I looked at her blankly. I mean. What the fuck was I supposed to do here? I obviously finished it in ten days because it’s for stupid kids and I wasn’t stupid.
“I didn’t cheat,” I insisted. “I wouldn’t even know how to do that. But what do you want me to do? There’s no way to prove it to you.”
I was so fucking done with high school and all this bullshit I knew didn’t mean anything. I just wanted this to be over.
“You’ll have to do it all again,” she said. “And we’ll make sure the teacher is watching your work.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great. Thank you so much.”
I flounced out of her office as only a privileged kid who knew she was destined for better shit could do. You want me to do the online government class for stupid kids, again? Fine. And acting isn’t a viable career? Well, I guess we’ll see about that.
The Saturday night after I got home, Craig, Brett, and I had tickets to see the Cardigans. An hour before Craig was supposed to pick me up, my phone rang.
“Hey. What’s up??”
“I just got off the phone with my brother . . .”
His voice was shaky. Oh, fuck. THANKS, A LOT, JEFF! Of course his brother broke down and told him everything. “Riddled with guilt” is how Craig described him. Look, it wasn’t like I felt great about it. But I’d been willing to keep up my end of the bargain. I guess Jeff couldn’t.
Craig was (rightfully) super pissed at me and didn’t want to go to the concert, but he was also kind of cheap and the tickets to the Cardigans were like twenty-five dollars, so he begrudgingly agreed to still go. I spent the show trying my best to get him to look at me or let me put my arm through his but his gaze was withering. I even cried a bit when they played “Lovefool.” Not to be manipulative, but truly because I just wanted him to love me and I knew I had done something reckless and stupid and I should have known better, but couldn’t he understand it didn’t mean anything??? I guess not. Not that night, anyway. I got him to agree that he didn’t want to throw away our friendship over this and I worked very hard that next week to make sure he understood how sorry I was. One week later, he was in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, when I cuddled up next to him and he kissed me again. I was so relieved. He was annoyed at himself that he caved so soon after declaring it was over for us, but I was just so happy that he was back that I vowed not to do anything to hurt him again. At least, nothing that he could find out about.
I had to fly to L.A. for my CalArts audition, and Brett’s older brother, Eric, agreed to pick me up from the airport and drive me out to Valencia for it. He also was going to show me around LMU afterward, and then take me back to the airport that night. I didn’t really have the grades to get into LMU. I mean, my grades were fine and my SATs were okay, but they still left a lot to be desired. I worked really hard on my essays, though, and even put together a picture collage to submit with my application. Instead of mailing it in, I just figured I’d drop it off in person while I was there.
My CalArts audition went great. I did a Shakespeare monologue—I think from Romeo and Juliet, although it’s possible it was from Hamlet—and I also did a dramatic monologue from some play in which I was a girl talking about being raped, but using birds being killed as a metaphor or something? Who knows? I really thought I was going to be a VERY SERIOUS DRAMATIC ACTOR. The CalArts people were seemingly impressed, and I felt very confident that I would get in. (Why wouldn’t I? WHO WOULDN’T WANT ME IN THIER SCHOOL?)
After my audition, Eric and I went to the Venice boardwalk and sat in the sun and had lunch and I remember breathing in the salty air and looking at all the weirdos wandering around the boardwalk and just thinking, “This is about to be my life.” We went to the LMU campus, which isn’t far from Venice, and Eric took me on a tour, introducing me to his friends. Then we walked over to the admissions office for me to turn in my application. There wasn’t anyone behind the desk but after a moment, a man poked his head out of a back office.
“May I help you?”
“Oh, hi!” I said brightly. “I just wanted to drop off my application for next year. I’m in town ’cause I was auditioning for CalArts and I thought I’d bring it by.”
“Great!” he said with a smile. “Save some postage!”
He grabbed my application and started to open it as I introduced myself to him.
