You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (24 page)

Over the summer of 2008, we continued taking meetings about the show, but at that point we’d stopped counting on a big company to come in and help us keep filming. We knew we could keep
The Guild
going. All by our lady lonesomes.

Of course, we needed to somehow get money to back-pay the cast so they’d keep working with us. (A year seemed kind of excessive to go without being compensated.) I hadn’t had an acting job in a while because I was so busy online cheerleading for the show 24/7. So all that was a problem . . . yeah . . .

“We could make a DVD and sell it to fund another season? Would that work?” During a breakfast burrito brainstorming session with Kim, I threw that out, not knowing how it could be achieved, but it sounded smart to my ears.

Kim thought about it for a second. “People like DVDs. Yeah! Let’s do it.”

At that point we were high on our own independence. Empowered anarchists. We could do anything!

Oh, boy.

I wrote season two of the show while Kim tried to figure out how to make a DVD from scratch. (Jane had moved on after season one to direct other things.) Heads up: There are jobs that you can DIY, and there are others that are worth paying someone else to do. DVD fulfillment is one of those you should NEVER TRY BY YOURSELF
UNLESS YOU THINK PUNCHING YOURSELF IN THE FACE IS A FUN WEEKEND ACTIVITY.

I changed the PayPal button on the website to be a preorder for the DVD and estimated we’d sell around a hundred copies. There were more than a thousand orders in a week. It was a sphincter-puckering windfall. The plan had always been to send them out ourselves, but never at that volume. After endless stuffing and addressing of envelopes and the inevitable “Oops, Kim! I forgot to charge people shipping!,” I’d reached my limit.

Kim sat down next to me and tried to calm me down, as usual.

“Would you rather be at a fast-food commercial audition?”

“No.”

“Would you rather have sold the show and have other people tell us what to do?”

“No.” Sniff.

“Then we’ll finish these DVDs, back pay the cast, then invest our share back into the show, and start shooting again. Does that sound like a plan?”

“Yes. Good plan. Yes.”

“Maybe we can ask some volunteers from Twitter to come help us with the labeling.”

“Better plan, yes.”

“Give me the customs forms, I’ll do the rest.”

Kim grabbed my pile of papers and shoved the return address stamper at me instead. “Stamp for a while. It’s therapeutic. Pretend you’re mushing it on somebody’s face.”

I stamped a few dozen packages imagining I was mushing the face of that particularly annoying douche-suit guy I’d met, and it helped. She was right. Damnit.

As the DVD orders slowed to a trickle, I finished writing the script for
The Guild
season two and we prepped to shoot the first episode on our DVD savings. It was going to be the shoestring way again, with only a few hoagies to split amongst everyone for lunch, but that was the only way to do it. We’d go for as long as we could! Or something plan-ish like that.

The week before we started shooting, I got a call from our snazzy Hollywood agent, George.

“Felicia, do you know Xbox?”

“Uh, of course I do. I’m a gamer. Duh.”

“They want to talk about making new
Guild
episodes.”

Ugh. I was so burned on meetings at that point, I got uppity.

“You know how I feel about . . .”

He was used to my antiestablishment tirades and interrupted before I could build up to my “strident” voice.

“They’re willing to be flexible. Just take the meeting, please.”

“Really?” A gaming company that would pay for the show and be okay with my anarchist demands? I decided to take the meeting. Because if nothing else, I thought,
Maybe I can scam a free Xbox!

And over pancakes (because I ALWAYS take meetings over pancakes), surprise, surprise, the Xbox guy seemed . . . flexible. And not condescending. They didn’t need to own the show, they’d leave creative decisions up to us, and they would give us a decent budget so we could pay everyone reasonably and feed them something besides cheap hoagies. In fact, they replied to literally everything I asked for with, “Sure, that’s reasonable.”

It made me flustered. Because it’s one thing to ask for what you want and another thing to GET it.

Checkmate, Felicia Day.

And that’s how we made four more seasons over four years with Xbox. Because I dug in my heels and was unreasonable, and got rewarded for it. (Definitely adding that to the coffee mug slogan bin.)

We started shooting the first two episodes of season two the weekend after the meeting, knowing that we would be 100 percent guaranteed to shoot the rest of the season, and no one on set would be working for free anymore. In a quiet moment during filming, I pulled Kim aside with tears in my eyes and hugged her.

“No more hoagies!” I whispered into her ear.

She nodded. “No more hoagies.”

Over the next several years, we found more ways to pioneer in the world of web video. I wrote a
Guild
comic book series, the show was the first web series released on Netflix. We even released a music video single that was number one on iTunes for a week. Beat Taylor Swift. (A song that was recorded in a friend’s closet, staring at his socks.) Sure, all the business things we did with
The Guild
are cool, but it was the relationship that developed between us and the fans and, for me, my own family, that made every rebellious step of the way worth it.

One of the drawbacks of being a homeschooled kid was that I don’t think I learned to be as independent as regular kids. My mother got me into violin, my grandfather got me into math, I killed myself getting a 4.0 in college; a lot of my life I did things because OTHER people guided my behavior. When I dove into acting with such naïve confidence, for the first time I was following something for myself. Problem was, my family didn’t understand the movie business, so they worried. A lot. Chances were high in their minds that I might end up becoming a porn actress and/or a heroin addict. (They had seen that happen once on
Law & Order
.)

When I tried to prove to them, “Hey! This is the thing I’m meant to do!” I’d frequently get egg on my face, like when I made everyone stay up until 12:01 a.m. to watch my first professional job, a Starburst commercial, not knowing I’d gotten cut completely out of it. My mom was confused.

