Dustin Diamond

by Timothy Niedermann

  As I look back now, I want to address a criticism I often receive from people about why Screech had grown so excessively corny and grating by the end of SBTB: The New Class. The bottom line is: I wasn’t a happy camper. Not only were the writers pulling that shit with Screech and Belding acting increasingly gay together, I just felt like the writers were out of material for Screech. The comedy moments simply weren’t as good. The New Class had a completely different feel from the original series—not just on screen, but from top to bottom. Den and I would look through the scripts and come to the sad conclusion that to a large degree that it was up to us to punch up our scenes together, adding as much funny as we could, because if we didn’t, it wasn’t going to happen.

  Toward the end of The New Class, I started thinking to myself, “It’s gonna be awfully hard as an actor to go anywhere from here after playing Screech for so long.” I knew it was going to be extremely difficult to transition to new, more challenging, and (most importantly) different roles as an actor after we wrapped the series for good. I often thought of the transition Jim Carrey made from In Living Color, but of course that was a completely different situation. Obviously Carrey is a much different talent from mine, but he also had the freedom to play a variety of roles on a single television show (instead of being locked into one character). But more specific to my situation, he made the leap into other acting opportunities by getting to play himself. I mean, he created outrageous characters, but they were all channeled through Carrey’s innate and unique sense of humor, which is pretty much the Thousand Faces of Jim Carrey. The power of his humor and the draw for the audience—regardless of the outlet—is that it originates from Jim Carrey. Audiences got to know him first and foremost as Jim Carrey. That’s why, in my opinion, Carrey was so easily accepted and commercially successful right out of the gate in Ace Ventura Pet Detective.

  As for me, I wanted to conspire a way to become known as Dustin Diamond in the waning days of SBTB: The New Class. I was always a fan of Buster Keaton and pure physical comedy: rubbery faces, slapstick, and exaggerated stage movements. I was hyper aware that I was deeply pigeonholed as Screech, having played the character for over a decade. That’s not bad in and of itself (see Kelsey Grammer as Dr. Frasier Crane), but I had other aspirations, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to change people’s set impressions about my range and abilities as a performer.

  I knew that whatever comedy acting I branched off into and tried after SBTB, whenever I made a face or hammed up a line, audiences would say, “Look, he’s doing Screech,” instead of, “Dustin Diamond’s pretty funny.” That is, if I could even get past casting directors and be given the opportunity to stretch in more challenging roles. It’s a common lament: the double-edged sword of early success as a child actor. Screech has certainly been my Sword of Damocles (my attempts to crawl out from under him and stay in the game have been well documented). But that’s the price I’ve paid for playing a single role too well for too long. You can say what you want about it, but it’s tough to argue that I didn’t take the ball and run with it when handed the role of Screech. I employed all my resources to make as indelible an impression as I could with the tools I had to fully realize that character. A character, mind you, whose only distinguishing characteristic at my first audition was that he “speaks in a high, squeaky voice.”

  Some actors have been able to transition into second lives as iconic characters. I think of the late Bob Denver. A previous generation only knew Denver as Maynard G. Krebs from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But of course he was later able to go on to larger fame—Hollywood immortality, really—as Gilligan.

  I think what has surprised me most since SBTB is how many people seem to truly dislike Screech. Some go far out of their way to spew vitriol about the character. Perhaps it’s a poisonous mixture of their opinion of me in real life coupled with a television character whose personality was intended to be aggravating and annoying to the “cooler” kids who ruled the high-school roost. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve always viewed Screech as an Everyman, and that’s how I tried to play him (especially in the original SBTB). I saw Screech as a wide-eyed innocent, an outsider cast away from the hipster crowd—an observer and reporter of what were purported to be the important happenings of the high-school hierarchy while maintaining his individuality by never wavering from his unique eccentricities or so-called nerdish pursuits. The Screech I tried to portray in the 1990s prodded millions of viewers across the globe (and still does) with the question, “Is it really better in the long run to be captain of the chess team or captain of the football team? When you grow up, would you rather be Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, or Trent Dilfer, with a Super Bowl ring, a couple of hobbled knees and a decent five-iron shot to a tight pin? And, when it’s all on the table, who’s really sexier: the ex-jock or the billionaire?”

