Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (7 page)

DAVID LASCHER:
I don’t think it affected the work at all, and personally, it just added to how wonderful the experience was. We always worked well together and had an amazing relationship. It definitely didn’t make anything awkward.

LISA MELAMED:
I knew they were dating and tried to be the adult cousin. I was thirty. My attitude was, I didn’t want to get too into the kids’ business.

FRED KELLER:
It was fifteen-year-olds in love. They handled it very well.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
For two seventeen-year-olds who didn’t know how to handle it at all, when it played out and we needed to end it, we just didn’t know how to work together after the fact. I vividly remember an episode after we had just sort of broken up and David had gone away to New York and I had gone back to Pennsylvania for the summer. And then we came back and he had a new girlfriend he was telling me about and I was telling him about my new boyfriend and we just didn’t do well with it. I wasn’t as aware of it until we weren’t speaking to each other and they wrote this episode where he and I were, I don’t know, “conspiring” against the rest of the group at the Bar None Ranch and it was like every single scene we were together and we would have to pretend to be best friends in each scene and then they would yell “Cut!” and we would walk in separate directions. It’s something I laugh about now.

BLAKE SENNETT:
Venus and I were fond of each other, and they wrote that into the show.

ADAM REID:
Alasdair and I were vying for Alanis Morissette’s affection. It was a lot of fun to play up those aspects of our young teenage life as we were living it.
And
make fun of it. It didn’t hurt that we both actually had crushes on her, too.

DAVE RHODEN:
I had a total crush on Melissa Joan Hart. We went on two dates. She was a sweetheart and a little shier than people might think. Their set was opposite ours, so we would run over there and say hey. I was probably just too nervous to know what to do with myself.

SEAN O’NEAL:
I invited her to my eighth-grade dance. Something like that. Maybe one of my proms.

DAVID SIDONI:
Everyone realized there was potential for stuff to get really childish and junior high-ish, so rather than let that happen, we decided that there weren’t going to be any issues.

SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ:
There was so much packed into that half hour. We had a
lot
to do. We had to get it done. So if you had an issue with someone, you weren’t going to get your work done. It was really important to all of us that the show be good, and that was our highest priority.

JULENE RENEE-PRECIADO:
There were no hookups. No one dated.

MICKI DURAN:
I got together once with Mark David. But that wasn’t anything. I had a crush on Ivan Dudynsky. And I always had a crush on John Crane. I was so young! I got crushes!

MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG:
Danny Tamberelli was probably among my first crushes—the lead singer of New Kids on the Block, Green Day, and maybe Danny. So that was fun as a little girl discovering boys. A lot of growing up happened for me on the
Pete & Pete
show.

SARAH CONDON:
Obviously, when they become teenagers and young women, they graduate into a certain whole other thing. Sometimes it can be a bit . . .
abrupt
for some people, because you know them in one way and then you’re learning about them in another way. It’s a hard road for female actresses in that regard.

CHUCK VINSON:
Melissa, she was not a young girl anymore. Her body started to change. I mean,
her breasts were growing.
She started her period, and you
don’t
want to get in a woman’s way when she’s having her period!

LISA LEDERER:
Clarissa was not going to become overtly sexy; we weren’t going to go that route, for a variety of reasons. It wouldn’t have been true to who she was.

ALISON FANELLI:
We didn’t even start wearing makeup until three or four years into
Pete & Pete
. We tried to keep it as down-home and natural as possible.

LISA LEDERER:
At one point, Melissa was saying she wanted to have her belly button pierced, and she did, and she wanted to show it on the show. But there was a little bit of
I Dream of Jeannie
there, because we could never show the belly button! They felt it might have crossed the line and would be “too sexy.”

ALISON FANELLI:
There was a note about my skirt in a certain episode: “The skirt was a little short on Ellen, so remember we need to keep this covered.”

LISA LEDERER:
We were never going to show cleavage; Melissa was never going to show up in a bikini top, that kind of thing. She did become a little more sultry as the show progressed, but that was probably appropriate.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
I don’t think anyone in my camp was shocked by the
Maxim
issue with me in it. I think the only people who were shocked by it were the
Archie
comics people who owned
Sabrina
and were looking to get paid out.

ELIZABETH HESS:
I personally didn’t see the cover of
Maxim
but certainly heard about it from my NYU students. I think Melissa wanted so much to be seen as a woman after being a child actor from the age of four. And sadly, I still think objectification is the most obvious way to try to achieve that. Although it undermines rather than underlines a woman’s stunning singularity and strengths.

SEAN O’NEAL:
As far as Melissa’s
Maxim
spread: Kudos! It takes a lot as a celebrity personality—especially a female—to expose herself. It was daring but necessary to put her in a different category.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
Oh, you know . . . That was just her mom trying to change her profile. My job was just to not have things like that go on while she was working with
me
.

CHUCK VINSON:
I’d been down that road before with Lisa Bonet from
The Cosby Show
being in that Robert De Niro movie . . . My statement about Melissa was this: She has grown up.

