You get the picture. It was humor just how we liked it, straightforward and juvenile. Needless to say, the good-natured antics of Weed and Shroom would come back to haunt me.
The Captain started hanging with some male-model buddy of his who lived on the beach with his weirdly hot girlfriend. You know the type, where there’s something not quite proportional about her face and just a tad off about her disposition, but you’d still love to bang her—like one of those razor-thin European runway models with eyes like a hammerhead shark. Anyway, the Captain agreed to house-sit while this model dude was away, then promptly started putting the wood to his slightly irregular girlfriend. Eventually, she left the model, moved in with the Captain and started supporting him financially. Shit like that was par for the course when it came to the Captain. He had no moral compass. His was the type of personality that would do whatever was required to get what he wanted. The dude was pure bad news.
Then it was my turn to get roped in. One night we were all hanging out, smoking and drinking, when the Captain started bitching about how he had no wheels, his parents wouldn’t help him get a loan, he had no one to cosign for him, yada, yada. He said he’d finally been offered a really good job, and he was going to be making good money but that he had no transportation. His back was against the wall, and he needed a hand. He laid it out for me. He thanked me for getting him the great background gig on SBTB, which was a guaranteed stream of income, he just needed this one favour, closing the deal on a cheap car. He was getting a great deal, and he promised to pay me right back. Yada, yada.
So me, being (a) drunk and (b) stupid, agreed to go down with him to the dealership the next day and cosign on the dotted line. And I did. What a putz I was.
Fast-forward a few months to when the Captain starts missing payments. The lender starts ringing my phone off the hook. I said to the Captain, “Dude, you gotta make these car payments.”
“Sorry man. I don’t know what happened. I sent the check.”
I recognized this. It was the same tired song and dance he gave me when I wanted my Marshall amplifier back. He had played me all over again. After that, he started making threats to common friends of ours that he was going to hop in the car with Hammerhead and slip over the border to Mexico. Mexico?! The word itself is synonymous with lawlessness and evasion. I started freaking out, convinced this guy was going to slip down there and make the car disappear, sticking me with the whole bill for a phantom vehicle. On top of that, Captain Shutterbug had amassed all the VHS tape footage from his ubiquitous handheld camera (including “borrowing” all the ones I had in my possession) for some magnum opus music video project he was editing together for the band. When shit looked like it had definitely taken a turn south (literally, to Mexico), I told the Captain in no uncertain terms that he was responsible for all the payments on the car. His response was, “Are you threatening me, man?” I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for this guy’s bullshit; the bait was deep in my belly. I decided it was time to act. Luckily, I had already surreptitiously cut my own set of keys. I located the car (that miserable fucking car) and moved it to a secure location.
Meanwhile, Captain Douchebag had been a busy beaver, editing together all the most suggestive footage from his bong circle, combining it with our loveable pals, Weed and Shroom, and sending the tape off to Hard Copy, that stalwart of upstanding, hard-hitting television journalism. He told the producers it was exclusive footage of Dustin Diamond, TV’s Screech, engaging in elicit drug use.
That’s when NBC’s lawyers got involved. I don’t know how, but they blocked the tape from airing. But the Captain would not be denied. He was a tireless crusader against the apparent injustice of a former friend, who cosigned his loan but had the audacity to ask him to make his own car payments. Next, he captured still photographs from the video footage, printed them on posters and placards and started pick and started picketing outside the front gate of NBC Studios in Burbank hollering, “Screech is a drug user and a liar! Don’t let your children be corrupted by Saved by the Bell!” At that, one of our producers came down to the set and said, “We’ve got a problem.”
I couldn’t believe it. Come to think of it, I still can’t believe it. I had been a friend to this guy. I’d gotten him a spot on the show, hooked him up with a place to live, shared clothes—all the stuff pals do for each other. I had been rope-a-doped, and it hurt.
When I moved the car in question to its secure location, I popped the trunk and discovered two garbage bags full of VHS footage he had taken. This shit went back to when he was maybe ten years old. He had video of every friend, every family member, and every passerby he had ever trained his camera on. There was also plenty of footage of him humiliating girls, him pissing on passed-out drunks, committing acts of vandalism, and destroying private property. My dad and I sat and fast-forwarded through hundreds of hours of his mayhem. It was sickening. I came to the conclusion that I was watching a monster. How had I not seen this side of him? Of course, what was conspicuously missing were any images of the band or me. He had found his own secure location for all that footage.
The phone rang. It was Captain Douchebag, “Where’s my fucking car?”
“Your car? Excuse me; I’m making the payments. It’s my car now.”
“We’ll see.” And he hung up.
You’ve got to hand it to the Captain, he was tremendously good at being a scumbag—way better than I was. Turns out he arranged for his to be the only name on the pink slip for the vehicle. Under the law, I had no rights to the car.
So, the next day, one of our production managers and producers on SBTB, Chris Conte, stepped into my dressing room and said, “Um, Dustin? We have the Burbank Sheriff’s Department on the phone, and they’re saying they’ve issued a warrant for your arrest. They’re on their way now to take you into custody unless you surrender a certain motor vehicle.” When I heard that news come out of Chris’s mouth, I swear, I swallowed my heart into my stomach. How could I be arrested for paying the loan on a car I was legally responsible for? Captain Douchebag can stop making payments and shuffle down to Mexico, but I’m a wanted man? There’s so much about American jurisprudence that continues to baffle me.
I was forced to return the car to him. I learned later that, at the police station, the Captain went on and on about how I had taken advantage of his trust and abused our friendship. Apparently it was a bravura performance, certainly his finest work outside standing in the background of The Max on SBTB. And his girlfriend was there too, balling her wall-eyes out, claiming I had stolen tapes of them ensnarled in their most intimate embraces. It was all bullshit. There were no sex tapes. If there were, my dad and I would have seen all that hot hammerhead action during our all-night, fast-forwarding marathon.
Are you getting as tired of this guy as I was? Well, there’s more. In fact, he saved the best for last. All this drama was incredibly embarrassing in front of my colleagues at NBC. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that I gotten mixed up with an evil dude. But I just looked like a clown. At home, the Captain started calling me, taunting me, clearly trying to provoke me into threatening him over the phone, “Ha, ha! I won! I got the car, the tapes. What would like to do to me
if I was there right now, huh? What do you think you could do to me? Tell me all the gory details.” At that point I’d finally learned my lesson. I directed his inquiries about whatever potential physical harm I would enjoy inflicting on him to my attorney.
Frustrated by that approach, the Captain changed tactics and sued NBC. He had found some Lionel Hutz-type lawyer to file a $2.5 million conspiracy lawsuit against the network for allegedly conspiring to damage his career by discrediting him and dismissing him from his job on SBTB. According to the Captain’s lawsuit, everybody at NBC was conspiring to ruin him, from Peter Engel and Tim Shannon (stage manager for the extras) to me, on down to the guy who switched the jugs in the water coolers. My lawyer looked at the suit and said, since there were eight counts and most of them invo
lved NBC (under Douchebag’s deep-pockets theory), we should just sit back and let NBC take the lead on the motion. At last, here was something NBC’s lawyers could sink their teeth into.
Once again, the red ants descended. In short fashion, they body-slammed the Captain in a flurry of depositions and motions, each landing like a full-on legal roundhouse to his smarmy chops. The Captain’s lawyer offered to settle for $250,000. NBC countered with an offer for him to settle his lips around their big corporate balls.
So in the end, Captain Douchebag got nada. But not everybody escaped cheap. I still had to pay my attorney’s fees and another $8,000 to get out from under the car that, according to the Burbank sheriff, I didn’t legally own. The car was repo’d, sold at deep discount, and I had to cough up the difference. I should just be glad that, when all this went down, the Internet was still in its infancy, and YouTube didn’t exist. That would have given him an immediate forum where everyone could draw his own conclusions before I had any legal recourse to tell my side of the story. I shutter when I think about what celebrities—especially young ones—are up against today in this vicious, instantaneous electronic game of screw your neighbor. Look, I’m a firm believer that the truth should always prevail and that those who do wrong should get their comeuppance. But every so often you encounter a person in which desperation and determination are interchangeable. This dude, Captain Douchebag, was through the looking glass. He’s one chapter in my story that I’m glad has ended.
