Why Not Me?
Page 7
And now, trapped in Palm Springs, I thought: Oh fuck. Why am I only friendly with Bob Greenblatt? Why did I not force him to become my friend?!
By the end of Monday, I still had heard nothing. While shooting scenes for The Office, I heard from our writing staff about other pilots getting picked up to be filmed. For the first time in seven years in the TV business, I was completely terrified about my career.
Between lighting setups onstage, I called Howard, and my agent, Matt Rice, again. They were gentle, but the news was bad. NBC had passed on my pilot. They didn’t even like it—or me—enough to shoot it with no intention of ever picking it up! Where was my pity pilot? I told them I totally understood their decision (I didn’t) and wasn’t surprised (I was surprised), and hung up.
Then I sat in my trailer and wept.
When you are entitled, you are the most insufferable person ever. If you are entitled and hardworking, which I am, you are still pretty insufferable, but at least you somewhat earned your entitled behavior. For all my other theoretical faults, no one can deny my powerful and driven work ethic, handed down to me from my immigrant parents and my suburban Boston peer group of kids who thought Cornell was a safety school. I had thought it went without saying that I would one day have a show on NBC. It felt like destiny. It’s crazily presumptuous, but I always imagined a world where my show was on the same network as my favorite Must-See TV shows. And now it wasn’t going to happen.
It’s weird when you feel your dream slipping away from you. Especially when you have no other dreams. I was surprised that my overwhelming feeling was not sadness; it was terror. What on earth am I going to do now? I thought. The Office isn’t going to last forever. Would it end, and would I go work on a lesser comedy, sitting bitterly in the corner of the rewrite room of My Mismatched Moms, eating a California Pizza Kitchen Thai Crunch Salad with peanut dressing on the side, telling people how great my show would have been? Or would I have to take a job as the obligatory ethnic host of House Hunters International, my voiceover gamely trying to maintain the tension of “Which house will the couple pick?” when everyone knows it’s the one the wife wants near the beach that’s perfect for entertaining?
I had reached the level of self-obsessed insanity at which point no reasonable person would ever feel sorry for me. But sometimes, in life, or at least in driver’s ed, the best advice is to “steer into the curve.” It was from this terror that I got an idea. I remembered the man who had been the president of NBC when The Office first started. The man who greenlit The Office when no one else thought it could succeed and, later, 30 Rock. That man was Kevin Reilly.
KEVIN REILLY, THE ONLY JOCK WHO HAS EVER LIKED ME
Kevin Reilly likes to speak in sports analogies. It’s one of the most unsettling things about him because I am a nerd who doesn’t understand anything sports-related at all, except Serena Williams’s tennis outfits, which are fierce as hell. Kevin’s always saying things like “You’ve got a real deep bench, now, kid.” Or “You gotta keep your eye on the ball, and you’re going to push it over the goal line.” And I have no idea what he is talking about, but I nod enthusiastically and say, “Sure, of course, sports,” and hope he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions.
Kevin Reilly was always somewhat of a celebrity to me because, as I said, he had greenlit my favorite shows. His championing of The Office was particularly noteworthy because, at that time, critics and audiences alike weren’t crazy about it. He just trusted Greg and Steve and knew it was worth standing by.
Kevin is also very, very handsome. Ridiculously handsome. He looks like the guy they’d cast to play “Network Executive” on a terrible but fun-to-watch TV show. More important, I really liked what Kevin liked. Network executives usually have bad taste. It’s either just a reflection of what market research tells them that normal people are into, or whatever their adolescent children are obsessed with. I have so often been on the receiving end of whatever powerful network executive’s children are watching that week. That is when I get calls telling me I should write an arc on my show for the singer Austin Mahone.3
Howard sent the pilot script to Kevin and he and his team read it immediately. I got a call that he would like to see me the following day.
Call me superficial, or call me a genius (or call me both—Why can’t both be true?), but before the meeting, I went to the MAC store to get my makeup done, then to the Drybar on Sunset and got a blowout. I wanted Kevin and his team at Fox to see me as a potential star of a network TV show. They didn’t need to see my large pores or my forty sad strands of witch hair. They wanted big, bouncy, shiny, Two Broke Girls hair!
I drove to the Fox lot across town, parked, drank two shots from a bottle of Jose Cuervo that I keep on the floor of my passenger seat, arranged my breasts so it looked like I had filled in a solid B-cup, dissolved enough Listerine breath strips on my tongue so the inside of my mouth was burning, and raced across the lot, hoping not to run into Rupert Murdoch in my Keds (I wear Keds to every meeting and then go the restroom and change into my “slutty career woman” stilettos before I actually see anyone important).
I was joined at the meeting by Bela Bajaria, the head of Universal Television Studios. I was very lucky that Bela was so supportive and determined to sell the show somewhere other than NBC. But she was also my boss, and her presence made me even more nervous. “You’ll be great. You know what you’re doing,” Bela said warmly to me, a perfect stranger, while we waited to see Kevin. I nodded, grateful, while privately dying inside. How does she know I’ll be great? I’ve never pitched a show before! I get nervous when I tell anecdotes! Sometimes I accidentally blurt out the ending right in the middle! Also, I’m sweating. Do great people sweat so much their thighs stick to the leather sofas they’re sitting on?
