Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (28 page)

I never entertained the concept that Gary was using me for the free movies. The way I looked at it, it didn’t cost me a cent and I liked the company. Well, that’s the way I looked at it for most of the three months, but toward the end, some stuff started happening.

I called Gary once to see if he just wanted to grab a bite to eat. We had seen all the movies at our free theater that week.

“Where were you thinking of getting a bite at?” he asked. I suggested this Chinese restaurant I liked. “There’s never any chicks around there,” he said. I rattled off a few other restaurants and with each one he took a long pause pondering if these were good choices where chicks might possibly be adjacent to our table. And then I started wondering why it wasn’t enough to just have a bite with me somewhere, just to do that? Why did there have to be an agenda along with that lunch?

And then I’d hear about parties or bars he’d go to with his slick friends, Brad and Steve. When I asked why I wasn’t invited, he told me he liked hanging out with them because they brought his game up with the chicks. Apparently, I wasn’t an asset to his social life.

He’d go out of town on surfing and skiing trips with some of those other guys while I watched his house and his cat. That’s what friends do, right? And I liked his cat. Maybe he figured I wasn’t a surfer, and I wasn’t. But I still felt left out.

As soon as the three months were up and free movie season was over, Gary became too busy to see me. He said things were really cooking in the producer business. I’d call to see if he wanted to grab a bite and he’d explain he was staying in and buckling down and getting serious, whatever that meant.

Other people have tried to take advantage of my free movie season too. One woman I was interested in asked if she could borrow my Guild card so she could take dates to free movies. Another friend asked if he could go with his wife. There are about five others who call like clockwork every November when free movie season begins. “Hey Fred! I’m looking in the paper, there’s a bunch of movies that look good . . . you’re still in the Guild, right?”

But the person who abused this movie privilege the most was myself. I put pressure on myself that I had to see every free film I could. If I had a cold or something else I should have been doing, I still felt I had to see a movie. And some were movies I knew I wouldn’t even like, like
Sense and Sensibility
. But hey, it was free. I made a list every year of all the movies I saw and took other people to, and I admit that I loved looking at the list, adding up how much it would have cost if I’d actually bought a ticket for all these movies and feeling good about how I hadn’t.

And then I got very altruistic about it. I’d do my usual lurking outside the movie theater, hoping to bump into someone I knew so I could offer to take them in for free. If that didn’t happen and it was nearing show time, I’d scope out someone waiting in line who didn’t look like a yuppie.

“Hey, I can get you in for free,” I said.

Sometimes they looked very scared and said, “No thanks.” I once worked up the nerve to approach a cute girl. She took me up on the free ticket but then sat a few rows behind me.

For ten years I got free movies, and then my Guild membership was due to expire because I had been acting far more than writing. I began to panic that the power of free movies would end; I’d have to be like a normal person and wait in line and actually buy a ticket. What was I going to do without the reign of power?

But when my membership was up, I felt oddly at peace. I realized how much pressure I’d been under to see the movies and then strategically try to take a guest. Now, I thought, people might possibly like me for me and not because I could take them to free movies.

Later, a script I wrote got me back in the Guild. I haven’t told anyone until just now.

38

AM I SOMEBODY YET?

I
was standing on line to start a new unemployment claim when I got recognized. I humbly shrugged my shoulders and commented something like, “It’s no big deal. Look where I am.”

“Can I ask you something?” my amazed fan asked. “What do you think was your big break? When did you know you had arrived?”

Was this guy serious? But I could tell by the look on his face, he was. He looked at me transfixed, smiling, laughing to himself, shrugging his shoulders in awe as if he were recalling some of his favorite appearances. My big break? I can’t really say. Maybe it was many years later when the unemployment insurance office implemented a system where you could file your claims over the phone insuring the ultimate comfort and anonymity.

There have actually been various validations that have come in unexpected dribs and drabs where I’m able to stand back and go, “Wow! There may actually be something here.” Perhaps it was the times I’ve been on
TMZ
, as the “celebrity” Harvey’s sidekicks were trying to figure out just who I was. They all threw in their two cents trying to figure out my name till one of them, looking at his computer, said, “Fred Stoller! That’s who he is!” After that I was on several other times as that guy you know, but are never sure where from.

