Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,61
“Isn’t this strange and exciting?” to anyone, because everyone else was used to it. So I just had to pretend that it was totally normal that I was suddenly wearing makeup and getting my clothes picked out for me and talking about 98 Degrees into a camera that was recording images that would get played in people’s living rooms, sometimes right that very second.
Otherwise, I am fairly certain that I spent my first year at MTV in a constant state of shock. It’s the only way to explain my lack of nerves, my even emotional keel, my sudden habit of saying yes to everything without thinking. And it started right away: as I taped the pilot for the show that would become Eye Spy Video, my producer George got a call. It was from Tony, the head of production, and he was asking for me. It seemed that Carson and Ananda and Toby would all be heading down to Seaside Heights the next day to get ready for the MTV Summershare programming launch, so they needed someone to host MTV Live, the daily, ninety-minute live show from the Times Square studios. “You wanna do it?” Tony asked casually, as though it were no big thing to ask a guy who one month earlier had been standing on the sidewalk outside the building whether he could be the sole anchor for ninety minutes of live television programming. “Sure,” I said, as though it were not a terrifying thing to do. “Great!” he said, and it was settled. Tomorrow, I’m just going to be on the air, on my own, for ninety minutes, I thought, and for some reason that I will never understand, I did not have a TV-movie nervous breakdown right there on the spot. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
My guests would be Doug Savant of Melrose Place, who was appearing in the Matthew Broderick Godzilla reboot, and Stacey Dash from both the movie and the television versions of Clueless. And then the rest of the time, I’d be doing whatever: taking callers, talking to viewers out in Times Square, just doing whatever we felt like on live television.
Hosting live television is a dream, in that it doesn’t make much sense, it’s nothing like real life, and you forget almost all of it when it’s over. You have an earpiece deep in your ear canal so that the control room can tell you to stretch, or to cut things short, or to stop making that face. There’s a teleprompter with your lines on it, or in the case of MTV, just vague bullet points so you have a general sense of what you’re talking about. There’s a roomful of production assistants and producers and cameramen and audio engineers and lighting guys and a stage manager and sometimes an audience and everyone’s looking at you. As the show is about to start, everyone seems nervous; there is a palpable tension in the air, because anyone could fuck anything up, and if anyone fucks anything up, it’s live, so there are no second takes. Of course, the person on camera is the only one who can visibly fuck up, and that’s you, and you’re new here. Then they’re counting down in your ear (TEN) and your heart starts beating faster and faster. The person in your ear says you’re going to start the show into Camera Two, but then fifteen seconds in you’re going to Camera One and staying there, until you move back to Two. (SEVEN) And you don’t know which one is Camera One and which is Two, and then there’s the one on the big swinging lever thing that you will later find out is called a jib, and is that Camera Three? Or is that Camera One? (FIVE) And also they’re moving the news segment with Kurt from act three to act five. (THREE) Wait, where do I look? (TWO) Your mic is picking up clothing noise, so use the stick for act one (ONE). And you’re on.
And then it’s a blur of images and sounds—the face of Master P, that Wallflowers remake of that Bowie song, a viewer won a car maybe? In the blink of an eye, it’s ninety minutes later and you’re on the other side. You’re sweating and disoriented and tired somehow, like you’ve just gone on a long road trip through a thunderstorm, and you say: “Again. Let’s do it again.”