HOW I PRODUCED A PSYCHIC INFOMERCIAL AND ANGERED GOD

by Tom D’Antoni
Written c.1996
I found this on a portable hard drive. I had forgotten I had written it, although not the experience. I may have sold this to the Chicago Reader. Or I may have never sold it.
Shrug.

            When I was in my twenties, selling out was a hot topic of conversation among us young writers, journalists, film makers, musicians and such. The talk was usually about how were never ever selling out, never giving in and never prostituting our talent for something as evil as cash.

            Twenty years later I was making car commercials. You’da thought I couldn’t sink any lower.

            I could.

            Three years after car commercials, I was writing and producing a 900 number psychic infomercial.

            I tried to remain faithful to ethics and principle and truth, but the kind of piety needed to remain faithful and also make money escaped me.

            So now here I was in charge of a big-budget, multi-camera, destined to run at 3 a.m. on every television station in the country, totally bullshit television product designed to get morons to spend money they don’t have to hear bogus advice from telephone “psychics” whose job it is to keep them on the phone as along as possible.

            Telling you this is like a pro wrestler telling you his sport is fixed. You already figured that out. Sorta like a supermarket tabloid writer telling you he made up all the stories.

            I did that too.

            So maybe you are not that stupid and had figured out already that these psychic infomercials are a crock of shit. Here I am to confirm that fact for you.

            The show contained a half-hour of “psychic readings,” true life incidents (like the one where dead people were contacted by a “ghost psychologist), testimonials, interviews and a 900 number which ran at the bottom of the screen at all times. And in little print beneath it, “For Entertainment Purposes Only.”

            We know, we know.

            It all started when a poet friend of mine and I decided we wanted to go into the 900 number psychic business. He had worked as one just prior to his detox. We were both broke and, I mean, how hard could it be to fool people who believe in this stuff?

            There was a lot of money to be made. A lot. A whole lot. More than either one of us had ever seen, according to our projections.

            We had endless conversations with a sleazeball 900 number company which also wanted to get into the fortune telling biz. We had gotten close enough to get lawyers to draw up a contract and were ready to sign when a woman named Gail Summer showed up.

            In her late thirties/early forties, tall with frosted blonde hair, cut short, glamorous from across the room (though not nearly so up close), she was severe but ingratiating, full of treacly new age insincerity. She was also classically passive aggressive. If she got mad, she got her boyfriend to be threatening while she watched.

            Like she did after she watched the raw footage of her performance after the taping. I stood up to him. I think she liked that.

            She had done car commercials and pitched other, similarly high class businesses on TV. She had a short acting career which flopped. Small parts in a couple of TV movies. All along she had been an astrologer, doing charts for money. She thought she had hit it big when she did a 900 number infomercial for Mike Lasky a.k.a. Mike Warren, a hustler who had made a lot of money as a gambling tout.

            Her infomercial was a big hit. Suckers were calling by the thousands but she felt she wasn’t slurping enough from the trough, so she quit Lasky who went on to make those hilarious “Psychic Friends Network” shows with Dionne Warwicke and Rip Taylor. Shows that are direct descendants of Gail’s.

            Gail put together her own bunch of fortune tellers and called her group “The International Foundation of Professional Psychic Counselors.” She wanted it to sound like they were therapists.

            Don’t laugh.

            Ok, laugh.

            I laughed. Not in front of Gail, however.

            So before you could say, “Get lost, boys!” the poet and I were out and she was in with the 900 number company. And the 900 company had the bucks. Or so we thought.

            The poet got tossed over the side and I fought hard enough to get to write and produce her infomercial. I promised not to sue them.

            Gail showed me her previous show and its script. Said she wanted a more dignified type of show, in keeping with her (snicker) Psychic As Therapist concept.

            I can really keep a straight face.

            I asked: We want “live” readings like you had in the first show, don’t we? Yes.

            Are you going to provide the psychics? Yes.

            And you’re providing the people getting the readings? Natch.

            And they’ll already know the psychics? Yeah.

            And they’ll have interesting stuff in their “readings?” Of course, she said.

            And you can provide the studio audience? Oh yes.

            Sid did provide most of the audience. I provided some, my girlfriend and her son, a junk shop owner and her girlfriend, and the poet who got dumped.

            And for those segments, she did, in fact, provide the psychics and the people who were getting the readings. And they came in for the dress rehearsal the afternoon of the shoot so that their “live” readings could be rehearsed.

            On the roster of “Client Testimonials” Gail sent me were descriptions like, “Is willing to say anything we want.” And “Will say whatever we need.”

            I wrote most of the script, Gail wrote some of it and approved the rest. Here’s how one of the spontaneous, hand picked audience member “live” readings opened. Gail just happened to be in the right row to choose “Jackie.”

            Quoting directly from the shooting script:

            GAIL: Who’s ready for a reading?

            audience applauds/hands shoot up/Gail picks Jackie

            GAIL: What is your name?

            JACKIE: Jackie Brown

            GAIL: Have you ever had a reading before?

            JACKIE: Yes I have.

            GAIL: Do you have a specific area of your life you want to find out about?

            JACKIE: Yes I do.

            GAIL: Well, go right on into the counseling center and meet Grace Grella!!!

            jackie  walks to cc/audience applause/music

            Oh my, was that dishonest? Oh my, was that triple suplex part of the script Mr. Hogan?

            By the way, the show opened with two disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, in very small print upon a field of video blue.

            ONE: “The people you will see are not actors.”

            And TWO: “The psychic demonstrations are real.”

