by Judy Greer
With all my stuff still in a storage space in Chicago, I pieced together some furniture to make my new apartment a home. I scored a mattress off a production assistant from an independent movie I was shooting when he moved in with his girlfriend and didn’t need it anymore. I got an armchair off the same movie. The producers asked me to work overtime for free, which is fine, but their mistake was asking me inside the vintage furniture store we had been shooting in. I told them that if they bought me the green chair I had been eyeing all day, I’d do it. It was forty dollars. I worked hours and hours of overtime on that film, no one ever saw the movie, but I still have that chair. I bought a white TV/VCR combo, covered the box it came in with a scarf, and sat the TV on top. Finally, I found some nesting tables and a lamp at a local vintage shop, and I was set. I was happy there. Eventually, I had my stuff shipped out from Chicago, but when it came, I didn’t unpack the boxes for the longest time. I liked living with no stuff, probably due to my mom’s obsessive-compulsive spring/summer/fall/winter clean outs, but whatever the reason it kept my new life very simple. I also thought it would be easier for the potential robbers if they could just carry out boxes instead of having to tear the place apart to find my valuables. Less mess for me.
I tried to make some friends in my building—that didn’t go well. First, there was the gay couple that “watched” my apartment when I would travel. We had a miscommunication. To me, “watch” meant make sure no one steals my shit. To them, “watch” meant steal my shit. I should have figured it out when they told me that they fixed the drawer pulls on my dresser; I would have just thought I’d lent out all my CDs, books, and jewelry. The guy who had the apartment next door clearly had a cockroach problem because he would constantly bomb, which only forced the bugs to run into my apartment. There should be a label on the cockroach-killer bottle that reads, “If you live in an apartment building, be sure to warn your neighbors you’re bombing, as the cockroaches will probably just run next door. They’re not as stupid as you are filthy.” I actually went on a few dates with the guy across the hall. He was cute, but I remembered my mom always telling me not to shit where I ate, and that seemed like what I was doing if I dated a guy in my building. Also, he had lost the hearing in one of his ears, which he said threw off his balance, and therefore could only stand if there was something he could hang on to or he would lose his balance and fall right over. Perhaps you think me shallow, but at that time in my life I just wasn’t ready for that kind of caregiving in a relationship. He did take me out for Indian food on our first date. I’d never had Indian food before, and I have loved it ever since. My plan was to stay in the building until something great opened up in the actual canyon. I checked the bulletin board several times, but I tend toward laziness. Luckily I met an actress who had a great little place up there and said I could take over the lease when she moved in with her boyfriend. I felt my apartment hunting was done and I could wait it out while eating Slim Jims and drinking Diet Coke with the Armenians on the street sofas. What I didn’t anticipate was how long it was going to take her to actually move in with her boyfriend. It took a really long time. Like, over a year. But eventually she did, and I finally got to move to actual Beachwood Canyon.
The upgraded apartment was in a house that had been divided into three separate units. It was a little more expensive but totally worth it. It had a huge bedroom, a little living room, a tiny kitchen, weirdly, two full bathrooms, and quarter laundry in the building next door I was allowed to use. I called it my tree house and I loved it. But what I loved most didn’t have anything to do with the apartment; it was that I finally had a parking space to call my own. In the driveway. Right in front of my door. That only I was allowed to park in. This was major. I was right around the corner from a charming café and an overpriced market and right under the Hollywood sign. If the wind was right, I could probably have hit it with a well-constructed paper airplane.
