Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (26 page)

Paranoid about getting caught, I hibernated in my apartment for two weeks. It was getting costly having take-out food delivered, so I finally thought it might be safe to sneak out and get a bite in the outside world. I headed to my favorite spot where I thought I recognized the writer who’d called me. I immediately ducked and hid in a bathroom stall for a half hour.

A few seasons later I was brought to
Hannah Montana
for a part without having to audition. There’d be no idiotic antlers on my head or moose cries. I’d be playing an un-dynamic casting agent. Billy Ray Cyrus was thrilled to be working with me. He was more than complimentary and I appreciated that. Being a teen show, everything was over the top, sort of like vaudeville, but ironically, as I delivered my lines in my characteristic low-key, deadpan way, the producers kept saying I had to bring it down even more. What I ended up doing that made them pleased seemed like Ben Stein on Quaaludes.

After the taping, while I was walking toward my parking spot, Billy happened to stop by in his truck, thanked me again, and said, “We should do a movie together. We’re a funny combination.” He tipped his hat and headed off.

Nice thing for him to say, but those words almost destroyed me for three weeks. I went back and forth as if this was an opportunity from Spielberg I just had to exploit. Yes, that
would
be a funny combination. He’s this burly country Western guy with the big hair and hat, and I’m the skinny neurotic Jewish comic guy. That would be a great movie, right?! Okay, but what would the movie be? And was he serious? I didn’t know, but being diligent, I knew I had to follow up with this opportunity. So I went to a video store on Sunset and bought every comedy duo box set I could: Martin and Lewis, yes, that’s what we’d be like! I bought
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
,
Cheech & Chong
, and also country and Western albums I wasn’t familiar with to be versed in that. I studied the films and albums for days on end.

I agonized what the film should be, and was he really big enough of a star to say, “Hey, this is Fred Stoller and we’re gonna do a buddy movie together”? And how would I track him down? I went back and forth, should I write it? Write what? Over and over until the anxieties exploded in my head. Finally, sensibility got the better of me and I realized he was a good guy, but not one who could get a movie done, especially with me playing his sidekick as his selling point.

34

A HANDY GIG

D
an Yaccarino, a successful children’s book author, got the green light to cast his Nickelodeon show
Oswald
about a lovable helpful octopus. He deliberately set out to cast it with some of his favorite television character actors. He didn’t want to go the typical route of cartooney, over-the-top voice actors. He brought in Michael McKean and David L. Lander (Lenny and Squiggly from
Laverne & Shirley
), Laraine Newman, Fred Savage, Eddie Deezen, Richard Kind, and me. He’d seen me in
Murphy Brown
and cast me as a talking dopey tree for several episodes. We had a lot of fun. Dan told me how much he loved what I did, and again I heard those words, that not
maybe
, but
definitely
he’d have me back for the next season. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another season, but almost ten years later when an executive from Nickelodeon moved to Disney and helped create a new show, she remembered me from
Oswald
, brought me in to audition, and really pushed for me for the role of a nervous monkey wrench in
Handy Manny
, an animated show about a handyman and his group of talking tools.

Handy Manny
came just when I needed it. I had just come from an audition where I waited an hour to read for a small guest part in a new pilot playing a bellhop. After reading my three lines the casting director said, “Very good, but could you do that without your New York accent? This takes place in San Francisco after all.” I said, “Sure, um, no problem.” What I wish I said was, “Oh, I forgot. They made that new law that if you move from Brooklyn to San Francisco, you can’t get a job at a hotel.” Actually what I really should’ve said, and I do now, is, “This is how I talk. When I try to lose my accent, it doesn’t sound natural.” So I thought by annunciating each word very deliberately, I could lose the accent. I ended up sounding like someone trying to talk slowly and precisely to a deaf person.

On my way home, my agent called saying my other audition for a casting agent was canceled, but moments later I got a call from my voice-over agent. “You’re gonna be on
Handy Manny
! The show got picked up for fifty-two eleven-minute episodes and you’re gonna be in every one of them!”

It turned out for almost 200 episodes I had a reprieve from the hustle and uncertainty of scrambling for my next sitcom or movie role.

