Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  Leo would come to the agency now and then, and I’d spot him in the hallway. He was always nice to the staff, and would wave or nod and say hello to everyone. But any hopes I had that he might remember some special spark with me were doused the first time I interviewed him as an E! reporter.

  “I used to work at AMG and delivered your mail,” I confessed.

  “You’re kidding! Yeah, you look familiar,” Leo said. I waited for the thousand-watt lightbulb to go off in his head, and for him to say, The girl in the crappy Jetta, right? I would even have settled for The gorgeous mystery girl with relish on her tooth, right?

  Nada.

  He more than made up for it at one of my first times to cover the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony. Where reporters are stationed along the red carpet at these events isn’t random, or first-come-first-serve. The prime spot, or first position, is standing at the start of the red carpet. I was in last position, the spot where stars quickly pass just before they enter the building. Everyone’s in a hurry by then to get inside and get to their seats. On this particular occasion, Leo, who was up for Best Actor for his role in The Aviator, was running late. He hurried down the red carpet without giving any interviews, apologizing along the way as everyone called his name, trying to snag his attention. But when he caught sight of me, he grinned and said, “Hey!” and jumped over the rope to come talk for a second. “Sorry, I’m not doing interviews because they are rushing me inside,” he said. “But I just wanted to say ‘hi.’ ” I was able to get a quick sound bite from him about how excited he was, and felt like Barbara Walters as I heard the other reporters frantically telling their producers, “No, we don’t have Leo! Only Giuliana got him.”

  After paying my mailroom dues at AMG, I got promoted to assistant. The manager I was assisting was named Pam Kohl, a no-nonsense boss who wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, so deep was her contempt. I did nothing to change her low opinion of me. Running a day planner was never my strong suit. The Sunday night before my second week on the job, I called her up.

  “Obviously you hate me,” I said, “so I’ll just quit.”

  “No, you won’t,” she said. “You’re going to come in tomorrow.”

  Pam was only four years older than I was, and little by little, she began to open up and we forged a tentative friendship. I was still terrible at my job (again with the phone messages—seriously, people, they’ll call back eventually), but she kept thinking I would get better with experience. I’d been with her a year when she called me in one morning to go over her schedule.

  “Giuliana, who am I meeting with at one?”

  “That agent and his client?”

  “Okay, and what time is my Kaye Popofsky meeting?”

  “One o’clock.”

  “Okay, you see the problem?”

  My penance for the double booking was to entertain Kaye Popofsky while Pam finished the first meeting. Kaye was a former agent friend of Pam’s who was part of a new startup called LOAD Media. When Kaye arrived, I went out to greet her, apologized profusely, got her some coffee, and stayed to chat. She couldn’t have been more gracious about my scheduling blunder, and we ended up having a great conversation. She asked me all about myself, what brought me to L.A., what my aspirations were. It turned out that LOAD had an entertainment division. After Kaye had her meeting with Pam and had left, I went into Pam’s office.

  “Kaye said I could audition for a reporter gig at her new company,” I told her. “I know it’s really hard to find a good assistant,” I apologized, “but I’m not a good assistant.”

  LOAD was my cool dream job—a hip, fun start-up using the Internet to compete with the likes of Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. I would do press junkets, premieres, and set visits to interview celebs. People could then download the segments on their home computers to watch whenever they liked, avoiding the hassles of streaming. It was a brilliant idea, but ahead of its time—the software kept crashing users’ computers. My own parents ordered me to stop sending them my videos. I didn’t care: I was having the time of my life, standing next to Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight reporters with my big, funky-ass microphone to thrust in famous faces at red-carpet events.

  At the premiere of Gone in 60 Seconds, a forgettable thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, I snagged great interviews with Angie and Billy Bob Thornton. In those days, they were wearing vials of each other’s blood around their necks and were all over each other making out. The segment got tons of attention, and I felt like I was maybe starting to make a small name for myself. I kept sending my résumé, headshot, and samples of my work to the big leagues, waiting to be discovered. I was getting a ton of practical experience, working with real editors, writing my own segments, and honing my interview skills.

