I Want My MTV (86 page)

 

ALISON STEWART:
I moved from the production department to MTV News by showing them some writing samples. The news department was changing. It wasn't just going to be a PR machine for artists, which was always the difficulty: You wanted to ask a confrontational question, but the artist's video was in heavy rotation.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
Even though I was twenty-four, it seemed logical to me that I could cover a presidential race. I come from a middle-class background; my dad's in the military. I went to college to get a job, not to get an education. As a freshman, I was already trying to find a place to work. In New York, I'd covered Ed Koch's mayoral campaign. When I was in Vermont, I'd covered a gubernatorial race, as well as Bernie Sanders running for the House of Representatives. I had mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional races under my belt. Dave Sirulnick was interested in having serious news, so I suggested we cover the presidential campaign. He said, “I'd have to have people who are really passionate about doing it.” And I said, “That would be me.”

 

ALISON STEWART:
I was sitting in the newsroom and Dave Sirulnick walked through and said, “Alison, you like politics, right? We're going to cover the presidential election. I'd like you to produce it. Can you go to New Hampshire next week with Tabitha Soren?” Within a week, we were in a New Hampshire classroom with Bill Clinton. We were overwhelmed. CBS takes up two hotel rooms just for their editing equipment. Here we are, a tall, aggressive redheaded woman and her short, black, frizzy-haired producer, with a computer and some folders. I was twenty-five. Other reporters made fun of us. “
MTV News
? Isn't that an oxymoron?” I can't tell you how many times I heard that. These were the same people who, a year later, were asking me for tickets to the Rock n' Roll Inaugural Ball.

 

DAVE SIRULNICK:
During the course of the campaign, we probably interviewed then-governor Clinton six or seven times. Some reporter asked President Bush, “Would you ever go on MTV?” And his answer was, “That teenybopper network? Why would I do that?” All year, we asked to do an interview with the president. Then, forty-eight hours before the election, we get a call from the White House: President Bush will do an interview with you.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
I was given ten minutes in the back of a train with George Bush, who was snarky and dismissive. I had prepared; he hadn't. I asked a question about his tax returns, and they stopped the interview.

ALISON STEWART:
The Clinton campaign got it right away. Bob Kerrey got it. Jerry Brown changed his clothes before we interviewed him, from a suit into a flannel shirt. Tom Harkin was like, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn.”

We didn't need to talk about social security or tax cuts. We focused on jobs, student loans, gays in the military. It was a big risk. We would have been a laughingstock if we hadn't done a good job.

 

ETHAN ZINDLER, Bill Clinton campaign staff:
My title in the Clinton campaign was assistant press secretary for youth media outreach. I wrote George Stepha-nopoulos a long memo in June, outlining a strategy for targeting youth media, including MTV, college papers, college radio, etc. MTV's coverage was huge. In retrospect, it seems rather antiquated, given how far we've come with the Internet and Facebook, but back then, putting a politician on anything other than mainstream network television news was considered way unconventional.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
I was dumbstruck at how fast our election coverage took off, and how seriously we were taken. We hired a woman who worked for CNN to host part of it, and it turned out to be a disaster, because she sucked and was completely wrong for us. I was convinced we couldn't throw a bunch of kids at the president, and it turned out that was exactly what we did, and exactly what we should have been doing.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
The network threw a lot of weight behind our coverage. The key was, it opened up a lot of new advertisers for them—maybe cars, maybe AT&T. It became lucrative for them. Also, it allowed Viacom to throw more weight around in Congress, at a time when there was lots of cable legislation.

 

TOM FRESTON:
I went with Ken Lerer and Judy Miller to the '92 Republican Convention. The same Judy Miller who worked at the
New York Times
during the run-up to the the Iraq War. She decided she wanted to do a
New York Times Magazine
piece on MTV's political impact.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
As soon as they saw I wasn't showing up in a halter top, as soon as I started talking, it was pretty clear I was there to ask politicians about their platforms. The reporters scratched their heads at us, but once the
New York Times
followed me around and wrote about us, it legitimized us.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
My goal as an MTV correspondent at the '92 Democratic Convention was to show that there are people in metal who are intelligent and articulate. So I went up to Oliver Stone at the convention, and he seemed like he was out of his mind on drugs. I also talked to two politicians with the same last name: Bob Kerrey, the war vet that lost his leg? Nice guy. But John Kerry is a total asshole. He and Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls coach, were two of the rudest guys I've ever talked to. Phil Jackson looked into the camera and said, “Fuck MTV.”

 

TABITHA SOREN:
They gave me a mix of assignments. I flew to Colorado to interview Tom Petty, and he wouldn't talk to me. His manager said, “Tom is sick.” I thought,
This is rude. I am not going home without an interview. Fuck that
. I was relentless, and finally the manager called MTV. They apologized to him for me doing my job. I got a call from the news department: “You're pissing everybody off.” Well, did you send me here to get an interview with Tom Petty or not? Christ, if Bill Clinton can talk to me, so can Tom Fucking Petty.

 

ALISON STEWART:
Tabitha had a lot thrown at her at a young age, and I don't know if she handled it as well as she could have. I'll say that diplomatically. Professionally, we were terrific, but personally, we clashed quite a bit. She got a lot of attention, and you know what happens to young people who get a lot of attention. She could be hard on people behind the scenes who were trying to help her, and I wasn't ever sure why. There's no reason to be short with a cameraman. There's no reason to yell at an intern.

 

ADAM CURRY:
Her nickname was Crabitha. That's what we called her. She was cranky and nasty and gnarly.