When I got a taste of the animation world, complaining was impossible. There were no wardrobe fittings, no waiting around all day for a run-through or a tape night, no makeup, or even the need to shave or shower if you were late. And you weren’t trembling that your lines wouldn’t hit at the taping. They’d make sure they got what they wanted usually in three takes. Each recording was intimate, concentrated on you, and never frantic.

Always a collector of quirky toys and kitschy TV memorabilia, I achieved my dream when a talking action figure was made for Rusty, the nervous monkey wrench I was voicing. Actually, there were dozens of other toys I’d scoop up at the studio, soon making my apartment more like
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
’s pathetic bachelor pad than it already was. But nothing thrilled me like having a talking figure with my own voice! The only problem was that for some reason this action figure was a limited edition, only available in Canada. After losing a fierce bidding war on eBay for it, I convinced a friend, who was working in Vancouver, to buy it for me. But when he brought the toy home and showed it to his two-year-old son, the kid fell in love with it and didn’t want to let it go. I had to jump through hoops and buy something else the little boy liked to replace it.

I sent a talking Rusty to my mother who only was concerned with how much money I got for it. She is insanely gullible, and I admit I might’ve been a bit cruel when I said I got five cents every time the button was pressed and it spoke. But then I felt especially guilty when she called a few days later asking if I got the money because she was pressing it all day.

Going to recording sessions reminded me of when I was a kid and my father would come home from work and I’d run down the steps hoping he’d have a surprise toy for me because of that one time, that did happen. Sometimes there’d be
Handy Manny
blankets, a sweater, knick-knacks, and other fun toys lying around to take.

I got to work with greats like Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Michael York, Marion Ross from
Happy Days
, and dozens of other loose, grateful celebrities making a cameo. It was in-and-out, easy, fun work. I loved my regular job on
Handy Manny
, but even there sometimes I felt like the outsider. The cast was comprised of animation all-stars who had about a dozen other
Handy Manny
gigs going at the same time. In animation, you knock out your work so much quicker than live action, you can run to another gig, perhaps even several a day—that is if you’re “in.” There are about twenty-five voice-over actors who do 90 percent of the work. Being “in” means having more range than I do. You can have a unique voice and get lucky, but to do as many as the millionaire all-stars do, your voice can’t be that recognizable and you have to alter it to whatever the show needs. And it helps your possibilities of being around if you can do several different characters. They only have to pay each voice-over actor for three separate characters per episode.

At first, I was a little left out of the conversations at
Handy Manny
. The others knew each other very well, having spent years hanging out, doing hundreds of gigs together. The women usually sat together and looked through magazines, waiting for their cues. They were very adept at doing anything that had nothing to do with the show until it was their line; they’d text, read, or gab about expensive home renovations or buying their next home. And then, with a radar sense, they knew it was their turn, put their magazine aside, said something like, “We can fix it, Manny,” and then resumed drooling over a photo of an amazing guest house they just had to have.

Sometimes though, their radar sense would be off. An actress played the part of a flashlight who only spoke Spanish. Most of her lines were, “Yupi! Yupi!” I think that meant, “Yippie!” When she’d be reading or texting and it was her line we were waiting for, the actress next to her would elbow her, indicating it was her turn. She never could find her place and always took a shot and said “Yupi!” Half the time her guess was correct.

One time the ladies literally spent thirty minutes talking about a dream bathroom she was hoping to build. One of the guys butted in and suggested a company that only charged twenty grand for bathroom renovations. The women scoffed at him for chiming in with his useless information. They continued talking about the perfect bathroom and one actually said, “Yes, you need luxury, but also functionality is important too.” My jaw dropped. Really? Expensive bathrooms also have to function?

It was the easiest job in the world. Most of my lines were, “Oh, no, Manny, I’m scared!”, “Do we have to go so high up, Manny!?” or, “I’ll stay here where it’s safe.”

I’d usually have six, or sometimes just three, lines scattered throughout the script. I’d sit, and when it was my turn, stand up, scream that I was scared, and then sit back down.

Handy Manny
let me save my money and not have to do things that made me miserable. It helped cut down the showbiz desperation, and I didn’t feel I had to constantly leap midway off the toilet for any audition. I started turning down auditions I knew I was wasting my time on, that I had no shot at. And with much of the desperation gone, I was able to try to think how to be more creative as opposed to fruitlessly ramming myself into other people’s puzzles so much.

