Dustin Diamond

by Timothy Niedermann

  Life after SBTB turned out to be harsh on Den, too. Sometime after we wrapped the last season of The New Class, I ran into him, and we went out for a drink. Den wasn’t looking tip-top; he had put on a bunch of weight. That’s when he told me he’d been released by his agency, summarily shit-canned by his agent. That was a pretty low blow. Hollywood is a town where most actors fire their agents with the same frequency I used to fire my BB gun in my back yard. It’s not supposed to work the other way around.

  After The New Class, I started doing comedy on the college circuit. I was traveling and doing a lot of dates for The National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), an organization that arranges appearances of speakers, performers, and celebrities for on-campus events. It wasn’t long before Den had a new agent who was booking him for the same events in direct competition with me. I was doing my comedy act, while Den was presenting some sort of motivational speechification. Admittedly, it was annoying that Den was trying to go up against me for bookings. I was of the opinion we could combine forces for double-bookings to bring Screech and Belding to schools with some sort of play off of our TV characters with a spin into our new gigs. But whatever. He wanted to do things his way, and he didn’t really have much else going on.

  I don’t do the NACA circuit anymore. It was a fun experience, but I had to learn to accept it for what it was. The students who organized the events were often the outcasts: the theater kids and hall monitors—the real life Screeches. It was pretty amusing, though only because I could see how they relished the authority and decision-making power they possessed in the organizing and facilitating of the events where I would perform. As they tried to maintain a tenuous air of executive authority, and I would think to myself, “You guys realize I’m older than all of you, right?” In reality, most of the gigs were pretty bare bones and unprofessional—as one might expect from any student-organized, cob-job event. Sometimes they wouldn’t even be able to provide me with something as basic as a secure room for me to store my cell phone, keys, and other personal items while I was on stage. They’d just point to a chair in some common area for me to sling my coat over and drop my bag. Maybe this sounds like celebrity-prima-donna, groomed-by-NBC, hissyfit bullshit and no big deal—but it’s not, really. Once, while I was performing, my road manager had his cell phone stolen. It was loaded with his contact list of celebrity clients, along with backstage passes for different events and other personal items. It wasn’t funny, actually. So there are certain standards all performers need to maintain for ourselves.

  Like I said, Den was at these events to deliver a rousing motivational speech about clean living to exactly the wrong demographic. He was serving up the high school SBTB credo to college students already deep into their investigations of casual sex, casual (or even hard-core) drug use, binge drinking, and the practiced dual arts of biting sarcasm and bitter irony. You can image how that crowd received the message Den was pitching. This was a post-SBTB generation of college students that viewed the show’s incessant reruns with snarky cynicism and ebullient irony. Case in point: the Saved by the Bell drinking game (see Appendix A.).

  I haven’t kept real close tabs on what all the other cast members are up to post Bell. It’s certainly far from the forefront of my mind, but if it ever happened, I’d love to see the gang reunite in a film where everyone plays against type. Let’s give everyone a real test, push their acting chops to their outermost boundaries. I’d like to see Mario play a mentally ill person, Mark-Paul play a homosexual struggling against his true self. Um, I want to see Tiffani play a crack whore. Man, this is hard. Okay, still just spitballing here: Lark can play a homeless person with rags for clothes. Elizabeth can play a prim and proper schoolmarm with skirts cut at the ankles. I’ll play the serial killer. Twenty minutes into that film, if everyone is doing his and her jobs, no one in the audience would recognize anyone from the gang from Bayside.

  ON BEING A CHILD STAR

  I mentioned earlier that the pay for the principle cast members of SBTB was below what it should have been. St. Peter acted like he was such a nice guy (Heeey, there’s my stars. I’m looking out for you guys), but the fact in Hollywood is that when it comes to pay, kids get raked over the coals. The way it worked at that time was that there was a mandatory pay increase of ten percent per year. The producers would lock us into multi-year contracts (usually three years), so we didn’t have the power to negotiate if the first season was a hit. That was part of the logic behind the standard increases each year, as protection for the actors. This provision wasn’t great, but it was still better than nothing. Then one year, from a clear blue sky, word was handed down that the standard annual increase had been sliced in half to five percent, which is barely a cost-of-living increase. It may sound like griping, but when you’re starring on a successful program, your window to parlay that success into fair remuneration is a small one. I know everyone thinks, “Oh, you television stars, you’re making so much money. Quit your goddamn belly-aching.” Well, everything is relative. If you’re not maximizing your opportunity when it’s in your grasp, it’s the same frustration whether you’re an actor, an entrepreneur, or a shift worker down at the mill. Your job is your job, and you want to be compensated comparably to your peers.

  That’s another topic: your peers. Actors on Saturday-morning shows are graded on a much different scale from actors in prime-time (regardless of viewership share). We were paid much, much less than cast members of prime-time shows and, frankly, looked down upon as the slumdogs of the industry by the arrogant elite. (What time slot are you in? Oh, how terrible for you.) The cast’s parents were aware of it; they bitched about it, and most of them talked big about their plan to approach St. Peter. But, like I said, ultimately they chickened out. Look at Tiffani and Elizabeth. They bailed rather than remain for the second half of the last season. For the right money, I bet they would have stayed.

