#5 - Stay away from the crabs; or Where hope goes to die
When having something you wrote get shot only to never see the light of day can be a good thing
I don’t know how much I’ll talk about my film/TV industry experiences in this space for obvious reasons as I do still work in the industry, which was the cause of my dormancy these past couple weeks as I was in Los Angeles working an award show honoring Ryan Reynolds (who was truly humble and delightful, though my personal interaction with him was next-to-nonexistent). Past cursory positive things like that, don’t look for the spilling of much in the way of beans, as my future work could and likely would be jeopardized by having loose lips.
I’ll start by briefly stating that I moved to LA in 2015 with the goal of being a TV writer. I was in my mid-30s, and my industry connections were limited to a co-worker from a dozen years earlier who’d begun to make quite a name for herself and produced a handful of indie projects that I’d quite liked but who was never going to bother* holding my hand through trying to navigate the nebulous industry and the sister of a friend’s then-girlfriend. Needless to say, my prospects weren’t the rosiest.
* I do NOT begrudge her this. She had a meeting with me at her production company, which was more than I probably deserved in the first place, and (in retrospect) I was not in a place where I was prepared to have this meeting. She was moving upward and onward, and really, did Hollywood really need more white male writers? Probably not.
This sister of a friend’s then-girlfriend, the wonderful Robin Humbert, recommended me to a friend of hers, who used me on an award show for hero dogs about 7 weeks after we arrived in California. I busted ass, was the only non-garbage PA they had that day, and worked steadily from there on out (as steadily as you can while freelancing in the industry) moving up the production ranks quickly, but getting siphoned off into the production cone because I was good at it, coordinating my first show 10 months after starting in the industry.
I never really got a shot at working on a scripted TV show, which is sort of where you need to be to make inroads with writers—I say ‘never really’ because I did work on Goliath during its last season, but the writers’ room had already completed all the scripts and broken.
But after about six years, I was as far from being a writer in television as I was when I moved there and felt stuck in a track that would have led me to line producing eventually, which is not what I wanted at all.
The one thing I wrote while in LA that did get shot was something I hope never sees the light of day.
I made quite a few really great friends on what has to be the worst production I ever worked on, an Indian feature where the director was also the star who had to go to HMU for up to two hours for prosthetics before showing back up an hour after everything had been set up to his specs to find the lighting not to his liking, all while filming in three languages—meaning everything that was eventually shot was done so in triplicate—that shot for three weeks before shuttering and vanishing into the ether, never to be heard from again. It’s even disappeared from IMDb, which I didn’t even know could happen.
But you tend to make closer friends on shows that are utter disasters, as your bond is forged in fire, and I definitely made some of the closest friends I had in LA on that shoot, despite the nightmare.
One of those friends had some prior modest success as a child actor, having had a recurring role on Drake & Josh only to eventually move away from acting and into other ways of making a living, which at the time also included freelance production work.
About a year after that show unexpectedly wrapped, he came to me with a concept he thought I’d be a good fit for teaming up with him. We started to develop it as a web-series, writing the first two episodes, and blocking four more. The first script was tight, acerbic, and funny. The second one was pretty great, too, and the concept for the entire series was designed to be able to shoot for virtually nothing, as each one was set in a single home and was to be shot docu-style.
As we were toying with trying to shoot it ourselves—I’m no camera man, but my buddy Pike could easily have shot it as he’d DPed an actual documentary that looked great and played some festivals—my writing partner went out to his old compadres from Drake & Josh, and suddenly it went from something we were going to make ourselves to a shoot Drake Bell was going to be directing and which would function as a de facto D&J reunion with his TV parents playing the beleaguered parents of our main character, a young woman in need of an intervention for reasons which I’ll refrain from spoiling.
Most of you could probably guess that this wrinkle wasn’t one that meant much to me, as I was 24 years old when the first episode of that show had aired. That put me well outside of the tween demographic it was courting, and it was neither Canadian nor melodramatic, so I had zero relationship to the show.
Still, any way that there were going to be more eyes on something I’d written couldn’t be bad, right?
So on a random Saturday a few years back, we got together at my buddy’s house with the actress playing the lead, my buddy playing her roommate, his photographer girlfriend who could jump in as B-cam if we needed it, a sound guy, Drake Bell—who I’d actually randomly worked with on one day of pick-ups for an entirely forgettable film and was A-cam/directing—and myself* to start the day.
*If I had a role that day, I guess it was as script supervisor. It definitely wasn’t a role that was clearly defined, other than that I had co-written the script.