Have I talked about being a sparkly human yet? Well, I have a theory. There are certain people who are what I call sparkly humans. These are people who have things just happen for them or to them because other people see them and seemingly inexplicably want to help them. Because they sparkle. From the inside out. I was always a sparkly human (still am, for the most part, on most days). Adults just liked me and wanted to help me. Not kids at my school. Sometimes sparkliness isn’t recognized by peers until much later. Sometimes sparkly people are even bullied as kids. Because other kids want to put that light out. They don’t understand it and they want to kill it. The secret is, if you’re truly sparkly, you survive all that bullshit and you don’t let them put it out. And at some point, you start to get rewarded for it. Sparkly humans aren’t always entertainers, and they don’t always become famous. There are sparkly humans everywhere. And there are also plenty of people who are wonderful and amazing, but aren’t sparkly. It’s a very specific thing.
So anyway, I’m sparkly. And in this case, the man who took my application turned out to be the head of admissions at LMU, and even if my grades and SATs weren’t exactly what they were looking for, he thought I was funny and engaging and loved my essays and my collage of pictures from my life. I got accepted to LMU for one reason: because I was sparkly.
Soon after that, Mrs. Carrick announced that there was an open casting call for an anti-smoking commercial and that they were looking for real teens to star in the spot. All of the kids from the theater department went after school to audition. I brought my headshot and trumped-up résumé and waited my turn with all my friends as they brought us in one at a time. They asked me to dance around while miming smoking and burning someone with my cigarette. They asked me if I smoked and I lied, “Only sometimes, if my friends are.” They seemed satisfied with that. They called my mom the next day and she told me that I’d booked the lead part in the commercial.
“BUSY! Congratulations, honey! That’s SO GREAT!”
I was beyond excited. We shot all day, in a warehouse in downtown Phoenix called the Icehouse that I had spent many Saturday nights dancing in, high off my face. In the commercial, I was dancing in a mosh pit (thankfully, it was a faux mosh pit, and since I was the star of the commercial, I wasn’t in any danger of dislocating my knee) and accidentally burning people with my cigarette until two dudes got fed up and crowd-surfed me and dumped me into a trash can. For the dancing, they played the White Zombie song “More Human Than Human” on repeat, and to this day, when I hear that song, I immediately think of being in that anti-smoking commercial.
I was positively high at the end of the day. This was what I wanted. I wanted to be on sets and work so hard I could barely see straight and hang out with people who I would probably never see again and eat craft services and get my hair and makeup done and get paid to act.
I found out I got into both CalArts and LMU and decided that LMU was the better call since I wanted to start acting professionally as soon as possible, and in the conservatory program at CalArts, working was frowned upon until you graduated.
I was chosen to give a speech at graduation, which in and of itself was fairly hysterical, since it was questionable whether I would be able to graduate at all, with the whole Government debacle. But I finished the course online to the satisfaction of the vice principal and was cleared to graduate. Afterward, my parents took me out to dinner to celebrate with Brett and Craig and also Shawn Harris, who wanted to come to my graduation. There’s a super-hilarious picture of all of us, standing in front of the Chart House in Scottsdale where I’m in between Shawn and Craig, my arms around both and smiling this shit-ea
ting grin, like, Oh fuck! I don’t think I was even still sleeping with Shawn, although I guess that’s possible. Craig was more or less my boyfriend by that point.
I had one moment of panic over the summer that maybe I should stay in Arizona and just go to ASU with all my friends. Plus, Craig was a year younger than me, and I didn’t want to leave him. I actually looked into it, but my mom was having none of my cold feet.
“Elizabeth. Absolutely not. You’ve been waiting your whole life for this! Don’t be an idiot.”
She was right, obviously. I had been waiting my whole life to move to L.A. and try to make my dreams come true. And as we’ve already established, I’m a lot of things, but I am not an idiot. So in August, right after my eighteenth birthday, we packed my car, I kissed my parents and my friends and Craig goodbye, and I drove myself to my new home, a dorm room at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, California, which was about as close to Hollywood as I could get.