35

BUILDING MY OWN HOME

I
was pleading with Sarah Silverman to do a sex tape with
me.

“Sarah, I mean you’re not doing as well as you used to and if we had a sex tape . . .”

“. . . If we had a what!?”

“It’s not such a big deal,” I said. “Everyone has one. We both could use the Internet buzz. Look, I’ll do all the nudity. All the nudity will be on me. I’ll cover you.”

It was an idea for a comedy segment. After years of being a guest in other people’s homes, I decided to somehow build my own. I had an idea for a quirky talk show where I play a delusional security guard on a studio lot who thinks he’s a talk show host. Like any other host, I do a little opening monologue, have a sidekick, and do desk and video remote pieces, but all while inside my enclosed booth.

I had this idea for ages but didn’t know what to do with it until the web started putting out millions of shorts from comics and everyone else on the planet. It was competitive, but if you had just some money and knew people who knew how to shoot and edit, you could slop together your own segments.

After looking to no avail for a parking lot that had a booth I could shoot this in, I fronted my own money and had these two guys build an actual guard booth. I rented a U-Haul and transported it to a parking lot in the hopes that this web series would go viral and lead to an actual show. I then began the arduous task of convincing celebrities I was acquainted with to drive through my gate/show.

I managed to persuade Sarah Silverman, Bob Saget, Howie Mandel, and Fred Willard to “guest star.” We’d shoot them sitting in a car and then use a double to make it look like they pulled up to the gate.

Saget came to the parking lot psyched to help out, but then didn’t want people to know what car he drove. Okay, that would be understandable if there was anything that distinctive about his car. So we said we’d supply a car for him, but he didn’t like the choice of cars our ragtag group of young camera guys had. I was trying to convince him to just sit in a car, not a horrible one, pull up, and it would all be okay.

“No one’s gonna see this,” I told him even though I hoped a million people would see it. “The shot of the car will be just a second.” He was hemming and hawing. I was scared we were going to lose him. But he finally relented. He said he was going to make a comment that it wasn’t his car. He was driving his cousin’s. Fine, say anything, as long as we had Bob Saget drive through. And he was great. Our bit was my sidekick and I decide we should give cool gift bags to the guests so they’ll tell their other celebrity friends they should be on the
show.

Saget drives on and I announce to the “crowd” in my head, “Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Saget! Since I’m hosting a show and you’ve hosted shows, any advice for me?”

“Show? What show?” Saget responds. “I just want to get on the lot. There’s no show here. This is just a security booth.”

“Okay, Bob has to go. Let’s give him his cool gift bag so he’ll tell his other celebrity friends!”

I hand him his gift and Bob looks at the stained bag. “This has obviously been used many times before by other people.”

“It’s your swag bag for being on our show!”

Saget looks through the bag holding up a used tube of toothpaste, an old cat toy, and some thread. “This is crap. Seriously, you have a job, get one. Open the gate!”

With Sarah Silverman, she would have to sit in a car right outside her house. And I’d learned from the Saget experience.

‘We’ll get you a nice car,” I e-mailed her.

“No, I want to use my car, a shitty car.”

I was so relieved she had a good sense of humor and wouldn’t be uptight about her image. My bit for her was that when she drove by, I try to persuade her to do a sex tape with me, that it would go viral and we both needed it for our sagging careers.

I usually waited until the last minute to e-mail the script, or just told them what they had to do on the set. It was either because I was tinkering with it till the last second, or I didn’t want them to get fixated on any one word and back off. I felt everything could be smoothed out once we were out there. So I sent Sarah the script the morning we were supposed to go out there. I then got an e-mail back.

“Bummer.”

I freaked out. Not only did I obviously need a celebrity of her caliber, but I was so pleased she agreed to do it, the last thing I wanted to do was upset her. Part of my character’s pitch to do the sex tape with her was that things weren’t going so well for her: I say things like her show’s been canceled, she hasn’t done any movies since
School of Rock
, and Jimmy Kimmel, her ex, is doing so much better than she is.

“Just cause I drive a shitty car shouldn’t mean I’m not doing well” was her next e-mail. I freaked out. I e-mailed back apologizing profusely. I never meant to offend her. She also didn’t like one of her lines with the word “pussycat.”

“Of course! Say anything you want.”