Beyond Vaudeville with Rich Brown
interview by Jaime Suicide
No one in network TV can match his eye for the eccentric and truly whacked out. Rich Brown, in character as Frank Hope, hosted the Manhattan cable access talk show Beyond Vaudeville. It aired from 1986-1996 until MTV picked it up for one year. Showcasing eccentrics and celebrities, the wide array of guests included Suzanne Muldowney AKA “Underdog Lady”, Tiny Tim, Fred Willard, Singing Gong Show Queen of Long Island Irene, members of the Klingon League of Assault Warriors, Shirley Jones and lots more!
Rich Brown has since relocated to Los Angeles, where he has worked as producer for The Daily Show, Fear Factor, Surreal Life, Distraction and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Occasionally he hosts a live talk and variety show with videos from his vast collection and special in-person guest stars at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Hollywood.
Jaime: Where are you from?
Rich Brown: I am from back east, originally. I grew up on Long Island, in a small town that is right next to a bigger town that a lot of famous people are from. Massapequa is the bigger town. That’s the home of the Baldwin brothers and Joey Buttafuoco and countless other luminaries. I grew up in Seaford and ended up moving into the city and then eventually out here to LA.
J: As Frank Hope, you were the host of the talk show Beyond Vaudeville that was on Manhattan cable access. When was it first aired and when was the last show?
RB: The first one was in ’86, actually.
J: That is my favorite year!
RB: I had been producing these shows at NYU and it kind of grew out of those. It was originally a stage show and then it changed into the TV show in ’86. It went for at least ten years. It must have been around ’96 or ’97 and then we stopped it when we brought it over to MTV.
J: That’s when it became Oddville. How long did that air?
RB: We did sixty-six episodes. It aired for about a year. It was on weeknights at 7pm and 11pm. The main slot was the 11pm slot.
J: How much of Frank Hope’s characteristics were a put-on?
RB: A lot of the questions Frank asked were questions that I really had on my mind. I think that the more I did the show and the more I did that character, the closer it came to me. All of the people we had as guests on the show were people that Frank liked, but they were also people that I liked, and the only place we parted ways was in the science-fiction area. Frank was a much bigger science-fiction fan than I am.
J: Speaking of which, do you remember that one episode where at the end you said, What do you have to say about today’s show, David? And he says, A lotta geeks. Or something like that? It was the show with the Klingons.
RB: Was that the Klingon League of Assault Warriors?
J: Yeah. Where did you find those people?
RB: I used to go to all of the Creation Conventions, which were these big sci-fi gatherings at some smelly old hotels in New York. I really wasn’t interested in science fiction but was just kind of fascinated by the fans. I would just go and walk up and down the crowded aisles and find people that I thought looked interesting, strike up a conversation with them, and then ask them if they’d like to be on TV, and in most cases they were excited about the idea of going on TV. They didn’t always have talents and they’d want to know what they’d come on and talk about. And I’d ask them what they were into. If somebody said Doctor Who, then they’d come on as a Doctor Who expert. The Klingon League of Assault Warriors actually worked at the conventions as security. They would dress in their garb and very seriously take their role as guards. It was kind of hard to take them seriously as guards, but they considered themselves to be very good guards.
J: Whoa. That’s really funny! So they were in character the whole time.
RB: Yeah. They would not have to pay to go to the conventions because they were acting as security. It was kind of like the Hells Angels at the Rolling Stones concert, where they were just brought on board because they seemed to fit the bill.
J: They were intimidating enough, eh?
RB: I guess the sci-fi fans would see a tough guy with a rubber bump on his forehead as intimidating. They would work on the doors and make sure that no one was sneaking into the conventions.
J: In the beginning of the same episode we were just talking about, the one with KLAW, Ron Held started to host the show since you were running late. When you showed up, you went behind David to get to the desk and that wall thingy fell on him and he freaked out on you. How much of that did you know about before airing?
RB: David was unpredictable. He would always tell us, “I can’t be responsible for what happens when I’m on this show.” When he would punch the puppets or push me, he would be very serious about it.
J: Like he was possessed.
RB: He was very forceful. One time he threw a piñata at a guest’s head. There was no telling David what to do.
J: That’s amazing! I always wondered how much of the show was adlib and how much was rehearsed.
RB: I always liked the idea of keeping it as unpredictable as possible. One of the joys of working in public-access TV is that you don’t have to have everything worked out to the minute and you don’t have to worry if the set is falling down during a show or if one guest goes on too long or if one guest is too short. You just go with it and somehow it just all seems to work. One of the things I have always enjoyed about public-access TV is the unpredictable nature of it. To me that’s exciting TV because you never know for sure what is coming up. It’s a lot less predictable than commercial TV.
J: And a hell of a lot funnier, too!
RB: Yeah. I’ve kind of OD’d on public access because after Oddville I was at the Daily Show for two years and I was presenting a segment called Public Excess and it was public-access clips from my collection, hours and hours of stuff that I taped off Manhattan cable, where we had four channels of public access TV. I would just introduce these clips, kind of like a Talk Soup of the public-access world. And after watching so many hours of public access, I felt like the character in A Clockwork Orange, when they peel his eyes back and force him to watch porn for hours, to the point where he just can’t take it anymore. I kind of got that feeling with public access after a while, but I was consuming way more than any person should.
J: On the Beyond Vaudeville show, there was an episode where you told Fred Willard that you and the Beyond Vaudeville crew decided to do the show after meeting people like Suzanne Muldowney, AKA “Underdog Lady,” at comic-book conventions. What else inspired you to do the show?
RB: I always found myself attracted to offbeat performers. In high school when a lot of kids were going to the coliseum to see that latest band, I was going to Holiday Inn lounges’ open-mike nights. The big inspiration for me was going to Roy Radin’s Vaudeville. Roy Radin was this producer who did an old-fashioned traveling vaudeville show. It would just go by bus from state to state. I went to see one of his shows on Long Island. It was probably around ’81, I think. Tiny Tim was in it, Jan Murray the comic, kiddie show has-been Pinky Lee, the Harmonica Rascals, a daredevil named Satani Demon—just a bizarre mix of people. It had John Carradine, the old actor, reading Edgar Allan Poe poems. He then had to introduce the next act, which was Zippy the Chimp, and the Chimp just goes across the stage on rollerskates. It wasn’t too well-received by the audience I was sitting in, but it just really spoke to me. This whole idea of variety and acts that might not have the broadest appeal really seemed to appeal to me. Roy Radin, unfortunately, eventually was killed in the famous Cotton Club murders. So we no longer have him to produce those shows. It was a real inspiration for me, and I started putting on shows at NYU. I was a student there and was rounding up people that I had known from the talent shows on Long Island. People like “Irene the Gong Show Queen” she called herself. She was a woman in her sixties who had big blonde hair and would sing “Good Ship Lollipop” and these sort of naughty songs, like “I’m Your Mailman”—I’ll lift your knockers and ring your bell and you’ll think I am swell, I’m your mailman! I can come in any kind of weather, just because my bag is made of leather. I don’t mess with keys or locks, I just slip it in your box, I’m your mailman! And then mixing it with all of the bizarre eccentrics I was meeting in New York City on the streets, I would always have my eye out for unusual people and they’d be in line at the supermarket, hanging out at a street festival or something, and just talking up these people and convincing them to come perform, whether they thought they had any talent or not. There was one guy, Mr. Feldman, who was this kooky old guy that I would see on the streets of New York and I presented him as a stand-up philosopher. It wasn’t something he ever saw for himself but the audience seemed to respond to it. It was just this kind of interest in these weird people that was building and became a way for me to indulge myself.
J: Who came up with the idea of Joey the Monkey?
RB: Joey the Monkey was a friend of mine, John Walsh, who had a monkey puppet that he was walking around with, it was a little hand puppet. It had a little hat on him and a big grin. When I was putting the Beyond Vaudeville TV show together, I was hoping to involve John in some way and we thought about that monkey puppet and John offered to become a life-sized Joey the Monkey and start dancing. I thought he did a very good job. His mask was kind of eerie-looking, but there was always a certain amount of levity to Joey. He and David would get into some really serious slapping and shoving. Joey probably took more hits from David than anybody.
J: Do you remember the episode with long-time New York news anchor Sue Simmons? Her face, when David and Joey were fighting, was so hilarious!
RB: Well, it was scary. They were both over six feet tall and those studios were pretty cramped and you really got the feeling sitting there that furniture was going to start flying. That was pretty genuine fear you were seeing on her face I think.
J: Do you know what the Underdog Lady is currently doing?
RB: You know, it is interesting you asked. There are some guys working on a documentary about her and they interviewed me earlier today for it. They have been working on it for at least seven years I think and have accumulated lots of footage of her. She is still living in New Jersey and still trying to correct the image of Underdog. She felt that the character should have been more meritorious—that’s her word—and she was not comfortable with the Underdog that was created by its creators. She felt that when Underdog was Shoeshine Boy, he was too wimpy. She’s been trying for these many years to correct that image. I’ve known her since around 1986, around the time that I started the show, and she was as steadfast in her goals then as she is now. God bless her, she’s still doing her best to change the country’s image of who Underdog is.
J: Did you see her on Howard Stern when she offered them an orange and no one would take it?
RB: Yeah. I think that might have been Stern’s last Channel 9 show, the last WOR show. She felt very burned by the experience with Howard Stern. She referred to him on my show as the King Midas of Smut. It got so bad that you couldn’t refer to him by name in front of her. She insisted that he just be referred to as Mr. X.
