by Guy Branum
So you can imagine my surprise when I was slogging through a gently-amusing-but-definitely-not-funny intro for Bruno Mars and I got a DM from a certified American icon, Mindy Kaling: “Guy, are you available for staffing right now by any chance? Hi!”
I’d met Mindy when we were in the movie No Strings Attached15 together, but I didn’t really know her beyond that. The offer came out of nowhere, like manna, or Taylor Swift dating Tom Hiddleston. As somebody who watched The Mindy Project religiously, I was thrilled.
I got the job. There were lots of jobs I didn’t get, and I haven’t told you about those. I have written hundreds of packets and sent hundreds of emails and hoped hundreds of hopes. That’s not what this chapter is about. This chapter is about vacuous professional advice no one will actually pay attention to, and juicy stories about the famous ladies whom I’ve worked with.
Chelsea was a force of nature, and Joan Rivers was a legend, but Mindy Kaling was something even more daunting: She was a writer. Chelsea and Joan needed writers; they depended on them. Mindy is an exquisitely talented writer, trained at The Office with one of the strongest, smartest writing staffs ever assembled. At this point, I’d written on two sitcoms, and both of them were smallish cable operations with a lot of inexperienced staff. I’d been helpful there but didn’t know how much I had to offer on a real network show.
One of the cool things was that I started midway through the season, so Mindy was already acting on the show. That meant I could get the feel of the room while she was on-set, and maybe be a bit more comfortable before I had to pitch in front of her.
Her writers’ room was hardly less intimidating. Everyone there had written on The Office16 or The Simpsons17 or 30 Rock,18 except19 my friend Chris Schleicher, who’d started at The Mindy Project straight out of college, and if you hear me saying someone got a sitcom writing job straight out of college, I think you can assume that college was Harvard and he was on the Lampoon. In Chris’s case, that would be accurate. He was the first openly gay president of the Harvard Lampoon. Like I said, that room is intimidating.
A sitcom writers’ room is a deeply hierarchical place. Everyone has a very specific title that doesn’t indicate a specialization in work but, rather, a rank.20 While I’d never been in one of these real, networky writers’ rooms, I knew how the vibe was supposed to work. As my friend Christy Stratton Mann21 had often told me, “In my day, being a staff writer meant you were supposed to talk once a day and expect that not a word you wrote would make it into the final draft of your script.”
That makes it hard, because you need to show deference, but you also have to prove that you’re an asset to the writers’ room. Figuring out the right moment to make a contribution, and making sure it’s a good one that meets the tone of the room, takes finesse. I’m not great at finesse.
Luckily, it wasn’t that bad. Since I was starting midway through the season, the room was in the middle of punching up a script that was already written. If we’d been at the beginning of the season, the room would have been breaking the story arcs for the episodes, and my contributions wouldn’t have been particularly welcome or helpful. A staff writer isn’t there to make major plot decisions; he or she is there to write jokes. I showed up when they needed jokes, and Double-Dutch-style, I managed to hop in and start playing along.
I found myself in a professional environment where I was appreciated, challenged, and the thing we’ve learned is super-important to me, respected. Mindy Kaling knows what shitty work looks like, and she will not accept it. She knows what good work is, and she loves people who work hard to share their talents with her projects. To say that at The Mindy Project I found the kind of professional environment where I work best doesn’t mean I was a luminary in the room. I wasn’t. I was surrounded every day by people who were funnier and better at writing TV than I was, and that forced me to be better. It was Berkeley quiz bowl all over again.
Joan Rivers was a legend, but even after I spent nearly a year working for her, I don’t know that she knew my name.
Chelsea Handler is my family. People ask me if I like her. I always say, “I love her.” That is different. One does not subsume the other. She gave me more than nearly anyone else has; she’s also been cold to me in ways that only a family member would think to be. My relationship with her, and everyone I worked with at Chelsea Lately, is deep, probably deeper than my relationships with the folks at The Mindy Project, but that’s only because we shared a crazy, chaotic, rewarding, and damaging experience together. The folks at Mindy and I just shared lunch and some laughs.
The bedrock of Mindy Kaling’s friendships is respect. She wants respect and she demands it, and on the occasions when I gave less to the show than I could, she let me know, with respect. But she also gives a shit-ton of respect. The people around her know she doesn’t just like them, she values their contributions.
And this is where I’m supposed to tie together my personal stories about Chelsea, Joan, Mindy, and Comcast’s cable possessions with my analysis of The Dick Van Dyke Show to show you something new. I could make this seem like an insightful attempt to explore how writing for others has changed my own voice, or maybe some bullshit about gay ventriloquism through these three powerful ladies. Or I could admit that there are no great life lessons in this chapter, just some midlevel dish about why I left Chelsea Lately, professional advice on par with what you’d get at a South by Southwest diversity panel, and a fat joke about Adele. But maybe the life lesson is that we don’t need life lessons. Maybe our lives are enriched enough by fat jokes about Adele.
* * *
1. When Mayor Jean Quan ran for reelection in 2014, she got 15 percent of the vote. As an incumbent. This was largely the result of her handling of the 2011 Occupy Oakland protests, where she visited and supported the protestors, then authorized use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to disperse the protestors. She wasn’t great at her job.
2. Look, if I’d gotten fired, I would tell you.
3. This section is for a very small subset of people who care what TechTV and/or G4 actually were. If you’re not a committed nerd who really wants to know what Olivia Munn smelled like, just skip to the next section.
4. Adam Sessler once insisted on including a Betty Friedan joke on X-Play.
5. Yet another of the plethora of gay Ryans in my life.
6. Okay, the joke wasn’t that great. If I remember correctly, we were discussing Britney Spears getting probation for driving without a license, and I said, “If Britney goes to jail, who’s going to neglect Sean Preston and Jayden James?” This was before her conservatorship made such jokes in bad taste.
7. That’s how low-rent and cable the show was. Our writers’ assistant didn’t type up the jokes, we did.
8. It wouldn’t have ruined everything. It would have made my show infinitely more sellable and producible. It just meant they’d make marginally less money. I was too old and too law-schooled to not see this conflict of interest, but I didn’t.
9. This Means War.
10. On Lea Michele in a silver dress: “She looks like a filling.”
11. On Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan: “I’m so glad Channing’s wife could get the night off at Cheesecake Factory.”
12. On Zooey Deschanel: “You know Zooey just started a website to encourage women to do comedy. I just started a website to discourage Zooey from doing comedy.”
13. I’m sorry I don’t have the joke. It may not have been kombucha. It may have been Google Glass or Justin Bieber’s fragrance, Someday. All I remember is that it was something very 2012.
14. It was from the 2012 Grammys episode. Adele won five Grammys, and I said, “Usually, when Adele leaves with five of something, it comes with coleslaw and some biscuits.” Joan thought it was very funny but didn’t want to make fun of a woman for being fat. I had no business making fun of a woman for being fat, either.
15. The one with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. The one wit
h Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake was called Friends With Benefits. We’ve discussed this before.
16. Emmy winner Charlie Grandy.
17. Emmy winner Matt Warburton.
18. Emmy winner Tracey Wigfield and non–Emmy winning underachiever Lang Fisher.
19. This is not entirely true. There are two other writers who didn’t work for those shows, Ike Barinholtz and Dave Stassen, but they are both really hot, so intimidating in other ways.
20. In descending order: executive producer, co–executive producer, consulting producer, supervising producer, producer, co-producer, executive story editor, story editor, staff writer.
21. Go Gators!
IT NEVER RAINS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
MOVING TO LOS ANGELES is never going to be fun. It’s tempting to imagine the terms on which it just works, like you’re cast in some blockbuster movie or you’re nominated for an Academy Award and you’re beautiful and rich and beloved. You’re moving into some glorious manse in the Bird Streets section of the West Hollywood Hills that you’ve seen on numerous episodes of Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles. You could spend your life fictionalizing a story that involves you having enough money, power, beauty, sex appeal, and fame to move to Los Angeles like a queen. Even then, when you drove down a block of Sunset, you’d see thirty people who were so much hotter than you, and you’d feel like shooting yourself.
