Penny always wore black clothes with boots, but she wasn’t some Emo-Goth by any stretch. We shared an interest in horror flicks and obscure metal bands, so I was drawn to her. There was no physical or romantic relationship, I just enjoyed spending time with her. And, I thought she was really hot.
After his divorce, Den was never very lucky in love. He used to offer Penny impromptu backrubs without much willing acceptance, much less reciprocity. Den was never real smooth with the ladies. His massage technique was more akin to that awkward rubdown President George W. Bush gave Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, in 2006. I wasn’t privy to all the gossip, but I do remember one day, when Penny and Den were sitting together up in the stands, Penny screamed at Den, “Fuck off!”
In all the years she worked on SBTB, no one ever heard Penny talk like that. She was crying and very upset. She didn’t want to be anywhere near Den. I asked Penny what happened, and she said everything was fine and didn’t want to discuss it. Everyone was staring up at Den seated alone in the stands. It was an extremely uncomfortable moment. Den rose slowly and tried slinking out the stage door. Later, when I asked him what happened, he said, “I don’t know, she just freaked out and started acting weird.” That’s as far as he would go towards an explanation. After that explosion, Den would never be seen anywhere near Penny again.
TAKING IT TO THE MAX
Ed Alonzo played Max, proprietor and magician-in-residence of The Max diner and all-purpose hangout for the gang at Bayside, in nineteen episodes between 1989 and 1992. Ed was an accomplished magician in real life and shared an enormous magic and prop studio warehouse with that wordsmith of male pattern baldness, that prankish pummeller of picnic fruit, Gallagher.
Ed also used to perform on Michael Jackson’s private stage at Neverland Ranch. When I heard that Ed performed there, I begged him, “Dude, can you take me with you next time?” He agreed, but when the day arrived, for some reason I can’t explain except to regard it as pure intuition, I decided to back out and stay home. There was a powerful voice in the deep recesses of my gray matter that boomed, “Don’t Go!”
I recall traveling with Ed and one of his hot wives (perhaps his second) to Missouri, I think St. Louis, for a charity event. All I remember is that it was God awful hot and sticky. I also remember that I was instructed to zip Ed’s wife into her sparkly stage costume, during which I enjoyed a panoramic view of her spectacular breasts. I was, like, Dude, I’m looking at your wife’s rack. Doesn’t this bother you? But Ed was in his own magical world, preparing his implements of deception to delight that night’s audience.
Later, I was on stage to assist Ed in one of his tricks, where he made a bird suddenly appear in an empty cage. Ed presented an egg for the wide-eyed children, who crowded the stage to inspect. He then smashed the egg into the cage. This released a trap door, which sprung open, depositing the bird into the cage. At this point let’s just say the bird in question had had difficulty with the Midwestern heat and humidity inside its secret hiding space. I held the cage aloft for all to ogle as, in a grand gesture, Ed opened the tiny door and in a practiced flourish called out, “It’s magic!” The dead bird thereupon fell to the stage like a feathered paperweight. Realizing what had happened, Ed, the consummate pro, took advantage of the audience’s momentary disorientation by smoothly scooping up the carcass and handing it off to wife number two. He then moved quickly on to his next illusion.
In 1987, I played Big Z in a film called The Purple People Eater alongside Dr. Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris, who, by the way, was an asshole. He strode around set like the cock of the walk; the de facto star of the picture—sort of like a poor man’s Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Look, I’m not trying to hate on Neil Patrick (another member of the Hollywood Two-First-Names Club), but a lot of these child stars were incredibly full of themselves and their overblown accomplishments (admittedly, I include myself in that category, but only on occasion).
But what’s important to this story is that Neil Patrick Harris loved magic. Loved it! Hey, I’m not knocking it—I loved magic, too. My dream was to learn every card trick in the magician’s repertoire then hop a plane in a full assault on the tables at Vegas. I was, like, ten years old. If magic was the drug, Ed Alonzo was the dealer. He had what Neil Patrick and I were jonesing for. Ed would perform many of his stage tricks on the set of SBTB, which was cool because he allowed us to see behind the action where all the trickery came into play. Another joy of having Ed on the set for his episodes was that whatever wife he had at any given time was fucking smokin’ (his first wife especially). But despite Ed’s matrimonial status and his overt flirtations with his magician’s assistants, there was always something, I don’t know, shall we say, flamboyantly enthusiastic about his demeanor.
