Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 28, 1990 TAG: 9007280428
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JERRY BUCK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If you've seen her ditsy cartoon of an empty-headed Valley girl, you might agree. It's a persona she's honed with albums like "Goddess in Progress" and such songs and videos as "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun," "I Like 'Em Big and Stupid" and "Trapped in the Body of a White Girl."
She co-wrote the movie "Earth Girls Are Easy," in which she also had a starring role, from one of her songs.
Brown's weekly half-hour show is a tongue-in-cheek way of introducing rock videos. It's set in her tacky condo, where friends and relatives occasionally drop by.
"I make fun of the videos," Brown said. "Some of them are pretty lame. After all, if it's rock 'n' roll, it should be a little rebellious. Poking fun at them is in the spirit of rock 'n' roll. MTV never told me to do that. They just said, `Here's the show.'
"You know, when television first started, Ernie Kovacs did a lot of experimental comedy," she said. "That was before the networks started research to see if their shows would appeal to people. I think research is killing a lot of good shows before they ever get on the air. It destroys innovation and originality."
Brown speaks from experience. Her pilot "Julie Brown: The Show" was broadcast by CBS last summer.
"I got amazing reviews," she said. "But the research wasn't good enough to get it on the air. Then they came up with something called `Peaceable Kingdom.' No wonder the networks are losing their audience to cable, because cable's still willing to experiment."
"Peaceable Kingdom" was an undistinguished drama on CBS' fall schedule that died a quick and merciful death.
Brown is in her second season on MTV. Of the cable music network's three female video jockeys, two are named Julie Brown. The other is better known as "Downtown" Julie Brown.
Don't think for a moment that Brown is like her character. She did grow up in the San Fernando Valley, the Valley Girl's natural habitat, but she studied acting at the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She's been a standup comic and she writes her own offbeat songs.
She and her regular writing partner, Charlie Coffey - they wrote the "Earth Girls are Easy" screenplay with Terence E. McNally - have several more movies in development: "Medusa: Portrait of a Pop Legend," in which Brown would play a pop music superstar, and "Totally Witchin'," a musical about a woman possessed by a witch's spirit.
Brown began doing a standup comedy act with Coffey while attending ACT in San Francisco.
"Most female comics were taking sexuality out of their acts," she said. "I thought that was a shame. Marilyn Monroe could be sexy and funny at the same time. When I started 11 years ago, a lot of women were doing self-deprecating humor - `I can't get a date.' I wasn't going to do that. I thought I was attractive.
"Charlie and I were very successful in San Francisco, but people in Los Angeles didn't understand our humor," she said. "Charlie left the act and I was doing a single. It's tough because you have to be aggressive with the audience. Then I began singing, and once I did that it became a whole new thing."
Brown appeared in such movies as "Any Which Way You Can" and "Police Academy 2," and was a guest on such shows as "The Jeffersons," "Happy Days," "Laverne and Shirley" and "Newhart," where she appeared several times as airhead weather girl Buffy Denver.
Before starting her half-hour show on MTV, she had made several guest appearances as a video jockey. In her early appearances, she came on and said she was "Downtown" Julie Brown, who is black. At the time, she was promoting her album "Trapped in a White Girl's Body."
When MTV offered her a show, she said, she didn't want to move to New York.
"I'm an actress, and I felt that would take me out of acting," she said. "We reached a solution and I do the show here. As long as I show three videos on each show, I can do anything I want. I can break into a video and say, `Stop, I have something to say."'
by CNB