Fame. Justine Bateman

this machine, because someday, just maybe (we hold the hope), someday we might step on that square that holds the bottom of that Fame ladder and we will fly up it to another plane, another life, a way out of this one, and we will be hovering above, with a bundle of nice stuff.

      Prior to the late 1990s, there was no frenzy to be famous. There were those who were tremendously famous, sure, but as huge as the Fame was, it was not coveted by everyone you met. What I mean is, it was compartmentalized, it was thought of with a proper kind of perspective. People were amazed when they saw the famous, but they didn’t then immediately after start thinking about how they, too, could attain some Fame. People didn’t really think that way back then. You were an actor and you were very famous, but these other people, they had their own lives and their professions and there was a self-respect in that. People seemed to take pride in whatever they were good at, whatever profession they had tackled. A dentist, a publicist, a finance executive, a stationery store owner, whatever. There was not this obsession we have now with becoming famous. There was not this shame that people seem to absorb now, that they or their business isn’t “famous.” “Gotta make my mark,” and not by being a good stationery store owner or a pet store manager, but by getting followers, fans, viewers.

      That pride from before faded away for many, and instead having a camera follow someone around on a reality show started to become a baseline of “approval” and professional self-respect. If a camera was following you around, recording your every banal move, well then, you must really be something. So, around 2000, we had a perfect storm of entertainment-focused shows and magazines needing material, and reality programming making it possible for those lacking entertaining talents to become famous. When social media dropped in, around 2006, then everybody could join in on trying to have a semblance of Fame, depending on how many “followers” you had. How many people would be alerted as to where you ate lunch or would see pictures of your dog, wet and shriveled in your sink, while you gave him a bath? How many people? It was at that moment that the dormant human trait of “lack-of-followers paranoia” was awakened.

      “I have 315 Facebook followers. Pretty nice. Look at that. Dum-da-dum-dum-dum. What’s Dave been up to? Let’s see. His account . . . Got it . . . What the fuck? 1,245 followers. What? How . . . How does he know that many . . . That can’t be real. How does he have that many followers? What the fuck? I gotta . . . Hey, everyone! I’m going for the big 2,000! Will you help me get there?! Tell your friends to give me a follow. Get me to 2,000!” And that’s the way that went. You got those posts, right? Those messages? Your friends trying to “break” 500? Trying to get to 1,000? Something like that? Sure. Kinda made you sick, right? I mean, here’s this beautiful tool to stay in touch with your people (or this perfectly evil way to market to you, whichever), and they have to go and pollute it with their lack-of-followers paranoia. That sucks.

      * * *

      OK, I can hear someone: “Who the fuck do you think you are, Bateman? You think, you assume, that everyone was just happy as pie in the ’80s and ’90s while you rolled around on your haystack of Fame and money and privilege and limousines and helicopters to the Super Bowl? FUCK YOU! You think we were just all happy back then, without all that? And how dare you put down our attempts at grabbing a little bit of that with our Twitter followers and our Facebook friends and our YouTube vlogs. You’re not the only one, you know. WE WANT ALL OF THAT TOO.” I can hear that. But it’s proving my point for me. Everyone deserves respect for what they do, and to be fairly compensated for what they’re good at, but for 99 percent of the population, it’s not for being an actor or a world-famous rock star. And that’s OK. That’s what I’m saying.

      Size

      Let me tell you how it used to be. This is going to sound like I’m 100 years old and telling you about “what it was like in my day, Sonny,” but it’s not. It was fairly recent. The Fame in the ’80s and ’90s was the tail end of the “concentrated audience Fame.” Imagine a time without cable TV as you know it, where the Big 3 networks rule. NBC, ABC, CBS. Nothing else matters. There are smaller local stations that play game shows, talk shows, and the reruns of the Big 3 shows. You have HBO in there, but it plays movies that were released in theaters a few years ago (“Home Box Office,” get it?). CNN has just started (1980) and Showtime comes along in 1983. So, cable is basically one station trying to fill 24 hours with news every day and a couple of channels playing movies you’ve already seen. The Big 3 networks were where it was at. And you had to watch the shows when they aired. Recording shows on videotape on your VCR was pretty new, and unless you were good with the VCR timer, it was a virtually useless way to catch your favorite show if you were away from your TV that night. No, this was “appointment television.” You’ve heard that term. So, appointment television and no Internet. Yeah, can you imagine? No 500 channels on cable and no Internet. (Whatever would you do with yourself if you were dropped into 1982 right now?)

      OK. No Internet, a few cable channels, and video games were super basic; you went to an arcade if you wanted to play video games. It was the Big 3 networks. That was it. The Big 3 and the movie theaters. So think about it; if you were an actor on a TV show on one of the Big 3, you were IT. People would rush home from work to catch the show that everyone was going to talk about in the office the next day. You miss the show and you are not part of the conversation tomorrow. No watching an episode on your DVR or binging on the whole season later on Netflix. There was none of that. So, people would not miss their favorite show. They would watch it when it aired. That’s weird now. I mean now, I don’t know what nights or times my favorite shows are on. Do you? My DVR just grabs them or I find them online later. But back then, everyone made sure they were in front of that TV when the shows aired.

      Let’s do the math. That translated into an average of 26 million people watching any one of the top three or four TV shows during the 1980s. Every single week. Think about this: the top TV show right now has numbers that would have had it cancelled after its first episode had it aired in the ’80s. “Ratings” tell you the percentage of people who had your show on, out of ALL the people who own a TV. The TVs that are turned on and the TVs that are off that night. The “share” is the percentage of people, or “households,” who had your show on, out of all the people who were actually watching TV that night. Family Ties had a 32.7 rating at its height, meaning 32.7 percent of all Americans who owned a TV set (practically every household owned one) had the show on every week during that period. Maybe there’s one person in front of each TV, maybe there are four. The population in the US then was about 242 million, so that’s about 62 million people watching. Every week. That’s getting close to modern-day Super Bowl numbers, you see? Look, I don’t want to saddle you with a lot of math, I just want to show you how concentrated the TV audience was back then. The top shows now: Modern Family, say, or The Big Bang Theory, are pulling in a 2.3 rating or a 3.4 rating. You got a population here now of 324 million, so that’s 7.4 million or 11 million people watching those shows each week, respectively. These are the top-rated shows. Low numbers. Millions more people watched one night of a TV show in the ’80s than watch an entire season of some 2017 shows. That’s because the audience now is fractured, all over the place. 500 cable channels, more TV channels, TV series still being made on the Big 4 (there are four now), but now also on HBO, Showtime, A&E, AMC, FX, etc., etc. Movies still in the theaters, but video games in the home. Lots of choices. You can’t get those big TV ratings numbers anymore unless you are the Super Bowl.

      Love

      So here I am, I’m in it. 16, I’m 16 when it starts, and I’m in it, in the Fame. Didn’t see it coming, just in it. People smiling at me. Happy to see me. SO HAPPY to see me. Like a baby or a toddler. Me. Being looked at as if I am the long-awaited child of a couple who thought they couldn’t conceive. Looked at as if I can do no wrong. Everything I do, looked at by others with big, glassy eyes, smiles that cannot be drawn down with any of my actions. Applauded for basic tasks, even. Like a toddler dressing herself, feeding herself, walking, running, scribbling shit on a piece of paper with a crayon and up on the refrigerator with PRIDE. Everybody loving you. You, celebrity. You, newly famous person. Everybody loves you. Is proud to throw their arms round you and call you “pal.” People who would make a show of snubbing you are