PART IV:
THE DENOUEMENT
FLUNKING “ THE COLLEGE YEARS”
When SBTB: The College Years got cancelled after only nineteen episodes, they handed out T-shirts with the show’s title emblazoned across the front. I used white-out to replace the word “years” with “semester.” Going into it, nobody expected the show to do well. We had broken the oldest rule in the book: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We tampered with the formula that had worked for so many years on the original SBTB and had failed to transition the format to a broader, more mature audience. We had a terrific, talented director in Jeff Melman, but SBTB was just never meant for prime time. The bottom line was: putting a Saturday morning show on prime time was never going to work. It’s a different style of humor.
New cast members included Anne Tremko as Leslie Burke, Kiersten Warren as Alex Tabor, Bob Golic as Mike Rogers, and Patrick Fabian as Professor Lasky. Kiersten (whom I remember mostly as the ditzy, red-haired girl because the show’s run was so brief) later appeared in the film Independence Day as the scared chick yelling on the roof, “They’re coming for us!”
Ken Tucker, the same TV critic from Entertainment Weekly who panned the original SBTB, gave The College Years an “F,” under the headline, “Dumb Bell: With Its Insipid Mix of Buff Bods and Maudlin Social Messages, Saved By The Bell: The College Years Wears Prime Time’s Dunce Cap.” He went on, “Given the always stunning amount of idiocy on television, this is probably going out on a limb, but Saved By The Bell: The College Years (NBC, Tuesdays, 8:00–8:30 PM) has certainly come to seem like the hands-down stupidest, least worthwhile series on prime-time TV … How gratifying it was to hear Drew Carey, costar of The Good Life, the NBC sitcom that now airs immediately after Saved, say recently that he ‘hates’ Saved, that having to ‘follow a show like Saved by the Bell, that’s like having to go to the prom with your ugly cousin.’ … The rest of the actors are glib in the manner of most TV performers who are used primarily to posture attractively. The exception to this is (Dustin) Diamond. During Saved’s original run, his Screech became a fan favorite for his wobbly, register-shifting voice. These days, the grownup Diamond must force his voice to break in order to pull off Screech’s trademark sound, and his face is required to maintain a moronic rictus at all times. Diamond could be as good an actor as Dustin Hoffman, for all we know, but rarely has anyone been so utterly trapped by his role. The one good thing that could possibly be said about this show’s seepage into prime time is that some parents seeing Saved by the Bell for the first time may now realize just how bad Saturday-morning TV programming has become and take steps to shield their children from such dreck. At least, that’s my dream, and as Zack recently instructed Kelly, ‘If you have a dream, you should go for it.’”
Without question, the biggest story that came out of that shortlived series was Mark-Paul’s infamous condom throwdown. It stands as the only time in SBTB history when the cast did not return at the end of the night for a final curtain call and to thank the audience. Here’s what happened:
One of the production quirks that developed over the short time we did the show was that outtakes would run at the end of each show, highlighting the mishaps, pranks, and bloopers that occurred while taping. It wound up being a popular aspect of the show, and we would wonder throughout the week which outtakes might wind up being selected. Needless to say, we began freelancing a bit, trying to create moments or situations that might make it into the out-takes reel. This time, Mark-Paul decided he was really going to spice things up.
In this episode, Bob Golic—who played Screech, Leslie, and Alex’s dorm advisor—entered one of the girls’ rooms and closed the door. Suddenly, Mark-Paul knocked, unscripted. When the door swung open, he held up a gum wrapper he had folded to look like a condom and bellowed, “Never fear, Trojan Man is here!” The audience started cracking up as Mark-Paul dashed off stage and frisbeed the wrapper up into the crowd to raucous cheers and applause.
Even though this was SBTB: The College Years, technically geared toward a prime-time audience, that didn’t matter to St. Peter. He. Was. Pissed.
Mark-Paul staged his gag in the last scene on a Friday at the end of taping, so after we wrapped the show, we were all backstage preparing to come back out for our final bow. But before we could, one of our stage managers started making his way up and down the hall announcing in a quick, severe, matter-of-fact voice, “There will be no curtain call. Everybody needs to get back in their dressing rooms. Right now.” The audience had already been removed from the studio. Clearly something dark and ominous was headed our way. No one ever spoke to us in that kind of tone. Whatever the issue was, it was some heavy-duty shit.
