After watching Miley Cyrus make kissy faces into MTV’s famous Times Square photo booth all night during Total Finale Live, we couldn’t help but wonder if anything a little more R-rated had happened in that little box. So we asked TRL V.J. Damien Fahey, and he didn’t disappoint: “I remember Jewel, she showed a nipple,” he told us at the show’s wrap party, at Nikki Beach Midtown. “She didn’t realize it was a lipstick camera inside the photo booth. And she was in there with her rodeo boyfriend at the time, and, um, that sounds demeaning, but she just whipped it out and didn’t know a camera was in there, and the next thing you know, the whole control room got Jewel-boob on the television screen.”
This, unfortunately, was a brief trend for TRL. “When we first started the show, there were girls who would stand out there and flash, and that phenomenon lasted all of about a week,” Fahey added. “Which is good, because most of our audience is 13.”
But it wasn’t all boobs and celebrities in Times Square. Something about TRL helped to fashion the identity of the New York landmark. “Just as New York was sort of reasserting itself as a tourist destination, MTV and TRL became kind of a mecca for any kids who are interested in pop culture and pop music,” former V.J. John Dave Holmes said.
“When I first got there, there were signs from a few fans who were from one of the boroughs, like I’m from Brooklyn, I’m from Queens,” original V.J. Carson Daly explained. “And then it was, I’m from Connecticut, I’m from Pennsylvania, and then it was I’m from California, I’m from Puerto Rico.”
