If anybody was looking for a sign that MTV is growing respectable as its teeth lengthen, it was available here over the weekend.
The music video network, whose initials used to stand for Miscreancy, Trouble and Vandalism, came to this conservative Midwestern hamlet and was welcomed like a traveling crafts fair.
The president of Vincennes University marched in an MTV welcoming parade. City council members stood in the cold much of the day Saturday to watch the taping of a hip-shaking dance show called “The Grind” and a dating show that celebrates teen sexuality called “Singled Out.” The heavy metal band White Zombie played songs including “Welcome to Planet MF” and “Electric Head, Part 2 (The Ecstasy)” in an Eberwine Avenue back yard at hearing-impairing volume levels.
And standing at key points on the perimeter, helping to make sure this portion of the campaign to corrupt America’s youth came off without a hitch, were about 40 of Vincennes’ finest.
On hand to supply the obligatory quote about cartography was Duane Chattin, media relations director for the university and a city council member. “Any time you have a chance for a small town to be seen by 60 million people,” he said, “it puts us on the map.”
The town of 19,600, which existing maps actually locate along the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana, did everything short of handing the keys to the city to Beavis and Butt-head.
The culture mash grew out of another one of MTV’s attention-grabbing contests, which has seen the network do everything from give away rocker Jon Bon Jovi’s childhood home to send viewers to a German castle for Thanksgiving dinner with Aerosmith. In the latest, “MTV Invades Your Space,” the winner would get $25,000 and see the title’s threat carried out.
Thanks to a 65-cent phone call made to the 900 number one video-watching night, Brandon Collins, a 20-year-old, second-year V.U. student from Logansport, became the one among 50,000 entrants whose home would be descended upon by a crew of hipsters from planet New York for a day of television, airing Friday.
(And if you’ve always wondered what the coolest dancers in an Indiana town would look like bopping in a street alongside professionals from New York on a thirtysomething-degree day at 9:30 in the morning, tune in “The Grind” at 3 p.m.)
Collins, an amiable Sigma Pi brother and sports medicine major, lives with two roommates at 23 East Eberwine, in a one-story, white frame, off-campus house decorated in a style a fraternity brother characterized as “poor college student.”
The $165-per-month home shimmers with the warm glow of plywood. Mustard-yellow kitchen appliances testify to the durability of 1970s craftsmanship. And a hodgepodge of chairs and couches, some covered in velour, speak favorably of the recycling instincts of Brandon and roommates Phil Tolbert and Derek Fisher.
In other words, Metropolitan Home would not be interested. But Music Television’s stylists, having no choice in the matter, were. Arriving in town well in advance of Saturday’s taping, they affixed a giant MTV sign to the roof, a blue covering to the chimney and stages to the front and back of the three-bedroom structure.
Inside, they plastered the walls of Phil’s room with Cindy Crawford posters and Brandon’s with framed portraits of MTV’s female veejays. They put a portable hot tub, Softub model, in the kitchen.
But before any of this could happen, of course, the landlord had to be notified.
In addition to collecting Brandon’s rent checks, Rick Lang, 42, is a maintenance manager at the Southwest Indiana Regional Youth Village and owns a party store in town.
When roommate Phil approached Lang’s wife, Tana, at her job in the university bookstore, “They told her they needed to ask a big favor,” Lang said.
“Oh, no. What’s that?” Tana responded.
After talking with MTV representatives, who promised to return the house to normal before leaving and to buy them a new roof if it began to leak later on, the Langs were persuaded to let the show go on.
Their daughters, ages 21 and 17, helped put the event in cultural context. To their son, age 13, Lang said, “Son, you’ve got the coolest dad in town.”
Making it all work
Given that the plans were for a crew of 100 to arrive and a city block to be shut down, MTV also had to clear things with local officials, a task that was reportedly accomplished without trouble.
It wasn’t as if the town has had no experience with MTV types, said Mike Nardine, a V.U. police officer the network was paying $10 an hour to work security Saturday.
“John Cougar Mellencamp, he went here. Did you know that?” Nardine said. “He started out in broadcasting at Vincennes before he went on to Indiana University. He was actually arrested in this town. Minor consuming, I believe.”
“Red Skelton,” Nardine added. “He’s our famous person.”
A young man who was to be married at 2 p.m. Saturday, the day of the taping, in a church a couple of blocks from Brandon’s house read about the planned activity and grew concerned that, say, “Here Comes the Bride” might be drowned out by the strains of a more aggressive White Zombie number.
He called town officials, who relayed his fears to MTV. MTV rearranged its shooting schedule so the street would be quiet during the wedding hour.
Brandon, meanwhile, who had previously been best known on the campus as a member of the cheerleading squad, was adjusting to celebrity.
He and his roommates, keeping a vow they had made when Phil dialed the contest number three successive times to enter all three names a few Thursdays ago, planned to split the $25,000. Only Brandon had interesting plans for his share: a motorcycle.
(Landlord Lang also had plans. “All three prepaid their first semester’s rent,” he said. “Now they can afford to prepay second semester, too.”)
Brandon will be featured in a number of on-camera bits: chatting with the veejays, enacting a fictionalized version of the winning moment, being the male contestant who picks a woman to date from among 50 clamoring for his attention in “Singled Out.”
His girlfriend didn’t like the idea of his going on national TV to win a date with someone else, he said, “but I said, `Live with it.’ “
It’s MTV’s show
Leading a tour through his house, he pointed out the changes MTV had wrought. “The video game, I don’t know if it works or not,” he said. “The Elvis thing is theirs.”
Whispering, he said, “This is my room.” And that lump asleep atop the bedclothes? “That’s one of the `Grind’ dancers.”
“People have said I’ll probably get fan mail,” he added.
MTV personalities, meanwhile, tried to adjust to Indiana. Veejay Idalis–just Idalis–said she tried line dancing at the bar in the hotel the New Yorkers inhabited. Veejay Kennedy–just Kennedy–recommended the catfish at the hotel restaurant. Jenny McCarthy, a native Chicagoan and the co-host of “Singled Out,” said, “I can relate to these people better than the New York people can.”
The “Singled Out” writers tried to include some local color in the game. On a makeshift set in Brandon’s front yard, contestants had to do the “Bobby Knight chair throw.” At another point they were asked, “Better Hoosier: Dan Quayle or Orville Redenbacher?” And the fellow student Brandon won a date with was actually named Marian Andretti, as if in honor of the Indianapolis 500 (she’s not related, she said).
“They’ve been very polite. No bad language,” said one of Brandon’s neighbors, 66-year-old Beulah Carie.
“I didn’t want it to come,” said her husband, Harold. “I figured they’d be parking cars in the yard, have a lot of loud music, have a lot of drugs. None of that.”
That’s because, as Idalis said, “It looks like a wild party on TV, but we professionally make it look like that.”
So when you see music video introductions taped from what seems to be a party scene in Brandon’s kitchen Friday, what you’re actually seeing is a bunch of people who only started whooping it up when the cameras went on. Then they stopped as, say, veejay Simon Rex fouled up his lines. And started again.
Look closely in that scene. You’ll see Brandon and Phil finger painting with chocolate pudding, a group of female Vincennes students in bikinis in the hot tub, and the landlord, his 13-year-old son alongside him, hamming it up in a straitjacket.
“These people,” Idalis said, “are our real demographic.”
“Maybe we can get dates now,” said Phil.