JOE O’CONNOR:
I don’t think she should have done it, myself. But there’s this thing in LA where they make decisions based on this kind of stuff: initial sexual reactions. Most of the actresses in LA, while they’re still young, try to do this. If a girl hasn’t made it out here, in terms of movies, and hasn’t gotten that image by the time she’s twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, she’s finished and they move on to younger girls. Pretty terrible. Actually, they do it with young
guys
now, too. Still, I think Melissa should have gone and tried to do it a little different. Is that way too much? I had too much coffee.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
I think it was one of the best things for my career. I was twenty-three and had already been on the cover of
Details
in my underwear, and no one made a big deal about
that
, and here I was doing
Maxim
to, you know, promote a movie, and
I’m a full-blown adult
 . . . There was this big controversy as to whether or not I was “allowed” to be sexy. It was hilarious. Of course, for like a week I panicked—“Am I gonna be fired? Am I gonna be sued?” But after that week went by and they were talking about it on
Leno
and
Regis & Kathie Lee
and the
Post
had it every day, it really drove the numbers up at the box office for my movie that week.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Alanis Morissette was prematurely mature for her age. In a scary way. Prematurely driven. “I’m going to be a star.” Not just in the way she carried herself, but physically, sexually. Clearly other things were going on in her life I was not privy to at the time.

ADAM REID:
Alanis played a demo tape one time when she was probably twelve. Maybe she was thirteen, but it was one of her first recording efforts. She was definitely singing about “adult” concepts. That was the first thing that really struck me:
Wow, she’s really mature. She’s thinking about some
deep
shit.

BRENDA MASON:
She was definitely a talented songwriter, but way too much has been made of the “Alanis thing.” She was only in five episodes, and I directed her in all of them. Roger wasn’t overly fond of her, feeling she didn’t “stand out” as a character. And he didn’t like her short, boyish haircut. I’m not sure she was really comfortable in the sketch comedy milieu either. What the crew members remember about her is her deep commitment to music. She developed a rapport with one of the audio guys, and he helped her with some of her initial recordings. Nothing was ever released.

VANESSA LINDORES:
I still have her first two singles on a forty-five that she gave me back then. Alanis and I were friends. I wish she had stayed around longer. She was very focused on her singing, but she wasn’t weird about it. I’m not at all surprised by her success.

JOHN BINKLEY:
I had a strong commitment to casting fifteen-ish kids to play fifteen-year-olds. We had only one issue in that area, and it was a pretty clear one, because it turned out that Brooke—played
brilliantly
by Robyn Ross—wasn’t actually fifteen when we started. We hadn’t been validating people’s birth certificates or anything. If they looked right, that’s what counted. But I discovered after the first season that she was eighteen in the second round, which was shot about a year after the first one. And she started looking older. By the third season, all of a sudden she’s nineteen and she’s
really
looking older. We reluctantly let her go and recast her. Robyn was
not
replaceable. I made a mistake. We should have kept her even if she looked forty-five.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
My last couple of years, I was so
clearly
older than the other kids that it probably wasn’t a good thing for the show. I had already moved to Toronto and was ready to get on with my life and was flying back to do my stuff. I probably stayed on a good couple of years past my due date.

ALISON FANELLI:
The last year of the show, Michael and Chris and Will and I sat down and really thought that Michael and I were getting a little old for the stuff they were writing. It was a
kids’
show. So we knew that we might be getting phased out if
Pete & Pete
did continue, especially with Danny getting older and the “Nightcrawlers” episode
that focused more on him and his friends. So that helped me launch out of the business.

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
It was difficult to watch that happen to someone else knowing it was just a matter of time before you were done. It was a very different lifestyle during production, and for a kid who’s in the middle of stumbling through the world trying to make sense of everything, it was a huge part of our identity. So to lose it, you lost that part of who you were, that extended family, those relationships, that routine, and all the conveniences that came along with it.

JOSH MORRIS:
Roger tended to lose interest in the boys when “their balls dropped,” as he’d say. He wasn’t interested in them anymore. He probably wasn’t even interested in them as
people
anymore. And he had gotten very close with a lot of the boys on the show. I know that happened to Alasdair.

TOBY HUSS:
These kids had all these different people in their lives. And when you take that away from them, it’s a jarring and weird thing. It was for me, too.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
And the timing—being fifteen, sixteen—a lot of figuring out who you are, about being vulnerable. I might not have been able to vocalize at the time a sense of needing to be reassured. Letting kids
know that there’s nothing wrong with them—it’s really just this thing we’re doing where the fit isn’t right, and it’s more about networks than it is about the people. It’s strange: There’s a lot there in terms of knowing how important childhood or being a child was for Roger in particular—that’s what drove him—and then there was an unspoken realization that I was growing out of the thing that was central or important to him on some level. None of us were going to stay kids. It took a while to figure some of that out.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
At the beginning, it was harder because the kids were more close to my age, and by the time they left the show, they were good friends of mine. That was a bit weird because kids would grow out of it really quickly, whereas I was in some sort of weird time machine where I wasn’t aging.

RICK GALLOWAY:
I was just happy to continue the process, but that was the hardest thing, saying good-bye to cast members and hello to new ones. You spend three years with some people of a solid team and it’s just . . . awkward. We were so young, and it was a decision made so over our heads.

DAVE RHODEN:
There was no animosity about that at all. I was actually really excited for the people who got to stay. The worst thing was missing hanging out with Chris Lobban, my buddy. But at the same time, I hadn’t seen any of my high school friends in basically two and a half years. I literally went on one more audition for something else and then never went to another audition again.

VANESSA LINDORES:
Personally, the turnover was
very
hard for me. I would become friends with girls on the show, and then before I would know it, they’d be gone. Marjorie and Alanis are examples. We would have sleepovers and hang out on the set, then . . . gone. I was ready to go when it was my turn to pass the baton.

BOB BLACK:
It was obvious that kids grow up—that’s what they do. It’s no different from being in school. When you’re in middle school, you have eighth graders, and the next year comes along, and the eighth graders aren’t there anymore. I don’t think it was that big a deal, simply because this was just one more aspect of how life is when you’re a kid.