ABC's Extreme Makeover

ABC's Extreme Makeover

It started more than 25 years ago, when Dr. Dean Lodding DDS was a junior in college with his sights set on dental school. If he hadn’t dropped by his advisor's office that day on his way to a dorm party, he’d have missed the application deadline for the entrance exam and would have had to wait until his senior year to pursue dentistry.

Perhaps he would never have gotten involved in cosmetic dentistry, or never opened his state-of-the-art Smile for Life Dental practice near St. Charles, Ill. Perhaps, too, he wouldn’t have met Bill Dorfman.

Dr. Dorfman, renowned for making Hollywood smiles flashier, is known to fans of “Extreme Makeover” as the lead cosmetic dentist of the hit television show. It was his friendship with Dr. Dorfman that got Dr. Lodding invited onto the personal re-design show. “They wanted to have clinicians from different parts of the country involved” Dr. Lodding said, “to emphasize that this is not all just about Los Angeles.”

Procedures were filmed in Dr. Dorfmans’ office. “He’s on the 17th floor of a high-rise,” Dr. Lodding explained. “Space is at a premium so everything is tight and compact, but TV makes it seem like it’s bigger and more open. Everybody is just packed into the room. It’s no different than working in St. Charles,” he said, “except that there’s a cameraman, a sound man, a producer and director.”

Doctors Dorfman and Lodding played “tag team,” working on patients in three or four rooms at a time. Dr. Lodding said other patients for the show were in Los Angeles at the same time, involved in different aspects of their total makeovers, such as the eyelid lifts, nose and ear surgery, laser hair removal, liposuction, and botox and collagen injections that one of his patients, Pam, received in addition to extensive dental work. He said Dr. Dorfman estimated that a million dollars in dental work alone was donated during the first season.