I unstuck myself and we went into Kevin’s office. The good news: Kevin was cheerful and open about how much he liked the script. His super-handsome face was glowing with handsomeness. But he wasn’t won over yet. He had some very specific notes he wanted me to address. The notes were about making sure that the character of Danny Castellano was strong and masculine. He didn’t want my character to outsmart him and push him around. I had my assignment.
One of my very worst qualities is how impatient I am, but it’s actually very helpful when I am rewriting. I skipped out of the Fox lot, threw my Keds back on, resisted the temptation to go over to the Simpsons building and take selfies with the Bart Simpson topiary, and raced to the car to take another shot of Cuervo for my drive home—this time a celebratory one.
For the next three days I worked nonstop. There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks, and I had it, big-time. If I breathed in deeply, I could smell my unwashed scent and it was intoxicating. It smelled like hard work. You know on Game of Thrones how Khal Drogo always looked powerful and dirty because he’d been marauding nonstop for weeks? That’s how I pictured myself. I was Khal Drogo on this pilot. My fingers were my Dothraki Khalasar. And Kevin Reilly was my Khaleesi, for I was going to make him/her mine/Drogo’s.
I turned in the script to Bela and the rest of studio. They signed off on it and sent it to Kevin. I waited.
Two days later, Kevin called me. He said he wanted to shoot it.
Kevin didn’t even use a sports metaphor, like “I’m putting your script into the game,” he just said it. But in truth, my Hail Mary pass had been caught in the end zone just as the last seconds ticked off the clock. I just looked up those terms online.
I was so excited, and I was really scared. I no longer worked at The Office. I was going to have a new office. My office.
THE NO-LONGER-UNTITLED MINDY PROJECT/THE TITLED MINDY PROJECT
Originally, in my pilot script, I had named my character Mira. But Kevin Reilly told me to change it to Mindy. This made me nervous. Ultimately, the note was the best advice (OK, order) that he ever gave me. By having the lead character share my name, it lent an authenticity to the show that people reall
y responded to. Jerry Seinfeld kept his first name Jerry in Seinfeld, and it made you feel like you were his pal too, and that he wasn’t trying to add distance between the viewer and his point of view. Calling her Mindy also inadvertently helped to make me more famous. My real name was on TV listings and billboards and radio ads across the country! Now whenever I see a subway ad for The Mindy Project, I can’t believe it’s my actual name on there, and I get so excited, even if my face has been vandalized with a Hitler mustache. Because that’s how you truly know you’ve made it.
I had finally done it. I had created a show. Not for Must-See TV, home of Cheers and Friends. But for Fox, home of Married … with Children and Joe Millionaire. You never quite get everything you want the way you want it. But here I was, a showrunner and TV star, so who cared? Nothing bad would happen to me now. The end!
NOT SO FAST, BIG SHOT
Four years later, after three seasons, Fox canceled The Mindy Project. The day it was canceled, I was in Montana, on the first vacation I had taken in seven years. When I heard the news about the show, I was floating down the Blackfoot River. I was incredibly surprised. But I probably shouldn’t have been. A year earlier, handsome, supportive, sports-analogy-using Kevin Reilly had left Fox for TBS, and the new heads of Fox did not agree with him that I was a valuable “designated hitter.” You know when an old prewar building in Manhattan is bought by a developer and all the new tenants are cool yuppies, except there’s one old rent-control crone left over from the Depression? And the landlord really wants to evict her but because of tenant rights has to pretend like “No, we love Crelga; she’s so colorful and full of attitude. I love her Depression stories!,” but secretly they are thinking of ways to have her replaced by John Stamos? It was kind of like that. I was Crelga.
The day we were canceled, I received hundreds of texts and emails, and The Mindy Project trended on Twitter. I have never been prouder of the show. We also received calls from other outlets that were interested in buying it. One was from the streaming platform Hulu. I knew Hulu because, besides sounding like a whimsical Danish candy, many of our fans were already watching it there. My friends Jason Reitman and James Franco were already doing series for them. Hulu was attracting better talent than the networks were, and when I met the president, Craig Erwich, he loved the show and wanted it to help establish their brand. Most important, though, he was good-looking. A week later, the deal was announced that Hulu had picked up The Mindy Project for season 4, for twenty-six episodes. I’d gone from barely having time to transition from my panic of not having a job to the panic of more work than I’d ever had before. And that’s all show business is, really. Transitioning panics.
I think that’s the lesson of this story: you never know what is going to happen.
Other lessons:
• No matter how good you have it, it’s cool to want more.
• Self-pity gets results.
• Sometimes you can get a second chance.
• Sometimes you get a third chance.
• Never take a vacation.
• Austin Mahone has a bright future as a singer and youth-brand spokesperson.
• It’s OK to drink tequila in the car if you just had a really good meeting.
• If you believe in yourself and work hard, your dreams will come true.
