The best part about my family is that there is a lot of love, no pressure, and we go with the flow. My parents were supportive of my Joey and Mary gig, and, in all honesty, I was the star of the show. This didn’t make me think, Next stop, Scorsese! But the summer as Gino did give me a boost and motivate me to go west. It only made sense. I booked it right off the bat and then kept up with serious, veteran actors.
Speaking of the professionals in the cast, I saw the guy who played Joey in New York about three years ago at Eataly, an Italian food marketplace, where he was selling coffee beans. Twenty years ago, we had the same dream and were on the same path together. No slam on Joey—he’s got his own business and seems happy. I just think it’s interesting to see where people end up after they give up on the dream. Maybe the only difference between me and him is that I didn’t give up, no matter how frustrated and full of doubt I felt at times.
WHEN I FIRST arrived in L.A., I’d sent my head shots to a thousand people, as you know. I re-sent them to hundreds, including to the casting offices at soap operas. When I mailed to General Hospital, I put a Post-it note right above my face that said, “Casting: I’m ready to operate.” I just couldn’t send a picture without a pun. It’s like a sickness.
They must have liked my enthusiasm, because a week later, I got called in to be Office Worker #4. The job was to enter the “office” set with a folder and say, “Where do you want me to file this, boss?”
It was my network television debut. My mother told everybody she knew. My father asked, “You get paid?”
“Yeah.”
“Up front?”
“Right after.”
“In cash?”
They paid $234 for the day (by check), which was the equivalent of two eight-hour shifts at the Four Seasons. That meant I could work one less shift at the lounge and devote the time to comedy instead. Everything related back to comedy and earning enough to do it. Being an extra on soaps seemed like a gold mine. I needed more of that. I let the GH extras casting person know that I was available and ready to work. I’d carry a whole box of folders if they needed me to.
I started getting regular spots on GH, Days of Our Lives, and Port Charles, in a wide range of parts with no emotional depth, like Cop #2, Surgeon #1, or Patron #3. Every part came with a number. The only number I cared about was $234.
Being an extra isn’t anything close to acting, but there’s no shame in being part of the scenery. In the industry, extras prefer being thought of as “atmosphere.” I didn’t care what they called me. These jobs were cake. I’d show up 9:30 a.m., put on my costume, hang around until two or three, eat for free, get the call to walk across the set, occasionally deliver a single line of dialogue (like “You’re under arrest!” or “Scalpel, STAT!”), then clock out and get paid.
In addition to standup and soaps, I auditioned for roles in sitcoms. The first thing I learned was that sitcom auditions were cattle calls. I’d walk into a room and find fifteen or twenty actors, all of us the same age, all of us with more or less the same look, all of us desperate to book a part in a sitcom that usually amounted to one scene with five or six lines tops, if you were lucky. I’d walk into these casting sessions, look around the room at all the other actors, and ask myself, How the hell are these producers going to tell us apart? I had to distinguish myself in some way, separate myself from the pack.
I’ll use my marketing chops, I thought. They already had my head shot. What could I send them that would make them remember me?
A pizza. I tried it once, and sent a pizza to the casting director named Penny with a note: “Thanks for seeing me. Enjoy your lunch.” My friend Mike played the delivery guy. He walked into the room carrying the pie, and said, “Hey, Penny, I’m out here ten years, delivering pizzas, and this guy comes into the shop just now and orders a pie to go, for you. He wanted you to have it. Open it up. He put the pepperonis into a cent sign for Penny. Unbelievable. We started talking. Funniest guy I ever seen in my life. You seen this guy?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We just saw him. Thanks for the tip. We are going in a different direction, but leave the pie.”
This did not get me a callback or a part. I really thought someone would offer me a job because of the creative combo of inventiveness and pepperonis. For me, hope springs delusional.
