In the summer of 2000, Melanie Martinez—who was fired a few weeks ago as the host of the PBS kids program The Good Night Show—responded to an ad in Backstage. Someone was seeking a “young-looking” actress who could play a short role in a public-service announcement.
Dressed as a goal-oriented Catholic schoolgirl, Ms. Martinez delivered such memorable lines as: “One thing I’m not planning on is getting pregnant. That’s why I choose anal sex. I mean, sure it hurts a little, and I wind up walking funny for a day or two. But I think my future’s worth it.”
Locusts, an idling school bus and chatty workmen wrecked the audio. “But Melanie was very consistent, very sincere in her delivery, and she didn’t try to camp it up and oversell the humor,” Mr. Mack said. The short was called I Have a Future, and Ms. Martinez was paid the going Screen Actors Guild rate of $500 for her work.
They shot a second short, called Boys Can Wait, in February 2001. In it, an actress playing Ms. Martinez’s mother gives her a purple dildo. She was paid an additional $500.
“I did them as an actor, and, you know, I thought they were really funny,” Ms. Martinez said. “It was on a really timely issue that was part of the current social climate, if you will, and I thought they were funny, and I did them because they were funny, and I knew that I could add my humor to it, and I did them.”
Ms. Martinez said she neither hid nor disclosed the existence of the faux-P.S.A.’s when she auditioned for The Good Night Show in 2005. Mr. Mack, who still exchanges Christmas cards with his former starlet, removed the spots from his Web site, technicalvirgin.com, in 2004.
Still, the P.S.A.’s found their way—as all things will, eventually—back onto the Internet, on YouTube and other sites. It was then that Ms. Martinez voluntarily told her bosses about the existence of the P.S.A.’s. She was fired six days later.
“PBS Kids Sprout”—an 11-month-old digital network that reaches 20 million homes—“has determined that the dialogue in this video is inappropriate for her role as a preschool program host and may undermine her character’s credibility with our audience,” was the official comment from network president Sandy Wax.
Here are the shorts in question:
One thing that can be said about management is that they don't have a sense of humor.
No comments:
Post a Comment