One day, Ed invited my dad and me to his magical warehouse. Wandering around the cavernous space we saw Gallagher’s oversized tricycle, the giant couch, his octopus suit, etc. Ed even gave me one of Gallagher’s beer guns—a device wherein you load a can of beer or soda, puncture it with the trigger and direct your stream of carbonation at some hapless victim. My dad and I had a great time, and I made plans with Ed to come back for another visit. But later Ed cancelled, informing me that he had accidentally scheduled over some quality time he was spending with his new best pal, Neil Patrick Harris.
The D-man getting passed over for the Doog? Say it ain’t so!
Ed wound up spending a lot of time with Neil Patrick Harris. A lot of time. For a while they were inseparable, going away to perform magic together, conjuring their mystical spells of enchantment.
It wasn’t until years later that Neil Patrick Harris announced that he was gay.
PART II:
HOW THE MAGIC HAPPENED:
A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF SBTB
MONDAY
Monday morning, around 8:00 or 9:00 AM, everyone would shuffle in one-by-one, wiping the weekend haze of booze and drugs from their raw, sleep-encrusted eyes (or, in St. Peter’s case, the remnants of inspirational scripture passages) and take their seats on stage for the week’s first table read. The table was sectioned into four folding tables shaped in a long “T.” Peter, the director, assistant director, and line producer situated themselves at the head, while the cast, guest stars, and stand-ins (who read the guest-star parts if they weren’t yet cast) seated themselves opposite one another along the length. The lovely Linda Mancuso and the network suits sat in the stands, where the audience would normally be, while the writers sat further up the bleachers, enveloped in shadow.
After everyone had consumed their bagel and coffee and Tylenol and gotten themselves situated, we would read through the entire script. We acted out the gags, hamming up the laughs as best we could, while everyone scribbled their notes for changes.
After that, we kids were off to three hours of set school with Sidney Sharron, our teacher, while everyone else took a break. Sidney also occasionally played Mr. Klopper, the janitor, on the show. During the break, the execs and writers disappeared upstairs into their offices to make notes. The writers would fervently call their agents to see what was the buzz around town on their new spec script, pleading for a better writing gig than SBTB. Set school was administered under very rigid guidelines. We had to be in class for a mandatory number of hours each week. So, if we were pulled out of class to be present for some complicated set-up onstage (which was rare), Sidney would dutifully clock us in and out to insure we adhered to all the government’s standards. Set school was only three hours per day, but consider that we had two designated teachers as well as various language tutors. Though our set-school hours were much briefer than public school, they were way more intense, with a lot of personal instruction. Instead of one teacher for thirty to forty students, we enjoyed a ratio of two or more teachers for six kids. When you have that many teachers per student, there’s not much opportunity to get away with anything. It’s not like regular school where you spend most of your days goofing off, daydreaming, or shielding your spontaneou
s boners with your Trapper Keeper. I was a typically antsy kid. I got easily bored and felt cooped up in the small room where they conducted set school. It was so quiet in class most of the time that you could actually hear the seconds ticking away on the wall clock. Sometimes I would ask for a quick break and when I would eventually wander back Sidney would say, “Uh, Dustin, you’ve been gone fifteen minutes.”
“Really? Huh.”
When we returned to our scripts from set school, there might be a bunch of revisions sent down for material that didn’t work in the first read-through. We would then head over to the sets and start blocking out the scenes for the actors. Blocking is when we would run through the lines again on set with full cast, guest stars, stand-ins, and the director. We would rehearse our movements and camera positioning and mark off our stationary positions for each scene. We ran through each scene multiple times. What a tragedy it would have been if, say, Mark-Paul hadn’t known exactly where to dive in order to catch Screech’s mom’s treasured Elvis bust when Slater tripped and sent it sailing in the “House Party” episode.
