Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (3 page)

WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES AND LIFE’S WIDE POTENTIAL
still flirted with me and took my calls, I tried other jobs in the entertainment industry. For me, acting had totally passed its sell-by date. I didn’t like it anymore and if the total lack of job offers was any clue, acting wasn’t so fond of me either. But damn it, I liked being around creative types. They were emotionally damaged, immature, fearful, grandiose, and prone to dressing far too young for their age but as far as I was concerned they were family and I wasn’t prepared to give up on them yet.

My first thought was,
I’ll become a sitcom writer because they ingest sugar and caffeine by the barrel and I’m good at that already
. As far as I knew, sitcom writers sat in a windowless office for days on end, being fed a constant drip of Red Vines and Thai food to keep their blood pumping while they debated which word was inherently funnier: “kneecap” or “Schenectady.” If the writers worked on a cable sitcom, the debated words would be obscene and the Red Vines would be the cheap generic kind, which tasted nearly the same. Cable writers still got Thai food. Either way, this was a good life to my way of thinking. I’d be gainfully employed in show business and my grocery bills would be nonexistent. I commenced to writing.

This plan had several flaws. For one thing, the entertainment industry needs far fewer writers than actors. For another, writing a spec sitcom while huddled in the dark, spider-saturated
back room of a house you are sharing with what seemed like 115 people didn’t ease the I’m-becoming-a-weird-little-shut-in-about-a-minute-away-from-writing-a-manifesto-and-wearing-mayonnaise-as-foundation concerns I’d been struggling with for several months. I’d sit in that darkened cobwebby room for hours on end, frowning at a computer screen, eating pretzels, and preparing for the magical day when I’d be handsomely paid for frowning at a computer screen and eating pretzels. At the sound of any human voice in the vicinity, I would drop all creative efforts, emerge from my cave squinting at the daylight, brush the spiders from my eyelashes, and talk about anything to anyone I found lounging by the pool. The loungers were more than glad to keep the conversational ball aloft as long as I was willing to talk about being high, house music, or the joys of listening to house music while being high.

On paper, I had one housemate. In reality, I had one housemate, his boyfriend, a handful of their college friends eager to see how many brain cells they could destroy before starting grad school, and a claque of random characters my housemate had met at a bar the previous evening. The common denominators were that they were all attractive, they all lived off trust funds, and they all had the work ethic of runny cheese. Most had vague aspirations toward creating art as long as creating art didn’t conflict with being attractive, getting high, hanging out in bars, and having carnal knowledge of complete strangers. Discouragingly enough for those of us who want to believe that good work habits matter in life, many of these people went on to earn vast sums of money while still finding the time to continue to be attractive, get really high, hang out in bars, and have carnal knowledge of complete strangers.

I walked outside to mingle with that day’s sybarites. Someone was using skills he received completing his MFA to sculpt a bong from a cantaloupe. It was passed around. Inhalation occurred. Minutes later, someone said dreamily, “We should get a…pizza.”

Silence. The guy who made the suggestion looked worried.

“Did I just say that out loud?”

Heads nodded dreamily.

“It is called a
pizza
, right?”

Everyone besides me pondered. Eventually, someone nodded. Yes, that’s what it’s called. The CD player, showing more industry than anyone around the pool, slipped from one George Michael tune to the next. I fidgeted in my lounge chair.

I had spent the first part of the day with a handful of attractive and quick-witted twenty-somethings who, while they existed only in my head, knew when they were talking out loud, knew their problems could be resolved in twenty-two minutes, and knew the word for pizza. These three-dimensional characters didn’t strike me as believable. Having had enough of the real world, I ran back to the sanctuary of my computer and my spiders. I had grown fond of those spiders. I had even named some of them. A few more months of this and I’d be taking their suggestions for dialogue. Perhaps I needed to reconsider my pre-midlife-crisis career change.