  Screech was a champion of the underdog. He stood for any kid who got bullied or singled out for being different because Screech achieved “popularity” and acceptance within the group by remaining true to himself. Yes, SBTB was the Pollyanna concoction of an idealized high school sprung, fully formed, from the mind of St. Peter Engel (like Athena from the forehead of Zeus).

  St. Peter himself described Bayside as “the school we all wish we could go to.” But within the world of that super-stylized fiction, I worked to play Screech with honest sincerity. To be blunt about it, SBTB played to a world that labels people—the jock, the nerd, the slut, the girl next door. But labels only simplify life for those who, for whatever convenient reason, choose to pigeonhole for others, often casting them as negligible or inferior, all for the ease of being able to catalogue themselves advantageously in society’s vast Rolodex. But those people do not define you. Rather, they define themselves through the labels they choose to apply to others.

  At the end, I think I overdid it with Screech, much to my detriment. My plan was simple, though far from brilliant. I had convinced myself that if I went way, way overboard with the character as the series wound down towards its finale, it would be easier in the aftermath of the show to separate the actor Dustin Diamond from the outrageously cartoonish, cheesy, obnoxious character of Samuel “Screech” Powers as a young adult. I believed that anything I did comedy-wise after playing Screech at a volume of eleven for the final season would ease my transition into more subtle roles. Surely, I reasoned, casting directors would be able to see that I was basically aping around like a Looney-Tunes character instead of revealing any aspects of my depth as a person or a professional performer. I was trying to widen the gap as I approached the finish line.

  During that final season of SBTB: The New Class I even altered my appearance more by growing out my hair. The stylists stuffed it all up into a hairnet and picked it through to create that helmet of wild, curly hair I was sporting. I wanted to do whatever I could to divorce me, Dustin Diamond (the person and performer), from Screech the character on SBTB. My goal, as I said my final goodbyes to good ol’ Screech, was to leave him in the realm of the absurd.

  HOW I MISSED OUT ON THE SCOOBY DOO MOVIE

  In 1991, Casey Kasem was on set all week for the rise and fall of Zack Attack in the “Rocumentary” episode. Casey and his wife, Jean, were amazing human beings. Jean became famous playing Loretta Tortelli on Cheers (“Hi, gang at Cheers!”) and then again on the short-lived spinoff The Tortellis. In a side note, her son on The Tortellis, Anthony, was played by Timothy Williams (also a writer on that show) who appeared as Brett in the “Blind Dates” episode of SBTB in 1990.

  One evening, the SBTB cast members were invited to the Kasems’ house for a celebrity charity silent auction Casey was hosting for one of his many philanthropic causes. Also there was that Siamese Dr. Frankenstein creation, the Coreys (Corey Haim and Corey Feldman when they were at the height of their fame). Of course this was long before Corey Haim was trying to sell his teeth for a slice of pizza on the streets of Santa Monica. The Coreys strolled around Casey’s house like God’s twin
gifts to the Earth, truly believing they were the cat’s nards because they graced the covers of Bop and Tiger Beat.

  I was in awe of Casey as the voice of my all-time favorite cartoon character, Shaggy, in my favorite cartoon, Scooby Doo (remember, I named my dog Scooby). In fact, years later it was me who got the ball rolling on what would become the Scooby Doo feature film—a project I was cut out of at the end. What happened was this:

  I decided I wanted to play Shaggy in a Scooby Doo movie adaptation. Toward the end of the original SBTB, I contacted Kasem about it. I asked if he would coach me on pitch, cadence, phrasing—anything he was willing to teach me in my quest to become Shaggy in live action and get my project off the ground. Of course, the ever-gracious Casey agreed and invited me to his home, where we sat together as he taught me the voice dynamics he’d perfected over the decades. I then talked to my friend Wally Wingert, who later played Don Lewis, radio DJ, in a 1996 episode of SBTB: The New Class, and had made a great career in voiceover work (including various characters on Family Guy now). Wally put me in touch with Iraj Paran, who was an art director at Hanna-Barbera Studios on various projects, including Scooby Doo. Iraj brought me to meet directly with Joseph Barbera. Joe Barbera loved the idea of a Scooby Doo feature film. I began to work with his team, taking pictures of myself in a Shaggy shirt and wig with Shaggy facial hair. I re-created the hunched-over Shaggy posture—I had Shaggy down. Then Joe Barbera hand-drew Shaggy and several other visual aspects of the project in a proposal that pictured me (in real-life, human form) looking into a mirror with a Scooby Doo backdrop, while reflected back to me was a drawing of Shaggy (in Joe Barbera’s own hand) that looked disturbingly familiar—to me! I was elated. At last, I had completed my transformation into Norville “Shaggy” Rogers!

  Supplementing the artwork was a book we created that was an elaborate, bulleted pitch for the film project. The book itself was an ingenious work of art. It was constructed with illustrated cut-outs, including a pair of drawings that folded out to support the book upright when you set it on a table. One drawing was of me as Shaggy while the other was of the original, animated Shaggy character. I carted this pitch under my arm all around town while producers and studio development execs kept shuffling me off to different meet-and-greets. One exec told me there was already a script in development, while others said there was no interest in doing a Scooby Doo feature, especially one that included live action.

  I relayed all my trials and tribulations back to Casey, who nodded knowingly. It was all old hat to him. He had always felt they had under-marketed the Scooby Doo franchise. For instance, he wondered why they had never even done the simplest and most obvious idea of licensing Scooby Snacks to dog food makers and receiving royalties from the packaging. Of course they did sell the rights eventually, but you’re always left to wonder why things like that take so long. It doesn’t take a fucking marketing visionary to make that deal happen.

  Anyway, I was beating every bush in town with my pitch book in tow when I was encouraged to meet with Jean McCurdy, president of Warner Brothers TV animation and head of Kids’ WB. (McCurdy headed up Hanna-Barbera after it was absorbed by Time Warner in the Ted Turner takeover around 1996.) She also oversaw animated series, like Batman: The Dark Knight, and had a big say in what projects got fast-tracked and which died a slow, agonizing, Hollywood-development death.

  My whole pitch for the film revolved around the idea of Rotoscoping. That’s when animators trace over live-action film movement (think Roger Rabbit). At least, that was the original technique before the advent of computer animation. Now the term refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it can be composited over another background. That sounds complicated, but my idea was even cooler. I wanted to employ a sort of reverse Rotoscoping. I wanted to preserve the integrity and feel of the original Scooby Doo episodes, so my idea was to transpose the live action over the animation. I wanted the finished product to look identical to the Hanna-Barbera creations. That would eliminate any chance of actors’ cheesy interpretations of the animated characters movements and gestures. So when I met with Jean McCurdy and spread out my materials and notes and pitch book and danced around talking about how I had Casey Kasem (the voice), Joseph Barbera (the creator), Iraj Paron (the art director), and the Scooby Doo animators on board for the project, I thought she had to see it was a slam dunk. I went as far as to present a voice comparison presentation, matching my voice characterization back-to-back with Casey Kasem’s. I even mixed them up so, hard as they tried, they couldn’t discern which was the original and which was me. But none of it seemed to impress them. They told me nothing was moving forward with a Scooby Doo feature. They told me if it did, I’d be the first to know. They told me a lot of stuff.

  Everybody on the set of SBTB knew that the Scooby Doo feature project had become my obsession. Den came up to me one day and said that he’d heard there was a script for Scooby Doo going around town and that Mike Myers was attached to play Shaggy. Fucking Hollywood, man. The way I heard it explained was that Myers had got wind of the project, bought the rights (which I could never afford), and written a script with him as Shaggy. I don’t know if that is exactly how it went down, but that’s how I heard it, and this is my story. I also heard that it was getting red-lighted (very much the opposite of green-lighted, the Hollywood term for a “go” movie) because there was content in it about Nazis. Nazis?! That may have worked for Mel Brooks, but America wasn’t quite ready for Scooby and the gang to motor the Mystery Machine into Berlin to take on the Third Reich—and I would’ve gotten away with the Holocaust if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!