Ironically, the location, what I longed for most of all, turned out to be the only problem with my new apartment—and it was a life-and-death one. Literally. When I was waiting to find my tree house, it never occurred to me that the Hollywood sign was a major tourist destination, that the only street I could take to get home thousands of people would drive their cars halfway up, pull over, and run into the middle of to photograph the sign. Huge tour buses of elderly people, foreign tourists, children, all jumping out of these buses, cars, vans, and walking purposefully, not looking both ways, into the middle of the main artery for this neighborhood, to take a shitty photograph of the Hollywood sign. Or, better yet, to have someone else photograph them under the sign pretending they’re holding it up! But what I really came to resent were the looks of apology that people would feign as they darted out in front of my car. One day, after I almost killed an elderly Asian tourist, I vowed to go to every bookstore I ever passed for the rest of my life and rip out the chapter in all the tour books that tells you to stand in the middle of that street for a great shot of the Hollywood sign. Tour book writers: STOP FUCKING WRITING THAT! YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR READERS KILLED! I did a spit take one day when I found out that there was talk of lighting the Hollywood sign. The community was really against it for historical reasons. I was against it because when it was dark out, and the most dangerous time for potentially hitting a tourist, there were no tourists since the sign was not visible at night. Thank God. I had just about as much as I could handle during the day. People, if you find yourself going to L.A. anytime soon, please just buy a postcard photo of the sign. I am not saying to not drive up there and see it, sure, do that. Get a coffee at the café, or even better, go horseback riding at Sunset Ranch and take a million photos of it from the trail on your horsey ride, but please, I beg you, do not exit your vehicle and stand directly in the middle of a road and take a picture. If you ignore this warning, I promise you will hear obscenities being screamed at you from the swerving cars.
However, none of these screaming people will be me. No, I have since moved on. I now have a less interactive view of the sign. I can still see it from my front yard, but I no longer fear committing homicide every time I drive home. When I was finally looking to buy a place, I saw so many different houses in so many different neighborhoods. I wanted to get away from the “sign.” I wanted to get away from the helicopters, cockroaches, and thieves. But in the end, like the crime family to Michael Corleone, it pulled me back in. My house was the only one I could find that I could afford. Call me superstitious, but maybe since I had made it this far staring at those famous white letters every day, I shouldn’t leave it behind just yet. I wonder if that iconic sign was somehow watching out for me as much as I was forced to watch out for its fans, and I realized I just wasn’t ready to leave “Hollywood” for good.
I think it was once I bought my house that I really felt at home in Los Angeles. Moving to L.A. is really hard. I had an easy time getting work, but fitting in and making friends was another story. I wanted a home, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in Hollywood. I didn’t want to get hurt and have an awkward breakup with it. I wanted it to be a clean split if it happened. And to me, a clean split meant not settling in. But time passed, and not settling in started to mean I wasn’t committing completely to my work and my life here, and I was ready to commit. Besides, at a certain point I had no other skills and nowhere else to go. When I told people I couldn’t get another job besides acting, that I wasn’t qualified for anything else, they’d often say, “Oh, please, if you can use Excel, you can get a job.” This proves my point because I didn’t (and don’t) know how to use Excel. I had no friends left in Chicago or Detroit, and I couldn’t use this famous Excel people spoke so highly of, so I reluctantly found myself at home in L.A.
When I look back at my first five years in Los Angeles, I don’t think it was the places I lived and their unique disabilities that kept me from feeling at home—I think it was that fear. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid this town would eat me up, but while I was fighting it and n
ot paying attention, I was planting roots. Time goes by fast in Southern California. I blame the weather. It’s pretty much always warm and sunny, and the seasons are so mild you blink and it’s been five years, blink again and it’s ten. It’s hard to track time here, because it doesn’t change much. Leaves stay green and they stay put, and by accident I did too.
Judy Greer Is My Name. Well, Now It Is.
WHEN I LANDED MY FIRST PROFESSIONAL ACTING job and had to join SAG, the actors’ union, my given name was Judy Evans. My full legal name is and always has been Judith Therese Evans. For some reason, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) insists my middle name is Laura—but it is wrong and, it turns out, impossible to bargain with. At the time I joined the union, you could only have one name per member, and there was already a Judi Evans; she was on my awesome babysitter Shirley’s soap, Days of Our Lives, which made it my soap, too. Judi Evans played Adrienne Kiriakis, a real pillar of the Days community, and in the early days of my career (and life) I didn’t feel comfortable using our shared name. She had it first and she was really good. I had a decision to make. I could be Judith Therese Evans, Judith T. Evans, Judy Therese Evans, Judy T. Evans, or, as my mom’s side of the family called me to avoid confusion with my aunt, Baby Judy. And even though, legally, all of those options except Baby Judy could get me on an airplane using my driver’s license, all those names felt like someone else’s.
Having three names felt too fancy, and I am not fancy. Being called Judith just made me feel bad about myself because the only time I ever heard it was when I was in trouble and my dad went full name on me, or when the kids in school yelled “Judas Priest!” in the halls when I walked by. I had a long talk (approximately eight minutes) with my parents about changing my name from Judy Evans, and we decided I should stay Judy but change the Evans to a different family name.
My dad’s mom’s last name was very Serbian and hard to spell and pronounce. So that was out. I still have no idea how to spell it. However, my mom’s grandmother’s last name was McGuire. Judy McGuire had a cute ring to it. The fact that I was drinking Guinness in Irish pubs all over Chicago at the time might have had a little something to do with my decision as well. On the night I settled on my new name, I fell asleep (passed out) happy with my new identity and excited about the future of Judy McGuire. The next afternoon, I arose from my drunken slumber to find a giant billboard right outside my window of Tom Cruise, laughing in his sunglasses, with two giant words next to his giant face: Jerry Maguire. In fact, the entire city of Chicago was painted with posters and billboards of it. I felt like I was in a Punk’d episode—everywhere I went, there was my almost-new name, sides of buses, benches, posters plastered all over construction site walls, phone poles. Maybe they did this for every movie, but with this one I felt bombarded; it seemed like overkill.
Now, remember, this was before the Internet. I didn’t know Tom Cruise was starring in a movie called Jerry Maguire seconds after he was cast in it. To add to the equation, I was finishing college, so even if there was Internet, I totally had my head up my own ass and probably wouldn’t have used it anyway (someone recently told me there was Internet back then and a computer lab on campus too. Huh?). If you didn’t go to school with me or live in the apartment complex I spied on across the street, I didn’t pay attention to you. After I saw that famous grin looking at me through my bedroom window, I felt at a loss. I didn’t want to be Judy McGuire anymore. I wanted something new, something different. I knew that the Jerry Maguire movement would have to eventually die down, but I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted my name to be new and exciting now; I wanted to be ahead of the curve! The only option, as I could see it in that moment, was to steal the identity of Big Judy, my aunt Judy Greer. She was the Big to my Baby. She was the woman I was named after. It immediately made so much sense that I was mad at myself for not thinking of it sooner.
My parents claimed that they knew several Judys and liked them all, so that’s why they chose that name. But, to me, Big Judy was the best, so I give her full credit for my first name. (Also, my dad dated a Judy before my mom, and I’ve always thought it was a little weird Judy was even a potential name for me in the first place but whatever, I guess my mom isn’t as needy and competitive as I am.) Judy Greer married her high school sweetheart, Jerry Hershman, and became Judy Hershman. But since she never moved from the town she grew up in, people knew her as both. Perhaps Judy Greer felt right because I had heard it my whole life, or maybe because I loved my aunt Judy so much and she was so special. Either way, I just knew it was the one, so that’s the name I finally decided on when I joined SAG.
By the way, if you’re reading this and you have any pull with the people at IMDb.com, could you do me a favor and tell them that there is not, nor has ever been, a Laura in my name? I don’t know how they got that information, but they are wrong. And I am prepared to show my birth certificate if that’s what it takes. It makes no sense: if I’m going to lie about anything at this point, it’s going to be my age, not my name.
It Takes a Village
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN WAS THE FIRST DIRECTOR TO call me on the phone himself to offer me a role in his movie. The movie was called The Village. I auditioned on tape in L.A. and then flew to New York to meet him in person for the final callback. The next day he called my cell phone and asked me if he could send me the script and if I would play the role I auditioned for. I was in a taxicab when I got his call, and when I hung up, my driver was the first person I told; he didn’t understand what I was telling him, but I could tell he sensed it was good news and that if he acted excited, his tip would reflect that. I had just finished shooting 13 Going on 30 and was so excited to have another great project so soon after. M. Night Shyamalan directed huge-budget movies, and I was going to be in one! (Take that, everyone who made fun of me in high school!)
It was my first big role in a big-budget film that shot outside L.A. I’d been in some big movies before, but either they weren’t on location, or my roles were so small I was only there for a few days, and in both cases I was too nervous to pay attention to anything but not screwing up. I had yet to experience anything like The Village. I would be working on the same movie for three months and living in the middle of the woods in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. My career was getting real.
One of the many things that made an impression on me from that movie was the size of the crew and how appreciative Night was of them—at least that’s how it seemed to me. He insisted that we were fed well, he hired the same people over and over again (meaning the crew; he hasn’t hired me since), and every Friday at lunch the names of all the crew members were put in a pot, someone would draw a name, and that person would win a trip for two to some fabulous destination—I remember Hawaii and London being two of the places. The actors weren’t eligible for Night’s trips, only the crew, and that’s when it occurred to me that they are the ones who really make a movie happen.
I couldn’t get over how many different jobs there were on a set! There are guys who have to put plywood boards all over base camp because when it rained there would be mud everywhere and we might slip and fall and break something important. There was the costume department, which had to tie us into our corsets every morning, untie us at lunch, tie us back in after lunch, and then out again at the end of the day. Our hair and makeup artists, who had to plaster our hair down to our skulls, put our wigs on, and then take them off at the end of the day, clean and prep them for the next day of work, and unplaster our hair. The camera department has to haul all the lights and camera equipment out of the trucks every day and load them back in every night. Sometimes hundreds of people are responsible for a movie. The actors, writers, director, cinematographers, designers, and producers are so outnumbered that I always wonder, if a director is being a total asshole, why isn’t there a coup?
I don’t know how many people were on the crew of The Village, but I just finished shooting Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and I asked someone on set how many people were w
orking on the movie. It seemed like for every one person on set, there were two somewhere else in the world working on it as well, in offices, doing special effects, etc. At one point thirteen hundred people were employed by DOTPOTA! (That’s what we called it due to the title length and verbal laziness.) That’s a lot of cast and crew on set, a lot of personalities spending fifteen-plus hours a day together, for several months, far away from all their homes and families. And in the case of DOTPOTA the weather was either cold and rainy every day in Vancouver or stiflingly hot and humid in New Orleans. There were guys on that movie who were paid to light stuff on fire and guys paid to make sure that the other stuff didn’t burn. There were trucks that were delivered by even bigger trucks, and different people to drive them both. At the bar after work you could have drinks with an actor, helicopter pilot, truck driver, and makeup artist, all working on the same job! It’s a small town of people all working together to make something that only exists at that moment in the minds of a few people. Yes, everyone is getting paid for their work, but still, I think it’s impressive. This really makes me realize the beauty of the movie and TV industry, and even though I’ve been doing it for years, I never tire of it. Well, except for one thing. I get really bummed when I’m in a movie with someone amazing and I don’t even get to meet that person. I’m thinking specifically of Meryl Streep. I mean, come on … it’s MERYL!!!
Another movie I did called Jeff, Who Lives at Home was a much smaller film. The crew was about forty to fifty people, but they were no less impressive to me on set. There was no budget for lobster and steak at lunch, like some of the giant sets I’ve been on (although we did have a crawfish boil one night after work, which was awesome because I got to hold a baby alligator), and people were doing several jobs at once, but I could really feel how excited everyone was to be working on our little movie. And Jay and Mark Duplass, our co-directors, knew everyone’s name and always smiled and said good morning and thank you. They were great bosses, and I could tell they were genuinely grateful to everyone who came to work every day ready to work hard, have fun, and help them tell their story. One thing I appreciate about the crew is that, like the mailman/woman, they are there every day. Rain, shine, freezing cold, sweltering heat, 5:00 a.m. call times, no matter what. They don’t get to call in sick. They don’t get to take breaks in trailers like we actors do. They are the village that it takes to make a movie—no job is too big, no job is too small, and all of them are the filmmakers.