Looking back, I think I was ambivalent about starting at the bottom, down in the sitcom bogs. This is not because I thought I was too grand for an entry-level assignment. No, my great fear was that my writing was just good enough to get me in at the bottom, and I would stay there forever, eventually becoming its queen. This fear was not completely irrational. Once, during a
meeting, a television executive who had read my sample scripts leaned across her desk and said to me, “You’re good.”

I tried to find an expression that said, while modest about it, I heard this all the time, and not just from my office spiders.

She continued, “You’re not just good. You’re
Saved by the Bell
good.”

I waited for the laugh to follow. She was joking, dear God let her be joking. Her expression of having bestowed upon me a great blessing didn’t change. For months afterward, I was haunted by the specter that if I worked hard and had a massive stroke of good luck I might—just possibly—write a sitcom episode that worked in a special appearance by Carrot Top.

In the end, I didn’t stay with sitcom writing because that career path wasn’t helpful. I wanted to help. I wanted to be of service. Thanks to ninety-hour workweeks, sitcom writers are only of service when lavishly tipping the Thai-food guy. I couldn’t wait that long. I had to help now. Hiding the pets so my housemates wouldn’t get them stoned was a benevolent act but not quite enough. The answer came to me as I frowned, talked to spiders, and struggled for punch lines: I’d become a talent agent. Yes, that’s it. I’d represent actors, using my lifetime of experience in the entertainment industry to protect and serve these talented, fragile artists. The sheer simple genius of my idea caused me to stop, midword. God, it was so perfect, so logical, so helpful.

And so wrong. I spent about two years and nearly all my remaining goodwill being a talent agent. The agency where I worked was not big but it was prestigious. We had a small roster of clients who continue to win awards and critical acclaim on a regular basis. We had a larger roster of clients whose faces make
you stop and think, “Wasn’t he in my sister-in-law’s wedding party?” The actors I represented were worthy people and, for the most part, genuinely talented. They deserved a good agent. Sadly, they got me. Having a twisted need to be of service wasn’t enough to make me good at my job or even competent. For one thing, I have an almost phobic distaste for discussing money. If you are the person negotiating contracts, you shouldn’t get sweaty at the thought of talking about money. You shouldn’t have to give yourself weird little pep talks just to get up the nerve to say “Mr. Casting Director, I’m sorry to interrupt your speech on what an important and meaningful script this is, and I hate to not be all about the art, but the actors are actually going to get paid, right?”

Frequently, the answer to this was “Um…”

Our agency divided the work not by the actor but by the medium so, in theory, I handled every client up to and including the Academy Award winners for my corner of the industry. Of course, by the time I became an agent all the good corners were covered. Two agents covered studio projects and two agents covered television. What’s left? I’ll tell you what’s left: indies.

When I was hired, I imagined a life of impassioned advocacy; of bringing exactly the right actor to the attention of a young and brilliant independent filmmaker who would give us all a reason to go to Sundance next year. In reality, my projects fell into three categories: God-awful but financed; Wonderful but never-going-to-get-financed; and Horrible and being-shot-next-week-in-Bulgaria. Always, mystifyingly, Bulgaria. At least once a month I would be handed a script about half-naked teenagers being terrorized by a giant red ant in a small Midwestern
town (which was going to end up looking suspiciously like Sofia, Bulgaria). This movie inevitably starred someone like Morgan Fairchild, on whom the producers had spent their lavish casting budget.

That was the other pleasure of my movies: if I was very lucky, they actually paid Screen Actors Guild minimum wage. Most of the time, the original casting sheet would say “Salary deferred,” which meant we all were supposed to buy into the collective hallucination that a 16-mm art film about a struggling writer/director in Los Angeles (played by the writer/director) and his devoted, incredibly hot, frequently naked girlfriend (to be hired after multiple auditions) was going to dazzle the festival circuit, be picked up for distribution by Miramax, and then, hoo boy, wouldn’t the money roll in!

Such was my life. Most clients passed on the scripts I covered, and I couldn’t say I blamed them.