  Stage parents are whole other breed of human, anyway. Many are living vicariously through their children, channeling a career they failed to achieve for themselves. It’s a fact that tends to contribute to the fucked-up nature of the industry as a whole—every-thing is inverted. The whole pyramid of logic has been obliterated. I didn’t have an allowance as a kid; I was pulling down the main income. But it wasn’t like I was doing the family banking at eleven years old, either. That job fell to my parents. They cashed my checks, deposited what they saw fit, spent how they saw fit, and didn’t feel they owed me any explanations. People could look at my life at that age and assume I was doing very well financially. I was forced to make that same assumption because I had no power over my earnings or the decisions being made for the investment and saving of my income. It would be different, I suppose, if I had had the option of blowing my own money; but I didn’t. With very little oversight or obligation to me as the principal wage earner, my parents blew or lost my money for me. That’s why today, I’m no longer on speaking terms with my dad.

  I had no choice but to trust my parents to make the best decisions for my financial future. But most parents are not financial wizards, and mine let it be known that they were making sacrifices to move and commute everyday so that I could build a career as a performer. Everything we’ve done has been for you so that you can have a bright future. But the bottom line was, my parents just weren’t that good with money. That’s a tough situation for all kids in the entertainment industry: ninety-five percent of all work done by children is done without court-approved contracts, and eighty percent of all the work in the entertainment industry is located in the state of California. If your money as a child actor wasn’t being protected, then why were you working so hard? What was it all for? It became such an issue for children in the industry that sixty years ago they passed a law known as the Coogan law, which exists only in California. This law was named for the 1930s child actor Jackie Coogan (who later achieved a second round of fame as Uncle Fester on the 1960s show The Munsters), whose parents had burned through $4 million (think of it, in t
he 1930s!) by the time Jackie reached the legal age to take charge of his financial affairs.

  The Coogan law required that fifteen percent of my earnings be deposited into a special, protected account that neither my parents nor I had access to until the day the I turned eighteen. If it hadn’t been for that law, by the time I turned eighteen, all that money would have been gone, wasted, just like the other eighty-five percent. But keep in mind, the Coogan law only comes into play when contracts are called into court for approval. Yes, the child star definitely plays against a stacked deck.

  Take my dad, for instance. He brought me to the set most of the time because my mom worked such odd hours. What were his responsibilities all day? I had to attend school on set, memorize lines, do run-throughs, blocking—you name it. I missed most of the extracurricular activities and field trips offered through my program at Valley Tech. Meanwhile, he was shooting the shit with the crew, playing Sega Genesis inside an air-conditioned studio on a movie lot. To be fair, sometimes he had to walk all the way down to Kraft Service to make himself a sandwich (actually, they made it for you). All complimentary, of course. I had my down time, but my job was far from just hanging out all the time—it was a serious job. On top of all that, I’m playing the “nerd” character on the show, so I have that to contend with every day of my professional and personal life. I’m the skinny guy with the curly ’fro struggling to find where I fit in beside the Golden Child and the muscle-bound, permed mullet when it came to trying to stand out as a real individual rather than the character I portrayed on TV. I scored my share of coochie backstage at SBTB, but it wasn’t easy, walking around all day cracking my voice while sometimes wearing a yellow chicken suit. Hey, I played the number one nerd in the world, for all kids, for a decade.

  There were a number of professional and personal obstacles I had to overcome while my dad kicked back playing Super Mario Brothers. But the suits didn’t care about what I was up against, nor did my parents. The bottom line was, I had a job to do. Their opinion—all of them—was, “You’re making good money, learn your lines, do your shit, don’t bitch.”

  Another odd aspect of being a child star is that I was constantly aware of wannabe actor adults who either openly resented my success or angled to get close to me so that I might rekindle their long-extinguished aspirations. I had a third-grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Anaheim. She was an actress—er, I mean, failed actress. She made it abundantly clear that my very presence in her vicinity annoyed her to no end. She, and teachers like her over the years, would send me home with up to five hours of spiteful homework just to exercise whatever authority they had over my time and attention. I got sick and tired of it. That’s why I worked hard, accelerated my studies, and graduated from high school at sixteen.

  I’m well aware that many of you will have no sympathy for this situation. But this was my life; this was my experience. And if I have kids of my own one day, I will never let them get involved in the entertainment industry. I’m just too jaded, and there’s too much I would be frantic to protect them from. I know what I had to endure, and still endure, and I wouldn’t want it for them. Simply put, I don’t think Hollywood is a good place for children. The industry uses you when it’s convinced it can gain something from you and drops you when it thinks it can’t. Hollywood is like a friendly, open embrace that squeezes you tight, then reaches around and picks your pocket. All you feel in the moment is the warmth of that hug. You have no premonition of what selfish forces are maneuvering around you in that window of your usefulness. And even then you think, “Hey, he stole my wallet! Mmmm, but I still miss that warm, snuggly hug.”

