Christopher Darryn
- Additional Crew
- Producer
I started my entertainment career as "the youngest stand-up comic in the New England area." (Boston Globe) After Variety reviewed me as having a "rich inventive mind," a NYC personal manager urged me to move to New York where I worked on my act and emceed very late night at the famous "Improvisation" comedy club. A one-man tribute show to the late comedian Lenny Bruce quickly led me to a meeting at 20th Century-Fox in Los Angeles to discuss playing "young Lenny" in a sequel to the Dustin Hoffman movie "Lenny." The sequel never happened but I loved SoCal and, determined to stay, quickly landed a job at Universal Studios ultimately doing VIP Tours. Freelance writing in my spare time, I developed a knack for research that eventually led to a position with a live Lifetime cable talk show called "America Talks Back." The host's requests for information, literally minutes before going live, led to my computerizing their research department. Creating an in-house database of publications, I and my personal computer became an important asset to the fun but, sadly, short-lived little live talk show. My new appreciation for computers propelled me to found "The Online Entertainment Network" - the first social media website with forums, information and software customized for entertainment professionals. Far ahead of its time, OEN launched but crashed. The Internet was still a mystery to most industry people and so the first social media site of its kind was unable to build the subscriber and advertiser base necessary to keep the servers serving. Contemplating OEN's failure, I realized producers and research directors wanted the speed and power of online research but were "technophobic" or simply too busy to learn the complex computer search languages. Enter "The Research Department," the first computer-based research company to cater primarily to the fast-paced world of TV talk shows. As the genre filled daytime and late night slots, the competition for new subjects and fresh guests intensified and the popularity of talk shows actually became the subject of talk shows. A Los Angeles Times article titled "InfoMan" revealed me as "one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets" and a KABC radio interview led to my receiving hundreds of letters from people wanting to share their stories on TV talk shows. The question was; how to help them? The answer was "The National Talk Show Guest Registry (tm)." News spread quickly and globally about the "first clearinghouse for regular people who wanted to be talk show guests." My own guest shot on The Maury Povich Show assured "The Research Department" and NTSGR database would soon become an invaluable guest and story resource for at least forty different shows. As the popularity pendulum swung from TV talk to reality TV, I retired the registry but not myself. I'm still behind the scenes where I'm happiest.