  I’d been at LOAD for six months when I showed up one morning at nine o’clock and got word that there was going to be a staff meeting at ten. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my radar was definitely picking up a weird vibe, and after Angelina and Billy Bob, that bar was pretty high. Something’s off, get your tapes, the shrewd voice inside my head commanded. The tapes technically belonged to the company, not the individual reporters. I spent the next hour surreptitiously packing mine up and sneaking them out to hide in my car. My delinquent teenage years had given me balls of steel when it came to bending or breaking rules, and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t known when and how to go rogue. When the appointed meeting time rolled around, we were taken into rooms ten at a time and summarily fired. LOAD was in its death throes, and only twenty of the 120 employees remained at the end of the hour. We were told that we would be allowed to go back to our desks to collect our personal belongings only—under supervision—before being escorted out of the building. If I hadn’t taken my tapes, I would have had nothing to show any prospective employer. All my hard-won experience would have evaporated forever right along with LOAD itself.

  I didn’t have time to sit there and congratulate myself for foresight, though: I spent what little savings I had on an editing session to turn my LOAD work into a demo reel. I was ecstatic when MTV called.

  “Do you have a very wide knowledge of music?” I was asked.

  “Oh, yes. Vast knowledge,” I said. I’d grown up with Kurt Loder and Downtown Julie Brown. My musical taste ran from Madonna to Beastie Boys to Frank Sinatra to New Kids on the Block and everything in between. I was a natural for MTV! These were my peeps. I was ecstatic when I was invited in for an interview.

  I appeared before two interviewers, who held out a bag and told me I had forty-five seconds to go through it, pull out a CD, and succinctly describe what it meant to the world of music.

  First up: Madonna. “Madonna is known for constantly reinventing her image, but with this album, she is also reinventing her sound.”

  Michael Jackson: “How do you top Thriller, the best-selling album of all time? Well, it’s not easy, but if anyone can do it, the record breaker himself can and this album in my hands may be the ticket.”

  P. Diddy: “Having started out in the biz as a talent director before founding his über-successful label Bad Boy Records, Diddy is a force to be reckoned with in the industry and this latest album proves just that.”

  Jennifer Lopez: “J. Lo recently debuted her first studio album, On the 6, after achieving success as an actress…In fact, she was recently the first Latina actress to get paid over one million dollars for a role in the hit Out of Sight, opposite George Clooney.”

  I was on a roll. I could be writing liner notes. Then I pulled out Daft Punk. Instead of just admitting that I knew absolutely nothing about them, I decided I could bullshit my way through it, so I just started making up all kinds of lies about how they were reinventing punk music and bringing huge numbers of new fans to the genre because of their creative genius, etc., etc. The interviewers looked at me blankly. Because, I discovered later, Daft Punk had nothing to do with punk music whatsoever.

&n
bsp; “Okay, thank you. Uh huh. Bye-bye.”

  I squeaked by on savings for a few months. Then, as luck would have it, my best friend, Colet Abedi (we’d met while giving each other Bitchy Resting Face over the copying machine as low-level associate producers for a late-night syndicated gossip show that instantly tanked), got a job casting for ABC’s The Bachelor, and she brought me on board as a casting assistant for an upcoming project. We were going on the best girls’ trip ever—an all-expenses-paid weekend in Minneapolis to find hot guys to be potential cast mates for the show. We went out partying our first night, and all but forgot our mission when a waitress walked by our table and said “Weezer” under her breath. I looked over and spotted the band hanging out.

  “I get the lead singer,” I told Colet, who had no idea who Weezer was, anyway.

  “Fine, who’s the lead guitarist?” she agreed.

  “Tall dude with the tats.”

  Weezer seemed delighted to see us, and we proceeded to spend the whole night hanging out with them, taking it from drinks to dinner to clubbing. We were on our way to party more back at our hotel when the topic of tattoos came up, and the lead singer (mine) said his friend (Colet’s lead guitarist) had done the ink we were all admiring. I was impressed. “He sings and is a tattoo artist? Is there anything this guy can’t do?” I said out loud. All of my date’s bandmates started laughing and saying stuff like, “Sing? Have you ever heard John sing? He is the worst!” I thought it was all band humor until one of the other guys said, “Come to think of it, none of us have good voices. Good thing we’re great tattoo artists!”

  “Wait, you guys aren’t Weezer?” I asked. They looked at each other and laughed some more.

  “Why would you think that?” my almost-boyfriend wondered.

  “Well, because I think the waitress mentioned it when you sat down at the restaurant.” Had we misheard? Or been set up?

  More laughter, accompanied by high-fives and drunken keeling-over glee. Colet and I turned away without a word and walked away, pissed that we had just wasted our whole night with a bunch of drunk Minneapolis tattoo artists. I wanted to tattoo the word asshole on my forehead.

  “Bitches!” the spurned tattoo artists called after us.

  “Screw you, non-Weezers!” I shot back.

  The next day, we slapped some flyers in a few gyms and waited around for hot glistening men to come flex for us and beg to be on our show. It didn’t happen. We were perplexed. This was Minnesota. Shouldn’t it be swarming with second-generation Scandinavian studs? It was the July Fourth weekend, and we decided that the quality hot guys must be on the water, so off we headed to Lake Minnetonka. Because, yeah, everyone knows it is nationally acclaimed as the Lake o’ Ripped Bachelors. Right? Our plan was to wangle our way on to someone’s fancy boat. Once there, the flaw in our thinking became obvious: The fancy boats were in the middle of the water. We would need a boat of our own to get to Gatsby’s yacht. Or Sven’s party pontoon. Whatever. We just needed some not-ugly men in their twenties with a pulse and all their teeth at this point.

  “We’d like a pontoon,” we told the boat rental place.

  “No, we’re all out.”

  “Um. Okay, do you have a cigarette boat?” Clearly I had been watching way too much Miami Vice.

  “No.”

  “A Scarab?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, what do you have that we can drive?”

  We ended up with a little motorboat that we couldn’t manage to steer in anything resembling a straight line. Or even a lazy zigzag. We just kept spinning in circles. We’d come up to some fancy boat and pirouette in front of it like some overexcited Pomeranian about to pee on the fancy people. Nobody invited us aboard. Finally, we headed for Lord Fletcher’s Old Lake Lodge, renowned for its lively bar scene on the shores of Minnetonka. We pulled up to Lord Fletcher’s berth and crashed into it. We tried but failed to act cool as we hoisted ourselves out of our toy boat and went inside to recruit gorgeous Norwegian American bachelors. Lord Fletcher’s has six bars and something like nine dining areas, and still we struck out. Minnesota, we were forced to conclude, had a serious lack of desperate people willing to humiliate themselves on a reality show. We went back without a single candidate.

  —

  Back in L.A., Colet and I were driving down Beverly Boulevard one Friday afternoon, talking about our career hopes like we often did, when I felt this sense of despair swamp me. I’d been in L.A. for four years, and nothing was happening. I had no money. No one was hiring me. Everything was falling through. The few opportunities I had fizzled quickly. I had gotten on television exactly one time, and that was only because the ship was going down and the producer had nothing to lose: I had been a lowly associate producer for a late-night National Enquirer syndicated gossip show, and on the brink of cancellation, my boss told me I could report a piece about the eighties making a tiny comeback. I went all out, dressing like Madonna and roller-skating down the boardwalk of Venice Beach with a boombox on my shoulder, making an absolute idiot of myself as I called out to gawkers, “Hey, the eighties are back, didn’t you hear?” The cute spoof was all I had to show for my on-air aspirations. I was a total loser, and my world felt small and pathetic.

  “I’m done,” I told Colet. “I’m never going to make it here.”

  Colet was having none of it. If I wanted a pity party, she was not going to RVSP.

  “Giuliana, you can’t give up hope! What’re you going to do?”

  “Maybe go home?” I ventured.

  “And marry Richard?” she scoffed. I shook my head. It wasn’t as if Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, or any real Weezers were going to carry me off on a white horse.

  “I need a sign,” I declared. Colet was deeply spiritual. She was into crystals and oils and energies and all sorts of weird shit I don’t understand. A sign was something she could relate to. My spirituality was more traditional, but I had my superstitions, too. Bizarre as it sounds, my phone rang as if on cue, interrupting our contemplation of my future. I glanced at the number but didn’t recognize it.

  “Get it,” Colet suddenly urged.

  “Nah, I don’t know the number. I don’t mess with unknown numbers.”

  “You have to answer it!”

  I picked up the call and heard a woman’s voice.

  “Giuliana?” she asked. “This is Gina Merrill.”

  “OH MY GOD, the GINA MERRILL?” I shouted back. “I’ve been sending you tapes for years, did you get them?”

  Gina was a talent recruiter at E! Entertainment. Surprised by my fangirl reaction, she couldn’t immediately confirm that she’d gotten my previous six thousand pieces of mail, but she had gotten the latest tape, with my LOAD work and the goofy eighties-is-back piece.

  “Can you come in on Monday to audition for a week?” she wanted to know.

  I stayed calm long enough to get a time and place, then hung up so Colet and I could scream with excitement.

  “I know this is it,” I said. The turning point.

  The first thing I did was trade in my Jetta for a Jeep Cherokee, taking out a loan to pay for it. I was that sure that my fortunes were about to shift.

  I was supposed to report to E! on the Miracle Mile at 6:30 on Monday morning. I showed up fifteen minutes early, carting a big suitcase full of clothes and shoes, curling irons, and my Miss Maryland Caboodles case full of makeup. The office building was all high ceilings and marble floors, silent and empty. No one was there, and a sign said they didn’t open until eight a.m. After some confusion and calling around, I discovered I was at the wrong reception area. The executive producer, Peggy Jo Abraham, came to fetch me. She looked surprised by my suitcase.

  “What’s all this stuff?” she asked.

  “My hair and makeup and clothes,” I replied.

  “We have hair and makeup and wardrobe,” Peggy explained.

  Whoa.

  It got even better as I walked through the newsroom and caught sight of popular anchors Jules As
ner and Steve Kmetko, and was ushered into a cubicle and given a temporary password. I soon learned from a friendly assignment editor named Maureen that I was the thirty-ninth person to try out for the job. And the last, I silently vowed.

  Nowadays, when you see a segment of a host interviewing a celebrity, he’s most likely reading questions that a producer writes. A small hive of broadcast worker bees perform all the vital tasks and make the necessary decisions that go into each segment. Back in 2001, though, it was all on the reporter. We were expected to come up with questions, log the tape, find the best moments, do our own research, write our own scripts, and choose the clips to go with them—all before the show went live at 4:00 p.m. Pacific time.

  My first day on the job, I was assigned to report on that night’s premiere of Summer Catch, a movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel. In the movie, a character played by Wilmer Valderrama has an affair with his friend’s mom, played by Beverly D’Angelo. When Wilmer came up to me on the red carpet at the premiere, I thought it was a stroke of genius to ask him:

  “So, do you like moms in real life?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Wilmer said playfully.

  “You know,” I went on, “do you do moms in real life?”

  “I don’t know what you mean!” Wilmer coyly insisted. We both laughed it off, and he moved on.

  The next day, I was sitting with my editor, Don, when the moms riff came up. Don swiveled in his chair and fixed me with a hard look.

  “You can’t put that in there.”

  “Yes, I can!” I objected. It was a great bit. No way was I losing it.

  “No,” he insisted. “You’ll get fired and so will I, and I don’t want to lose my job over this.”

  “I got it approved,” I countered. Don was dubious.