Tony Brown was a shy LSU student who wanted help expanding his social horizons.
But he did more than seek help from a fellow student or even a campus counselor – he went to MTV.
MTV recently finished filming an episode of the show MADE based on Brown’s life at LSU. MADE “makes over” people who want to change but have goals too difficult to reach on their own.
Past episodes of MADE include a skinny “nerd” who wanted to be a starter on his high school basketball team and a broad-shouldered football player vying for an opera career.
Brown, a political science sophomore, sent a video asking MTV to help him learn how to talk to girls because he felt too uncomfortable to do it on his own. Brown said MADE already has changed his life.
“I used to feel like a nerd, but now I feel like a cocky bastard,” Brown said. “Watch out LSU, the ladies’ man is here.”
Nikki Varhely, the show’s director and one of the producers, said Brown was in dire need of help when it came to meeting girls.
“He was the quintessential dork,” she said. “He had never had a girlfriend, and he wants to be a ladies’ man.”
To give Brown the boost he needed to feel confident when approaching Southern belles at LSU, MTV sent him a coach to teach him how to be cool.
David Wygant, a self-proclaimed “image sculptor,” worked with Brown for four weeks to “transform” him from the social outcast he was into a big man on campus . According to his Web site, www.whatsyourexcuse.com, Wygant is a dating coach and public speaker who will “show you how” to be “happier and stronger.”
“There’s nobody I can’t transform,” Wygant said Friday in the Quad while Brown was being filmed. “I can change a person because I use their own personality – it’s been hidden.”
Wygant said there has been a tremendous change in Brown’s personality and looks since he was first brought to coach him.
“It’s unbelievable – he looked like a geek when I first ran into him,” Wygant said. “So we took him shopping, gave him a new hair cut and a new attitude.”
MADE producers did not allow Brown to give many details about his life since MTV came onto the scene because they did not want to give the episode’s plot away before it airs.
As Brown rushed off to class Friday, he gave some short, quick comments about what it has been like to be followed around by cameras.
“I don’t really pay attention [to the cameras],” he said. “But it’s been fun.”
Though Brown tolerates the video cameras with hopes of having a long line of ladies waiting to date him after the show airs, some of his fellow LSU students view the camera crews as intruders.
Adam Hensley, a biology sophomore and Brown’s roommate, said he turns his back anytime a video camera is around him.
“I’m excited for Tony, but I’m not used to being on camera,” Hensley said. “I don’t like it.”
Other LSU students seemed to thrive when thinking about being associated with Brown’s potential campus and MTV stardom. About 25 people attended a party hosted by MADE producers Friday night in Brown and Hensley’s East Campus Apartment, and a few of those in attendance said they enjoyed being surrounded by cameras.
Bonnie Buckner, a mass communication sophomore, met Brown during filming a week before the party. She said she has gotten used to the cameras.
“Now it’s like commonplace,” Buckner said. “I forget it’s MTV because now I know them. Now it’s kind of like, ‘Oh there’s Nikki Varhely.”
Brown is excited about his recent celebrity status on campus, but Chris Baldell, mechanical engineering sophomore and Brown’s friend, is concerned for him.
“I’m worried people will only talk to him because of MTV,” he said.
The MADE Web site said its subjects “may not always make their goals, but they just might realize they had what they wanted all along. They’ll never know unless they get MADE.”
The LSU community can find out if Brown will be the campus ladies’ man he hopes to be when the episode airs Sept. 27 at 11 a.m. on MTV, cable channel 71.
– Staff photographer Autumn Wood contributed to this story.