You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (21 page)

(Oops, that was actually one of the actors we hired for a part who was amazing. Love you, Robin!)

The process gave me a lot of empathy for those on the OTHER side of the camera. For so many years as an actor, I’d enter a casting
room and assume the people inside were thinking,
Wow, she’s ugly. This girl’s going to suck. She messed up a word on the page? AMATEUR!
But as a producer, I sat there day after day, watching dozens of people read the words I wrote aloud, and all I could think about was . . . uh, me.

Oh God, she can’t pronounce the words. My script is unshootable, what was I thinking?!

That joke didn’t work. We probably should change this to a video game drama. I’m in tears myself right now, should be an easy fix.

She’s okay for the role. But why is her hair so much thicker than mine? I’m taking those biotin pills, do I maybe have cancer or something?

I wish I could say my experience casting
The Guild
helped me audition better myself—put the process in perspective as an artist and rid me of the burden to be perfect. But nah. I still enter every casting room and freeze up like a basket case.

Eventually we did find amazing people who looked adorable together and actually showed up on time, rounding out our cast in a totally balanced, free-costing kind of way. They were wonderful. I love them and will never say anything bad about them.

And I certainly won’t EVER admit that I asked my friend Sandeep to play the character of Zaboo partially because he owned two cameras we needed for filming. Nope.

[
 3: Never Let a Film Crew Shoot in Your Home 
]

The most expensive part of filmmaking is getting locations to film in legally. That’s why we “chose” to shoot everything in our own homes. (Choice had nothing to do with it, of course. I was just being cutesy with the air quotes.)

My house is painted like a clown car, with each room a different
QUIRKY!
color,
so we shot the majority of the show there. For three days straight. And even though it wasn’t a big crew, having ten to fifteen people invade my private space was close to walking on the beach in a bikini without remembering to shave all the way on the anxiety scale. As an introverted person who likes everything around her to stay in its place and who personally likes to go to open houses with the express goal of sneaking a look into strangers’ medicine cabinets, I knew that every inch of my home was destined to be violated.

A lot of the stress couldn’t be avoided because we were working in such tight quarters. There’s a reason regular film stages are as big as Sam’s Club and not a small Los Angeles bungalow. One of the main character’s locations was a shed in my yard, about six feet by six feet large, with a sign “Daddy’s Doghouse” on the door. (Previous owner’s touch, promise.) Shoving cameras, lights, actors, crew members, and an active bacon griddle into an area the size of a Fiat was not optimal. I mean, the crew was mostly comprised of ladies, but even then, the BO became stronger than the San Antonio Spurs’ locker room.

I tried to preempt problems by making a calm announcement every morning, “This is my house, guys! Please treat it like your own!” But months after we wrapped, I was still finding Diet Coke cans stuck under my couch cushions and half-sandwiches ferreted in my towel closet. I’m sure no one DELIBERATELY tried to trash my home, but no matter how many times I’d say, “Please don’t give my dog any scraps; he’s gluten allergic,” he would mysteriously get diarrhea. EVERY NIGHT. I won’t even mention my frustration with male people not being able to hit the toilet while peeing. I couldn’t enter my own bathrooms without wanting to wear a hazmat suit. We never could have completed filming without opening our homes to the crew,
but to this day, I still have rings on my dining room table that I gaze at with bitterness. “I put out coasters. All the time. No one used them.”

Despite the personal-boundaries issues, the set was a casual place that made it feel like we were kids playing dress-up in our homes. (Because we WERE in our own homes. Four feet away from where we slept.) That informality gave us the freedom to do things that would never happen on a professional set. Mainly because of OSHA regulations and child labor laws.

There’s a scene in the first episode where the neglectful mother character, Clara, puts her newborn baby down on the floor as she’s talking to the other guild members online. We needed to cut to the baby doing something hilarious while Clara was ignoring him. There were a ton of baby toys on set, but we couldn’t find anything that made the scene EXTRA funny. Jane tried everything. “Give him that penguin. No, it looks too cute. What about his shoe?” Kid was saccharine adorable with any object, but I knew we needed to find something extra special to make the gamer crowd laugh. STEP IT UP, BABY! GIVE US THE FUNNY!

About ten minutes in, the baby started getting cranky, and we got to the point of “It’s good enough.” I hate that point. It’s either perfect, or it’s the worst thing ever made and everyone is an artistic failure, including myself. (Yay, emotional extremes!) I started running through my house, yelling back to the crew, “Give me two minutes, feed him, tickle him, stick a boobie in him! I’ll be right back!”

After rifling through my office drawers like a madwoman, I found something perfect for the shot.

And no, it wasn’t plugged in. I’m not a monster.

[
 4: Disaster Is Your Low-Budget Best Friend! 
]

The reason real television shows have hundreds of people working on them is pretty much for “disaster mitigation overhead.” Also: it takes a village to make people look pretty. In our case, there were only the three of us to deal with everything that could go wrong during our shoot. And tons of things did. And bonus: I am plagued with the kind of anxiety that makes me dart my head around like a meth-addicted hamster! So . . . not the best combo.

When a light fell over outside one of the windows of my director Jane’s house, it started a VERY minor brushfire. I immediately thought,
Oh God, the City of Los Angeles is going to arrest me for arson. And we don’t have a permit to shoot here. We’re all going to be arrested, then sued in
The People’s Court.
Must scout overpasses for future homesteads on the way home tonight.

