Working Stiff (24 page)

In the few days prior to their departure, Lauren and Rob were constantly having conference calls with Ross and Jen Ehrman tweaking, finessing, massaging, and frequently leaving us all wondering if they were high on drugs.

“What I'm about to say comes from a place of love….”

Rob would always preface another step away from our original concept and toward unrestrained physical comedy.

Despite being Ross's production partner on this project, Corin Nelson had been absent throughout the weeks of preproduction due to her recent appointment as the executive producer of the ill-fated
Sharon
Osbourne Show
. Ad hoc ideas flew out of her mouth as quickly as she'd conceived them. If an idea was well received she'd continue to flesh it out on the fly; if it sunk it was immediately discarded, never to be thought about again.

Corin was constantly fluffing my ego and stoking my imagination.

“America is going to want to fuck you,” she'd tell me on a daily basis. “You're going to have your pick. I hope you're ready for what's about to fucking happen for you.”

The first day of shooting was at the Viacom offices in Santa Monica. The premise of the segment was that with reality-based programming being so pervasive, auditioning for reality TV shows had become an American way of life. Concept-wise, it was sort of a stretch, but the idea was a firm favorite of the execs in New York.

In just a few hours, six hundred people had answered an ad Brian Wahlund had posted on Craigslist. The post was an open casting call for a new reality series that MTV was producing and it instructed applicants to send a picture and brief bio.

The idea was that from the moment the hopefuls arrived, they would be pumped up to believe that this particular project would be the biggest thing MTV had ever produced and would make the single successful applicant a household name the world over. A series of cuts would be made and the final six applicants would each be given ten seconds to prove why they should be the successful applicant.

Around a hundred people were shoved into a large greenroom. For many, this was just one stop on a day full of open auditions. I recognized a few faces from back home in the East Village, but my concocted back story was that I'd just moved to LA from merry old England, so I couldn't say anything. Jen Ehrman, Cherry, and Andrew ran around the greenroom taking down particulars of the candidates, and we pretended not to know each other. One hundred was cut to forty, which was cut to twelve, then left only six applicants, the sixth being me.

There was Dave, a clean-cut-looking porn impresario from Orange County; Ebony, a pretty young actress; Dan, a peroxide-blond pretty
boy who managed to be both fratty and fey; Tiffany, a rail-thin Tara Reid–esque party girl; and Beth, a nondescript shy girl.

As the girls all hugged and kissed each other good luck, we were led from the greenroom to a windowless audition room, where Ross asked each of us to behave in strange ways: act like a chicken, be a tree, pretend to be a mugger, and so on, then all interact with each other. With international fame seemingly within reach, everyone took to their assigned roles with conviction. And after two minutes Ross calmed everyone down.

“Okay,” he said. “The head of the network is watching this on a live feed elsewhere in this building. You each have fifteen seconds to look into the camera and explain why you should be the sole subject of MTV's most revolutionary programming to date.”

In truth, Rob and Lauren
were
watching on a live feed.

Ross pointed at Dave.

“Go!”

Dave leapt forward.

“Hey! My name's Dave, I got no tattoos, I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs; I'm the boy next door. Your friggin' next-door neighbor is doing porn, bro. Whad'ya think about that?”

“Cut!”
said Ross. “Beth.”

“Let's see. I'm Beth. Um…people like me. I'm fun and personable. Good to be around…and…um.”

“Cut!
Ebony.”

“Hey, my name is Ebony. I'm a strong, sentient being who is both pishon…wait…. I am passionate and iticolade…sorry, articulate um…and…”

“Cut!
Dan!”

“'Sup, MTV?” Dan suddenly picked up a hitherto undetectable blaccent. “My tag's Dan and da question you gots ta acks yo'self is can you people handle
this
?”

Dan shucked himself out of his tight white T-shirt and flexed his gym-rat body. Ross sadistically let Dan silently flex for about twenty long seconds, leaving him to rack his tiny brain to fill the dead air.
But instead there was the most sphincter-clenching awkward silence as Dan's eyes shot around the room, begging for Ross to yell cut.

“Yeah, baby!” he finally said after half a minute had elapsed.

He kissed his bicep.

“It's a gun show!”

“Okay, that was real nice, Dan, thanks and…cut.”

Embarrassed, Dan shuffled back to his place on the line.

“Okay.” Ross cleared his throat, looked up at me, and skillfully stifled a grin. “Is it Grant or Graham?”

“It's Grant.”

“Australian?”

Ross knew that being erroneously pegged as an Aussie was intensely annoying to me. We both stifled a smirk.

“English.”

“Okay, Grant, show us what you got.”

Jen Ehrman, Ross, Brian Wahlund, Christian, Brett, War-Dog, and the Donger all knew what was about to happen, but did remarkably well to conceal their anticipation.

I could just imagine Rob and Lauren in the adjacent room leaning in closer to the monitor that was showing the live feed.

Ross had told me that this would all be about the reaction of the five other finalists, something we wouldn't be able to easily reproduce, so I'd have to get it right the first time. I wasn't thrilled with the segment, but in theory the reveal was really funny, if a little base.

I began marching on the spot with my elbows and knees locked straight.

“My name is Grant Stoddard,

“I walk about the town,

“Sometimes with my trousers up and sometimes with them
down
!”

On the word “down” I bent over, grabbed the fronts of my tear-away pants, and yanked them off in one deft motion, revealing my naked lower half, save the knotted tube sock I'd tucked my penis and testicles into.

My unwitting costars' jaws dropped as I heard four loud gasps behind me. Their eyes were flitting between Ross and my bare behind.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah!”
I said, transforming the march into a cancan, then a rough approximation of Riverdance, while yelling, “Pick me, pick me, pick me!” the stuffed sock flying hither and dither.

“Cut!”
yelled Ross, holding back laughter. “Okay, well, Grant seems to have upped the ante, but I'm feeling nice, so does anyone want to take another shot at this?”

They didn't.

“I think he just shut down the audition,” said Ebony.

I had.

The next morning we awoke at five thirty to be at a Burbank Catholic school at sunup.

I had been outfitted in a tight tracksuit top, running shoes, over-the-knee tube socks, Bjorn Borg–style sweatbands, and a pair of skintight, lime green, terry-cloth booty shorts that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Minutes before the shoot began, a meeting was called in the school parking lot to discuss whether parading my clearly visible package around in front of fifteen eighth-grade girls was grounds for a lawsuit. Though Rob spent an inordinate amount of time assessing my situation, he decided that I should probably wear underpants, but even when not “commando” I looked as though I was smuggling five servings of fruit about my loins. It seemed that the comedy premise of the show was entirely genital in nature.

The segment started with me running out of a wooded area, vaulting over a creek and into the throng of the ponytailed adolescents.

“Hello, ladies!”
I yelled as I sprinted toward them.

“Hi, Grant!”
they yelled back in well-rehearsed unison.

“Girls,” said one of the two impossibly glammed-up coaches, “let's show Grant what we've been working on for him.”

The girls snapped into formation. A crowd of bemused early-morning onlookers began to assemble on one side of the field.

“Ready? Okay!”
they all shouted.

The girls then proceeded to spell out my name with their pompoms, yelling each letter in time.

“G, G, G, G, R, R, R, R, A, A, A, A, N, N, N, N, T, T, T, T, what does it spell? GRANT! Whooooo!”

The girls put me through my paces, eventually hoisting me up on their dainty shoulders to be the zenith of a pyramid and helped me dismount without injury.

“I'd like to get me some a that!” said one sassy and buxom Lolita to her friend while pointing at my crotch.

Ross and Corin were being fed lines by Rob and Lauren for me to say, finally decimating my concept of a documentary-style travelogue. The situations were now quite skitlike.

“Honey,” said Corin, running over to me while still receiving instruction on her earpiece from Lauren and Rob. “You're a fucking superstar, but we need you to say, ‘Girls, would you like to help me spread cheer around Los Angeles?' but say it more British. Call them ‘Love' or ‘Birds' or some shit like that. Okay, so
way
more British.
Go!”

The idea of “turning up the British” was sort of abhorrent to me, but I'd do my best to humor everyone if it meant the show would stand a better chance of being green-lit for a series.

