Yesterday,
this item on Gawker, a rumor that many employees of the for-chicks
Oxygen network were getting canned, reminded me of the oh-so-special time in my life that I pitched Oxygen a TV show. In late 2002, not all that long after I launched Reverse Cowgirl 1.0, I was approached by a producer at MTV Networks. Blogs were the new hot thing, and various members of the mainstream media community were scouring the not-as-big blogosphere for talent. At the time, I'd done a considerable amount of TV, and I was a bit soured on it. Saying the word "penis" a half a dozen times on one episode of "Politically Incorrect" had left me wondering exactly what I was doing. In any case, I bit, and the making of a TV pilot, if that's what one could call it, ensued. The concept--well, the concept was vague. I suppose it was an attempt to turn the Reverse Cowgirl into a TV show, whatever that meant. A name for the show, "Oh, Susannah!", was created by a Reverse Cowgirl reader. Back then, I was all about transparency. (Now, I'm just transparent.) Some typing was done and some phone meetings were held, and, as I recall, we hashed out something that approximated a script. The budget for the pilot was nonexistent, for reasons that, I think, had to do with a higher ranking producer's (prescient) reticence. Eventually, it was time to produce the pilot, and the producer flew out to LA and met me and another producer friend of mine I'd lured into participating at a hip hotel on the West side that I would later revisit while sitting on my couch watching an episode of "Project Runway" in which Jay made a dress for Heidi Klum that she subsequently rejected. (Clearly, this is a hotel where dreams are dashed.) In any case, I believe we shot the entire pilot in 48 hours. It consisted of a series of short segments, and "segments" would be overstating it, in which I went and hung around with people who had sex-related jobs and stood there watching them do their thing, squawking pseudo-sassy questions from the sidelines, or, cringe-worthingly, "got involved." (
Shudder.) Our subjects included some
burlesque dancers, one of whom, I believe, refused to take off her clothes; a
famous pimp, whose apartment featured a clear plastic toilet seat that had coins embedded in it; and a
pornographer in the Valley who showed us Polaroids of a girl doing something with a dog. The highlight of the entire enterprise was when we met up with a huge-breasted woman at the
Derby, where she sang the show's theme song, "Oh, Susannah," while she played the piano with her boobs. Finally, the shoot was done, and the producer went back to New York, where he fashioned the footage into some sort of completed state for the purposes of pitching. At that point, I flew to New York. There, the producer and I hit the streets and got in elevators and sat down in meeting rooms and pitched the show. The first stop, I believe, was Oxygen. In the office of
Geraldine Laybourne, we sat and watched the pilot. It was like watching a porn movie with your mother. Watching myself on a video monitor dance around like a white girl doing reverse minstrel, as I donned the money-green coat and rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses of a pimp while he called me "Princess" and offered to "turn me out," wondering what Laybourne, who was sitting a few feet away, was thinking, was not what I would call a "good time." It was more like a 21st century gonzo-porn version of "the horror, the horror." Needless to say, Geraldine passed. So did Comedy Central. As did
Brian Graden. Over the years, I've found, when it comes to selling sex, selling out is harder than you'd think.