As the show progressed, this process took considerably less time, until we could basically just phone it in. Sometimes there were instances when we wanted to hammer through and get things done, but during those early years the network had to adhere to strict child-labor laws. You could be sure that, when the second hand hit the twelve, Sidney would jump up and say, “That’s it, work’s over.” In those early days of SBTB, we were required by law to maintain an extremely strict education and work schedule. Years later, when I had graduated from high school and we had all mastered many of these pre-production steps, we were allowed to come in as late as noon or after to run through new scripts. But until that time, the Monday table read started first thing in the morning and rehearsal and blocking took until 5:30 PM. Then, pulling away from the studio in our Pinto, dad and I had our hour-and-a-half commute back home to Anaheim to look forward to.
TUESDAY
Tuesday we started on the set with scripts in hand for another full read-through. We rehearsed each scene three, four, seven times—what ever it took. The crew would begin to work with the cast to figure out all the props and special effects. For instance, if Zack says, “Y’know what? I’m gonna get us into that concert,” and pulls out that shoebox-sized cell phone, at this time during rehearsal he would have the actual prop phone in hand. Every day was a step closer to the finished product before a live audience, so every prop and effect was hammered out with meticulous detail. We’d break for lunch around 1:00 or 2:00 PM and return to set an hour later to run through everything all over again.
At 4:30 PM every Tuesday and Wednesday, we would commence what was known as “network run-through.” This was a big deal. It was when all the suits and bigwigs convened, descending from their corner offices to sit in their comfy director’s chairs in front of a personal rolling table (for their brilliant note-taking and random musings) in the area between the stage and audience, where the cameras would normally be. We ran through each scene in chronological order, from scene one to scene twelve or thirteen in a typical script, which translated into anywhere from forty-two to forty-four pages on average.
The length of the script usually depended on how much business we had in the episode. “Business” was the crew’s shorthand for creative problem solving, defined as any effect that needed to be designed and activated in the successful execution of a scene. For instance, if there was something in a scene that Screech wasn’t supposed to touch but he touched it anyway before exiting, then that thing falls over, hitting another object, causing a chain reaction, etc. Or a scene in an episode where Zack is selling Lisa’s clothing designs in the hallway, and there’s a gag where all the lockers are supposed to open simultaneously when he pushes a button on a remote control. The arrangement and execution of all those effects that were out of the cast’s direct control were known on-set as “business.”
We would perform the network run-through, front to back, including as much of the business as we could so the execs and writers could see how it looked in live action. The run-through usually ran about an hour. It’s a half-hour show, but it took twice as long to set up all the scenes. At this stage, things were still very primitive—no hair, makeup, or wardrobe—and we were still holding our scripts. When you had memorized all your lines and could recite them without your script, it was known as being “off-book.”
Regardless of anyone’s skill level as a performer or backstage shenanigans, one thing everyone was pretty equal on was memorizing their lines. It was the one, major requirement of us, and we all approached it like professionals. People got their lines down fairly quickly, but I was usually the quickest. Especially later, during The New Class, even with all the notes that would be passed down throughout the week, Den and I would be off-book by Thursday, while the kids still had their heads buried in their scripts. Getting off-book was also a practical matter for the blocking. If your face was facing down towards your script during run-throughs, it made it hard for the lighting and camera guys to set up their shots and get their angles.
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday was exactly the same as Tuesday, just more refined. We arrived in the morning, ran through scenes, broke for lunch, then came back and ran through more scenes.
On stage we had a refrigerator always packed with our favorite beverages. There was the Kraft Service table, where we could get sandwiches made or pile up on the snacks (until Tiffani’s ass relegated us almost exclusively to fruits and vegetables). The ladies who worked for Kraft Services were always very friendly and fun to be around. We could go to the NBC commissary and bring food back to our dressing rooms, where I’d spend most of my time playing video games: Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Neo Geo—all the finest game systems of the 1990s.