 

LINDA CORRADINA:
Tabitha could be moody and crabby, for sure. We'd send her out on pieces and she'd come back with the goods—breaking down “What is a caucus?” and “What is a primary?” She was doing a job way beyond her experience, and doing it well, but it took a toll, I'm sure.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
After the primaries, there was a lull in the news. I was at odds with the MTV publicity department, because I was being interviewed all the time. I was on
Letterman
,
The Tonight Show
,
The Today Show
,
Good Morning America
, any CNN show. No one was ever patronizing towards me; I think I was more in danger of patronizing them. Sorry, that sounds kind of jerky.

 

ALISON STEWART:
I think our coverage changed the election. MTV helped Bill Clinton get himself elected. A lot of people were saying, “MTV is biased for Clinton.” But he was the one candidate made most available to us.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
I loved the early '90s era of MTV. It was among the lowest-rated eras of MTV, and among the most influential.

 

 

 

MTV HAD BEEN PLOTTING THEIR OWN VERSION OF
a soap opera for years, and it finally arrived in May 1992. Except it wasn't a soap opera, because MTV couldn't afford scripts, costumes, actors, and sets. Instead, the original idea had mutated into
The Real World
, a show that invented the modern reality-TV show and brought landslide ratings to the network. Everyday people were the new rock stars.

 

AMY FINNERTY:
I saw flyers up around the halls of MTV for the casting of the first
Real World
, and I thought,
Who the hell would sign up for something like that?

 

TOM FRESTON:
People asked me, “How did you come up with
The Real World
? That is genius.” It was just because we didn't have any money.

 

VAN TOFFLER:
Joe Davola, Doug Herzog, and I looked at statistics about how much our audience watched soap operas during the day. So we said, “Let's do a soap opera.”

 

DOUG HERZOG:
We decided to do a teen soap opera, with a rock n' roll attitude. Fred Silverman, of all people, the former president of NBC, recommended a woman named Mary-Ellis Bunim, who came from the world of soap operas.

 

JONATHAN MURRAY, TV producer: :
Mary-Ellis had produced daytime soaps like
As the World Turns
, and she was working with MTV on
St. Marks Place
, a scripted show about young people on the Lower East Side. When we put together a budget, MTV was like, “Oh my god, we can't spend this much money. We get our music videos for free, and now we're going to spend $300,000 for a half hour of television?”

 

LAUREN CORRAO:
It would have cost around $500,000 a week. In comparison,
Remote Control
was about $15,000 an episode.

 

JONATHAN MURRAY:
But Mary-Ellis and I saw this as our big break, and we couldn't let it go. So we pitched a new idea: six young, diverse people living together. We'd put them in a loft, follow their lives with cameras and create half-hour episodes. There'd be conflict and growth, and that would give us our story arc. We pitched it at breakfast and it was bought by lunch.

 

LAUREN CORRAO:
I'll never forget, Mary-Ellis said, “What if you could do a soap opera with no actors and no writers?”

 

JUDY McGRATH:
Someone at Nickelodeon said, “You can't put an unscripted soap opera on television!” Which immediately made me competitive and certain that we could.

 

JONATHAN MURRAY:
We delivered two twenty-two-minute pilot shows. MTV tested it, and it tested through the roof. And then we waited. And waited. They had six months to make a decision about giving us the go-ahead for season one, and they took all six months. I think they knew they were crossing a bridge that could change the channel forever. God, for the first ten years of
The Real World
, MTV never promoted the fact that the show was getting huge ratings, because they didn't want it known that music videos
weren't
getting huge ratings.

 

KEVIN POWELL, cast member,
The Real World
:
I was a freelance journalist, and I'd started writing about music. I was interviewing an R&B group called Joe Public at a diner in midtown Manhattan. They were four black guys who wore their hair the way we all did back then, in little twisties or high-tops. You know, beginning dreadlocks. A woman named Tracie Fiss came to our table and said, “I really like the way you guys look. We're doing a documentary-type show for MTV, would any of you be interested?” I can't say I watched a lot of MTV, but I took her card. I'd been a student leader at Rutgers University and was politically active, so I thought,
If I try out for the show and get on—
which was far-fetched
—maybe it will lead to some college speaking appearances
.

 

ERIC NIES, cast member,
The Real World
:
I was cast for
The Real World
through my modeling agency. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was twenty years old. I was going to clubs, having a good time. It was an opportunity to work with MTV, which could be a stepping stone for my career. And I was getting a free place to stay.

 

KEVIN POWELL:
Jon and Mary-Ellis had an incredible vision. Outside of
An American Family
on PBS in the '70s, there wasn't anything like it. I was really into their idea of combining documentary filmmaking with a soap opera. I thought it a fascinating social experiment.

When Julie and I had our famous “race” argument on the sidewalk, we were so passionate about our positions that we were oblivious not only to the cameras, but to the crowd of people that had gathered. She was a Southerner, I was a Yankee, and we had completely different perspectives on the world. People have told me that was the first time they'd ever seen race talked about in that way on national television. People have written dissertations on our argument.

 

ERIC NIES:
I'd posed naked for a Bruce Weber book, and the producers decided to throw the book on the coffee table in our apartment for everybody to see. They felt they had to create conflict. But for me, it was all good. It grabbed me more attention and helped my career. Obviously, that's what the show is all about.

 

LAUREN CORRAO:
Of that cast from the first season, Heather B. was a rap artist, Andre was in a rock band, Becky was a folk singer, Julie was a dancer. It fit into MTV's pop culture universe. There was enough music on that first season to calm some of the fears about doing a non-music show.