Advice From Dirk Diggler's Mom

Did you see the movie Boogie Nights?  If you did, you saw Joanna Gleason as the mother to Mark Wahlberg's very popular character.  If not for advice from Joanna Gleason, I would not have had a New York City local TV morning news show career in the 1990s.  Seriously.  You've seen her in two of Woody Allen's best films:  Hannah and Her Sisters (the wife in the sperm donor request scene) and Crimes and Misdemeanors as the romantically disillusioned wife opposite Allen.  It was reported this week that Disney tapped Rob Marshall (Chicago) to direct a big screen version of Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods.  A musical based on several children's storybook tales and the lessons they teach, Joanna Gleason played the Baker's Wife and won a Tony Award for her glowing performance.  The Baker's Wife seems content but she wants more than her meager life.  She frustrated.  For one thing, she's not had "a bun in the oven."  She's half of a childless couple.

In Boogie Nights, she's the caustic and emotionally castrating wife and mother to the very well-hung young man who'll run away from home and become the porn superstar known as "Dirk Diggler."

In between that Broadway show and Boogie Nights, I got to meet Joanna through a mutual friend.  A terrific meeting it was.  The friend invited me to a casual Saturday brunch at Joanna's place.  Let me tell you -- the world would be a better place if Joanna Gleason wrote a cookbook.  As terrific as she is onstage and onscreen, she's just as terrific in the kitchen.  I'd seen her 1988 musical comedy Into The Woods  performance. I was a fan before that, thanks to my I Love My Wife original cast album.  Come to find out, she'd watched my talk show on VH1.  Joanna knows the business of "the business."  She was not surprised to hear that I didn't have an agent even though I had my own network talk show.  In the early 1980s, when I started my TV career, if you saw a Black guy on a news or TV magazine show, he was usually doing sports.  I was doing film reviews.  I was on the syndicated show, PM Magazine, the only African-American doing celebrity interviews that aired nationally.  I talked to new actors Meryl Streep (Sophie's Choice), Jessica Lange (Tootsie) and Ben Kingsley (Gandhi).  That national exposure helped me get from the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee to WPIX TV in Manhattan and, a couple of years after that, on VH1.  This was all done without the benefit of a broadcast agent.  Why?  "I wouldn't know what to do with you" is what most agents said when they politely rejected me for representation.  The rejection was really rooted in what George Lucas recently talked to Jon Stewart about on The Daily Show -- I was different coupled with the fact that minorities are not often seen as "marketable" to mainstream audiences.  Lucas was blunt about the barriers he faced producing and promoting his true story of African-American World War II heroes. Red Tails is the name of his movie.  This is why stars like Whoopi Goldberg could make Oscar history with hit movies like The Color Purple and Ghost and then not have any film offers.  Me?  I got really good reviews from TV Guide, People Magazine and The New York Times for my VH1 talk show work.  Still couldn't hook a broadcast agent.  One New York agent, a truly nice man named Conrad Shadlen, said "If you did weather, I could get you a job in a heartbeat." This was in 1991 after my VH1 contract expired.  I didn't do weather.  I'd done half-hour network interviews of Norman Mailer, Kirk Douglas, Paul McCartney, Carlos Santana, Marlo Thomas, Jodie Foster, Michael Caine and Meryl Streep ( for A Cry in the Dark) and Mel Blanc...but I'd never done weather.  By that time, Black men on network TV were doing sports and weather.  I was still different.

Joanna invited me to take her workshop class.  She was one of the best teachers I ever had in my life.  She was accessible, helpful, honest, enlightening, direct.  I loved her class.  Then I got a call one day from a guy I'd met during my VH1 years.  I don't know if you remember The Pat Sajak Show, but I was a semi-regular on his CBS late night talk show.  I'd go on, engage in light, goofy banter with Pat and promote VH1.  One of Pat's former staffers was working on new project.  A game show.  "If you were going to be in L.A., I could get you into the auditions. I think you'd be perfect for this."  Well, I was in New York, getting some commercial work and looking for a new full-time TV gig. I had a big interest in being a game show host, but this game show, a spin-off of a night time vehicle called Studs, sounded kind o' cheesy.  Not exactly a Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune or Let's Make A Deal hosted by Joanna's dad, Monty Hall.  I planned to return his message on my answering machine with a polite "No, thank you" but I had a hunch to pass it by Joanna first.  I called her.

"Don't ever turn down the chance to get work if you don't already have a lot of work at the moment," she said.  I brought up the high cheese factor of the game show.  She replied, "You're not always going to get quality projects offered to you.  But you do the best you can.  Remember, work leads to other work."  She also reminded me of the power of networking.  She'd gotten some film roles not because agents submitted her but because she went out and connected with folks, charmed them and let them know how to cast her.  I had that one plane ticket -- from redeemed frequent flyer mileage -- and used it to fly out to Los Angeles and audition.  It was a great audition.  I knew my work was really good.  I was focused, I was funny, I took direction really well.  I made the writers laugh.  When the associate producer who got me into the audition told me how good I was, I felt I had a chance.  But I didn't get the job.

"Take a shower, put on some nice clothes and have someone take you out for a bite to eat. Put it behind you and move on."  That was Joanna's answer to the news that I didn't get the job. Then she told me of similar things to happened to her.  In between my TV & radio commercial bookings, my other job was behind a video rental store counter in the Chelsea section of downtown Manhattan.  Don't laugh.  I love films and I loved working in the independent video store.  Late one morning, I was on my way to Video Blitz when the phone rang.  It was the executive producer of the game show in L.A.  The host they'd hired had to pull out due to medical reasons.  The episodes he'd taped had to be scrapped and they had to start over.  The job was mine, if I wanted it.  Could I be on a red-eye flight that night?  Yes, I could!

It was a month-long summer replacement late night game show called Bedroom Buddies.  I kid you not.  It was a bit like The Newlywed Game only not as sophisticated.  In New York, it aired on WNYW, the local Fox station.  TV critics, not surprisingly, hated the show. I think one review began "Not since Chernobyl..."  But a few of them liked me.  Anyway, the money was good and helped me pay off some bills.  In August, I got a local call to meet about a new project.  The call came from WNBC.  Executives were developing a new program to be called Weekend Today in New York.  There was no live weekend local morning news program on a network affiliate in New York City.  WNBC was launching one in September 1992.  A producer felt I'd make a good entertainment & lifestyles contributor on it.  She'd seen me on the game show and found out that I was still living in town.  I had no agent.  But I had face time hosting a national show.  It was a gig I wouldn't have booked had it not been for advice from the woman who played Dirk Diggler's mother.  Joanna Gleason.  Just as she'd said, "Remember, work leads to other work."  I was a member of the original Weekend Today in New York morning team when it premiered.  I quit the show in January 1995 and accepted an offer for more airtime -- and during the week -- on WNYW's Good Day New York.  Again, no agent.  Executives saw me on WNBC.  I worked there until 1999.  ABC News network movie critic opportunities followed.

On a personal note, the WNBC job helped me take care of my partner when he was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.  He was diagnosed four months after the premiere of Weekend Today in New York.  He passed away in June 1994.  The WNBC and the WNYW employment helped me pay off the mortgage on my mother's house.  It also provided me some pretty good stuff to put on my demo reels and resumé.  Again, not thanks to a broadcast agent.  Thanks to Joanna Gleason.  I am still grateful for her advice, honesty, humor...and food.  Besides being one fabulous actress and singer, she's a mensch.  She's living proof that you don't have to return to the zip code of your childhood in order to "give back to the community."  Her community is the people in her life.