Jenny McCarthy

Jenny McCarthy

Jenny McCarthy has a great personality. Her vivacious charisma, snappy banter, and amusing facial expressions on MTV's Singled Out, a hyper-charged nineties version of The Dating Game, made the should-be stupid game show somehow bearable--nay, hypnotic. But Jenny McCarthy show-business attributes extend beyond mere personality--the twenty-three-year-old former Playboy centerfold exhibits such profound perkiness that Hollywood producers have ignored her meager résumé and inundated her with proposals for game shows, talk shows, and sitcoms. 
Just a few short years ago, in 1992, Jenny McCarthy was scrambling for funds to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois University. She decided to quit school and embark on a modeling career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women over waifs, and hand-delivered photographs of herself to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors liked what they saw and paid McCarthy $20,000 to pose as Miss October 1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Now a certified babe, Jenny McCarthy moved from her native Chicago--where she grew up with three sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman--to Los Angeles in search of stardom. 

Hollywood auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, Jenny McCarthy forty-seven-year-old manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview at MTV. The network's producer liked what they saw and hired Jenny McCarthy to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Funny, telegenic, and able to manhandle fifty testosterone-swollen contestants without incurring (or committing) bodily harm, Jenny McCarthy was an immediate success. MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract that promotes Jenny McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gives her carte blanche to create a program of any format that best suits her talents. Jenny McCarthy recently opted to bow out of her host responsibilities on Singled Out to concentrate her attention on creating a new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny Jenny McCarthy Show, which will be, in her words, "kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on acid." She is also developing another sitcom for NBC, which positions McCarthy as an East Coaster who inherits a Hollywood mansion and gets a job as a movie star's personal assistant.

Playboy, too, was keen to further its relationship with Jenny McCarthy; it offered $500,000 to snap more nude photos. When McCarthy demurred, claiming that this was not the career path she was presently pursuing, the magazine settled for rerunning old pics. Although she also declined proposals from Fox and NBC, Jenny McCarthy is nonetheless venturing beyond teen-oriented cable channels and gentlemen's magazines. She appeared as "blonde nurse" in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen character (a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold. It seems McCarthy is heeding and exceeding advice that her mother proffered years ago: "Be like Vanna White."

Jenny McCarthy's 'Dirty' Movie Features Sum 41 Frontman
LOS ANGELES — One of the numerous films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival next month was written by Jenny McCarthy.

Yes, that Jenny McCarthy.

The former Playmate of the Year, whose film career has consisted
mainly of cameos in movies like "Scary Movie 3," "Scream 3" and "BASEketball," got sick of not seeing any good comedies for women come across her desk, so she wrote one herself. Two, actually.

"We're usually cast as the funny guy's girlfriend, and I say bleep that!" McCarthy explained. "No thank you. I'm gonna do it myself, and I finally became old enough to learn how to do it myself, and I'm doing it."

McCarthy wrote "Dirty Love" and shot it last summer. Her husband, John Asher, who directed her in "Diamonds" and "Thank Heaven," was the first to sign on. Carmen Electra, Eddie Kaye Thomas of the "American Pie" movies and Kathy Griffin co-star, while Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 has a cameo.

"Carmen plays my girlfriend and she's hilarious in it," McCarthy said. "The premise is a girl that walks in on her boyfriend sleeping with another woman and she seeks revenge on him the entire time. You know I wrote it, so it's gotta be pretty controversially insane."

"Dirty Love" will be part of the Park City at Midnight category, which has featured "The Blair Witch Project" and "Super Troopers" in the past.

McCarthy anticipates the movie will hit theaters in the summer, around the same time she and Asher start shooting the other movie she wrote, "Rollin."

"It's about ecstasy," McCarthy said. "There's so many people taking it and not enough people making fun of it, so I wrote a comedy about it. It's pretty insane. I have no words of wisdom about it, it's just plain funny."

McCarthy is also scheduled to shoot two other movies in 2005, "National Lampoon's Cattle Call" and "Once in a Lifetime."

This report is from MTV News.

McCarthy diversifies body of work
Jenny McCarthy is seemingly everywhere these days.
Yesterday, she was on "The View," then drove out to Queens, where she was in production on one of two episodes of ABC's "Hope & Faith," in which she'll appear later this season.

Friday, she'll turn up on WE: Women's Entertainment in "Take My Kids Please!," a new reality show airing at 10 p.m.

Come January, she'll star in "The Bad Girl's Guide," a sitcom for UPN.

"I couldn't be happier," McCarthy told the Daily News. "I feel like I took control of my career finally. I got in the driver's seat. I'm finally using my brains, not my boobs."

Don't forget, it was her breasts - baring them, that is, in Playboy - that gained McCarthy notoriety in the first place.

Early on she also did some guest roles in shows such as "Baywatch" and "Silk Stalkings" and later went on to co-host "Singled Out," a dating game show, and star in her first sitcom, "Jenny."

She serves as a host of all purposes for WE. For example, on Friday's launch of "Take My Kids Please!," she interviews people about bad baby-sitting scenarios. The show itself is built around a couple who is sent on a night out while an inexperienced friend or neighbor baby-sits their kids.

"I love how my career has turned into the direction of family, versus sex," McCarthy said. "I'm actually delighted when I get a call [for a job] like this."

Well, it's a career that's not completely without sexual innuendo.

Her recurring character on "Hope & Faith" is a bit of a floozy. Her father on the show is played by Tony Curtis, and she sleeps with Kelly Ripa's character's dad, played by Robert Wagner.

And don't look for McCarthy to turn up in a big dramatic role anytime soon.

"No, I never really wanted them to begin with," she said. "You won't see me in movies of the week, where I'm dying of cancer. I'm honest, a blond, and funny. I'm not going to try to be Gwyneth Paltrow."

Instead, she wants viewers to look at her as one of the girls. And she only takes parts that won't take time away from her 2-year-old son.

As for thinking with her brains and not her breasts, McCarthy is thinking about baring herself again for Playboy.

"They've asked me, but I've not decided yet," she said. "I have no problems doing it. Everybody's seen everything already anyway."

Richard Huff

Other great sites:

• JENNY MCCARTHY NUDE PICTURES, NAKED FAKES