  The kids of the industry are often the victims of their parents. But it’s the parents, in fact, who go through a more serious withdrawal than their children when the money dries up and the perks of the Hollywood lifestyle are history.

  When I step back and look at it all, I ask myself, “Was it all worth it?” The answer is yes. But I know that I grew up tougher than most kids, especially on an emotional level. I grew a thick, iron skin, numbed my emotions (when required), and taught myself how to suck it up and soldier on. Those factors, coupled with my experiences with people who tried to take advantage of my friendship, forced me to build walls between the world and myself and to never show vulnerability. It’s an odd sensation. I always assume a camera is watching.

  EPILOGUE

  If the end of SBTB was the end of an era, then the best way to usher in a new era, from my point of view, was to create new memories. I had to decide what direction I wanted acting to take me in after the Bell. I decided I wanted to go into stand-up comedy. It’s a tough second act—no overnight process—and it has taken me a lot of hard work and long hours of performing and travel to reach a point where I feel I’m delivering a strong, entertaining stage act. It has certainly made me appreciate a whole new art form. The acting gigs aren’t gone forever, I’m just more careful now about what I choose. After SBTB, I received a lot of scripts and offers to rehash a cloned version of the Screech character. I rejected all of them. I’d done the Screech thing, and I wanted to push myself to expand in a different way—as a professional artist and as a person. Most recently, playing the villain on reality television has been liberating. It’s helped me shake that image of the one-trick pony.

  In my career now, doing stand-up comedy and making notorious appearances on reality TV shows, I feel like people have begun to embrace me as a completely separate entity from the character of Screech. In my comedy, people judge me on my material and whether or not I can make them laugh. In my role as a reality-TV villain, people appropriately hate me as the whiny, spiteful scumbag I portray.

  For those who have yet to receive the memo, reality TV is anything but. The producers work with you to create characters to—again, not unlike SBTB—fill out a list of archetypes that viewers at home are looking for in each new installment. I have embraced the role of bad guy/asshole. By the way, it’s way more fun to play the villain than any other part. The producers help you create your character, carefully crafting his (or her) personality to create conflict in the group dynamic, and then they let you know when it’s “go time”—time to jump in there and stir the turd soup. They want the bad guy to generate a ton of negative feedback; they want people’s fingertips smoking as they dash to their keyboards, filling fan sites and discussion boards with thick, noxious venom for the one character they hate the most, the one wrench in the works without whom—if he would just get kicked off the show—everyone would get along so well, spontaneously locking elbows and swaying as they sang “Kumbaya.” Reams and reams of malicious chatter fill the Internet; viewers spew and froth about how much they hate that dopey motherfucker on Celebrity Fit Club. My only response is: keep those great e-mails coming. It means I’m doing what I was paid to do.

  The funniest part to me is that the producers didn’t believe at first that I could pull off the bad-guy routine. They didn’t want to give me a shot, because they thought I was too typecast as squeaky clean and dorky from all my years as Screech. They were leaning towards Warren G being the bad guy that season. I had to convince them I could do it. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s the television industry. It’s been my life and livelihood for twenty-four years (I’m now thirty-two). I knew I could dig deep, push buttons, and make millions of people really, really hate my fucking guts.

  Like that blowout I (supposedly) had with Harvey (that’s Gunnery Sergeant Harvey Walden of the U.S. Marine Corps for the uninformed) on Fit Club. None of that was scripted, but we both knew what we were trying to accomplish in that scene. We conferred with the producers backstage and then rolled with the punches on camera. When the director yelled cut, I turned to the crew and said, “That was pretty harsh.” They laughed and said, “It’s gonna look great on TV.” Then I returned after what was supposed to be a week wearing a T-shirt that read “Star of the Show” … Hello? Are there really television viewers in America who don’t think wardrobe approved th
at shirt? Who believes that I could walk onto the set of a network television show wearing whatever I brought from home? I also wasn’t allowed to tell the other cast members that the producers from Granada Productions for VH1 were paying me more money on the side, under the auspices of my own “development deal.” Since the show wrapped, and I was able to gauge the reaction to my performance, I have felt like I should have played it safer on Fit Club and perhaps portrayed a “nice guy.” I had a lot of fun playing the asshole, but I dramatically underestimated how seriously viewers take “reality” television.

  In a way, where public perception and sentiment is concerned, I think non-actors have an advantage over professionals in the format of reality television. In my case, I was groomed by NBC and was in full-on, network-combat mode for more than decade in a career spanning twenty-four years. I approach every new set as a character role, even for talk-show appearances. When the camera is on, so am I. I consider the sensibility of the audience; I play a scene with the host balancing wit, charm, and attentiveness; and I respond with interesting, effective, concise, and informative answers while ever-conscious of my perceived “likeability.” I approach all those aspects of my performance while balancing my rapport with the host, because it’s important to maintain a specific role while being interviewed, especially for an international broadcast. There are many factors at play during talk-show appearances, a format that the viewing audience might consider the ultimate example of natural, candid, reality-based television. But it, too, is an acting process that requires professional focus. When there’s a camera, there’s an audience; when there’s an audience, there’s awareness; and when there’s awareness, reality breaks down.