In Search of One for the Books

The bull is named Bodacious, and a video clip shows what happens to someone who rides him. It’s a violent but mercifully brief trip that somehow results only in a broken eye socket, a broken cheekbone and a concussion for the rider.

“Great, great video,” Eric Schotz enthuses.

But Schotz, one of the executive producers of Fox’s “Guinness World Records: Prime Time,” has one question about Bodacious: “Is he really the world’s worst bull?”

Perhaps, but ultimately it’s the aforementioned video that drives “Guinness,” a reality program that has found a home on Fox Tuesday nights at 9. As the network has discovered with other shows that use superlatives like “scariest” and “worst” in the title, viewers are willing to watch regardless of whether they truly believe you are showing them, say, the world’s biggest tumor.

The tumor was part of the debut installment of “Guinness” in August, a show that drew 14 million viewers. While the numbers have declined as “Guinness” has gone up against new fall competition--original episodes of ABC’s “Spin City” and NBC’s “Just Shoot Me”--”Guinness” has nevertheless solidified its time slot, averaging 10.5 million viewers each week and building on its lead-in, back-to-back episodes of “King of the Hill.”

Despite the fact that their show inevitably delves into the grotesque (recent spots have featured a woman who eats glass and a man who stood covered in nearly 100 pounds of bees), Schotz and fellow executive producer Bill Paolantonio bristle at any attempt to lump “Guinness” into Fox’s lineup of cheap-to-produce, hit-and-run TV shows like “World’s Scariest Police Chases” and “When Animals Attack.”

The instinct to run from the comparison is natural, since Fox has come under increasing fire for its reality programming, punctuated by last month’s arrest in Idaho of a crew filming a segment of “World’s Nastiest Neighbors.”

But Schotz and Paolantonio argue that the Guinness name alone distinguishes their show from so much modern-day vaudeville.

“What makes ‘Guinness’ the TV show and ‘Guinness’ the book unique [is that] there are rules and regulations to everything that is shown or written,” Schotz says. “If you want to have a sword-swallower, the swords will have to be of a certain length.”

Produced by LMNO Productions, the company behind CBS’ “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” “Guinness” is a spinoff of the “Guinness Book of Records.” Since its first edition was published in England in 1955, the book has sold more than 80 million copies in 40 countries.

Schotz calls the book “the encyclopedia of our times.” Others are more skeptical, as a recent Sunday Times of London survey found that the 1999 edition of “Guinness” contained a number of errors and information that is up to 24 years out of date.

Regardless, the index cards on the walls of the conference room at LMNO Productions in Sherman Oaks attest to the “Guinness” attractions that keep pulling in viewers to the TV version: “the world’s largest tomato fight,” “the human calculator” and “the world’s most destructive family,” which, contrary to first impressions, does not involve a brood of passive-aggressives but a family that likes to blow things up.

It’s Friday, and Schotz and Paolantonio are meeting with their researchers to see what oddities of nature, far-out feats and just plain amazing stuff the staff has come up with for future shows.

Today, there’s the world’s most extreme game show, with footage from Japan of people undergoing various means of torture. In one clip, a man wearing just underwear is tied to the ground, covered in feed and pecked by chickens.

It’s slam-dunk video, but other stories will need fine-tuning and more legwork. All will need official verification from the “Guinness Book of Records” headquarters in London, Schotz and Paolantonio say.

In the case of Bodacious, for instance, the executive producers want confirmation from the National Bull Riders Assn. that Bodacious is indeed the meanest creature ever banned from the circuit.

“Something that’s based on height and weight, it becomes easier to say, ‘We have video proof,’ ” Paolantonio says. “Something more subjective, in that case Guinness becomes the final arbiter,” though it’s at the very least amusing to picture “Guinness Book of Records” officials soberly considering whether Bodacious is indeed the meanest bull on the planet.

While show staffers comb newspapers and the Internet looking for potential record-breakers, some “Guinness’ aspirants contact the show--like the Florida man who called offering to shatter the record for riding a motorcycle through a firewall by traveling 200 feet through the flames, doubling the existing record. His asking price? $14,000, to cover production of the stunt. Any payment beyond such costs is considered on a case-by-case basis, the producers say. Also on the menu at today’s meeting is the 3-D body artist who surgically embeds steel spikes in people’s heads (“Call the AMA and find out if there’re any lawsuits pending against the guy,” Schotz instructs a staff member); video from New Zealand of a man who claims to blow the world’s biggest bubble; and footage of a guy water skiing after jumping 80 feet out of a tree.

Noting that “it’s not politically correct to make fun of freaks anymore,” Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at Cal State L.A., says “Guinness” may be dressed as sober reality, but that’s just to distract people from the fact that they’re engrossed in the same timeless entertainment of the old carnival show.

“You’re really in a situation now where everybody is trying to come up with some genre of entertainment that will be pulling [viewers] away from every other genre of entertainment,” Fischoff said, adding that the current climate of reality shows puts American society on the slippery slope to televised executions.

None of their segments make the cut, counter Schotz and Paolantonio, if they can’t be spun in a way that sells them as human interest pieces. That’s what they’re targeting--not oddity for oddity’s sake but human interest stories, testaments to the triumph of the spirit, they say.

Take the piece they did recently on Rosalie Bradford, Schotz says. Bradford is registered in the “Guinness Book of Records” as the world’s heaviest woman, having hit a peak weight of 1,202 pounds in 1987. But she also holds the record for the most weight loss by a woman, slimming down to an astonishing 283 pounds in 1994, according to “Guinness.”

“It’s an easy shot in tabloid TV to call her the world’s fattest woman,” Schotz says. “It’s how you phrase it. . . . We’re very conscious about treating these people with some sort of humanity.”

It’s a bit harder to find the humanity in the world’s biggest apple fritter, which is why Schotz rejects a researcher’s pitch that it be a segment on its own. Instead, the fritter might get packaged as part of a piece on incredibly big food, which would include the world’s largest bagel at 563 pounds.

Pass the cream cheese.

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* “Guinness World Records: Prime Time” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox.