This is when our lives started to change.
Producers got in touch with us to transfer the show to Off-Broadway. We got a director, we got a budget, and we could finally return our costumes to Brenda"s brothers. The show went up at P.S. 122, a beautiful theater in the East Village that at one point had been a public school. There"s a special level of cool for buildings in Manhattan that have at one point been something else. Someone might say to you, knowingly, "Oh, did you know this theater used to be a zipper factory?" or "You obviously know this discotheque used to be church, right?" or "We are eating in a restaurant that at one point was a typhoid containment center." That"s what I love about New York. If Rikers Island ever goes under, I know Andre Balazs will have that place turned into a destination hotel for urban metros.e.xuals within a month, tops. People will sit in their cell/hotel rooms and say, "You know a convicted s.e.x offender used to live in this cell, right?" The solitary confinement unit will be the honeymoon suite.
The show was short enough that we could do two shows a night. That in itself was challenging, because in the play, the twenty-one-year-old Ben tries to impress Matt by chugging an entire twelve-ounce bottle of apple juice in one gulp. So I actually gulped two bottles a night, though the apple juice was diluted. As I"ve written about in great detail in this book, I"m no dainty girl, but I"m a not a camel, either, and doing that twice in one evening was pretty nauseating.
Word of mouth from the Fringe helped sales. Nicole Kidman and Steve Martin coincidentally came to see the show on the same night, and before long the show was selling out so much that we had to add a third performance a night. This meant three bottles of diluted apple juice. By the third curtain call of the night I had to consciously tell myself not to barf when we took our bows. I have never been so excited to hold back vomit.
BLOODSHED
On the night that Bruce Weber of the New York Times was reviewing the show, I accidentally punched Brenda in the face and broke her nose.
How does one accidentally fracture the face of one"s best friend? Well, in my defense, there is a fight sequence in the play. It happens toward the very end. Matt has been so antagonized by Ben"s immaturity that he tells him he has no talent. Ben, in the heat of the moment, punches Matt. It was a ch.o.r.eographed punch that we had worked on for weeks. But, I don"t know, maybe I was drunk on apple juice, because my fist connected with her nose. It made a funny little cracking noise, which, I should probably note that Brenda did not immediately recognize as funny. That"s because Brenda was too busy bleeding. Her shirt was instantly soaked with blood. Noses, for the record, bleed like crazy. It looked like I had stabbed her in the face. The audience collectively gasped; there was a long beat of confused silence during which Bren looked at the blood on her hand and then up at me. Then the house manager turned on the lights, and Brenda ran offstage.
Brenda held paper towels to her bleeding face, and I stood by her dumbly, completely in shock at what I had done. Our director David Warren appeared backstage moments later. He walked over to us briskly, with the imperturbable cool of a soldier who dismantles explosives for a living: "You have to finish. The show must go on. Go." There was no p.u.s.s.yfooting or a.s.sessing our comfort levels. We just had to do it. I had never heard anyone say the phrase "the show must go on" in the literal sense.
Brenda wrapped a makeshift bandage around her nose and valiantly went back onstage. We finished the last ten minutes of the play, took a bow to a standing ovation from an impressed, if horrified crowd, then jumped in a cab and headed to the emergency room of St. Vincent"s. Bren"s nose was officially broken. Years later, she acquiesced, it took her a weekend to not be mad at me anymore, but I think it was actually a full week before she forgave me. I don"t blame her, though, Bren had a perfect nose. It"s still pretty perfect, but now it has a tiny b.u.mp in it, which she good-naturedly pretends she likes. I guess the lesson is that if you"re going to punch someone in the face, your best bet is to punch your best friend. Counterintuitive, I know.
Bruce Weber gave us a great review in the Times and also a separate little write-up about the nose incident. The publicity drove sales even more. People were curious about this weird, sixty-minute East Village play starring cross-dressers, during which at any moment physical violence might erupt. Great press from Rolling Stone and Time gave the producers confidence that the show could move to Los Angeles. So while there was a production going on at P.S. 122, we started another one in L.A.
EMOTIONAL BLOODSHED
Matt & Ben was invited to the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, in Aspen, which was a big deal, because HBO sponsored the festival and the place was full of powerful Hollywood execs. Only later I would realize that someone wasn"t powerful simply because they had the t.i.tle of "exec" and a company had paid for him to travel. Actually, the fact that he could be shipped away from Los Angeles for a week meant he was less powerful.
Aspen looked the way I had always imagined Switzerland to be, down to the beautiful blonde women walking around in shearling coats with fur pom-poms. Aspen is one of those places that looks rustic but where everything is actually sickeningly expensive. This was on a whole other level from New York, which was just plain old grossly expensive. Aspen was so expensive I was surprised it wasn"t entirely populated with the children of Middle Eastern oil moguls. We were put up at a Days Innstyle motel on the edge of town, but made the smart decision, upon waking up in the morning, of moving our hang-out time to the lobbies of the fanciest hotels. One day, we snuck into the gym at the St. Regis and did the elliptical machines for twenty exhilarating, frightening minutes.
How do I say that audiences in Aspen completely hated our show without you thinking I"m exaggerating? They hated the show. This was a festival designed for stand-up comedy and sketches, and we were the only play, which made us the longest show by a good thirty minutes. Even worse, we were in an auditorium so huge it could"ve doubled as a venue to announce the NFL draft. What worked so well in the intimacy of an Off-Broadway black box theater lost its charm in this cavernous s.p.a.ce. It was like staging a flea circus at the Rose Bowl. Though, come to think of it, "flea circus" probably better describes the attention span of our audiences. People kept getting up to leave in the middle of the play. We"d hear the door open, light would stream in, and then we"d hear the conversation the leavers would have with the people waiting in line for the act scheduled to follow us. When is this going to be over? How much longer? There"s supposed to be a sketch show in this venue about guys playing with their t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es after this!
FAILING UPWARD
I"ll chalk it up to good agenting that Marc Provissiero, our agent, was able to parlay Matt & Ben into a pilot deal. Marc was pa.s.sionate, young, and did charming things like disappear to Costa Rica and send us bottles of hot sauce in the mail. He could also switch from making small talk to becoming fiercely intense about our careers, making unwavering eye contact with his blue eyes. He"s the kind of guy you could see successfully carrying off an Aaron Sorkin monologue in real life. If he ever quits show business he could be a leader of a successful cult. It goes without saying he was a killer agent.
Our pilot, based on our lives in Brooklyn, was set up at a network that no longer exists, which I will call SHT. It was called Mindy & Brenda. It was supposed to be Laverne & Shirley but s.e.xier, I guess. Or like Mork & Mindy, replacing the alien character with Brenda as a sensible earthling.
We had a group of producers for the project, a few of whom I still think of with great affection. One was the legendary Tom Werner, who produced The Cosby Show and Roseanne. Tom would mention offhandedly that he"d caught a great baseball game the night before, and we"d later realize he was talking about sitting in his box at Fenway Park watching the Boston Red Sox, the Major League Baseball team he owned. I liked Tom a lot because he never got fl.u.s.tered or anxious, ever. We could burst into his office with Nancy Gracelevel anger over a network note, and Tom would sit back in his chair and distract us with a great anecdote about Bill Cosby. He was our wise, tan, and detached uncle.
When we wrote the show, we a.s.sumed that we would be playing the parts of Mindy and Brenda. This turned out to be a misguided a.s.sumption, because SHT had no intention of ever allowing that. We were told we would have to audition for the parts of Mindy and Brenda. Mindy and Brenda. I don"t know why we were surprised. SHT at this time was a network known largely for casting models to act in television programs and hoping audiences would enjoy good-looking people saying lines they had learned phonetically. If I sound bitter, it"s because I am still a little bitter. Who wouldn"t be?
If you were ever considering sitting in a room with a group of actresses who bear a pa.s.sing resemblance to you but are much, much thinner and more conventionally attractive, don"t do it. You might think it has value as an anthropological exercise but it doesn"t. I was sitting in an audition room with a bunch of girls who were the "after" picture to my "before." My audition for Bombay Dreams was Christmas morning compared to this. This was how I found out that I could convincingly play Ben Affleck but not Mindy Kaling.
The network cast two stunningly pretty and perfectly sweet actresses. By the time we shot the pilot, though, the script made little sense. It had suffered from the daily changes made by SHT execs who put too much stock in "what is cool now?" Being "zeitgeisty" was the biggest criterion for the show. Being funny as maybe fifth important, after wardrobe choices, hair styling, cross-promotional opportunities with advertisers, and edgy sound effects. By the time we shot the script, Mindy & Brenda bore no resemblance to us, figuratively or literally. I believe in the shooting draft they were both fashion bloggers who worked at a cupcake bakery and were constantly referring to their iPods. (This was 2004, when iPods were the white-hot reference.) I"m not proud of that script.
The pilot didn"t get picked up, my agents were disappointed, and I was very, very happy. I"d had so little Hollywood experience that I wasn"t smart enough to know that this was a big career setback. I was just relieved that that show wouldn"t go forward with my name on it. The only other thing I had keeping me in Los Angeles was that I"d been hired as a staff writer for six episodes of a mid-season NBC show that was the remake of a British show called The Office.*
*Notice how I laid in all that dramatic irony here? Like in t.i.tanic, when Kate Winslet"s character loved those weird paintings by a little-known artist named Pica.s.so? And in the audience of the theater you were laughing to yourself because you knew Pica.s.so turned out to be kind of a big deal? I"m trying to tell you that I"m Pica.s.so.
Hollywood: My Good Friend Who Is Also a Little Embarra.s.sing
Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real
WHEN I WAS a kid, Christmas vacation meant renting VHS copies of romantic comedies from Blockbuster and watching them with my parents at home. Sleepless in Seattle was big, and so was When Harry Met Sally. I laughed along with everyone else at the scene where Meg Ryan fakes an o.r.g.a.s.m at the restaurant without even knowing what an o.r.g.a.s.m was. In my mind, she was just being kind of loud and silly at a diner, and that was hilarious enough for me.
I love romantic comedies. I feel almost sheepish writing that, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years or so that admitting you like these movies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from watching them.
I enjoy watching people fall in love on-screen so much that I can suspend my disbelief for the contrived situations that only happen in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the normal lead guy, say, slips and falls right on top of the hideously expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead"s dress doesn"t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron is on her. I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They"re all partic.i.p.ating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it.
So it makes sense that in this world there are many specimens of women who I do not think exist in real life, like Vulcans or UFO people or whatever. They are:
THE KLUTZ
When a beautiful actress is in a movie, executives wrack their brains to find some kind of flaw in her that still allows her to be palatable. She can"t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would want to see that? A not 100-percent-perfect-looking-in-every-way female? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours.
So they make her a Klutz.
The 100-percent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way, except that she constantly falls down. She bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date. (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it"s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it"s Fred Tom.) Our Klutz clangs into Stop signs while riding a bike, and knocks over giant displays of expensive fine china. Despite being five foot nine and weighing 110 pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.