BUT GUESS WHAT? No one is going to tell you all the things you want to hear all the time. You have to know them yourself. And if you don’t, you end up on the floor of an upscale bar and restaurant in a small town in the South with ambulance sirens screaming toward you to take you to the local hospital, where you’ll sit for hours until they determine you’re sober enough for them to give you some medicine and pop your knee back in place. And Chad Michael Murray, who you judged as a douchebag, will stay the whole time and hold your fucking hand. And you’ll scream and cry when they do it, because it hurts, but also it’s not just about the knee, and someday you’ll realize that. And when you do, you’ll also be glad the internet didn’t exist the way it does now, that people didn’t have tiny cameras on their phones at the time and that Perez Hilton was years away from gossiping about messy actresses, because it gave you a chance to be messy and gross and get the fuck over it and get your shit together and be an adult and deal with your shit without the world knowing about it.
And when the writers turn your character into an alcoholic for your second season, it will hurt your feelings, but you’ll get over it. And when they don’t write you into the finale, it will hurt your feelings, but you’ll get over that too. Because you understand they probably would have just cut to Katie anyway.
A MOVIE SCRIPT ENDING
(Death Cab for Cutie)
I knew my mom didn’t really like Craig. She and my sister had confronted me when we were all in Chicago visiting my grandparents and staying in a hotel room together. They thought he was using me. They didn’t care for him and they missed Colin.
It had come out because my sister was dating a guy she met online (this was the early days of online dating), and my mom and I were convinced he was a serial killer. I looked into hiring a PI to make sure he hadn’t killed anyone. My mom talked me into saying something about how creepy the guy was to my sister on the trip, at which point Leigh Ann exploded and told me that everyone hated Craig, including my mom!
So . . . my mother somehow got us to confront one another about what she thought of our boyfriends. Meanwhile, she’s in the corner asking us not to fight. When I left Chicago, I was still angry with Leigh Ann, even though my mom tried to get us to make peace before we went to bed. It was actually kind of an amazing and manipulative plan on her part. She was always good at stuff like that. And honestly, she wasn’t totally wrong about Craig.
At the time, he was working at Starbucks and taking classes at a UC school, trying to get a degree or waste time until something better came along, I guess. He still wanted to be an actor. It was what he’d gone to school for in Chicago, but nothing was really happening for him in L.A. I’d paid for some classes for him at the Groundlings, an improv comedy school, and also his new headshots. I paid for most everything, as you can probably imagine. Like when his car got booted and I covered the eight hundred dollars in back parking tickets. I maybe even paid his rent once. But there was the free Starbucks for me! And plus, I didn’t give a fuck about money. Still don’t, much to my business manager’s horror. If I have it, I’m happy to spend it on people I love. And I loved Craig completely. I was certain we were going to get married. But whenever I’d talk about the future—like the two of us moving in together or getting married—he would get really cagey and say in a weird cartoon voice that he liked to use, “Who knows what the future will bring?”
And then he would sort of shrug his skinny shoulders and change the subject. I thought he probably felt like he wanted things to be on a more even playing field, career-wise, before we moved forward. Not to mention, he and his brother had a fairly intense and impenetrable bond. Jeff and I had recovered from our one-night make-out when I was in high school, and it almost seemed like it had never even happened—like we had been two different people all together.
Most of the time, the three of us hung out together. Jeff wasn’t exactly a third wheel, because it kind of seemed like Craig would be just as happy to hang out with his brother without me anywhere to be found. In fact, I felt like I was the third wheel most of the time. I seemed to embarrass Craig when I would try to join in on their jokes or talk about movies with them. He told me I laughed too loud in restaurants, asking if I always needed people to look at me. I knew that maybe he was right and I should try to be quieter, which would in turn make me more lovable to him, so I vowed silently to work on my dumb loud laugh.
In spite of all this, leaving Craig to go back to Wilmington was tough, but we made it through the season. That year, I lived at the beach and got a roommate, a friend of Michelle’s boyfriend who was working as a PA on the show. My old friend Oliver Hudson (who I’d been friends with since we spent a summer in Wisconsin when we were nineteen filming a terrible independent movie called The Smokers) did a ton of episodes, as did Bianca Kajlich and Jensen Ackles and Hal Ozsan. It was a really great year, with so many people around to hang out with, I wasn’t depressed or as lonely as I’d been in season five. Seth Rogen was cast as a guest star on the show and he came out and did an episode with me, which was fun. He and Judd had brought me back to L.A. to do two episodes of Undeclared, where I tried my best not to be jealous that I wasn’t on that show full-time, since it was so much more my people and sensibility, not to mention what felt like the entire crew of Freaks and Geeks.
I missed Craig so much and would always offer to fly him out to be with me. I was insanely jealous of any girls he was hanging out with or would mention while I was out of town and was prone to sulking on the phone, even though he assured me I had nothing to worry about.
When Dawson’s was over and I’d wrapped the show, Emily and I moved over to the Hancock Park–adjacent area of Los Angeles, into the upper floor of a Spanish duplex, just two streets away from where Rashida Jones had lived when I was on Freaks and Geeks. I loved the neighborhood and I was so much closer to Craig, which was great too. I left my longtime manager Lorraine in favor of a large management firm specializing in comedy called 3 Arts. I didn’t love my new managers the way I loved Lorraine, but it felt like an adult work decision that made sense, so I did it. I spent the summer auditioning for movies. I had done a fairly terrible pilot earlier that season that hadn’t gotten picked up.
Craig’s brother, Jeff, had pitched me an idea for a TV show for me, about a senior in high school who starts a makeup line, and I pitched it to my new manager, Mark. He liked the idea of me creating a show for myself but he thought I should work with an established TV writer, as opposed to Jeff, and said, “Look, Biz, if you get a show on the air, you can give him a job!”
Mark hooked me up with an “established writer” that 3 Arts represented who liked Jeff’s idea but what if instead we made it about a girl who’s in her twenties and inherits a bar from her estranged father? He actually sold the pitch and wrote the pilot, but it was never picked up or made. Jeff was weird about it, like I had taken his idea without giving him anything for it. I was confused. I had pitched his idea to my manager, but it hadn’t gone anywhere, which happens all the time. The show that writer sold and wrote was clearly his own idea. Plus, I made no money on any of it, I was just tentatively attached. And I had told Jeff what Mark had said, that if the other show had gotten picked up, we would’ve given him a job on it. It all seemed reasonable to me, but what did I know? I was twenty-four. But I also understood that Jeff had been waiting for something to happen career-wise and was getting antsy. I tried passing his scripts on to a few writers I knew, to see if anyone had a writer’s assistant job open. I also gave some of his specs to my manager. I thought Jeff, like Craig, was really talented and just needed a break. I wanted to help in any way I could.
Earlier that year, I’d switched agents shortly before switching managers, signing with a woman named Lorrie Bartlett at the Gersh Agency, which was still a smaller agency, but Michelle was represented there, so I felt like I was in good company. Lorrie was a badass agent who seemed to really understand me and had a similar sensibility in terms of the kinds of projects we both
liked for me. She called me in late July with an audition for a new Wayans brothers movie. I remember I had passed on auditioning for Scary Movie, because I thought the audition sides were demeaning—I think I objected to acting out giving a blow job to a ghost. And then of course, the movie was so huge and made Anna Faris a star and I felt like an idiot for not understanding the humor in it and just going for it and humiliating myself. WHATEVER IT TAKES, GUYS!
Before I went in for White Chicks, I didn’t even read the script. I just looked at the sides and gave it my all for the casting director, who brought me back for Keenen Ivory Wayans later that week. When I GOT THE PART, I still hadn’t read the script. The truth was, the log line basically told me everything I needed to know. Plus, I had eventually seen Scary Movie, so I had a pretty good idea about the kinds of movies they were making. This one was filming in Vancouver, which was a much shorter flight than to Wilmington, so I was happy to go. Plus, the movie would be over in a few months and then I would be back for pilot season. Craig was going to come visit me as much as he could, and I was promised I would be able to go back to L.A. a few times.
I think the first time I really read the script was at the table read in Vancouver. I mean, there are certainly some projects where you want to really dig into the material, but seeing as how there was a stable of writers and joke writers who were punching up the script the entire time, tracking the insanity of the story of White Chicks seemed less than important. I guess if I had read it, I would’ve seen that my character’s description, which had been erased for the audition sides, was that she was the “overweight friend.” As a size 8, I was cast as the overweight friend. Maybe the joke is that the girls are so shallow that a size 8 was overweight? I choose to believe that.
I liked working with the Wayans for the most part. I was sometimes leery of the comedy, like the sleepover blow-job scene, but they really tried to make it feel like everyone on set was now part of an extended family. I was especially impressed with Jennifer Carpenter, who was fresh out of Juilliard and starring on Broadway in The Crucible with Laura Linney. She was so committed and prepared every day and really went for it in every scene. When we showed up to do the now-infamous scene where we’re driving in the car and changing the song from Vanessa Carlton to Biggie Smalls, she had memorized THE ENTIRE RAP SONG. I was astonished—I had just learned the chorus, the part I knew would be used in the movie. She and I ended up spending a lot of time in our trailers watching DVDs of old movies while Shawn and Marlon sat through their four hours of prosthetic makeup every day.
I was so relieved when Craig finally came to visit. We ran around Vancouver together, spending my per diem eating at nice restaurants and getting drunk on wine. We went up into the mountains and hiked. On his last day, we were hanging out in my hotel apartment, watching TV before his car was coming to take him to the airport. The two things that always seemed to be on Canadian TV were That ’70s Show and ice-skating. That morning, it happened to be ice-skating. We sat there, tangled on the couch together, hungover from the night before and watched as a ridiculous package about one of the skaters played. It seemed like a parody, the story was so dramatic and insane. I looked at Craig and laughed.
“This feels like a Ben Stiller movie,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Ha! Totally or like Will Ferrell!”
“They should do an ice-skating movie! Like the two of them have to skate together for some reason. The first male-male skating team in the Olympics.”
Craig sat up and we laughed and talked about the idea for the next thirty minutes before he had to go, hashing out the plot to a ridiculous movie about Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller ice-skating together. Before he left, we agreed we should write it together. It would be so much fun. I loved Craig’s ideas, and I always thought I had really good ones, too. I just had never written a script before. Plus, it would be something we could do together. Shooting White Chicks had made me want to create my own stuff. My ideas for dumb movies were just as good as this dumb idea.
The next morning at work, I pitched the ice-skating movie to Keenen, who had made it known that he was always open to hearing any pitches from anyone. He liked it, but said he didn’t think it was for them but that I should for sure work on it. That night, after work, I was excited to talk to Craig. I had come up with more ideas of funny scenes and characters for the movie. He answered on the second ring.
“So, I told Keenen and he doesn’t think it’s for them,” I said, “but I did pitch it to Mark, and he thinks we should just write it as a spec and then take it to those guys, but he was super into it too—”
“Yeah, actually,” he said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. . . . I told Jeff about the movie idea and he’s super excited and . . . he wants to write it with us too!!”
At the end of the sentence he slipped into his weird cartoon voice, presumably because it was what he used when he knew what he was about to say would be unpleasant for me. I paused, stung and hurt that he didn’t want to just do this with me. Clearly, I wasn’t enough; I never was. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I wanted to do it anyway, with or without Jeff.
“Oh. Okay—I guess.”
“Here! He wants to talk to you!”
I heard shuffling as Craig handed the phone over to his brother.
“Hey,” Jeff said tentatively. “So listen. I know you guys wanted to do this but—I mean this, this is a really good idea. I don’t think you guys understand how good.”
I did actually understand how salable the idea was, but I let Jeff continue to mansplain to me how Craig and I weren’t prepared to write a feature script since it wasn’t something the two of us had ever done, and how since he had (albeit unsold spec scripts that weren’t getting his foot in any doors), he would be the perfect person to help us in the very-difficult-to-figure-out script-writing process. I was resigned immediately. I knew there was no sense arguing that I wanted to do it with just the two of us. Craig wanted his brother involved. They had clearly discussed this. I had no choice but to suck it up.
“Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I’m home in a week and I have like, almost three weeks off for Christmas so we can all work on it then, in L.A. and in Arizona over the break!”
• • •
I did my best to get on board with the idea. I loved Jeff, I really did. He was really smart and talented and I was sure he would be really helpful in structuring the script and fleshing out the story.
I registered the idea with the WGA, something that I had been told was a good idea to do, especially when something is such a good idea. I bought an updated version of Final Draft Pro for us, the screenwriting software, since I was the only one who could afford it. I finished up my work on White Chicks the next week and headed back to Los Angeles, excited to see my friends and Craig and work on the movie idea. Craig and Jeff wanted to go get beers at our favorite dive bar to celebrate my coming home. We went to a place called St. Nicks on Third Street, a no-frills sports pub where the beers were cheap, and if you got too drunk, the burger wasn’t bad. We settled into a booth, the boys sitting across from me. Craig gave me a weird nervous smile and said, “Soooooo. I know we said we’d wait but we just got so excited and—”
At which point, Craig nodded at his brother and Jeff produced, seemingly out of nowhere, a pile of printed-out papers, which were a detailed outline for the entire movie. I closed my eyes and tried to suck back tears. Was I just kicked out of something that was my idea? Something that was supposed to be fun and something we were all going to do together? I took the pages and looked over the outline. It was fine, but obviously, I had my own ideas about what I thought should be in the movie and how to break the story. Much of what Craig and I had discussed in Vancouver was in there, but still, I hadn’t been a part of this outline at all. It was so offensive. I guess why would I think that I was talented enough to be involved? WHY would I possibly have thought that something that was MY IDEA should remain MINE? Obviously, the boys knew better what t
o do with it. They’d seen every Coen brothers movie. Jeff had an UNDERGRAD DEGREE FROM NYU IN WRITING. Ugh. Such a dumb girl. You can’t be a part of THIS.
I felt gaslit. I threw a fit. I was so fucking angry. It got really tense, with Craig telling me to stop being so fucking dramatic and to stop overreacting. Jeff tried to backpedal and say it was just a jumping-off point, but it was too late.
“Jumping-off point?! What are you talking about?! You guys worked out an entire outline without me!”
Why was I always being left out of everything? Because I had a job? We were supposed to do it together, that was clearly the deal. Why couldn’t they have just WAITED A WEEK and done it with me? Because they were selfish and desperate and mad that they didn’t have their own careers. But I didn’t see that. All I saw was that they didn’t wait because they didn’t think I was worth waiting for. My ideas, my input, weren’t worth it. I was crushed. At the end of our drinks, we went home, all of us angry.
The next day, Craig and Jeff called me to tell me that maybe we should put it on hold for a bit and not discuss it and just all go back to Arizona for Christmas. I agreed, but my feelings were still so hurt. While we were in Arizona, Craig and I were walking his dog around his dad’s neighborhood one night so I could smoke a cigarette. He said he was sorry about the fact that they’d gotten so excited and that they still really wanted to write the script with me. I said that was fine but that I thought we should start over with a new outline that we wrote together, and that they would have to wait until I was wrapped on the movie to do it. Everyone agreed on the new plan.
In late January, the three of us started working on the movie together, meeting in Craig and Jeff’s apartment and coming up with dumb ideas about why the two male skaters would have to skate together for gold. We wrote a love interest part, that obviously I would play in the movie. We were trying to figure out how the coach gets the idea for them to skate, when I suggested that he sees them on TV fighting and it looks like balletic ice-skating moves. I was proud of breaking that part, since the whole dumb movie hinges on getting them to skate together. But more often than not, it was difficult working with the boys. They had their own shared sensibility and I always felt like—you guessed it—a third wheel. It wasn’t the fun bonding project I’d thought it would be for me and Craig. Also, I had to start auditioning for pilots again, and that meant a lot of time when I wasn’t available to work with them, so we agreed that they could write pages without me and I would go over them and make suggestions. It worked okay, but my relationship with Craig continued to be strained as the months went on.
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 16
