlain’s teammates the night he scored 100 points: ‘Hey, Wilt! I’m open!’”
MIKE ARMSTRONG: In the second season, they made me head writer. Doug sent Sandler to my office, He was doing a character that he wanted to do on the show, called Stud Boy, and in a thick Spanish accent, he was seducing an old woman. I didn’t get it, and I wasn’t sure anybody would laugh at it. Then I stood off to the side in awe as I saw kids go nuts for him.
LAUREN CORRAO, MTV producer: When we took Remote Control on tour to colleges, guys were screaming Sandler’s and Colin’s names. They were quoting lines from Sandler.
COLIN QUINN: Sandler had a character called Bossy Boy—he’d wear a fast-food uniform and they’d put freckles on his face with an orange Magic Marker. It was deconstructionist comedy, way before anybody else, like he was mocking the idea of doing a character, but he’d still commit to it. It was absurdist, Ionesco humor. It was so fucking funny it made me cry. I couldn’t help it.
KARI WUHRER: I thought Sandler was an idiot. An annoying, skinny twerp. And I thought, “Colin’s an amazing comedian, why’s he laughing at this guy?”
COLIN QUINN: We all knew Denis Leary. We brought him on the show as my brother, and the two of us fought every time he came out. We were two guys in their twenties, like, “Hey, fuck you. You’re not gonna get the better of me.”
DENIS LEARY: They kept saying, “We want you to play some characters on the show.” And I was like, Yeah, whatever. I don’t think Colin was a big fan of the show, but it made him and Ober big stars, kind of overnight. They hit the jackpot, and I was a broke, out-of-work actor and a barely working comedian, so the phone call was very welcome. They said, “You’re gonna play Andy Warhol, Keith Richards, and Quinn’s brother.” I was like, I don’t care who I’m playing. I needed the money.
KARI WUHRER: We shot down in Florida during the third season, and Britny Fox were on the show as contestants. It was the height of hair metal. I hit on their singer. The next thing I knew, I was getting tattooed and I was on tour with them. He was so dumb, my father called him “the house plant.” As soon as the tour ended, I never heard from him again.
JOE DAVOLA: When the show ended, ratings were still high. But MTV had this philosophy of “We’ll die if we don’t keep changing.” So after three years, they took it off the air.
COLIN QUINN: By then, it was time to go. We did so many shows, so many Brady Bunch questions. I was like, “Shit, didn’t we ask that last season?”
MIKE DUGAN: MTV wanted to keep doing new things. That thinking has changed; now the mind-set is “If it’s working, we’re not changing it.” Jersey Shore will stay on the air until it stops getting ratings.
MIKE ARMSTRONG: After Remote Control, Ken had mixed success. He did a sitcom called Parenthood, and he hosted a few other game shows. Remote Control remained his calling card. He was a journeyman comic and had a very dark sense of humor. One of his funniest lines was on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the JFK assassination. He popped his head into my office and said, “You know who was really responsible for that? The guy at the airport who bumped him up to a convertible.” I talked about this at his memorial.
Ken had some bad habits that he had to give up. And he did. He stopped doing drugs, he gave up drinking, he lived a straight life. But he’d had some surgery involving his spine, and then he had two cornea transplants, because the first one didn’t take. He joked about how the wheels were starting to come off. But I talked to him almost every day, and it didn’t seem like he was in bad health. The last time I called him, he said he had a horrible headache and was really in pain. The next day, November 14, 2009, I got a call that he’d died. It was determined he’d had a heart attack. We had a great memorial for him, with everyone who ever knew him, it seemed; Ray Romano, Adam Sandler, and Larry David were there.
DAVE HOLMES: Everything is snarky now, everything is pop culture–based now. But pre–Remote Control, it wasn’t cool to know all the spin-off shows from Happy Days. That meant you were strange.
DOUG HERZOG: Michael Dugan and Joe Davola are two lifelong friends of mine. We had the time of our lives making Remote Control.
TOM FRESTON: Remote Control stabilized our ratings. And it was a turning point. The idea of a game show on MTV would have been anathema five years earlier. When we had shows, we got better ratings.
DOUG HERZOG: There were still a lot of music videos on the channel. It wasn’t the MTV you know today. But the naysayers either left or shut up.
Chapter 34
“THAT’S WHAT HYPE CAN DO TO YOU”
CLUB MTV LAUNCHES THE “UPSKIRT SHOT” AND A POP SCANDAL
DISCO NEVER DIED—IT HID, MUTATED, AND RETURNED. The era of hair metal was also a gala period for dance music, which fulfilled MTV’s need—dating back to Michael Jackson—for vivid, fast-stepping videos. By the summer of 1987, dance music had earned its own daily show, Club MTV, guided by a pervy director who shot dancers, male and female, like they were strippers. The show thrived not only due to its displays of gyrating flesh, but also as a measure of what was topping the charts. Paula Abdul became the breakout star of 1989, despite a flimsy singing voice, because she was an expert dancer (and was also willing to duet with a cartoon feline who “rapped,” MC Scat Kat). And in 1990, Forbes reported, the highest-paid act in music was New Kids on the Block thanks to sales of lunch boxes and dolls and a Saturday-morning cartoon.
No act was more silly than Milli Vanilli, a name that has become synonymous with fraud. The music was created by Frank Farian, a German producer in his mid-forties who’d had success across Europe with the disco group Boney M. His first U.S. success came with “Girl You Know It’s True,” which was sung by generic American session singers living in Germany. The success of “Girl” and subsequent Milli Vanilli singles surprised Farian, who unexpectedly needed the nonexistent “group” to perform in clubs and on TV. He assigned the job—possibly under duress—to Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, whose dancing had made them minor celebrities in Munich. The fraud deepened as the album sold 7 million copies in the U.S., “and then,” Farian said, “it was too late.” After he admitted the Milli Vanilli hoax in November 1990, he predicted, “in five or ten years, Rob will see it wasn’t so bad. Then he’ll be thankful.” It didn’t work out that way. Less than eight years later, Rob—who, since Milli Vanilli was exposed, had made multiple suicide attempts, gone to prison, and been estranged from Fab—died of a drug overdose in a hotel room. His death was ruled accidental, though Fab has his doubts about the official cause of death.
JULIE BROWN: A lot of great dance music was popping up: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, Cameo, Taylor Dayne, Jody Watley. MTV took the danc
e-music niche and created Club MTV. It was a hip-hop, rocking, dance, nonstop, energizing show. It became a phenomenon, didn’t it?
TOM HUNTER: Club MTV was American Bandstand with dance music and hot girls. It got great ratings, but just as important, it showed people we weren’t merely a hair band channel. I was hell-bent for leather to try to defeat that notion.
