The first video is Nick Cannon and DJ Reach in the DJ booth at the 2008 Playboy Super Bowl Party. It was around 1AM when the party was in full swing. Reach has been in the booth for many Playboy events. Nick Cannon made a special appearance at the Playboy Mansion last year and this was his first time we had the opportunity to work with him. My buddy Charlie Romano handled most of the DJ logistics for the party.
And here is the video from me and Andrea Lowell having a drinking contest after Madden Bowl 08. Clearly, I win.
The dust has settled and the party is now in the books. For the third straight year, I’ve witnessed the Playboy Super Bowl Party officially known as Super Saturday Night. In Detroit, we were in a hangar at the Detroit Airport for the “8 Mile High Club“. Last year we converted the American Airlines Arena into “PM: Playboy Miami After Dark“.
Every year, there are uncontrollable elements that force you to adapt. It was freezing cold with snow in Detroit. In Miami, we were given l2 hours for move-in at the arena because the NFL had an event there the previous night. That’s $100K worth of carpeting, constructing bars/cabanas, creating a silent auction room with almost 100 items worth over $200K, building a massive DJ booth, and then making it LOOK like a party. By the time DJ Reach arrived at American Airlines, people were starting to filter in and there were guys with drills trying to put VIP booths together.
The War Room at The Playboy Villa aka the hotel meeting room
You can’t help but be delirious at the end of the night — Detroit was a 20+ hour day, Miami was exactly 24, and this year it was 21. Super Saturday Night is a 12-month project (they’ll be looking for a Tampa hotel in a couple weeks) with a budget exceeding a million dollars. And it’s always fucking incredible.
The Playboy Villa Our home away from The Crown Building in New York is always a luxurious boutique hotel in the hottest part of the Super Bowl host city. Not really. We usually occupy about 90% of the rooms at the hotels we choose. That means all the Playmates can be impressed by me moving boxes and driving a rental car (Toyota Highlander).
Playboy Staff (note the blackberry party) and Playmates Hiromi, Deanna, Tiffany, and Pilar dine on the breakfast buffet
This year, Mr. Charlie Romano was my bunk-buddy (we had a two bedroom, actually) and he managed to run amok in Phoenix as well (my exploits are documented here). He went to the Pepsi Smash in the VIP section. That’s just how we roll when we’re not blogging. We do it all for you.
On an early morning KMart run, I hit photographer James Trevenen’s rental with mine while backing out of the hotel parking lot. It was hilarious. But the final KMart run yielded one of the greatest “you’re not in New York” moments. The girl at the register asked us if we were French. It must’ve been Charlie’s mohawk. Charlie and I don’t look anything close to French. She must not get out of Phoenix very much. The “Playboy Villa” was in Phoenix, most of the other events were in Scottsdale, and the Playboy venue was in Chandler.
The Venue: Rawhide! Yee-haw? I bet the Giants were pissed that we chose this spot because the nearest hotel (literally a 60 second drive) was their team hotel. They could probably hear the party on Saturday night. We had to convert a gigantic tented area into a party. It was no easy task. When I pulled up on Thursday, I couldn’t even tell where it was going to be. Charlie and I drove all the way to the Western town — the kind where they stage shootouts. We got back on the road and found another road that brought us past the petting zoo complete with a bison.
Relevent, our production company, had the place looking like the retro-themed Desert Oasis and Resort by the middle of the day Friday. I did everything from lift boxes, haul a thousand pounds of water, direct traffic, find salt, set up umbrellas, help get the wireless internet set up, move really angry-looking and sharp cacti, and get our college rep bus to the event (more on that below).
The Hero: The Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch Bodypainter Mark Frazier and his team arrived at 10:30AM as we had specified in their contract. Mark is an amazing professional and I don’t just say that because he may be my ticket to the Playboy Mansion (his interview is in a follow-up post). When he arrived at the venue, there was no power in our production area and his crew couldn’t get started. Not a problem — Mark and his crew relaxed and knew they could get it all done. One of the guys asked me to give him our PR girl’s number so he could call her about inviting NFL player to the event. That’s always iffy, but he ended up getting Leon Hall. So it worked out.
