Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein

cleavage; Melissa was never going to show up in a bikini top, that kind of thing. She did become a little more sultry as the show progressed, but that was probably appropriate.
    MELISSA JOAN HART: I don’t think anyone in my camp was shocked by the
Maxim
issue with me in it. I think the only people who were shocked by it were the
Archie
comics people who owned
Sabrina
and were looking to get paid out.
    ELIZABETH HESS: I personally didn’t see the cover of
Maxim
but certainly heard about it from my NYU students. I think Melissa wanted so much to be seen as a woman after being a child actor from the age of four. And sadly, I still think objectification is the most obvious way to try to achieve that. Although it undermines rather than underlines a woman’s stunning singularity and strengths.
    SEAN O’NEAL: As far as Melissa’s
Maxim
spread: Kudos! It takes a lot as a celebrity personality—especially a female—to expose herself. It was daring but necessary to put her in a different category.
    MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: Oh, you know . . . That was just her mom trying to change her profile. My job was just to not have things like that go on while she was working with
me
.
    CHUCK VINSON: I’d been down that road before with Lisa Bonet from
The Cosby Show
being in that Robert De Niro movie . . . My statement about Melissa was this: She has grown up.
    JOE O’CONNOR: I don’t think she should have done it, myself. But there’s this thing in LA where they make decisions based on this kind of stuff: initial sexual reactions. Most of the actresses in LA, while they’re still young, try to do this. If a girl hasn’t made it out here, in terms of movies, and hasn’t gotten that image by the time she’s twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, she’s finished and they move on to younger girls. Pretty terrible. Actually, they do it with young
guys
now, too. Still, I think Melissa should have gone and tried to do it a little different. Is that way too much? I had too much coffee.
    MELISSA JOAN HART: I think it was one of the best things for my career. I was twenty-three and had already been on the cover of
Details
in my underwear, and no one made a big deal about
that
, and here I was doing
Maxim
to, you know, promote a movie, and
I’m a full-blown adult
 . . . There was this big controversy as to whether or not I was “allowed” to be sexy. It was hilarious. Of course, for like a week I panicked—“Am I gonna be fired? Am I gonna be sued?” But after that week went by and they were talking about it on
Leno
and
Regis & Kathie Lee
and the
Post
had it every day, it really drove the numbers up at the box office for my movie that week.
    JUSTIN CAMMY: Alanis Morissette was prematurely mature for her age. In a scary way. Prematurely driven. “I’m going to be a star.” Not just in the way she carried herself, but physically, sexually. Clearly other things were going on in her life I was not privy to at the time.
    ADAM REID: Alanis played a demo tape one time when she was probably twelve. Maybe she was thirteen, but it was one of her first recording efforts. She was definitely singing about “adult” concepts. That was the first thing that really struck me:
Wow, she’s really mature. She’s thinking about some
deep
shit.
    BRENDA MASON: She was definitely a talented songwriter, but way too much has been made of the “Alanis thing.” She was only in five episodes, and I directed her in all of them. Roger wasn’t overly fond of her, feeling she didn’t “stand out” as a character. And he didn’t like her short, boyish haircut. I’m not sure she was really comfortable in the sketch comedy milieu either. What the crew members remember about her is her deep commitment to music. She developed a rapport with one of the audio guys, and he helped her with some of her initial recordings. Nothing was ever released.
    VANESSA LINDORES: I still have her first two singles on a forty-five that she gave me back then. Alanis and I