Transcript
MTV: Pulling Back the Curtain on Pulling Back the Curtain
March 3, 2001
BROOK GLADSTONE: And I'm Brook Gladstone. The Information Age is meant to describe an epoch -- specifically the present or a little bit in the future --but it could just as easily apply to a stage of life -- specifically people a little younger than you -- unless you are a channel-surfing, message-testing member of the cohort called Generation Y.
BOB GARFIELD:A few years ago, marketers began to send kids the message: You matter. Your tastes matter. Your discretionary income matters. Naturally the kids agreed and sat back as a hundred forms of media competed for their attention. MTV won. recently many MTV shows have taken as their central theme: the other shows on MTV! Mike Pesca entered this endless feedback loop and emerged with this report.
MIKE PESCA: To be a member of Generation Y is to have your every curiosity catered to. It's to know that you can clog your hard drive with information about the walk-on character who flitted across Dawson's consciousness for two episodes.
BRIAN GRADEN: I think now in, in a culture of 200 channels and infinite Internet content what we want to do is deconstruct and understand every little aspect about how something is made famous and proliferated.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden is MTV's president of programming. That job once meant deciding if the 99 Luft Balloons video would go into high rotation. Now a lot of the programming on MTV is shows about other shows on MTV! Take for instance the Video Music Awards. [MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: What the hell was Rage Against the Machine bassist Kim C. doing atop our set at the 2000 Video Music Awards?
MIKE PESCA: The VMAs are more than the biggest night on MTV. Because of repeats they're many, many nights. Tack on another dozen or so nights of reruns of the documentary on the making of the Video Music Awards. Brian Graden explains the making of the first Making of the VMAs.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know it was, it was sort of almost accidental. We were sitting around maybe 3 years ago and, and we were reminiscing about the Video Music Awards that we had loved, and then we realized well these are moments that really happen in culture. To get people excited for this year's show, why don't we go back and remind them how cool the prior shows were? So it sort of just happened as a promotional whim, and then [LAUGHS] when we first aired it, the ratings went through the roof. It was probably quadruple the time period, and it was like oh, my God - we could really mine this because the audience seems to have an insatiable appetite for behind the scenes information.
ANNOUNCER: Now MTV has shown you our best this and hottest that and counted down our hundred greatest other things, but now to celebrate MTV's...
MIKE PESCA: These days, the "M" in MTV stands for "Making of." The Making of the VMAs. The Making of the Movie Awards. A new show called Making the Video. Brian Graden says MTV's viewers identify. Those idiots on spring break -- the cast of The Real World - the guy who won the contest to be a veejay-- Graden thinks every kid is secretly saying -- hey! -- I can do that!
BRIAN GRADEN: If you think about the people who are in the MTV generation now, they were raised on The Real World, on Monica Lewinsky, on O.J. --they were raised on Survivor -- so they're used to the fact that sort of relatively ordinary people can be plucked out of obscurity and suddenly made famous and all the accoutrements of fame are open to them. So I think they're fascinated by that process because they're like oh, my God -- even if I'm not a talented [LAUGHS] singer or dancer or politician, that could be me. And so I think they want the process deconstructed to know how they get access to it.
MIKE PESCA: The low tech way of getting access is showing up in person. That's what dozens of MTV fans -- some with guitars -- do each weekday in an effort to be invited on to Total Request Live -- MTV's popular after school show based in Times Square. [MUSIC] [CROWD OF KIDS SHOUTING] The kids' love to shout from the sidewalks below served as the perfect focus group of heavy MTV viewers. John McSweeney told me that all the "Making of" documentaries do creep into his mind when he's watching the source material.
JOHN McSWEENEY:If I think something in the Video Music Awards was cool or something was like, you know, something like weird went on -- yeah! Then you look forward to seeing it. But otherwise like it's something fun to watch.
MIKE PESCA: Yeah, just the thing. Now you were nodding your head - do you - when you watch the awards you kind of know that there'll be the special on it eventually? MAN: Yeah, anything I want to know I'm sure that MTV would put it on and--
MIKE PESCA: [LAUGHS] Right. They're not going to deprive you of information about-- [LAUGHTER] MAN: Yeah. Yeah. MAN: [LAUGHS] Exactly. MAN: [MOCK HORROR] Oh no!!!
MIKE PESCA: At, at a certain point watching these specials do you say you know enough already - I don't care that much about MTV? MAN: Well-- I, I care a lot about MTV. Like him --whenever I'm home, I, I watch it. That's pretty much it. So.
MIKE PESCA: So when you watch the shows about the shows on MTV, have you ever said to yourself it's all just a big commercial for MTV? MAN: Definitely not. It -- there are a lot of great shows on it. I mean-- it's one of the greatest channels out there, but it's - it's not a big commercial.
MIKE PESCA: Brian Graden sees his audience as possessing a level of sophistication unfathomable to anyone who's ever had to get up to change the channel.
BRIAN GRADEN: They can know, for example, a group like the Back Street Boys was quote/unquote "manufactured." Right? Put together down in Florida -- there are a lot of great producers [that are ?] behind -- they can learn all that stuff from behind-the-scenes information. They can sort of know that there's a level of artifice to it, because it's been deconstructed for them in a documentary and at the same time they're like, yeah, I know all that but I'm still going to kind of enjoy the music and buy into the fantasy. I think they get it on both levels.
MIKE PESCA: So many shows about so many shows has another effect. It trains the viewers to become perfect characters for other MTV shows. Take MTV's attempt at totally transparent programming: The Real World. Not only does MTV ask real people to live in front of a camera -- they have to try out in front of a camera so that the losers can be humiliated by other real people on camera! It's The Real World Casting Special. Mike, whose dream it is to be on The Real World, has been paying close attention.
MIKE: It's showing me not-- what not to do, because you know people get on there and they're like stripping naked - they're running around naked and the way I see it they're looking for people that are real. You have to be real. You can't go do-- any of these like crazy stunts and stuff like that, cause that's not you -you're not being real.
MIKE PESCA: A few years ago MTV tried to put viewer submissions on the air in a program called You Wrote it - You Watch It. It flopped. But now Graden says the talent pool might be up to the challenge.
BRIAN GRADEN: You know by sheer coincidence we're actually doing a pilot called My Life Is a Movie where we have asked our ordinary viewers, you know, ages 19 or whatever, to send us stories, and you'll be - you'll just be so amazed -- the stories [LAUGHS] are completely literate to how they expect and know a script will, you know, break down, and-- so we are pursuing that idea today, even though it didn't work 5 or 10 years ago.
MIKE PESCA: From audience to artists in 5 to 10 years. Even if only a tiny fraction of MTV's viewers ever become on-screen or off-screen "talent," MTV will be able to stock its shelves with programming. The training videos are being delivered via cable lines into the homes of America 24 hours a day. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.