Hot Mic! by Jamie Collins

Author:Jamie Collins
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: Jamie Collins
Published: 2018-12-03T23:18:47+00:00

Chapter 32

2006

The week after sealing the deal, Hannah and Marney met with the network executives for lunch at The Palm to celebrate the signing on of Hannah with Venture Media Network. Allison brought along Jon Novotny, who would be Hannah’s producer—if he met with her approval. He was a twenty-something hot shot from Lansing, Michigan, who had done wonders for his career by sleeping with Allison back in 1996, when she was still bedding boys whose careers she could advance in exchange for sexual favors. She was then-station manager of WDTR in Detroit, and he was a hopeful graduate looking for a break. He got one, all right. Allison hired him on the board and as an assistant to the producer of the Gregg & Gary Romus Show, and within two years’ time, was solely producing Gregg and Gary’s irreverent garbage hate-fest on Detroit’s “Big Thirty-Nine.”

When the show went syndicate, Novotny was sent out west to Phoenix with the incorrigible Gregg and Gary team, whose propensity for trash talk and wild stunt-radio antics took the industry by storm. They were overnight sensations among males twenty-five to fifty-four years old, eventually fouling the airwaves on twenty-seven stations from Hollywood to Hometown USA with their special brand of “blue humor.” As it turned out, the Romuses were not actually brothers at all—far from it. They were fraternity brothers from the out East who maintained the farce of their being siblings into their act.

Contractual legalities and, eventually a bad cocaine habit shared by both resulted in a quick and devastating decline of the show’s popularity, which was ultimately dropped in its second year in syndication.

Novotny then returned to the Midwest with resume in hand, a little older, far more experienced, and looking for an entirely different kind of show to produce. A few well-placed references brought him, once again, across the desk from Allison Michaels, who was then program director of WRCK, a classic rock format in Cincinnati. She had a morning show badly in need of creative witch doctoring. Jon saw the challenge for what it was—a job no one else wanted to take—but hungry and determined, he agreed to produce the segments.

The host was a twenty-two-year-old former rock musician, turned disc jockey who called himself Spit. Further, and more pointedly, he was the son of none other than veteran shock-jock and Howard Stern clone, Jesse J. James out of L.A.

Jon was desperate. Spit actually had a knack for the medium and managed to turn out some very brilliant content every now and then, which could eventually contribute to the rising success of the ailing station. Allison had since become a self-proclaimed lesbian with a pretense for wearing men’s boxers underneath her power suits. She had gained a good thirty pounds, ditched make-up altogether, and wore a men’s wristwatch. It was a look that worked well for her and often garnered respect from a staff that both feared and loved to hate her.

But what did he care? He didn’t need to pork ugly women anymore to score a decent job.

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