Of course, none of that happened, but the landlord did find out about it and forbade us to shoot at that location again (forever and ever for the rest of eternity). So we all had to sneak in separately the next day to finish one last scene, with a plan that was so intricate, it could have been taken out of
Mission: Impossible
.

“Joseph: Enter back door at 10:54 a.m. Felicia: Front door at 11:07 a.m. Lana: 10:20 a.m. through garage. Carry craft service in a single grocery bag. DO NOT BE LATE!” I’ve never been more nervous going to someone’s house in my life. I wore an outfit with a huge hat and sunglasses like Audrey Hepburn in a spy thriller. I parked half a mile away and, as I approached the house, I ran through the back door, feeling as if a sniper was outside waiting to take me down.

We finished the scene, but with me talking in a very creepy whisper. (And people ask me why my character Codex is so neurotic.)

Another time we were filming at my own house, and in the middle of the shot, the sound guy called, “Cut!”

“Leaf blower is really loud next door, dudes. We can’t work like this.”

Kim turned to me. “Felicia, you need to go charm your neighbor, get the gardener to stop working.”

“But why me?!”

“It’s your neighbor.”

“Oh, God. Okay.”

When I send food back at a restaurant . . . well, I don’t. Because I’m convinced they’ll send it back with cyanide in it. Or bodily fluids. I have only fired agents by certified letter. I apologize to cashiers when I return things at clothing stores.
I’m sorry you have to re-rack this dress because of me, but look! I steamed the wrinkles out!
Confrontation is what I dread the most in life. But my precious creation needed me to gird my loins. So that’s what I did.

I walked next door with my heart pounding in my throat. This was how Marie Antoinette had approached the guillotine, I was sure of it. “Hi, Mr. Gregory! We’re filming over at my house . . .”

“Is that why people were loud at seven a.m. this morning?” Of course, he had to embody the “cranky old man neighbor” cliché.

“Um, so sorry, I’ll tell them to be quiet tomorrow. We just need to finish filming.”

“So?”

“And we need the leaf blower to stop blowing?”

“He has to finish. The crepe myrtle’s gone crazy this year. When I first planted that tree . . .”

“What a cool story. Ahem, so if he could just pause for thirty minutes or so . . .”

“Don’t ask me, ask him.”

I turned to the gardener, who was standing too close, staring at me silently, and holding the leaf blower on his shoulder like a weapon. I started sweating.

“Hello.” No response. “Can you wait for thirty minutes please before doing more leaf blowing?”

He stared at me. And stared. I turned to Mr. Gregory.

“Does he speak . . .”

Mr. Gregory was staring at me, too. I felt like I was in a zombie movie. I fumbled in my pocket for any money I had and held out my hand.

“Eleven dollars? Stop blowing? Until five o’clock?” I tapped my wrist. There was no watch there.

The gardener took the money and nodded.

“Thank you, Mr. Gregory!” I called out over my shoulder as I ran away as fast as I could, back into my house. Full run. (Reminder, I have no dignity.)

Kim met me at the door. “How’d it go?”

“He’ll stop for a half hour, but I’m pretty sure if my house is invaded by robbers in the future, he’ll lend them a dolly to help carry stuff to their car. Let’s make this COUNT!”

Every time the camera rolled on set, my nerves ratcheted up. I seriously didn’t poop for a week. I think it was because I cared SO MUCH. I wanted everything to be perfect, I wanted people to think we were hilarious; hell, I wanted us to be the first to win an Oscar for a web series. I had incredibly high expectations, and at the same time, I wasn’t secure in anything I was doing. Half the time I put my “producer hat” on, I felt like I was playing dress-up.

“Absolutely the budget can accommodate a Steadicam for this shot. Psst, Jane: What’s a Steadicam?”

I pretended to be a leader, but on the inside I was still that homeschooled kid who wasn’t allowed to walk to the corner by herself. Because, you know, murderers.

I knew I was a jittery mess, so I tried to self-coach myself off the ledge every morning,
Be happy! All the work we’re doing is so good! Remember? That chauvinist comment from Bladezz yesterday went over like gangbusters!
But as a superstitious Southern lady, any second of enjoying myself felt like I was deliberately inviting disaster into the production. So any positivity backfired.

The whole time on set, I was convinced that something terrible was going to happen. So I coped by visualizing every horrific scenario possible and playing it out blow-by-blow in my mind as I tried to get to sleep at night. I saw the police shutting us down when a PA double-parked outside, a tsunami hitting Los Angeles before we got to film episode two. I had a recurring dream that one of the actors, Jeff Lewis, would have a heart attack. Or an aneurysm. He was the highest-risk cast member. Almost forty, practically a corpse. So every morning I’d look up “instant death” diseases on my phone in order to say them out loud to myself in the bathroom mirror and prevent disaster from killing him and ruining my show.

“Blood clot.”

“Aneurysm.”

“Heart attack.”

“Stroke . . .”

Knock on the door. “Felicia, are you ready to roll?”

“Sure!” “Okay! I’m ready!”

This sounds insane, I know, but I do this ritual a lot. When I’m driving in a thunderstorm, I say out loud to myself in a very musical theatre voice, “Gee, I sure hope this rain doesn’t make me spin out of control and make me die on this highway!”