There could be long stretches of downtime—sometimes as much as two or three hours at a pop—where content was being rehearsed that didn’t involve my character. If the extras were around, I always had something to do. One extra in particular, named Sherry, was the object of my desires for a while. She was in her late thirties and played a background teacher for a while. She had Ann Jillian-style blonde hair that was almost white, and she always smelled like vanilla beans. I flirted with her for a long time but could only muster some smooching. I always regretted that we never sealed the deal. Aside from those adventures, downtime Monday through Wednesday could get pretty boring. The only thing on the television in my dressing room was basic cable and all the live feeds from the other sound stages. Even though I was technically at work, I was essentially getting paid good money to chill.
But with all that free time, it was inevitable that us kids were going to get into trouble. That usually meant pranks. We started out with stupid stuff like moving around the tape on the floor of the set so that actors would fuck up their marks. Each mark was in the shape of a “T” and all different colors (for each character). You don’t usually see the marks on the floor in live action, but they’re there. We also took gaffer’s tape, tore off strips, and left them sticky-side up outside people’s doors so they’d walk on it and drag it onto the set. Not to mention the old favorites of slapping tape on someone’s back or seeing how many clothespins we could pinch on various parts of people’s clothing throughout the day.
Then we moved on to the big stuff, like when I messed with Bobo. Bobo’s real name was John Deitrich, and he was head carpenter on the set. He supervised the building of all the sets and, over time, became friendly with my dad. In the morning, dad and I would bring in our breakfast from Astro Burger, which included, of course, a giant chocolate shake.
We’d hang out in an area backstage at Raleigh Studios where Bobo had set up a Nintendo. We’d eat and play video games, get called to set, do our table reading, and come right back for another fifteen-minute break, more fast food, and more video games. Except for one time when I came back to discover Bobo had eaten half my breakfast and was still drinking my chocolate
shake. I’m said, “Bobo? What the fuck?”
“What?” said Bobo. “I saved you half.”
My dad just sat there, laughing. Okay, fucker. Lesson learned. So the next day I ate my breakfast fast, but left my chocolate shake, irresistibly alone and vulnerable, right under Bobo’s nose. When I returned for my break, Bobo had of course polished off my shake, which I had, of course, filled with Ex-Lax, that old chestnut of a prank. Problem was, I had no idea you were only supposed to mix it with a normal dosage. I had emptied the entire bottle into my Astro-shake. Poor Bobo.
While Bobo groaned and hollered at me from the shitter, he plotted his revenge. Later, when we were shooting before a live audience, Bobo went into my dressing room (this is why it helps to be friends with the janitor), gathered up every stitch of clothing I owned, stuffed it into a clear garbage bag, climbed up into the rafters and hanged it from a cord, swinging back and forth just over the heads of the audience. It was during a scene where I was seated in Mr. Belding’s office. Screech was supposed to gaze off dreamily, like, “I can see it now …” But what I saw was all my fucking clothes dangling from a rope.
And that wasn’t all. When we wrapped, I returned to my dressing room to find it completely bare—every stick of furniture and every fixture, gone. Bobo had enlisted his fellow Teamsters to cram everything into my closet and bathroom—the bathroom I shared with Mario, whose dressing room was on the other side.
After I got all my shit resituated, the pranks continued. Always a fan of the classics, I decided I was going to get Mario with the old cellophane-stretched-over-the-toilet gag. Mario liked to stay hydrated throughout the day, so I knew I could nail him on one of his frequent potty breaks. Sure enough, before long he started heading up to his dressing room. I rushed up, secured the cellophane across the bowl and waited listening on my side of the door. I thought perhaps I might get lucky, and Mario would go in there to drop a deuce, A.C. Slater-style (a term coined by fans for facing backward on the toilet, in the same fashion Mario sat on every chair on the SBTB set). Mario’s bathroom door opened; it closed. The fan clicked on, whirred. So far, so good. Then … a woman screamed! It was Mario’s mom, Elzia. Ah, Dios mio, la madre!
Dustin Diamond Page 6