And then there was Dick. His name isn’t really Dick but I’m going to call him that because I was Ahab and he was my great white whale. He was a terrifically gifted actor who seemed to take some profound pleasure in not acting. The man passed on every single project I had going, even the ones that didn’t make me want to leave the script at the bottom of a lye pit. I didn’t take it too personally because he passed on nearly every television interview my colleagues set up, as well as a few high-budget studio pictures. He felt strongly about acting only in projects he found compelling and he’d created a life where he could do just that. Other clients, after being out of work a few months, would start calling, first casually and then more frantically, re
minding their agents of their mortgages, their children’s schooling, their ex-wives, and their gambling debts. They, too, had high artistic standards but they also had the moral flexibility to take a guest-starring credit on
Full House
.

Not Dick. He had broad shoulders, a full head of hair, no costly bad habits, and no dependents. Casting directors would call asking for him. I would leave him a message to pick up a copy of the script. Days later, he would drift by and collect it. Weeks later, after avoiding calls, he would leave a 2:00 a.m. voice mail passing on the audition. He would then compound my aggravation by leaving a message with the receptionist explaining that he would be unavailable for three weeks because he was off to star in—and also haul props for—a friend’s independent movie to be shot in the Sonoran Desert where there was no cell-phone coverage.

The whale would evade me again.

Finally,
finally
, I got a script worth something. True, it was an independent film with no studio attached to release it, but there were actual, reputable actors signed, as opposed to many of my projects that starred Dolph Lundgren or, more depressingly, someone described as “the next Dolph Lundgren.” This was the real deal. The script was funny, the director wasn’t the son-in-law of the financier, and, the most thrilling news of all: they were paying more than union scale.

I developed a nosebleed from excitement.

Best of all, there was a perfect role for Dick, an actor capable of flawless comedic timing while shirtless. I submitted his picture and received no response, which isn’t surprising, considering how in three days the casting director probably received five hundred headshots for that one part alone, and there were
forty roles to fill. I started working the phone. I pleaded, flirted, begged, nagged, and cajoled. Not the casting director, mind you; she knew better than to answer her own phone. I may have propositioned the cleaning crew. But something in my cringing and whining tone must have worked because I got Dick in for an interview. I threw myself into the boat and headed out to the high seas to find my white whale.

I managed to locate him, convince him to call me back, pick up the script, and read it within a week. This set some sort of land-speed record. The good luck continued; he agreed to audition. I had the whale in my sight! He read for the part and the director fell in love with him. The casting director called me within an hour to offer the role, with a salary that would actually buy more than ramen noodles and Tang.

My hands shook when I called him. Barely able to conceal my glee, I told him he booked the job, that the money was not bad, and that he would be shooting in two weeks.

“Yeah,” he said absentmindedly, “I forgot to tell you. I promised my friend Ace that I would help him with his movie. I’m going to be in Riverside, on and off, for the rest of the month.”

Wave good-bye to the nice whale, Ahab.

No, he wouldn’t consider bailing out on his friend; that wouldn’t be right. Besides, it was a really cool script about speed-dealing bikers who spoke in blank verse. Half the characters would be sock puppets.

I got the phone number of the producer of Ace’s movie, a person I suspect was also Ace’s mother. She gave me Dick’s shooting schedule—contingent, of course, on the sock puppets being mended in time. I then called the production manager of
what I had come to think of as the
real
movie and got every single day Dick would be needed on set. They overlapped by two days. I went back and forth between the two people, trying desperately to get one to adjust his or her schedule.

It took the better part of a day, but I finally had the sock puppet producer offering to shoot Dick from 12:00 to 3:00 a.m., and the real movie’s production manager saying he wouldn’t schedule Dick to the set any earlier than six hours later. It was horrible, but my client was young enough to handle a long day in the name of art and a union gig.

Laughing in relief, I called Dick and, swelling with well-earned pride, I walked him through the schedule. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t him drawling, “Yeah, but if Ace needs me to help, I’m going to have to stay.”

Help
?
Help what?
Put the other actors back in the sock drawer? I put down the phone and slammed into another agent’s office for advice.