SINCE MY EXTRA work on GH, I’d picked up a few parts here and there over the years. A bouncer in a TV show called Complete Savages. A low-rent gangster in Cruise, a small independent film. I watched comedians I came up with land TV development deals and star in sitcoms. Nothing like that happened for me.
Until 2015! After seventeen years in comedy, I finally got a deal with NBC to write the pilot episode of a sitcom based on my life, called Sebastian Says. This deal was years in the making. My team and I cycled through a few writers and showrunners before we locked in with a writer named Austen Earl. Austen and I originally met in 2012 to talk about the possibility of collaborating on a sitcom. We hit it off and wanted to work together, but right after our meeting, he got an exclusive gig and wasn’t allowed to develop anywhere else. I was so disappointed. I felt like I’d found and lost my guy.
A few years later, when I was putting the pieces together for Sebastian Says, I reached out to Austen again, and was thrilled that he was available. In all the years of meeting writers, I’d never clicked with anyone like I did with him. We had a lot in common. We come from the same type of background: a blue-collar family. He married a woman from an upper-class family. We’re both driven, have a sense of humor, and ride scooters. You don’t find too many guys who drive Vespas. The only minor difference was he went to Brown, an Ivy League school, and studied American literature, while I went to Northern Illinois, where I reprimanded my fraternity brothers for pissing in Tri Sig’s mailbox.
Austen and I used our similarities to pitch to the network. “He’s middle class, I’m middle class,” I said at meetings. “He married into a wealthy family, I married into one. He drives a Vespa, I drive a Vespa. We see the world the same way. We understand each other’s lives.” On the strength of that, we were able to convince NBC to give us a deal, and Greg Garcia (My Name Is Earl, The Millers, and Yes, Dear) came on board. Suddenly, I had a network deal and was in business with Greg, a well-respected showrunner. The pieces were lining up.
It didn’t take long for Austen and me to hash out the script. I’d give him the characters, and he formulated the dialogue. He would call me up about this situation or that one and ask, “What would your father say?” “What would Lana say?” The show was all about the tension between my old-school, set-in-his-ways immigrant father and my young wife and her modern California sensibility, with me in the middle. Loosely, my life.
Script in hand, the network gave us the green light to make a pilot episode, so now we had to find actors to play the other parts. The three big roles were me, my wife, and my father. The network gave us a list of every actor in all of Hollywood who could pass for an Italian aged between sixty-five and sixty-eight years old. Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Joe Mantegna were on the list. It was hundreds of names long, anybody who fit the description. I didn’t even need the list. I already knew who I wanted to play my father: Tony Danza. I grew up watching Tony and felt as if I were already related to him. People told me growing up that I looked like him, and it made me feel cool. He was a veteran of two long-running hit sitcoms (Taxi and Who’s the Boss?). He hadn’t done one since then, so it would be awesome to bring him into ours. I could see the headline: “Tony Danza Plays Up-and-Coming Comedian’s Father on New NBC Show Sebastian Says.”
Greg got the script to Tony, and he responded within twenty-four hours to say he loved it and he was in! He gravitated toward the relationship between the father and the son: “This is how I grew up,” he said. “And I have a son. I get it.” It was exactly what I’d hoped to hear. For me, this news was another one of these moments when I couldn’t believe a guy I grew up watching and admiring was interested in working with me.
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br /> Negotiations with Tony took a while. I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t care. I was just happy to be in the game, working with Austen and Greg and, most likely, Tony Danza. Finally, after a few weeks and a lot of back-and-forth, Tony officially signed on. It was really happening! We had locked in a TV legend. It felt like we couldn’t miss.
As soon as the ink was dry on his contract, I reached out to Tony by DMing him on Twitter, writing, “Hey, man, I’m so excited that you’re doing the show. What a dream come true. Can’t wait to meet you and learn from the best. Here is my personal information.”
He called and left a message that I didn’t get right away because Lana and I were in Maui, where I had a corporate gig. When we got to our hotel room I saw the voicemail, and I played it for my wife. He said, “Hey, man, it’s Tony. I’m really looking forward to this. Give me a call.” It was one of those messages that, in the old days, the answering machine would have cut off it was so long. He sounded just like Tony Banta or Tony Micelli, that iconic voice that made listening to a message from him surreal. Lana and I just stared at each other in shock, replaying it, and she said, “Fucking Tony Danza just called you.”
For the rest of the trip, we would say “Fucking Tony Danza” out of the blue, look at one another, and laugh.
I called him back and suggested we meet before the upcoming table read of the script. He invited me to Florida to see his Frank Sinatra–type show where he sings with a band and does jokes in between songs, but I explained that I was unable to come because of the Maui gig. We decided to meet in New York for dinner the following week.
I walked into Patsy’s, an iconic Italian joint on West 56th Street with photos on the walls of famous people who’d eaten there. Tony was already in the back corner booth, holding court.
The first thing I noticed about Tony Danza: He’s got a crooked pinkie finger from boxing. Second thing: He is very nice, very personable. He knew every waiter by name, like, “Hey, Frank. Another martini for my friend.” Third thing: He has lived an incredible life and has so many stories that we could’ve sat there until morning. From Frank Sinatra stories, to his kids, his career, his fantastic cheese shop in Little Italy called Alleva Dairy, I could have listened all night. He’s sixty-five but has the energy of a thirty-year-old. I asked him question after question, like “How do sitcoms work? What can I expect?” I didn’t know anything, but he knew everything, and was only too happy to tell me. He also shared that he’d been researching his part in Sebastian Says, and he had assembled a New York City cast of characters who resembled the ones on the show so he could practice. I’d never even heard of someone doing that, and I was blown away that he was doing all this work and really diving in to make the show a hit.
We closed the place down. It felt like I’d known him forever. Tony was so down to earth and present. We ended the night taking a photo with a Frank Sinatra statue in the restaurant like any two good Italian boys should.
The next day, I met the pilot director, Scott Ellis. I talked to him about what to expect, too. I was going into uncharted territory. Part of me was a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to make it work. The show was written by Austen and me, starring me, based on my life, with my name in the title. The pressure was on. It was up to me to make the pilot good enough to air. If I established somewhat of a relationship with Tony Danza and the director before we got started on the production, it would be easier to hit the ground running and feel more confident on the set.
I went back to L.A. and worked with Greg on every aspect of the show. The wardrobe, the setting, the casting. Lana was deep into curating all the visuals. When they designed the set, they made a miniature 3D model of it. They asked about every decision, from what fabric should go on the couch to the paintings on the walls. My wife is a perfectionist and always pushes for improvement. If they asked me, “Which color for the curtains?” I’d just pick one, but Lana would say, “Do you have another shade of purple?” In the beginning of our relationship, I used to get frustrated with her because she was so meticulous. But now I’ve learned to trust her with all things creative, and when I see how her vision comes to life I’m always like, “Okay, now I get it.”
One of the biggest challenges that we had was casting the character of my wife. It took me thirty-five years to find Lana, and here I was trying to find someone to play her in two weeks! After seeing a lot of the actresses, none of them right, Lana said, “I can do it,” and started reading the lines with me. She was trying to help and had always secretly wanted to act, but this was not the time to do it. I needed an experienced pro for my pilot.
I sat through every audition, which gave me an entirely different perspective on the audition process. Now that I was on the other side of the table, I understood that you know in an instant if someone is right for the part. As soon as actors filed in, you could see the nerves, the discomfort. People would make forced and awkward small talk. They may have been great actors, but for the most part, they were not able to act relaxed.
