Frost/Nixon II: TNIAAM/Marrone

Tomorrow, around 12:30pm PST, I will sit down with Doug Marrone one-on-one and delve into his psyche deeper than anyone has ever before.  I will not come away from his history-making session without the dark, gritty, sticky secrets that Coach Marrone hides in the depths of his soul.  I will bare them all. 

That or we'll spend the entire time talking about how great he is.  It could honestly go either way.  We'll see.

I'm not all that nervous at the moment.  I'm sure the nerves will kick in eventually though.  I'm no stranger to interviewing people.  I've done plenty of phone and email interviews with people for jobs, web articles and even here on this site.  I've talked to some Hollywood types and done my best to craft an interesting story through my questions. 

The thing is though, I haven't done a face-to-face interview in a really long time.  In fact, I've really only done a face-to-face interview once.  In 2002.  At the High Times Stony Awards.

In a former life, I used to run a movie review website called Bikkit.com.  Feel free to search for it, it doesn't exist anymore.  It was my first foray into the world of online writing.  I had built up a decent base with movie reviews and a "guess the gross" weekly contest for opening weekend movie grosses, but I wanted to expand.  I wanted to get into the junkets and get on the interview lists.  Problem is, I was just some doosh with a website (some things never change).

Enter EInsiders.com, a slightly more polished and somewhat better regarded movie review website.  They were looking for reviwers and writers and I happily jumped at the chance.  Turned out they had an invite to something called the Stony Awards, sort of like an Academy Awards for stoners.  It was set to be hosted at B.B. King's in Times Square and Snoop Dogg was going to be the guest of honor.  If I wanted in, I was in.  I wanted in, so I was in.

I didn't own a hand-held voice recorder so I did the only thing I could think of.  I grabbed my digital camcorder and used that instead.  Quite the professional.  Snoop's interview was held before the ceremony and I captured some truly mesmerizing information:

There was no holding back tonight. No safety net. Oh no, Snoop came clean and he told it like it is. When polled on the origin of his Gatorskin shoes, Snoop didn't pull any punches. "Gator shoes? Actually, these are Crocodile. There's a difference, Crocodiles got mo' teeth." Mo indeed.

What do you want, it's the Stony's, not the Pulitzer's.  Snoop was nominated for Stoner of the Year and was also on hand to promote his movie The Wash, a triumph in cinematic art if thee ever was one.   He and the film won multiple awards and later on I found out that the only way to ensure that he'd show up that night was to guarentee Snoop would win.  What price, Stony's?  What price?

Towards the end of the evening I spotted actor Daniel Franzese who was on hand promoting the film Bully.  You might remember him from Mean Girls as well.  I remember mustering up the courage to go over and ask him for an interview which is hysterical in hindsight considering, well, he's Daniel Franzese.  He agrees, I turned on my camcorner and held it up to our faces like a mentally-challenged cameraman and interviewed him on the spot.  Sadly that opus has been lost to the tangled Interweb but he was a nice guy who later e-mailed me to thank him for not making him sound like a moron, as he was high at the time.

If you read the article, I'm slightly less than complimentary about the ideology behind the show and High Times Magazine in general.  And the event was also my first lesson in "people actually read what you write about them."  I got the chance to meet High Times' editor Steve Bloom a few months later and when told my name and that I had written a piece on the event, he put two and two together and said the following with a sarcastic drip, "Oh...I know you.  The guy who just LOVED the Stony Awards."  Again, this was months later and the guy just mentally name-checked me.  That's less than good.

And so, tomorrow, the circle will be complete.  From Snoop Dogg to Doug Marrone.  Just as God intended.  I'll try to get it up on the site ASAP but in advance don't expect too much out of me during the day tomorrow.  I'm busy hangin' with Dougers.