  Time went by. Joe Barbera passed away. Jean McCurty wouldn’t return my calls. Then the talk around town was that Myers had let the rights lapse and that the Scooby Doo project was available again. Next thing I knew, Kevin Bacon was on The Tonight Show telling Jay Leno he wanted to play Shaggy in the new Scooby Doo film. He got up and did his version of the Shaggy walk (which was horrible), and of course everybody hooted and cheered and loved it. I thought, “Shit, I can’t compete with Kevin Bacon. Plus, he’s like twenty years older than me.” Then I heard Jim Carrey announce he wants to play Shaggy in the new Scooby Doo movie. At that point I knew I really couldn’t compete. Bacon may have been twenty years older, but Carrey commanded $20 million a picture. Suddenly the project was the talk of the town. In the end, of course, the script wasn’t green-lighted until 2001 with a cast of douchey teen heartthrobs led by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. Their first order of business was to make sure their best pal, Matthew Lillard, was given the role of Shaggy. I got the freeze-out on my dream project. And it was cold.

  People can say whatever they want about how the Scooby Doo movie came to be, but they won’t convince me that I wasn’t the one who got it started. All the people who should know, and who were the point people for anything that had to do with the Hanna Barbera property of Scooby Doo, had me in their faces for years before that project got green-lighted. I met with everyone from Casey Kasem to Joe-fucking-Barbera himself and tried to convince them all that Scooby needed to be in a live-action, hybrid film on the big screen.

  The most disappointing part of all was when I learned that they had cast my favorite comedian of all time as the bad guy in the role of Spooky Island owner Emile Mondavarious—Mr. Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson. My favorite comedy sitcom is the British series Blackadder. I would’ve given my left nut to work with Atkinson. Instead, it’s Matthew-fucking-Lillard acting scenes with my hero. Yeah, Hollywood can be a rough town, and I’ve had my share of ups and downs, but that one really stung. Still does.

  AFTER THE BELL

  I’ll be the first to say I was one lucky sonuvabitch landing the role of Screech on SBTB. We were all lucky. Acting is a tough way to make a living—to make a life—and for those of us who were fortunate enough to land this gig, even though we didn’t always show it, we were grateful. Dennis Haskins and I stuck around for S
BTB: The New Class, but our other co-stars each had tough rows to hoe after SBTB ended, beating the streets and casting offices for new opportunities after being typecast as Zack, Kelly, Slater, Jess, and Lisa. After we wrapped SBTB: The College Years, it took Mark-Paul nearly five years to land a decent role, starring in the comedy feature Dead Man on Campus. And in 2001, when he was cast on NYPD Blue to replace another child star, Rick Schroeder, critics and fans howled.

  I think your adult life is just an extension of high school. High school is that period when you’re forming your personality, discovering what sort of person you really are, or want to work to be. The people in your proximity—for good or for ill—are powerful influences on the adult you will one day become. High school presents to you daily your first real-world relationships with other people: friendship, conflict, love, anger, betrayal … I could go on, but it’s hardly necessary. We were all there at one point, and many still are. There were times in my high-school days when I was bullied for being Screech on SBTB. I turned to martial arts for the emotional balance and physical skills that could protect me from harm when verbal ridicule led to physical aggression. I was a slender, birch-branch of a kid (don’t forget, the camera doesn’t exclusively add ten to fifteen pounds to Tiffani’s ass), but I made it clear early on that I would fight anybody who thought it might be fun to verbally assault me, or even threaten me physically, simply because they had issues with a character I once played. I decided very early on that I wasn’t gonna take no shit from nobody. I told many a wannabe bully, “Look pal, you’re gonna look pretty stupid tomorrow when you have to tell everybody you got your ass kicked by Screech.” This attitude of never backing down from bullies has imbued me with a lifelong commitment to sticking up for the little guy—except for that one time when I beat Welcome Back, Kotter’s Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo) senseless on Fox’s Celebrity Boxing 2. But I swear, that’s the only exception.