“Where were you? Did I miss you?”

“No. I guess I got cut out of it, Mom.”

“Oh, honey. What happened? Were you bad?” Mortifying.

Over the years, when my career didn’t seem to be building to anything significant, my dad in particular became a fan of the “backup plan.” He’s a very practical and business-savvy guy, and in a helpful way he hinted here and there in phone calls, “If you need to come home, I’ll pay for your law school . . .”

In the lowest days of my career, I thought about taking him up on it.

But then
The Guild
took off, and it finally seemed to prove that I’d chosen the right path. The problem was that the internet world was so new, it was hard to make my family understand, “We’re on YouTube and Xbox now! It’s a gaming console. Yes, it’s for games but they also have video . . .”
meant I was guaranteed to not move into their spare bedroom anytime soon.

I was in Austin, Texas, visiting my dad around season three of
The Guild
, and we ended up going to Bed Bath & Beyond together, probably for a new griddle because he’s a real “cook the sausage until they turn into meteorites” kind of guy. I could tell he wanted to talk to me about something serious. He’s always trying to get me to save money for some reason, so I thought,
Ugh, another time where I have to pretend to understand what he’s talking about with 401(k)s
.

As we wandered the aisles, of course I shoved things into the cart I wanted for myself so he’d pay for them. (I don’t care how old you are, that’s a daughter privilege.) He cleared his throat, and I knew he was going to launch into it.

“Honey, I want you to know you can always come home. Uh, you know. If things aren’t working out.”

I stopped the cart and rolled my eyes. I definitely would have rather talked with him about a 401(k) thingie. “Things are working out, Dad. I’m fine!”

“You haven’t been on TV as much lately.”

“Well, I’ve been working on all my internet stuff.”

“That sounds fun, but are you making a living at it?”

“I . . . kinda.” Technically I was still paying most of my bills with commercial acting, but unless I was phoning home for a check, he didn’t need to know that.

“I’m just saying, UT Law School is one of the best in the country. You always liked that
Ally McBeal
show . . .”

“Dad! I’m doing great! Honest . . .”

“Hey! Are you . . . Codex?”

We had stopped to have our earnest Lifetime moment in the
linens section, and a guy in his early twenties wearing a polo shirt peered out at us from behind a stack of flamingo beach towels.

I smiled. “Uh, yeah! That’s me.”

“Wow, this is so cool!”

He walked over, and my dad looked at the guy skeptically. I had a feeling he thought the guy was a plant.

“I love your show! I’m working, so it’s not technically allowed, but think I could get a picture with you?”

“Sure!”

As we posed in front of a stack of “As Seen on TV” items, my dad took the photo, then handed the phone back to the kid.

Dad had a weird look on his face. “You’ve really seen her web show?”

“Yeah! Me and my roommate love it. We’re gamers. Bought the DVDs!”

“That’s awesome, thanks for supporting!” I smiled and high-fived him. For many reasons, I’d never loved a stranger more than in that moment.

The guy waved and started to leave. “Nice to meet you! The roommate is never gonna believe this!”

As he walked away, my dad looked at me, and there was something different in his eyes. Surprise. Shock. And more than a little bit of admiration.

“That was pretty cool.”

“Yeah.”

“Ahem.”

There was an awkward beat between us. Was he gonna bring up the law school thing again? Ask me more about my show? Talk to me about my pension benefits?

“Let’s go get some pancakes.” He put his arm around me, and we pushed the cart toward the checkout. A few aisles later I had to pretend to look at ShamWows to wipe away a few tears.

Yeah, that moment near the flamingo beach towels was my sweetest
Guild
victory of all.

- 9 -

Convention Fevah

I have a cabinet filled with dolls of myself in my office. But I didn’t MAKE any of them, so that makes it less creepy, right?

In the summer of 2008, I walked onstage with the cast and creators of
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
, a musical web series released on the internet just weeks before, and was greeted by the screams of more than five thousand people. We were at San Diego Comic-Con, in Ballroom 20, the second largest hall at the biggest nerd event in the world. With me were Nathan Fillion and Simon Helberg and Neil Patrick Harris, my
Horrible
costars, and Joss Whedon and his siblings, Zack, Jed, and Jed’s wife, Maurissa, the writers. Joss Whedon was also the director. You may be familiar with him from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Firefly
, and
The Avengers
. (Whew, that was a lot of name-dropping.) As I smiled and waved to the audience, gazing out on the huge room filled with thousands of faces, I suddenly knew what it felt to be a rock star.

And my inner dik-dik didn’t want any terrifying part of it.

Nathan and Neil and Joss were extremely witty onstage during the panel, bantering with one another like the superstars they are, and the only thing I could do was stare down at the iPhone 3G in my
lap, frozen in fear. After the initial semi-thrill of walking onstage, five thousand people staring at you comes with an intimidating amount of eyeball reflection. At a certain point, a question got thrown to me, but there was an awkward beat of silence on stage because I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy staring at my lap. Nathan leaned forward to cover for me as I looked up and blurted out, “Oh! I’m sorry, what was the question? I was . . . Twittering under here.”

This was 2008. Not a lot of nontech people were on Twitter at that point. So it sounded . . . suggestive.

Yup, people thought exactly what you’d think “twittering” was if you didn’t know about social media: they thought I was masturbating under the table. And so did Nathan.

“It’s hot in here,” I said, flustered by the roar of laughter from the crowd.

“And wet,” said Neil. Which made me turn as pink as my borrowed designer sweater.

After that, a lot of fans joined Twitter.