Arizona nudity laws require that the models have pasties and latex thongs. Mark Frazier says he hates working with pasties and latex thongs. I feel like that’s almost a Chuck Norris level of bad ass in that statement. Possibly more. I saw the first girl done with my favorite design a little after before lunch. That was a nice diversion from the shit-hitting-the-fan pace we endure. One of my (female) co-workers was irked by the fact that “when the girls bent over, you could see their skin because their buttcracks weren’t painted”. I have an interesting job.
Mark Frazier and the Bodypainted Models… jealous?
Mark and the team finished the job with plenty of time to spare. The girls looked amazing. I felt pretty pleased with my first of two major contributions to the party.
The Bus: Reppin’ Playboy On Campus I fucking love college marketing. There’s no two ways about it. I love college sports. I love college girls. I love being irresponsible. I love having free time to waste. Other than the sports, those are becoming a much smaller part of my reality and it makes me sad. So my job “keeps me in the game” because I’m a sad old man. But this sad old man had to make sure that 50 beautiful girls from the University of Arizona made it to our party safely. I do a very good job.
Aside from the few hundred girl-only tickets that I sent out, the rep bus was my big contribution to “the ratio”. I assigned two reps, Michael Knudten and Laurie Laird, the task of recruiting a bus full of girls. It doesn’t matter how big the celebrity, the girls’ entrance has been a show-stopper the past two years and this was no exception.
Girls from the University of Arizona @ Playboy Super Bowl Party
They arrived at about 9:30PM and I was able to meet them at about 10:00PM with the bus parked right in front of our entrance. Charlie and I tried to work our magic with the PR team running the red carpet but we just missed our opportunity to have them walk the red carpet. We were told that Common, our host, was arriving at that moment. He walked in wearing a grey suit with some bad ass grey shoes that looked like they were worth more than my life. As we were about to the unleash the hotness of the University of Arizona onto the red carpet, Nick Cannon arrived and bumped us again. I was about to step in and stop the line when I saw a police car pulling up. We were definitely getting bumped from the red carpet again because Hef was arriving with a police escort and his girlfriends. Seeing The Man himself walk into our event was probably the first time I’ve ever actually been starstruck. They were walking the red carpet for about 30 minutes since EVERY press member wanted to interview one of the girls individually (plus Hef was there).
Hugh Hefner and Kendra Arrive @ Playboy Super Bowl Party
After about an hour and a half of waiting, Mr. Romano and I made our way down the red carpet with a gaggle of hot coeds right on Mr. Hefner’s heels. They literally entered the party after him as he had just finished his interview with Playboy Radio. You can check out the video of the girls below. We had a lot of NFL players at our event, so I suspect the bus did not go back full…
The Show: Party All the Time, Party All the Time, Party All the Time By the time my duties with the bus were done, it was pretty close to midnight. I had my stint at the door coming up at 1AM. The party is really just something that happens while I’m running around. It’s only 6 hours out of a long weekend of work. Still, we managed to pack in 2000+ attendees including a long list of athletes. Audrina and LC stopped by. Sadly, that’s sort of exciting for me. I saw them in Cabo last year at a taco stand at 4AM though. I did get to climb into the DJ booth with Nick Cannon and DJ Reach for a few seconds. It was a pretty amazing moment because it was just as Nick Cannon had started on Stronger.
I ended up back at the door soon after to have some guy try to get in with a girl ticket (his girlfriend said that somebody ahead of him had “mixed up tickets”… right). Another two kids tried to convince me to let them in without tickets because they came with a lot of girls … the old “we’re with them”. Sorry, guys. The fire marshal shut down the door at about 1:30 because we’d reached capacity. This happened in Miami at about 12:30. We could only let people in at a trickle after that.
