When Hollywood reality show producer Mike Fleiss was in college at University of California Berkeley, he studied journalism, even acting as the executive editor of the campus paper The Daily Californian. But his heart was always with his first love: television.
While his roots were technically in journalism, the decline of print media led Mike Fleiss to pursue a Hollywood career instead.
“I was excited by The Howard Stern Show and The Simpsons and stuff like that, and so I felt like there would be more freedom of expression, at least at that time in history, in television. That was my goal because I grew up loving television,” Fleiss recalls.
It didn’t take long for him to catch his first break, snagging a job with Totally Hidden Video. During his time there, Mike Fleiss caught the attention of Stephen Chao, then the president of Fox Television. He says Chao admired his ability to come up with show ideas and gave him the motivation to pitch his own show, Before They Were Stars, a series of commercial clips featuring celebrities before they were actually famous.
It was right in Fleiss’ wheelhouse. After all, the eagle-eyed Fleiss says he spent a good deal of his childhood plopped down in front of the TV where he studied how Hollywood actors and actresses got their start. He was cataloging the little-known faces. It paid off: In the early ’90s, he says that passion organically gave him the idea for Before They Were Stars.
“Back then, there were more sort of recognizable TV and movie stars and music stars,” Fleiss adds. “Everybody knew who Lee Majors was, or Tom Cruise was, or Brad Pitt. Now, today’s stars, they don’t have that much penetration. So we were able to sell a show that was just clips of famous, really famous people. Remember Tom Cruise was in a Crest commercial and stuff like that? So I had noticed that through my life of devouring television, just watching everything.”
Mike Fleiss, who just finished filming a horror movie called Possessions, says he made a sort of game out of identifying these celebrities before they were household names. When he had friends over, he’d quiz them on it.
“I’d show a clip and say, ‘Can you identify that person?’ So it had a game element to it too when you were watching it,” Mike Fleiss explains. “You were trying to say, ‘Who is that little kid?’”
A little creative genius, that’s who.
“And then they do it now on TMZ, you’ll see that kind of stuff. It wasn’t a great creative thing. I guess it was clever. It had a fun sort of quality to it — a sort of guessing game thing. So I had that. I had a bunch of ideas when I came down to LA, but that was the first one I sold.”