J: You were a producer for Fear Factor for a while. Wasn’t one of your jobs to come up with disgusting stuff to eat?
RB: Yeah. I moved out here to LA and got a job with Fear Factor and was hired to produce the gross stunts. The gross stunts were designed to be this inexpensive segment that would make it possible to pay for the big stunts at the beginning and end of the show because they required so much rigging and stuntmen and cameras. So they kind of left me alone in the corner, you know, [saying] “do something with this.” So I started talking to meat purveyors and getting some sheep eyeballs and cow eyeballs and started cooking them and testing them and finding out what could be eaten and how do you cook them in a way that can be eaten and testing them to see if they really were going to be challenging for people.
J: Did you eat them yourself?
RB: Yeah.
J: Oh my God!
RB: [Laughs] I drew the line at the live creatures. I didn’t want to eat that stuff and there was always someone in the office willing to test them. But any of the other items, yeah I did eat them because I wanted to kind of make sure that they really were disgusting and that you could get through them. Actually a lot of those organ meats are really tough and the secret to a lot of it, I discovered, was pressure cooking, which enabled you to cook the food which would make it safe to eat but it would maintain as much of its original look as possible and break down the texture a little bit so you could actually eat this stuff. That really came in handy with deer penis, which is really impossible to eat unless you pressure-cook it.
J: [Laughs] Oh, sick!
RB: It’s true of, I think, the bull penis as well and the elk penis.
J: [Laughing hysterically] How can you say that without laughing your ass off?
RB: [Laughs] After a while it just becomes [Laughs again] very commonplace.
J: Did you ever get sick?
RB: No. Nope. Never got sick. Sometimes the thought of it would make me feel a little queasy, but I never really got sick. The worst thing by far that I ever tried there was cow bile, which is sold in ethnic supermarkets out here in Los Angeles. Filipinos use a dash of it in salad dressing to kind of give it some pep. It is awful. It’s green and it smells horrible. We eventually used it on the show where the contestants would do shots of it. It’s really nasty stuff. If you just have a drop of it, it’s like licorice, but if you take anymore than that, it’s hell. It was a really wild experience working on that show and over the course of it I not only did these feeding segments but I put them in a CS gas {tear gas} chamber, had them dunk in cow blood, and pierced them where the contestants had needles going through their forearm and had progressively lower gauges so that it would keep getting harder to penetrate the skin. It was really pretty amazing to me that we were able to get as much on that show as we were able to get, considering it was network TV. It was a weird experience for me. Most of what I do is producing unusual people and that was a strange, different kind of trip for me. But I did get to work with people behind the scenes that were more my kind of people. I would bring sideshow people to work with me and design stunts like walking on broken glass. And talking with insectivores about how you eat bugs and worms and how you clean them. So that was kind of fun for me, working with those people behind the scenes.
J: You were also the senior human interests producer for Jimmy Kimmel Live not too long ago.
RB: Okay. That’s right. I was there for a little over a year and I produced a lot of the weird stuff on the show. I produced a segment called Future Talent Showcase where we had a Beyond Vaudeville-type guest come out and do a performance and then come and sit on the couch and talk to Jimmy. We’ve had everything from a UFO abductee singing about his experience with the aliens, Wild Man Fischer, who was always one of my idols; Izzy Fertel, who was Tiny Tim’s protégé; the little old man whose dream was to be just like Marie Osmond, so I had the pleasure of producing him and having him on the show when Marie Osmond was going to be on the show. I was kind of able to bring him together with Marie and she kissed him on his head and it was all pretty special for me. As soon as I heard Marie Osmond was going to be on the show, I just ran to Jimmy and said can we please book this guy, he’s written a song about how he wants to be just like Marie Osmond, and we brought him out here from the Bronx and he was a big hit. So that’s pretty much what I did on Jimmy Kimmel. I brought out Nelson de la Rosa, who was in the Island of Dr. Moreau with Marlon Brando. He’s something like 18 inches tall, a very tiny man from the Dominican Republic. I brought Chuck Barris on the show—that was real exciting for me. On Future Talent Showcase I’ve had a rock n’ roll yodeler. I tired to book our nose-whistler that we used to work with in New York, and he canceled at the last minute because he said he had a urinary tract infection, which I’m not sure if that was true.
J: You worked on a game show for Comedy Central this year?
RB: Yes. Earlier this year I finished working on Distraction, a game show airing on Comedy Central. People try to answer trivia questions while being distracted by things like geese pecking feed off their bodies or ping pong balls shooting at their face at 70BPM [balls per minute]. There’s one game where they have to buzz in by sitting on a toilet and peeing. I also worked on the sixth season of Surreal Life as a guest producer. I had an on-camera role in one episode and taught the housemembers how to host a TV show. I’m currently producing back at Jimmy Kimmel Live.