Willis McGahee showed up at about 2AM and the party was pretty much done. I was happy that we had landed the Madden Bowl champ. He shook my hand and told me that he had brought a couple of family members. Nice guy.
We drove back to our hotel after 5AM and I ended up getting into my bed after 6AM having to pack when I “woke up”. I got up at 7AM to make sure I was ready to go to the airport. Oh yeah, I heard there was a football game scheduled for Sunday. I did make it back just in time to see kickoff at my apartment.
I was at the Madden Bowl just minding my own business and I ran into one of my personal heroes, Roy Williams. I had followed his career since he had become a standout wide receiver with the Texas Longhorns. I even know that his favorite food is fried Oreos. My dad’s from Detroit, so I’m a Lions fan and that’s where he plays in the NFL.
All I wanted was for him to (1) acknowledge me (that pretty much happened, although not as planned) and (2) come to the Playboy Super Bowl Party (definitely got denied on that one). This was about ten minutes before Michael Irvin started sleazing on Andrea. Make sure you have your volume up… I think my best comment comes at the very end. I think it’s the 2:15 mark. Roy Williams is definitely not invited to my Cabo birthday party in March!
The title of this post actually refers to a lucky bastard named Mark Frazier. Mark is a professional artist and one of his skills happens to be bodypainting. Surprisingly enough, my dream job does not involve nude women. Well, maybe there’s some way to make that happen as a TV/movie producer, but that’s a long, long time away.
He’s a veteran in this field — with numerous Playboy covers. You’ve seen his work most recently on the cover of February 2008 with Tiffany Fallon as Wonder Woman, but my personal favorite is October 2005 with Sara Jean Underwood and Victoria Thornton painted with Oregon State and Arizona State jerseys respectively. Oh yeah, he also paints girls for most of Hef’s Playboy Mansion events. Are you already looking up airbrushing lessons online?
One of my responsibilities for Playboy’s Super Saturday Night (our party during Super Bowl weekend), is to get all of the bodypainting taken care of. It was pretty much a no-brainer to hire Mark for this year’s festivities. So I’m operating as his co-pilot/navigator (whichever has less responsibility) on this project. I have to give him direction for designs and revisions and pass them back to the rest of the Super Bowl event team. I also have to supervise on-site — which means I have to make sure the bodypainted designs are applied correctly (translation: in between running around and doing everything else at the event, I have to pop in and make sure the naked girls are painted with the right designs). Arizona nudity laws mandate that the girls must wear latex thongs and pasties, so it’s not quite as x-rated as some would hope.
Bodypainted girls with Usher Raymond IV from Detroit in 2006 & Bodypainted girls from 2007 in Miami
The process started with Mark sending us a few of his mockups. Unfortunately, that didn’t fit with our theme — so we had to go back to the well a few times. Mark has been fantastic with his correspondence and you can see the evolution of designs below. I can’t give away the theme, but I can tell you that one of the girls will be a bellhop and another will be a French maid (more below).
Two girls will actually get to wear a small amount of clothing that’s not made out of latex. It’s pretty hilarious that I had to buy a French maid hat and Bellhop hat. I’ll probably throw away the rest of the French maid costume — it’s not like I’m gonna wear it.
So the next step is picking the models with my co-worker Kaki. I didn’t help out with this last year but apparently some of the requirements are no “saggy boobs”, no visible stretch marks, and no “bumpy nipples/areola”. Please keep in mind that I DID NOT make these up — so don’t get mad at me for being a shallow asshole (a girl came up with them!). Katie Ludwig from OneSource Talent had auditions for models and Kaki and I will review the pictures this week. Sounds good to me.
If you can’t get to SSN ‘08, I’ll be covering all of the events for my blog. Stay tuned!
OCD was launched in early 2008 by the Official Chris Duncan. He writes about pop culture and current events including entertainment news, trashy reality TV, sports, politics, and celebrity culture.
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