L.A. is a wonderful place. TV shows and movies and songs—mostly songs—will try to convince you that it’s shallow and intellectually barren. This is rubbish. Los Angeles is a city populated by dreamers, and the minds of said dreamers are quick and powerful. It’s paradise, a place more beautiful and full of possibility than you think real.
That’s why coming here is terrible. It means confronting the extent to which you’ll never be able to actualize all the potential in front of you. That’s your problem—not Los Angeles’s.
I moved to Los Angeles late in the summer of 2004. I have previously explained to you the events that liberated me from the indignities of life in the legal field and led me into America’s creative classes. I’ve also told you that eight months after my hire, the network that had hired me was purchased by Comcast and two thirds of the employees were fired. I was one of said employees. I was then at an impasse. Did I accept my time in a creative job as errata on my plodding path into a boring life as a lawyer, or did I behave as though being a real, full-time comic was something I was able to do?
It would be cute if I’d gathered together my belongings and gotten in a car headed toward the Hollywood sign, but I didn’t. The actual truth is that during my last two months at TechTV, the aforementioned dying cable company, I had, every morning, called a production company in New York that made some VH1 show I enjoyed, and left a message saying I’d like to work for them. It seemed like exactly the story of spunk you heard from people about how they’d managed to best the entertainment industry. After six weeks of calling, then a polite two-week cessation while the guy I was calling was on vacation, he called me back and told me I could come in and meet with them.
Thus, my journey to Los Angeles occurred by way of Manhattan. I officially went for the interview, but really I wanted to try my hand at stand-up in a bigger, realer city. It was depleting my limited severance pay, but it was also a first tiny gesture of belief that I might have the potential to make a career out of comedy. I didn’t get the job, however.1 What I got was a call from my former employers at TechTV, telling me that if I could be in L.A. by the first of August, I would have a job as a full, real writer for the show I’d been working for.
The lesson of this story, children, is that the appearance of popularity matters. It is a very Los Angeles lesson. I did a moderate amount of buzzing about my rich job prospects on the Hudson, and those lovely, wonderful chumps at TechTV/G4 took the bait. God or The Universe or Lakshmi or The Secret had heard my gesture of belief in myself and had given me a chance at living a life based on commodified frivolity. All I had to do was move to Los Angeles.
One of my big theoretical points here is that no one moves to Los Angeles without an agenda. Occasionally, at parties, I will probe strangers by asking, “So, what’s your Hollywood dream?” Usually, this involves a small bit of choreography, so it’s really “So” (snap with both fingers) “What’s your Hollywood Dream?” (point with both fingers). People hate this. They almost invariably begin by telling me that they do not have a Hollywood Dream, then, about five minutes later, explain that they originally moved to L.A. to be a screenwriter but now they’re doing a lot of branded Snapchat content. There are certainly lawyers2 and epidemiologists3 who end up in the greater Los Angeles area for random “It’s a big city” reasons, but for most of the people living in Los Angeles, the move was a specific and concrete declaration that they believed in their capacity to be a professional entertainer.4
I will often dismiss this idea of believing in my Hollywood Dream when it comes to my move. I will say that the job at G4 forced my move, and if I hadn’t gotten it, I probably wouldn’t have made the journey. Both of these statements are probably true, but they ignore the extent to which upending my life and moving to a place where I knew no one was a gesture of resolute self-confidence. Perhaps it was a gesture I didn’t realize at the time, and God knows I love telling stories about how I lack the type of self-belief possessed by scrappy dreamers with better cheekbones than mine, but my move, no less than any other, was a declaration of “I can do this.”