• Well … I guess the people who work hard whose dreams don’t come true don’t get to write books about it, so we never really find out what happens to them. So …
• If you believe in yourself and work hard, you have a fighting shot at having your dreams come true.
* * *
1 If this is too interesting-sounding to toss off in an essay about something else, please read my essay about it in my first book. I bet your older sister or maybe-secretly-gay best guy friend has it somewhere.
2 Men! Psst, men! Are you still reading? Don’t worry, we’re past the chick-lit-girl-nerd stuff. Coming up next: competition, success, money, sex!
3 Austin Mahone (born April 4, 1996) is an American pop singer-songwriter. He is currently signed to Young Money Entertainment and Cash Money Records. He has filmed commercials for McDonald’s and Hot Nuts, a Mexican snacking nut.
MINDY LAHIRI, MD, EVERYGIRL, MILD SOCIOPATH
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT all white people are racist. And the clearest evidence of that racism is when white people (as well as people of pretty much every other color) confuse me with the characters I write for myself to play. Racism: When will it end?
Between playing the selfish, boy-crazy narcissist Kelly Kapoor on The Office and the contrarian, delusionally confident Mindy Lahiri on The Mindy Project, I should probably give up on anyone thinking that I, Mindy Kaling, am normal or cool. But I still have hopes. So I thought I’d try to clear up some of the differences between the two Mindys. I did something similar with Kelly Kapoor in my last book, although I don’t think anyone believed me.
Things Mindy Lahiri Would Do That I Would Not
• Dry her Spanx in an oven
• Send Michael Fassbender her underwear
• Own a gun and keep misplacing it
• Save a life
• Think Rick Santorum is hot
• Tell people she is twenty-four
• Have twelve handsome white boyfriends in one calendar year
• Sue a Boston Market for giving too-small helpings of sides
• Create a secret Twitter account just to follow the guys in One Direction and their fan accounts
• Deliver twins while wearing enough makeup for a Vogue cover shoot
• Flirt with a fireman while he was fighting a fire and be miffed she doesn’t have his undivided attention
• Ask to board a plane early with parents and babies because she feels that she too “needs a little extra time to get settled”
• Get banned for life from Pinkberry for sample fraud
Things Mindy Lahiri and I Would Both Do
• Yell at teenagers for being too loud on the subway
• Graze at the Whole Foods hot foods bar and get reprimanded, then claim racism
• Go on dangerous juice cleanses
• Dress like a children’s performer and think it’s high fashion
• Say “Whoa” when we see a hot guy
• Say “Whoa” when we see a hot pizza
• Lie on the floor in despair a few times a year
• Have a fake phone conversation to avoid talking to the Über guy
• Explain to a person on a plane who doesn’t speak any English the difference between Instagram and Pinterest
• Travel to the Super Bowl, but only for the parties the night before, and skip the game
• See food poisoning as an opportunity to springboard into a new exercise regimen
• Pretend not to have seen Star Wars to enrage Star Wars fans
ON BEING A MENTOR, BY GREG DANIELS
I KNOW WHAT YOU see when you look at me. A powerful, self-realized woman of color with a brilliant mind and a body that won’t quit. But I wasn’t always this way. No, there was a time not long ago, when I was merely smart and hot. I’m so sorry, I’m obviously joking. But I guess there’s some truth in every joke? So maybe it’s kind of true?
I feel so lucky to have my career. But it was just over a decade ago that I was a scared twenty-four-year-old off-off-Broadway playwright trying to break in to TV writing with no connections in Hollywood. Not many people know me from back then, because I’ve had them all killed. Of the small handful of people still alive is my mentor, Greg Daniels.
Greg was the first person to hire me in Los Angeles, to work on The Office. You know when you meet someone so smart and cool that all their tastes and opinions seem like the correct ones? And you instantly think: those are my opinions now too! That’s Greg to me. He would say he loved Monty Python and suddenly they were my favorite comedy troupe too. Most important, he took a chance on me, and he provided me with an example of someone whose career I admired and wanted.
I thought it might be interesting and useful to hear Greg talk about the experience of being a mentor and, if you’re lucky, how he taught me how to be brilliant and gorgeous.
• • •
MINDY ASKED me to write a few words (actually 500 to 750, yikes) on “being a mentor, your philosophy on being a mentor, your relationship to me, your relationship to young women in your life, etc.” So here goes:
What is a mentor? In scriptwriting, it’s a character who teaches the hero something important, often dies at the act-two break, and provides that little extra bit of motivation the hero needs to climb tearfully over the mentor’s broken body and get it done! No, thank you. Who wants to play that role in real life? The entertainment industry is swarming with talented young people who are willing to climb over your broken body and get it done. They are your competition and should be ruthlessly put down, not trained and encouraged. The most sensible response to reading a talented newcomer’s spec script is to keep insisting, draft after draft, that it’s confusing in some way, until they move back home and live with their parents.
Yet for some reason, I have been caught mentoring people. Why?
I blame having children. It messes with your instincts for self-preservation and substitutes a love of boring a captive audience that is forced to look up to you. And because I have daughters, I was particularly susceptible to Mindy’s first message to me, conveyed through her agent, which was “Daddy, I need help with my math homework.”