But I’d have to say another example of a confusing achievement came from a simple radio voice-over role. I was actually beating myself up for even reading for this part. It was for British Airways. When you audition for a radio ad, you go in a booth at your agency and they record you. Radio ads are pretty competitive. The agency that represents you also submits, along with your recording, about twenty of their other clients. And about ten other agencies do the same so you figure you’re competing with over 200 others for that role.

With all voice-over auditions, along with the lines you’re reading you’re handed a description of how they envision the character to sound. The character description for this part: “Nervous sort of guy, after all, he’s in therapy. Example: Fred Stoller.”

It was very surreal seeing my name as a character description. On the one hand it was flattering, but what it really was saying was, “Yeah, you’re a unique distinctive guy, but wait at the end of the line with everyone else, you schmuck.”

I was already in the booth. It still felt weird. I wish I had more time to think about this. Do I really want to audition for a Fred Stoller type? I was reading with a partner and she was in no mood for my neurosis. She was in a rush and wanted to get the audition over with, so I auditioned to play myself. When you do a voice-over audition, first you have to state your name and character. That means you say your name and your character before you go into the reading. I felt so stupid saying, “Fred Stoller as guy.”

I didn’t get the part. I was turned down for a Fred Stoller part. Someone at the ad agency listened to my audition and said, “No, this isn’t what we want.” Maybe when I auditioned I should have said, “Yeah, this is Fred Stoller reading for the Fred Stoller part.”

I figured that perfectly summed up my career at that point; it was my proudest moment of humiliation. I was flattered and then smacked in the face at the same time.

39

A ROOMFUL OF WEIRDOS

I
recently auditioned for an NBC pilot that was chockful of every kind of weirdo character you could find. I got off the elevator and before I could look around to see which character actors I knew in this massive waiting room, I heard the voice of a pre-teen boy exclaim, “Cool, you were in
Joe Dirt
!

I just had five lines in that movie, but obviously the kid had seen the film dozens of times. I was trying to concentrate on my material as the kid recited every line of his favorite film. His dad, who he tagged along with, was auditioning for the same part as I was, and he eventually told him to let me look my material over too. I smiled knowing I made his day, though the room was spilling with millionaires from previous hit shows looking for their next gig. The kid made my day too.

I looked around and it hammered home this illusion of the steady showbiz home I seek. Next to me was the guy who spent seven years on
According to Jim
, someone who was a regular on
Becker
,
3rd Rock from the Sun
,
Night Court
,
NewsRadio, Spin City, The Sopranos
and many other very familiar actors. I realized all of us were the same
—
some perhaps had bigger homes with a pool somewhere
—
but at that moment we were all sitting in the same crammed waiting room. Unless you’re Kevin James or Will Smith, you end up back in a room waiting to read for the next role. But I took comfort in that I had succeeded to this point and that I could leave that room if I so chose or I could pick which rooms I wanted to go to. Plus, I was in
Joe Dirt
among many other cool little things.

40

BEING A LEADING MAN

S
everal years ago, I was on a hot soundstage in Atlanta on the set of
The Change-Up,
playing a production assistant in a movie within a movie. My character was one of a group of frantic crew people getting Ryan Reynolds’ character ready for his scene in a soft-core porno shoot. When I got to the set, I found all my lines were cut for some reason. So I ad-libbed “Here” as I shoved a machine gun in Reynolds’ stomach as he passed. After our tenth take, the director gave us a note.

“Fred, no talking! Okay, let’s do it again without Fred talking! Ready . . .”

That experience would be humbling enough on its own. What made it especially deflating was that it put an end to a high I had been on since the night before. I had just flown in from Chicago where a film I wrote and starred in won “Best in Fest” at the Just For Laughs Film Festival. After the screening, we enjoyed an elegant reception and a Q&A where audience members hung on every detail of the making of it and told us how touched they were by it.