In Los Angeles, I rented a room in West Hollywood that was slightly too expensive. It was surrounded by gay guys who were all slightly too attractive. Meanwhile, I was surrounded by comics who were slightly too successful. Turned out that Los Angeles’s overripe offerings were too much for me.
Three months later, I hid myself in a hole in West L.A. that was less expensive, less challenging, and less fun. I proceeded to hide from L.A. for the following two years.
I distinctly remember sitting in my room in that too-expensive apartment in too-sexy West Hollywood and watching television. I was watching Pilot Season on Trio, a cable network about pop culture that has since died but gave us its only begotten son, Andy Cohen. I was very aware that there were too many shows in which Hollywood contemplated itself. At that point, we had Pilot Season, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Greg the Bunny, and within a year, they’d be joined by The Comeback, Fat Actress, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman, and an almost forgotten film called The TV Set. I was oddly sickened by this need for an industry to mythologize itself, and I was terrified of how I might fit in to this story I’d decided to enter.
The two most important stories of Los Angeles from this mid-2000s crop are Entourage and The Comeback. Both have a central celebrity who’s trying to ascend to the next level of success. In nearly every other way, they are different. Entourage is a fantasy of the Hollywood we wish existed for us, an attempt to purify happiness and success into an easily main-linable form. The Comeback is an autopsy, a forensic inquiry into the ways we tell ourselves what happiness is.
Entourage, for those of you who’ve managed to avoid its cultural presence for the past two decades, is the story of Vinnie Chase, a sexy young movie star on the verge of greatness, and the three buddies who fill out his posse: his failed-actor brother, Johnny Drama; his manager, E.; and his chubby, pathetic friend, Turtle. The plot of every episode is the same. Vinnie’s big chance at making it to the big time is put in jeopardy, the boys put their devotion to one another above all other things, and somehow their masculine solidarity catapults Vinnie on to even more success. Jeremy Piven’s hair plugs co-star.
Entourage is a comedy in the purest sense: In the end, things are always fine. In Shakespeare, a tragedy ends with a death; a comedy ends with lovers coming together and providing the specter of happy heterosexual reproduction. Entourage didn’t make many babies, but the boys certainly did try a lot. In no other way is it a comedy: There aren’t really jokes on Entourage. Some of Ari’s insults
may qualify as such, as might the stupid things Turtle says, but this show isn’t about quips or wordplay. Entourage is about excess. In the end, Vinnie always gets more—more roles, more accolades, more women, more weed—and he shares that largesse with his buddies. In the absence of wit, it is only this untrammeled optimism and the thirty-minute running time that lets us know Entourage is a comedy.
The presiding figure of Vinnie and the Boys’ world is Ari, Vinnie’s agent, played by Piven. It’s Ari’s job to state the rules of the world and introduce what passes for conflict in the plot. He must also berate his gay assistant and his needy wife with condescension and glee. The terms of the plot conflict do not matter. Oh, does E. need to get a director to do Vinnie’s movie? Does Vinnie need to pick the superhero movie over the indie that a girl wants him to do? It doesn’t matter, because the good thing always happens. Ari’s real role is to remind us of the moral code of this world: Power is the goal, and power is achieved through loyalty to your boys.
The Los Angeles of plenty that is imagined by Entourage is one created not by heterosexual procreation but from homosocial solidarity. In Entourage, women are, at best, treasure, objects that are part of the bounty that has been won by the boys for their correct performance of masculinity. The most significant female character on the show, Ari’s wife, is, for the entire run of the series, known only by this title. She has no name. She is an appendage. A trophy and a whining burden.
Similarly, Ari’s assistant for most of the series is a gay Asian man, Lloyd, who serves primarily as a sharpening stone for Ari’s masculine power. Lloyd exists in trembling fear of Ari’s berating tirades. He serves with selfless fidelity and deference. As a gay Asian man, Lloyd is representative of the identities that the jokes of 2005 categorized as least masculine. Rex Lee, a gifted performer, finds subversions in the performance, but the character as written is a sexless whipping boy. For in the world of Entourage, power makes masculinity and masculinity makes power.