From where I sat, I was rooting for every person who came in. The thing actors don’t always realize is that the people watching hope you will do well and make their jobs easier. We wanted them to knock it out of the park. When they didn’t, it was always a disappointment. Casting is a laborious, long process. There were different opinions in the room, too. I only cared about whether someone was funny enough. I talked to Jerry after this process. “In casting Seinfeld,” he said, “people had to make me laugh.” When you’re doing a sitcom, the actors have to have that quality. If they’re not making you laugh, they do not belong on the show. The network and other voices involved had other things to consider. In the end, we did put together a great cast, but I believe the overall vision of the show had been touched by too many hands.
After seeing scores of actresses, Vanessa Lachey was the standout for the part of my wife, and really nailed her audition. Lana saw her tape and agreed she was a fantastic choice. We then cast the supporting parts—the sister-in-law, her husband, their kid, my character’s friends, and the tiny world of Sebastian Says was populated. So we had a script, a cast, a set, wardrobe, a director, a showrunner. It was a week out from taping and we were finally good to go.
Or so I thought. Network had a problem with the script. We did a table read—all the actors reading their lines, but not standing up and acting them—in front of a few executives. After we finished, the network head said there were a few things he didn’t like. Like, the entire plot of the script.
The pilot told the story of how my father wanted to murder a possum in the backyard (material straight from my act) by putting antifreeze on bologna, and my wife wanted to do it in a more humane way. The underlings had requested that we use this story for the pilot and told us they thought it was the perfect idea. But the network head didn’t like it. Did the underlings then defend the script and tell their boss what they’d been telling us? No. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Whatever the head guy liked, they had to agree with. Whatever he didn’t like, they fell in line with that, too.
Austen and I had to go back to the drawing board. We went with something totally made up, about Tony’s character passing his apron, the one he always wore to cook Sunday supper, down to me so I could pick up the tradition. Part of the reason for the Sunday supper idea was to get everyone in the cast on the stage. It wasn’t enough to just have the three main characters talking in the yard. The passing-the-baton concept wasn’t from my real life and it felt contrived. But we worked with the parameters we were given, and in the end, I loved the script. The relationships between the characters were well established. I couldn’t have been more confident in Austen. He is a wordsmith and his comedic chops are outstanding. One of the jokes was about my having a problem with my wife’s half sister coming to Sunday supper.
She said, “She’s my sister.”
I said, “She’s your half sister. So we don’t have to invite her to everything.” A little play on words there
. Austen gave me great material to work with, and I believed the pilot was good enough for the network to order six or seven more episodes. We’d have a chance to breathe a bit and take it further.
Finally, after six months plus of hard work to get to this point, we were ready to shoot the pilot of Sebastian Says at CBS Bradford Studios, on the same stage where Seinfeld had been filmed for nine years. The vibes couldn’t have been better.
It was a big night, a big deal. My in-laws were in town. My mother, father, and sister were coming. Every-one was going to be there for the taping. The shoot would be the first time we performed it in front of a live audience. As a comedian, I was excited to hear the real laughter. During the dress rehearsals, the studio had been empty except for the cast and crew. If you tell a joke in a studio where no one can hear it, is it still funny? At the taping, we’d find out.
Basically, I was shitting. Totally nervous. I’d never done anything like this before. We started the opening scene, with Vanessa and me in a Whole Foods and how the store bothered me. There was a guy giving a massage, another touting the many uses of argan oil. A shopper (Shopper #5) wore hemp clothing, and I commented that it only comes in two colors—oatmeal and throw-up. Then when we checked out at the cashier, it came out that I’d forgotten the reusable bags at home. I told the guy to just throw our stuff in the paper bag, and he judged me for not bringing my bag made of wheat. In the next scene, I walked in the door to our home with all the groceries piled in my sweater and I dumped them on the table.
It was a funny bit, and we were getting laughs. But the director would yell, “Cut,” and suggest we reshoot the scene. The idea was to get the best take possible, but when we repeated the scene—or a single line—over and over, the audience knew the joke was coming. In my act, I’d never stop after a bit and say, “Hold on, guys. I didn’t do that quite right. I’m going to do it again.”
Stay Hungry Page 20