We shot the scenes with our lead actress and my co-writer as the roommate first. In the late morning, the parents arrived. We moved on to their scenes shortly thereafter, needing just a few notes and explanations as to what things like “ghosting” were, reinforcing that the script worked because their therapist had to recommend that they ghost their daughter only to have to then explain to the parent character what ghosting was.
My buddy’s then-GF/now-wife ran out and picked up a quick lunch order while we continued shooting, and then we broke for lunch, at which point our actor playing the intervention therapist/counselor showed up with his girlfriend or wife. Totally nice guy.
Drake went out to his car for a second to smoke because my buddy is SUPER straight-edge—like never had a sip of alcohol in his life. I honestly don’t care who does what to their own bodies. Do whatever makes life less awful for you as long as you’re not hurting anybody else. I don’t even care if you do it at work, as long as it doesn’t put anyone in harm’s way—or in a more selfish way doesn’t affect the job you’re doing, thus making my job harder.
The bulk of the shooting after lunch was the climactic intervention scene in a mostly naturally lit living room. If you were shooting this docu-style, you’d probably be shooting this with a second camera, which would have you alternating in the edit between a shot of the therapist in his chair and maybe a handheld shot of the family situated three wide on the couch.
Tight coverage of parents on either side of their daughter or the daughter herself shouldn’t have been in the cards for what was shot in the afternoon, but there ended up being a ton of implausible tight coverage shots while the natural light in the room shifted drastically over the next few hours.
*This is totally pedantic, but for a documentary in this format, all of this coverage implies additional cameras that there wouldn’t be room for in this space. This is all an issue when it comes to editing everything together because the natural lighting on the actors won’t match if you’re cutting between a wide shot at 1:30 PM and a tight coverage shot on the actor from 4:30 PM when they’re sitting in the same spot at what’s meant to be the same time.
This wasn’t disastrous, but if I’d felt less like an outsider gratefully watching something I’d helped write actually being shot and more like someone whose creative input was valued, I’d have adamantly pushed for extremely limited coverage (basically anything that wasn’t a zoom from the wide shot doesn’t fit the format).
If you’ve been paying attention, you’re probably waiting for the other shoe to drop because nothing I’ve described is so embarrassing as to care whether it ever gets seen by anyone.
What was disastrous was a VERY BIG CHOICE that our actor playing the intervention counselor made. On the page, the counselor was a beleaguered therapist who was sort of over everything. Any laughs that were to be derived from the part would have been because of how curt and droll he was and how indelicate he was with the person in need of the intervention.
I’m [arguably] a writer. I’m not an actor. When you write something and then have your lines said by others, they may not deliver lines the way you had envisioned them when you wrote the lines. If the intent of what was written is still coming across in the performance, I’m generally of the mind that you get out of the actor’s way in those scenarios. Maybe get an alternate take to cover yourself in the edit, but you don’t need to micromanage an actor.
Usually.
For the hours that followed, I watched in horror as the counselor was performed in gay caricature with a voice recalling Jim Gaffigan’s high “Hot Pockets” voice.
And while I watched through hands covering my eyes, everyone else was eating it up.
So not only was a shoot that had been going well circling the drain, I was stuck wondering if I was going insane for having problems with this character who was very much not written as a broad gay caricature performed in a way that I felt certain would play as offensive to MANY people, not just myself.
After a morning that had gone swimmingly and had me buzzing, I left hours later deflated and dejected, not dissimilar from how I felt when leaving LA a few years later.
I talked to my buddy a few days later and aired out my concerns about how offensive I thought the counselor’s performance was going to play. He got where I was coming from and definitely felt like there were aspects of the shoot that would have been much different had the shoot been left to us and not morphed into an impromptu Drake & Josh reunion. We never shot the second script we wrote, and the larger project died on the vine as he turned his focus away from the rat race. He’s left the industry and the city for much greener pastures and a brighter future, and I couldn’t be happier for him.
After having worked on Drake & Josh for this guy* and in any number of other jobs that were awful in their own right, including his role on the Indian movie we were on (which was easily the worst job on the set), it’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t want to keep grinding away…
*I also don’t have anything to add about the multiple allegations of misconduct in Drake Bell’s past, as I have zero relevant knowledge about any of the allegations—the first of which broke after this shoot happened—or really about anything about him. I was on a guerrilla shoot outside of the Guitar Center on Sunset for an hour with him and shot this one day with him. Otherwise, I don’t know the dude, and I know he would never remember me.
From what I can tell, this short has never been released anywhere. I hope it stays that way, at least not without an entire character being reshot.
Shit happens. Onward and, well, onward, I guess.