For the first time, I had found a project, not as a guest actor or seventh banana, but one where I was the central character. This time, the creepy blind date, the bouncer, the truck driver, the annoying landlord, the crazy waiter, all the weird oddball parts, were played by others. It was the story about my friendship with Vinnie D’Angelo, in a screenplay that I wrote called
Fred & Vinnie
.

Joel may have lived vicariously through my free food, but Vinnie lived vicariously through everything I did. That’s because Vinnie hardly ever left his Philadelphia apartment. Well, he’d leave every once in a while. Sometimes he had to. He just didn’t like to. I always thought of him as the happiest agoraphobic. He was also the adoring parent I never had. I could always call up Vinnie and count on him to make me feel like my life was so amazing. To him, anything I did during the day was brave and incredible. Let’s say I went to the post office. With that alone he’d go crazy.

“Get out! No way, man! You mean in the afternoon?! When it’s all crowded and all!?”

“Yup,” I said proudly. He made me feel going to any crowded place was such a badass thing to do.

“So tell me about the people. Were they all around you? Like, on what sides of you were they? Were you surrounded on every side?!”

“Well, there were people in front and in back of me. And I guess to both sides of me because the line had to curve round and round.”

Then, he’d lose it. “No way, man!” he said it with his nasal Philly accent. So I’d keep going.

“So this woman asked for a book of stamps. The teller asked what kind of stamps she wanted, and the woman said, ‘I don’t care, any stamps. It doesn’t matter.’”

This was too much for Vinnie. He was like a parrot the way he’d copy a phrase, “It doesn’t matter! Any stamps! The stamps don’t matter! They do not matter!” except that a parrot doesn’t copy an expression with any kind of emotion. Vinnie’s emotion was sincere. He loved every sound, every syllable of whatever information or expression I would relay to him. He’d just take it in and then immediately scream it back out in different ways.

“Doesn’t matter! It does not matt-ter! Any stamps! She didn’t care. She didn’t care what the stamps were! Woo! I’m screamin’! I’m screamin’, man!”

Vinnie would have been happy if my trip to the post office had ended with the woman saying she didn’t care what the stamps were, but there was more; and I was feeling good that I was making him feel good.

“Okay, so the teller, this black woman, gave the woman ‘any’ book of stamps, like she requested. The woman looked at them and said, ‘I don’t want Malcolm X stamps. Anything but these.’”

With that unexpected topper to the story, Vinnie would explode with laughter, and scream at the top of his lungs, “Ahh! Ahh! Anything but these! No way! She didn’t say that! Anything but these! Wooo! Woo!”

I met Vinnie around 1985, when we were both working a comedy club in some suburb of Philadelphia. I’m not sure of Vinnie’s whole history, but he did at one time have some sort of outside life. I knew that he briefly held a regular job and also did some theater. After that he was able to get by when the big comedy boom of the eighties hit. He never did more than the Philly local comedy club scene. But at that time, he had enough work doing just weekends and one-nighters around town. Plus, he didn’t have many expenses. He lived in a little apartment he called The Cave because it was always dark and cozy and he could sleep for hours on end. He loved every second of staying in and doing nothing. All he ever had to do was go out to some club and do his half-hour set, which mainly consisted of old jokes and prank phone calls he made with a phone he brought on stage. Then he’d head back to his cave.

Then one day, I got a very surprising phone call from Vinnie. He said that he always wanted to give acting a shot. He said that maybe one day he’d come to L.A. to see what it was like. He’d stay with me for a week or so, then crash with some other comics he knew from the old Philly club scene. His plan was to poke around, do some extra work, get a feel for it, see what might happen. Wow, was this the same Vinnie who bragged he could sleep for days and days at a time? Come to L.A. and see about acting? He said, “Just get me on a set.” His dream was to cozy up to some big star like Bruce Willis, who would then take him under his wing and give him other jobs. “Just get me on a set,” Vinnie said. That’s all I had to do. He’d take care of the rest.