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Danny- 'UGA Grad Receives Call..'

UGA grad receives call to get 'Real'

By PAUL FULTON Jr.
The Red & Black

Two weeks ago, producers of MTV's "The Real World" called University graduate Danny Roberts of Atlanta to tell him he was selected as one of the seven cast members for the new season.

"I jumped on my desk and started screaming," Roberts said about being notified at work. "And that was it. I just left my job."

More than 35,000 people auditioned for the show.

Roberts said he first interviewed for the show in Atlanta and he didn't "have a clue what it was going to be like."

Interviewers selected seven strangers from the crowd to sit down at a table to answer "really personal questions," he said.

"It's a chance for them to see you argue it out with strangers," Roberts said. "And they're all sexual questions. One of the first questions they asked was how we felt about masturbation."

Roberts said the interviewers told the groups that individuals would be notified within a week by telephone if they were to proceed to the next

round.

But one person pulled Roberts aside and told him that he had made it to the next phase of the interview process.

Each of the next four interviews were conducted by telephone and lasted more than an hour and a half. There was a camera in the room with Roberts during each interview.

"They want to know everything about you," he said. "Anything personal you can imagine."

Roberts performed well enough on the telephone interviews to proceed to the next round -- a meeting with two of the show's producers at an Atlanta hotel in a room equipped with lights, microphones and cameras.

"It was my first experience with all that, and it was kind of nerve-wracking," Roberts said. "The interview was a little more intense."

Roberts was one of 30 people interviewed during the final stage.

He went to Los Angeles at the beginning of December. He said the studio drove him to Hollywood with two other people where they walked the streets -- tailed by a camera crew. He said they stopped by a coffee shop on their walk.

"It was crazy, like being on a talk show," he said. "Everybody on the street came in to watch."

He said on his second day in Los Angeles he interviewed with three more producers and Piggy, a past cast member of MTV's "Road Rules."

"I was so blown away by then that I wasn't even thinking straight," Roberts said. "It was just so surreal."

After receiving his acceptance phone call, Roberts travelled to Los Angeles to film the casting special. He said he cannot reveal the location of the new show, but he moves on Jan. 19. Taping lasts four months, and the show airs in June.

Cast-

Seven more up-and-comers take field for latest MTV `Real World'

New Orleans is the setting for a new round of exploits in series with staying power

As Dobie Gray once said, the original's still the greatest.

The In Crowd of real-people-stuck-together series remains the cast of The Real World, which offers its ninth batch of mismatched housemates beginning with a one-hour episode at 10 p.m. tomorrow. This group gets a mansion in New Orleans and will try to mount their own public-access television show. The cast:

Jamie, 21, a rich kid from Chicago, the operator of an online extreme-sports outfitter, and in MTV's view ``good-looking, charming and articulate.''

	Kelley, 22, a would-be motivational speaker from Arkansas who according to MTV ``is blessed with stunning movie-star beauty.''
	Danny, 22, a University of Georgia graduate with a degree in French and foreign language education, ``irrepressibly flirtatious'' with ``a kind and generous nature.''
	Julie, 20, a committed Mormon and student at Brigham Young University who's expanding her horizons.
	Matt, 21, a junior at Georgia Tech who's putting himself through college as a Web designer and who favors Hawaiian shirts.
	Melissa, 23, a University of South Florida graduate whom a friend calls a ``half-black, half-Filipino Chris Rock.''
	David, 21, a Chicagoan (but definitely not from the rich part), body builder, musician, nonsmoker, nondrinker, who wants to be the first black president. Other activities include Mardi Gras (of course), a swamp tour, a visit to strip clubs and a competition in South Africa with the latest cast of Road Rules, a series that's The Real World with more physical challenges. It's all absolutely manipulative, of course. By the end of the first hour, you can see conflict emerging and issues a-piling. But it's also something of a departure from the let's-get-naked atmosphere of the most recent cast, in Hawaii. Indeed, one of the reasons why The Real World has maintained audience interest through eight previous casts (in, respectively, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Miami, Boston, Seattle and Hawaii) is that it balances its drama not only within a season but from one season to the next. Other series, including CBS' Survivor, have had a hard enough time coming up with one group of interesting people (although that show did use 16, where Real World has seven). Even Road Rules -- which starts its ninth season on MTV on June 19 -- has found it tough to be as engaging as Real World, except when the two shows combine casts for their gimmicky challenge matches. Of course, Real World also succeeds because it is so unapologetically manipulative. After I said some critical things about the first installment of Survivor, a reader called in to complain that I was judging it too much as a drama and not enough as a reflection of real life. In fact, these shows have very little to do with real life. The living conditions are set arbitrarily, people are put into situations where they'd never find themselves normally and events are planned to encourage confrontation and conflict. The Real World does all those things and more. You rarely see unattractive people on the show, which has proved a springboard to performance careers for some cast members. And in one scene of the New Orleans season opener, you can see one cast member's never forgetting she is on camera and giving her performance to the nearest lens. None of which makes the series any less addictive. I've sat through the eight Real Worlds to date and only the Miami cast proved too irritating for regular viewing. The first hour of the New Orleans Real World was annoying, too, but not enough to make me skip the next episode. R.D. Heldenfels writes about television for the Beacon Journal. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

Cast-TV Guide Article-

NEW WORLD
BY DANA KENNEDY

Nine years old and more popular than ever, The Real World is the true survivor

It’s a typically hot and sultry day in late May along the broad, tree-lined avenues of New Orleans’s historic Garden District. And even though there is air-conditioning inside the enormous Greek Revival mansion called the Belfort, where seven strangers have been living together for five months for MTV’s enduring hit, The Real World (Tuesdays, 10 pm/ET), the atmosphere is distinctly heated.

