Irreverent Film Lands Student a Job with MTV

As paparazzi and screaming fans began to fill the plaza outside Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House hoping to catch the red-carpet celebrities heading into MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMA) in September 2001, Gardner Loulan grabbed his video camera and left his room in McMahon Hall. A communications major and sometime prankster, he thought he’d document the excitement a few blocks away. Little did he know that he’d end up working for the network.

After slipping past security, Loulan and his roommate found a staircase to the attic of the opera house and made their way backstage. Then, using crudely made credentials, Loulan impersonated an MTV correspondent, talking with fans back outside and conducting contests for phony backstage passes.

“It was just good fun. I didn’t intend for anything to come of it,” said Loulan, who edited the footage and put it to music. A friend’s boyfriend, who worked for MTV, showed the piece to his boss. Three weeks later, Loulan was hired as the first veejay for mtvU, MTV’s college network, broadcast to more than 720 colleges nationwide.

Since then, Loulan has traveled to campuses in North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, Colorado and elsewhere, interviewing students on a range of topics. In sharp contrast to his cheeky, renegade coverage of the 2001 VMA’s, for example, he recently interviewed a Vermont college student who will be going to Iraq as a second Army lieutenant after she graduates in May.

“I like working on those stories because they have substance,” Loulan said. “You can get a feel for lives that are different than your own.”

Morgan Hertzan, the coordinating producer for mtvU who hired Loulan nearly three years ago, said Loulan is a natural in front of the camera.

“Gardner falls under no common description,” said Hertzan. “He’s fun-loving, silly, intellectual, athletic. Gardner could really be the next Johnny Carson or Conan O’Brien; he is that versatile.

“The first time we shot,” Hertzan added, “Gardner had not been trained as a veejay, but he quickly memorized three pages of script, and he spoke with Muslim students at Montclair State about 9/11 and discrimination with great compassion.”

It was not the first time Loulan connected with people in a compassionate
way. During the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, he traveled to Haiti with Fordham’s Global Outreach program to help care for sick children in a hospital and a hospice. Loulan filmed the experience.

“It was really hard to see the desperation and poverty,” he said, “but it was inspiring to see that the people were content with what they had.”

Loulan has since led two Global Outreach trips—one to Montana, Colorado and South Dakota, where students performed community service, including working on a Lakota reservation; and another to Waynesburg, Pa., where students built homes with Habitat for Humanity. This year, he also served as president of United Student Government on the Lincoln Center campus.

Loulan, a California native, will continue working with mtvU after graduation. He eventually hopes to direct and produce music videos and, ultimately, feature films.

“I wanted a liberal arts education that would give me a well-rounded view of things, not a school focused solely on one medium or means of expression,” said Loulan. “It’s best when your aspirations and your skills end up coinciding, and being at Fordham—and being in New York, the mecca of creativity and progressive thinking—helped give me the opportunity to develop both.”

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