“So, girls, would you like to help me spread cheer around Los Angeles?”

From the corner of my eye I caught Lauren immediately address Ross and Corin on their earpieces.

“More British!” they both mouthed to me, pointing skyward.

I turned up the British and ended up sounding like Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins
.

“Blimey, loves, what do you say to spreading some cheer around LA?”

“Yes!”
mouthed Ross and Corin, giving enthusiastic thumbs-up signs.

On the ride over to the next location with the cheerleaders, Ross made me write down all of the most ridiculous British slang and turns of phrase, which he wanted to pepper all of my subsequent dialogue with.

There was “knackered,” meaning tired; “bollocks,” meaning bullshit; “blimey” and “crikey” as interchangeable exclamations; “throw a wobbly,” meaning to have a tantrum, and so on and so forth.

“So every time you say one of those words a subtitle will appear on the screen, giving a translation,” said Ross.

“But I would never say
any
of these words.”

“Trust me,” he said. “It'll be hilarious.”

By ten a.m. it was already over ninety degrees in North Hollywood, where we were due to “spread cheer” to a picket line of employees from Von's supermarket. My waxy makeup was beginning to melt and I was becoming increasingly strangulated by my tiny terry-cloth booty shorts. By 2003 the reality TV craze was so pervasive that a crew's prime concern is to not get another reality TV crew in frame. In that one North Hollywood parking lot three other crews, albeit more modest than our thirty-person entourage, were roaming around in hot pursuit of reality.

After terrorizing several dozen Los Angelinos, Andrew, Ross, and I cooled off in Ross and Jordana's swimming pool before shooting the third of the five segments that afternoon. The concept of the “birthday” segment was so formless and inane that even as the cameras started rolling none of us had any idea what on earth we were supposed to do. The brief was that the fifteen-person crew plus five “friends” would appear at several different restaurants and see what we could get for free by telling them that it was my birthday, and then exponentially request more and more menu items on the house. The problem of course is that when a party of six is accompanied by a television crew, waiters are waving their eight-by-tens around and are ready, willing, and able to do anything for a measly bit of camera time. Having no real friends on the West Coast, my group of pals was made up of Jordana's cousin Steve, Ross's friend Amin, Corin, Susan, a friend of Jordana's, and Gabrielle, the girl I'd enlisted to help me in the threesome the week before. With no direction, canned lines, and overly accommodating waitstaff hamming it up for the camera, the segment ended up like a low-wattage version of a
Punk'd
skit and was completely unsalvageable as far as I could tell.

The last day of shooting began at daybreak at a shady-looking truck stop in downtown LA. Toothless crack whores scuttled between the
tractor trailers like roaches from the beam of a flashlight as our crew arrived just after dawn. As I chatted with the truckers, I felt that the segment was much more in line with my idea of the show and hoped it would be apparent to the powers that be at VH1. I didn't even mind Corin's constant coaching to be more British, which in addition to saying “blimey” and “crikey” also involved serving tea and scones to the truckers, who regaled me with tales from the road. It was our interaction that was driving the comedy of this segment, not me in tight shorts. I tried chewing tobacco, played with their CB radios, and even got to drive a big rig the length of the parking lot.

The last segment to shoot was the one Rob and Lauren were most “totally jazzed” about, me dressing up as a woman and trying to pick up guys at a karaoke bar. I spent the afternoon having my legs waxed and being made up at a beauty spa before heading out on the town. How this all figured into the theme of the pilot remained unclear.

After the three-day shoot I flew to JFK and caught a flight to London, where I met up with Brian, Chris, and Fatty. We'd had a European vacation booked for several months. The shooting schedule meant I'd regrettably missed the first leg in Reykjavík, Iceland. From London we flew to Athens then Crete, where Brian's parents had a time-share. We flew back to London, and the four of us spent a couple of days in Corringham, staying at my parents' house. I got to spend a week in New York before heading back to LA to do voice-over work on the pilot. There was no money left in the show's budget to accommodate this, and so I flew out on my own dime and took up residence in Ross and Jordana's spare room and rented a compact car.