“Jamie walks in, and I think, ‘This guy is totally gorgeous and unattainable,’” says Melissa, 23, who sits bare-legged on an upstairs bed in a teeny tank top and microskirt. She is recalling the day in January when she met one of her new housemates, handsome, square-jawed Jamie. “I was just lusting after him.”

Downstairs in the living room, 20-year-old Julie, a devout Mormon who attends Brigham Young University, can barely keep her eyes off Matt, who is playing pool across the hall. It is the cast’s last day in the house, and she’s not sure when she’ll see Matt, her first great—and unrequited—love, again. “I am nuts about Matt,” she sighs. “I don’t think I’ll meet someone like him again. I think my heartache will be very dramatic.”

It better be. As The Real World begins its ninth season, the show follows one of the most buzzed-about years in its history—a cast that sexed and boozed its way through five top-rated months in Hawaii. But it also faces a slew of brand-new “EDtv”–like competition, such as ABC’s Making the Band, Fox’s American High and CBS’s smash Survivor as well as the upcoming Big Brother.

Can this year’s cast deliver? In the Belfort house there are two deeply religious virgins (Matt, Julie), one scholarly, bodybuilding musician (David) who says he had sex with countless women in New Orleans, a gay man (Danny) whose boyfriend’s face cannot be shown on-camera, a boy-crazy woman (Melissa) who ends up celibate for all five months, a budding Internet tycoon (Jamie) and a golden girl who has a knack for getting everything she wants (Kelley).

Everyone seems to get along with one another except David, the stud, whom the entire cast, led by Jamie, confronts at the end of the season. “That whole conquering-women thing went to his head,” Melissa complains. “Off-camera he was constantly asking, ‘When are we going to go on a date?’ and I’m like, Eeuuuwww.’”

In addition to their Big Easy escapades, the cast produces and stars in their own weekly live show-within-a-show called The Real 7 on New Orleans public-access television. Oh, and the gang also goes on a 10-day trek to South Africa, where Matt describes Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 19 years, as “totally rad.”

None of the cast sleeps with a fellow housemate but, as 22-year-old Danny says, “This house had a lot of sexual energy.”

Sometimes the best place for that energy was outside the house, as when Melissa dances topless in a bar in the French Quarter, at one point covering her breasts with dollar bills given to her by patrons. David confesses he has a fantasy of stripping onstage, then decides to fulfill it.

All things considered, this Real World leaves its creators and coexecutive producers, Mary Ellis-Bunim and Jonathan Murray, confident that they’re still ahead of the pack. “We’re not worried,” says Murray, who also coproduces Making the Band with Bunim. “We were the first, and we’re still the best.”

Being the best often comes from the quirky alchemy among the Real World cast members, like last year’s roller-coaster romance between drama queen Amaya and Colin Mortensen, who costars in NBC’s summer series M.Y.O.B. It’s even better when the cast includes an obnoxious person who clashes with someone sympathetic. Think back to the series’s San Francisco season, its third, when troublemaking Puck taunted AIDS educator Pedro. (Puck was thrown out of the house and Pedro died of AIDS shortly after the season’s end.)

And despite the rigorous screening of the more than 35,000 applicants for each season’s cast, the most compelling stuff on The Real World often surprises the producers.

Murray and Bunim were caught off guard last year by Ruthie, who did not realize she had a serious drinking problem until the show was under way. “I think that was our own naïveté about college campuses,” Murray says. “She said she liked to party, and her friends said she liked to party. When we had the intervention, her friends came from Rutgers, and they were still playing it down. We’ve become more vigilant.”

The producers got a shock this year, too—when Danny began a romance with Paul, an officer in the military, shortly before production started. “We literally found out about Paul when Danny was telling his roommates during filming,” Murray says. “We thought, ‘How are we going to deal with this if Paul wants to visit?’ We don’t want to ruin his career because of the government’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.”

Their solution was to blur Paul’s face when he came to see Danny. “It bugs me,” Danny says. “There’s a scene where we’re kissing in the hot tub, but it’s just a blur. It’s annoying and not fair that it has to be that way.

If his face were shown, he’d be thrown out.”

So far Paul hasn’t been dishonorably discharged. And nobody bailed from the house, the way Justin did in Hawaii last year, even though Melissa says she almost packed her bags and hit the road. “Then I said, ‘Melissa, it’s only five months, you can do it.’ I went through hell on this show to get where I am today. A lot of us did, but we made it.” E Dana Kennedy is an entertainment reporter for MSNBC.

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