The next thing we knew, mild-mannered, easy-going, nasally St. Peter came charging up the hallway like a bull in Pamplona behind full-throated screams of “Where is he?! Where is he?!” It was unheard of. Cowering in my dressing room, I realized that in the five years I had worked so closely with St. Peter, never once had I heard him raise his voice. Peter stormed into Mark-Paul’s dressing room, slamming the door so hard it cracked. We cast members opened our doors a sliver to hear St. Peter screaming at Mark-Paul, “How dare you! Do you want to ruin my fucking business?! Huh?” Never raising his voice was one thing, but St. Peter—the patron saint of Pollyanna—never, ever swore. The dude was completely unhinged. The cast, the crew—Mark-Paul especially—were all terrified. St. Peter, still consumed by a biblical fury, raged out of Mark-Paul’s dressing room and disappeared up into his office. Moments later, Mark-Paul meekly followed. Without a word, he went straight to his vehicle and sped away.
When our Monday morning table read arrived, we all fled in, took our seats and waited for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. Not a word was said about the condom incident, the fallout, nothing. The light from the Golden Child still shone brightly.
It was the same story all the other times St. Peter accidentally thought he was mad at Mark-Paul, only to realize later that his star could do no wrong. Like when Mark-Paul ignored the dangerous-activities clause present in all our contracts and started riding a motorcycle. St. Peter got pissed but eventually got over it. Or when Mark-Paul got into skydiving. St. Peter found out and, citing the contract, forced him to quit. Of course Mark-Paul still went skydiving, he just didn’t talk about it anymore. Mark-Paul rebelled against everything St. Peter told him he had to do. Just because he was granted Golden-Child status, that didn’t mean Mark-Paul was immune to the other growing pains we were all suffering through
, coming of age in front of network suits, fellow cast, crew, and millions of viewers around the globe.
The only time St. Peter brought the hammer down on Mark-Paul—and all the rest of us for that matter—was when his Golden Child almost died during training for Circus of the Stars. The producers of the show asked us what circus talent we wanted to learn, and Mark-Paul, Mario and I suggested trapeze. They set up a training area atop Universal Studios in Hollywood complete with trapeze and nets. It was actually quite terrifying because the trapeze, when you swung through the air, extended beyond the edge of the building, leaving you out in the hinterland, staring down at a twenty-story drop. There was a net, but even so it was freaky. Mark-Paul’s training began first. The trapeze artists hooked him up to a rope-and-pulley system to assist him in learning how to do flips and to work his way up to doing them on his own. The ropes and pulleys helped him get used to the disorienting feeling of being upside-down. He learned that wherever his head looked, that’s where his body would follow. So, if he wanted to do a proper back flip, he had to trust that by throwing his head straight back, his body would follow in correct form. Once his body rotated over his head, he had to focus straight down on the ground to complete the flip. Up high in the air, the whole experience was a scary, awkward feeling.
Mark-Paul graduated past the ropes and pulleys and began to train freely with only the net below to protect him. I was there one day during training and watched while Mark-Paul, executing a flip, suddenly missed the bar, fell, missed the net below and landed on the back of his head with so much force he crushed his sternum with his chin. He broke his own sternum with his chin! He tore ligaments throughout his neck and lay on the ground howling and screaming in sickening pain. He couldn’t move or breathe. His injury put Mark-Paul in a hospital bed, closing down production of SBTB for six months.
That horrific event also shut down any plans for my performance on the trapeze. In the fallout, producers asked me what other event I’d like to try, and I suggested the high wire. That was an immediate, “No.” So I suggested taming lions. I got pulled into St. Peter’s office one day and he said, “Look, you’re not doing anything dangerous for Circus of the Stars.” As a result, I wound up doing the dog-training act. Whoopee! The dogs are already trained, they have a routine, so they just learned to take their commands from me. They also made me perform the act like Screech, letting the dogs do shit like steal my hat and making me chase them all around the ring. The dogs kept passing the hat to one another until, exhausted, I sat down on their pedestal as one came over and sweetly placed it back atop my sweaty brow. Best pals again. The dogs were the stars of that routine, while I took second billing once again as the comic relief. And it was all because the Golden Child broke himself in half on the flying trapeze.
Dustin Diamond Page 17
