Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction by Jake Halpern

Author:Jake Halpern [Halpern, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-01-02T14:00:00+00:00

One spring evening Dean Johnson invited me to his house for dinner and to watch the videotape of The Vicki Lawrence Show that had first brought him to L.A. The tape had been in storage for the past decade and he had not seen it since that fateful night in September of 1994. "It should be interesting," he said. "I'm kind of curious to rewatch it after all these years."

Johnson lived in a narrow townhouse on a sleepy back street of Studio City. His place was sparsely furnished with cream-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, two black cloth couches, and a glass coffee table strewn with a few copies of Entertainment Weekly. Johnson brought out a plate of cheese-covered bread from the kitchen. "Would you like some bruschetta?" he asked, taking special care to pronounce "bruschetta" with a hard "k." "That's the way I was trained to pronounce it when I worked as a bartender at Olive Garden."

With our bruschetta in hand, we sat on the living-room couch. For the next thirty minutes or so we watched a grainy copy of the now defunct Vicki Lawrence Show, until Johnson reached for the remote control and turned off the TV. "Looking back, it seems a little silly," he said with a sigh. "Part of me wonders, What was I thinking? The show seems cheesy. It's like watching an old rerun and thinking it's not quite as funny as I remembered it. And it makes me wonder where these assistants are now. As far as I know, none of them are still assistants. I guess…" He stopped himself and then began again. "I guess I'm not exactly sure what being a celebrity personal assistant prepares you for. Writers' assistants want to be writers. Assistant directors hope to become directors. If you have a recurring role on a UPN sitcom, you hope you'll get a recurring role in a primetime series. But what does being a celebrity personal assistant do for you?"

He went on to explain that he was currently trying to break in to moviemaking. So far he'd had some encouraging success. His boss, Tiffani Thiessen, had helped him get financing for a short film called Just Pray, which he had written and she would direct. They were planning to start production by early summer. He hoped this might pave the way to a new, more creative professional life. But in the meantime he was still taking care of her dry cleaning and managing her groundskeepers. "Tiffani has been great to me," he said. "But she is the exception. In general, I suppose if you are a celebrity, you don't really want to give your personal assistant a job as an associate producer in your new show. Then you'd have to hire someone else to run your life—and they might not get everything just right."

When I asked how much longer he envisioned himself working as an assistant, Johnson hesitated. "There are times when I probably thought I'd be doing this forever," he replied. "But a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.