BAD REPUTATION
(Joan Jett)
“Busy Philipps, everyone!”
Almost every audition for producers or directors starts the same way, with some variation of “Say hi to Busy Philipps!” or “Here’s Busy Philipps!”
And freshman year, this was all I wanted. To hear them call my name. To get started. A few years ago, Colin Hanks told me he remembers me crying hysterically in my dorm-room bed and sobbing, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! I JUST CAN’T WAIT ANY LONGER TO BE AN ACTRESS!!”
I’m rolling my eyes right now, but that’s who I was. It’s who I am. I have a hard time just existing. I always think that if only I could be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else, then I would be happy, finally. The hole would be filled. I know that’s not how life works. But it’s always been the thing that drives me.
• • •
Colin and I met when my new college friends and I went to see the LMU theater department production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There was a kid in it playing Billy Bibbit, and as soon as he took the stage, I was in. Listen, I know. But there’s just something about talent—real talent—that gets me. Also, he was tall and skinny and adorable. At intermission, I looked in the program and found his name.
“Do you know him?” I whispered to my friend Joe. “What year is he?”
“That’s Colin Hanks. Tom Hanks’s son.”
After the show, Joe introduced us. I told him he was great in the play (which he was). He told me he liked my skate shoes. And, just like that, I had a crush on him.
I had a boyfriend back home, and he had a girlfriend back home. But it soon became clear that we liked each other, and we started finding ourselves in the same places at the same time. One night, we hung out at a party and then stayed up all night, walking to the bluffs that looked out over the lights of L.A. and talking until the sun came up. By seven in the morning, we had kissed and decided we would both break up with our significant others back home.
And that was that.
Around that time, one of the Barbie girls I’d met at the toy fair very sweetly offered to give me some advice about getting started in the business. I ended up meeting with her manager, Lorraine Berglund, at her home in the Valley. She was petite and stylish, and she and her husband were from London. I immediately loved her. She told me all about the kind of clients she represented and how I would need to get real headshots, since apparently the ones I’d been using in Arizona wouldn’t work for L.A. She even offered to split the cost with me, with the deal that I would pay her back when I started making money.
Eventually, she got me a meeting with Marilyn Szatmary, who was the head of a small talent agency, and who did not disappoint in terms of being intimidating. She looked at me skeptically over her desk and narrowed her eyes. “Well, you’re very attractive. But can you act? Because I don’t take on pretty people who can hit their marks, I represent actors.”
I shit you not. Twenty years later and I can hear her saying those exact words to nineteen-year-old me. In fact, I believe that I committed them to memory while I was sitting there, because I knew what a fucking iconic thing that is to say to a young actress trying to break in to this business. Marilyn Szatmary did not suffer fools.
I assured Marilyn that I was, indeed, an actor. She then asked me to prove it by coming back and auditioning for her and the rest of the agents. I was elated. And I nailed it. Just like that, I had a manager and an agent, and I was ready for everything else. But it wasn’t until the second semester of my sophomore year that the auditions started to roll in.
Dawson’s Creek had been such a huge hit that all the networks were attempting their own versions of a “teen” show, hoping they would discover the next Katie Holmes. (I wouldn’t be cast on Dawson’s Creek for three more years.) In the span of those first few months of 1998, I was sent on over ninety auditions and callbacks. It seems impossible, I know, but sometimes I would only be reading for an assistant and then I would have to come back for the actual casting director, and then they would bring me back for producers or the director. Sometimes I’d audition for the same TV show four or five times. It became essentially a full-time job. Forget about making it to Intro to World Religions or Psych 102. I was in Glendale in a random office park, reading the same angsty teen drivel for the forty-seventh time. I got very used to hearing feedback like “They want to put a pin in you” (which means they like you but aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet) and “You’re not right for the lead but they want you to come back in for the other girl.”