            Ok, number two is not a lie, it’s just misleading. It doesn’t say that the psychic “readings” are real. It says that what you think are psychic readings, what we’re telling you are psychic readings are only “demonstrations,” and that these are real. Real demonstrations.

            Kinda like a disclaimer under a car commercial. Exactly like a disclaimer under a car commercial.

            Since we were trying to make the suckers call from home, we had to have a “live” reading from someone calling from home. We did.

            Well, not exactly.

            The “caller” worked for the 900 number company and although she was actually speaking on the phone to Raj, the psychic on the set, she was also actually in a room on the second floor of the production house. We had cleverly disguised one of their video editing rooms to look like hers or almost anyone’s home.

            She also was rehearsed, although not as well as I would have liked. But she was in sales and therefore experienced in pretending.

            There were money problems from the start. The 900 number company said they had a lot of money, but they didn’t. they tried to bring in an Iranian who owned a lot of those pay phones that never work, but he wanted to own everything and never put up a dime.

            When the set was delivered, and the builders wanted their $10,000 or they would take the set back where it came from, the 900 number company bailed and Gail put up the money herself.

            Cash problems continued. So much so that one of the people getting a “live” reading was a potential investor. Gail figured it would be to our advantage to put him in the show. He was given a reading by “Dr.” Olga Chorna who claimed she had been a “psychic for the KGB.” She looked like Kruschev in a print mumu with nice skin and those upside down glasses heavy older women favor.

            Sorry, folks, I did not check with Moscow to confirm, but she claimed to have used her psychic abilities in their space program. The potential investor also posted for the rehearsal. After all, he had to protect his potential investment.

            Jolly Dr. Olga told him he possessed great physical and emotional strength and that if he took home the extra-special Russian psychic scarf on the table before them, he would become a multi-millionaire.

            He kept the scarf and his money.

            Early in the process I wanted a celeb. Got to have a celeb, right?

            We did not get Dionne Warwicke. Or Rip Taylor, or Jimmy “J.J.” Walker, or any former junkie from the Brady Bunch. Gail told me that an old friend of hers—matter of fact someone whose chart she had done—was available. Jeff Byron.

            “Who the fuck is Jeff Byron?” I thought.

            “Oh, he’s…….?” I said.

            “He played Dr. Martin on “All My Children!!” Gail said.

            “Great, Gail, right up our demographic!”

            Funny, he acted just as surprised in rehearsal when he saw his chart, as he did when he saw the same chart during the taping. He was, after all, an actor, wasn’t he?

            We set up his intro by having an audience member ask Gail how she got into the biz. She suddenly remembered during her answer that, “One of my clients just happened to be in town,” and why doesn’t he come out from behind the set and say hi?

            We had flown him in for the rehearsal the previous day, and there had been a stink because he wanted first-class travel and we wanted to pay coach.

            I love spontenaity.

            The script was full of hilarious misdirections:

            GAIL: We have a group of professional psychics who have been certified by the International Foundation of Professional Psychic Counselors.

            Well, she started the IFPPC.

            I wrote most of the audience questions. And the answers. Gail wrote the rest of them.

            GAIL: Before we do a reading, do we have any questions on the psychic experience?

            medium wide shot audience/hands shoot up all over

            AUDIENCE MEMBER 2A: Gail, how do I know I can trust the psychic to be qualified?

            GAIL: Each of our psychics have to be fully accredited before we allow them to be with us. (etc.)

            AUDIENCE MEMBER 2A: That puts my mind at ease.

            Of course they were accredited. Her own organization was doing the accrediting.

            The final segment was designed to make the suckers weep. Some poor old man’s daughter had been murdered. Years later he was visited, he claimed, by a ghost. He called somebody connected with Gail, and she sent Dr. Roger Pile, a (ready?) “Ghost Psychologist,” who claimed that he could not only contact dead people, but that “disfunctions survive death.”

            That’s something to look forward to.

            On the set Dr. Pile crossed his plaid pantlegs and told us that he had contacted the poor man’s visitor and—guess what?—it was not his daughter, but his daughter’s murderer seeking forgiveness.

            The ghost got it and everybody lived happily ever after.

            What a great way to end the show!!! Makes you want to call a psychic this minute doesn’t it?

            And what was I doing during the taping? Oh, complicity! I was standing at the monitor, jumping up and down, waving my arms, and leading the audience in wild cheering. And trying to keep them from leaving before it was over.

            And babysitting Gail who had performed much better in rehearsal. So much so that we used the ghost segment from rehearsal instead of the main taping.

            I was Gail’s Rip Torn.

            I’m a sleazeball, too. A bigger sleazeball, because once I had ethics and knew better.

            On the other hand, I was merely making TV. That’s how TV people justify working on dishonest crap…or just plain crap. I could have been driving a cab. I wasn’t, I was making TV with  a decent sized budget and a five camera shoot.

            Call it media denial.

            But look when I was writing for the supermarket tabloid “The Sun,” I told America that a tribe of South American Indians who had never seen the outside world had been found dancing around a naked statue of Elvis and chanting something that sounded like “Viva Las Vegas.” Was I responsible for retards who believed it? Not any more than I’m responsible for retards who believe that somebody else can tell you what your future holds over the phone.

            I got my punishment. It was a $100,000 production and in the end Gail paid off everybody but me. I think that call that Karma.

            Meanwhile she’s got psychic lines running all over the country, and the money’s rolling in.

            This piece is Gail’s karma.

            I wrote it for the money.

thank you to the muse who inspired it.