John Padon, Las Vegas Sun, April 30, 2004

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: It’s business as usual for entrepreneur Padon Lisa Ferguson Friday, April 30, 2004 | 8:27 a.m. John Padon certainly has the business acumen and charisma it takes to become a serious contender on a future installment of "The Apprentice." Trouble is, he's entirely too busy creating television programs and networks of his own -- as well as maintaining his stand-up comedy career, and co-owning a local nightclub -- to even consider starring in someone else's reality-television show. "I'm trying to make a living," Padon joked about his varied occupations during a recent call from his Las Vegas home. "I just don't want to end up being the 70-year-old guy on the cruise ship telling jokes." After touring as the opening act for the likes of David Spade, Adam Sandler, Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld in the '80s and '90s, these days Padon performs almost exclusively in Las Vegas production shows and at local comedy clubs, including a gig that wraps Sunday at Riviera Comedy Club. "It was like comedy college working with those guys, and learning very quickly," he recalls, explaining how years ago Seinfeld, upon learning Padon's act was heavy on political humor, offered him some advice: " 'Why do you wanna work that hard?' He says, 'You're gonna throw away more material in the next 10 years than most guys write in their whole career.' "About five years after he told me that, I started realizing how true that was," Padon says, "because if people weren't stealing it from you ... it was losing its shelf life and turning stale, so you had to drop it no matter how good it was." His act is "pretty diverse today," touching on such topics as "al-Qaida, to Korea, to the ban on cigarette smokers pretty much across the country." He also talks about being the father of two daughters, age 9 and 13. "I still have birthing material in my act, and here I have a teenager. I think that's what Seinfeld meant when he said, 'Write something else.' That stuff will last forever." Padon's resume boasts stints in the production shows "Midnight Fantasy" (Luxor); "The History of Sex" and "Hot Stuff" (Golden Nugget); and "Skintight" (Harrah's Reno). Most recently, he and his showgirl wife, Dejah Juarez, were featured in "X," formerly at Aladdin. "Being a burlesque-show comic, which is what I like to call it, is very tough because you're the uninvited guest in a topless show," he explains. "You have 30 minutes of young, gorgeous girls jiggling, and you come out" to men in the audience, who are thinking, " 'Who's this idiot?' ... If they don't think you're funny in the first 60 seconds, you're dead." Padon entered the nightclub business when, he says, his childhood-friend-turned-club-owner Michael Goodwin approached him with the idea of opening a hot spot in Las Vegas. The comic says he immediately thought of the formerly empty space above Chinois, Wolfgang Puck's restaurant at the Forum Shops at Caesars. He claims to have "hooked up" Goodwin with Tom Kaplan, senior managing partner of Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group. Last year, following some red-tape and construction delays, OPM was born. Padon was made a "silent partner" in the business. While he visits the club about once a week and assists with some of the promotional work, he contends, "My expertise in the nightclub business, unless it's a comedy club, is zilch." OPM is set to serve as the backdrop for an upcoming reality show called "The Nightclub," which will follow "the inner workings of the club and the characters that make it happen ... their lives in and outside of the nightclub," Padon says. A deal is in the works to begin airing the series this summer, though he declines to reveal on which network it may appear. Padon (who, when asked his age, jokes that he's "turned 40 a couple of times now") knows a thing or two about the television industry: He won an Emmy for a script he penned for the ABC series "The Wonder Years." More recently he co-founded the VTV television network with business partner Donald Beck, a Los Angeles television producer. Originally, the network was to have featured programming dedicated to Las Vegas, which would air courtesy of a deal Padon and Beck have with the Turner Network Group (which includes cable's TBS and TNT networks). VTV, in recent months, has undergone a "corporate restructure," Padon says, and is now called VTN (short for Vegas Television Network). While he's tight-lipped about specific details, he says VTN is set to begin placing programs of varying styles and subject matter on several major networks. Another endeavor involving Padon, Beck and their business partners -- a company called Neolink Wireless Content Inc. -- is focused on bringing entertainment options to even smaller screens: those found on cellular phones. Earlier this year the men joined forces with Idetic Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based wireless media company that offers its MobiTV television network on Sprint PCS Vision-enabled cell phones. In March, Neolink Wireless Content Inc. and Idetic Inc. launched on MobiTV both VTV Scoreline, which Padon describes as a "24/7, up-to-the-minute scoreboard for all sports"; and VTV Sports, "a sexy, young babe sports-report network." The latter, he claims, is viewed on more than 150,000 cell phones each day, and that number is expected to rise this year as more cellular-phone companies come on board. "Pretty soon, your cell phone will be a personal, portable entertainment device ... It's gonna be huge." With his hands helping stir so many potentially lucrative pots, it's surprising to learn Padon has no plans to bid farewell to his stand-up career anytime soon. "I will probably do comedy the rest of my life. "It's not about the money, the fame," he contends. "You could ask any of my famous friends -- I've got a few of them who have gone on to being rich and famous -- and even after all the sitcom money and all the movie money, they still want to go stand on a stage and make a bunch of people laugh, because that's what it's all about." Out for laughs A clarification to a photo caption that appeared in last week's Laugh Lines is in order: Carla Rea co-stars in "Divas of Comedy" at Sahara, not Riviera Comedy Club, as was stated. If you missed this week's installment of the hit Bravo series "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," you didn't see the cluttered home and not-so-stylish duds of comic Kevin Downey Jr. receive much-needed makeovers. (You also missed the funny guy's marriage proposal to his girlfriend.) Don't fret: The episode repeats at 7 p.m. Saturday (Cox cable channel 53). See if Downey's new look has stuck when he takes the stage May 17-23 at The Comedy Stop at the Trop.