I had an audition one day for a pilot called The Acting Class. Lorraine told me the show was for NBC with Imagine Entertainment and Steve Martin producing, which was already exciting enough. But when I got the script, I couldn’t believe it.
Writers: Carlos Jacott and Noah Baumbach
Director: Noah Baumbach
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? NOAH BAUMBACH? FROM KICKING AND SCREAMING?! I was dying. Plus, I was perfect for it. I skipped my classes and worked on it all morning and then went in for my pre-read, which was just for an assistant. She loved it and had me come back a few hours later for the casting director, who also loved what I did and asked if I would be able to come back the next day for the director and producers. I was literally losing my shit. This was what I was supposed to be doing. I was sure of it. This was my TV show. It was poetic, really.
I knew I had to call Craig and tell him. He was in Chicago by then, studying acting at DePaul. Even though we weren’t really talking much at that point, he was the only one who would understand. We loved Noah Baumbach and had watched that movie together a million times.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “Do I say something to him?”
He laughed. “Yeah. I think if it feels right, just say how much you love that movie. Jesus. This is so cool. Break a leg!”
At the audition, the casting assistant brought me back to the office where they were reading people. She walked in ahead of me and announced to the room, “This is Busy Philipps, everyone!”
I was ready. Noah and Carlos laughed heartily at all the right places as I did my reading, and afterward, as they clapped, I gave an awkward little curtsy/bow.
“That was really great, Busy,” Noah said. “Thanks for coming in.”
As the casting director showed me out, I thanked them and waved goodbye again. The door was almost closed when I put my arm out and stopped it.
“Wait,” I said, half stepping back in. “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do this kind of thing, but this might be my only chance, so can I just say that Kicking and Screaming is my favorite movie of all time? Seriously. I’ve seen it a million times. And Mr. Jealousy, too. And I’m just such a huge fan of yours and this has been the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me so I just wanted to say that . . . OKAY, ’BYE!”
“Ummmm. Thank you?” Noah said with a smile. “That’s really nice. Great work, Busy.”
I flew back to campus, high on the whole thing. Later that day, Lorraine called and
told me that not only did they love me but there was something a little strange that they were hoping I would be up for doing. Apparently, NBC hadn’t officially green-lit the pilot, so Imagine wanted to put together a table read with all of their first choices in order to prove they should shoot it. I was so excited I could barely breathe.
Two days later, I drove to NBC, where I met the other actors cast in the read-through: Adam Scott, Nia Vardalos, Carlos, John Lehr, and a few others. Noah worked with us for a couple hours and then, in the afternoon, the executives at NBC filed in and we did a table read of the script. Afterward, I walked with Adam (who I’d just met that day) to the parking lot. I asked him what he thought was going to happen and he looked at me, “Oh. They’re not picking this up. No way.”
He was right, and I was really crushed for about ten seconds, until Lorraine told me that the head of casting for NBC, Grace Wu, had been very impressed with me and wanted me to come in and have a general meeting with her. General meetings generally feel like bullshit to me: I’ve been on a million of them. I’ve always thought that mostly they don’t lead to anything, but that agents and managers like to set them up to prove they’re actually doing something on your behalf.
But as it turns out, my meeting with Grace Wu was fairly productive. Especially the moment when she looked at me and said, “We have this pilot called Freaks and Geeks. I’m going to give you the script. You should read it. I think it could be a great fit.”
• • •
A week later, I drove to the Pacific Palisades armed with my audition scenes (commonly called sides) for the lead character, Lindsay Weir. I was brought in directly for the producers and director.
“Busy Philipps, everyone!”
I did my best Lindsay Weir, even though I was mad at myself for not managing to get the tears to roll down my cheeks in the scene where Lindsay tells Sam about their grandmother dying. When I was done reading, Paul Feig, the creator of the show, said, “Hey! That was really great, Busy! We actually have this other character. She’s probably not in the pilot you read, but we’re adding her to the show. Will you take a look at this and come back in and give it a shot?”
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