Now let’s wrap it up with a few thoughts for the people on the other side of the table: the suits at the networks. I don’t know if I can get through to you. I’m not even certain that you read books. Some of you are totally decent, sure. You tend to succeed and you also tend to get along with your artists. A percentage of you have your heads in the right place. My beef is not with you. My umbrage is with the suits who feel the need to “help” the artists in the actual creation of the art.
Here is my trip with you guys and gals: You and your company run a broadcasting business that is funded primarily by advertising dollars. The method by which you increase the amount of dollars coming in is to program content that engenders popularity, increasing the amount of viewership. The advertisers writing the checks to you naturally want as many people as possible watching their commercials, so if your television shows garner the most viewers, you will thereby reap the greatest amount of dollars.
To that end, you try your darnedest to hire writers, also known as “creatives,” who will bring you original, gripping material so as to ensnare as many of those aforementioned viewers as possible. The brilliant men and women of which I speak, these creatives, then fabricate entire worlds for you from whole cloth, peopled with characters of every flavor, for the embroidering of stories which will hopefully engage an audience for years to come. These writers are just about my favorite people in town, from the point of view of both a fan who is grateful for the heartwarming times they have provided me and my family and friends over the years and an actor who directly benefits from the opportunities they perpetually create for those of my ilk to make a dollar doing work we can actually stomach.
The creators envision the shows, they write the shows, they’re going to shoot the shows—THEY MAKE THE SHOWS. You, the suits, are, in effect, hiring a painter. You’ve seen their earlier paintings and greatly enjoyed them. You think that perhaps your company can sell their new paintings to America and the world beyond on your company’s art channel. You run this art channel; you were a business major or a broadcasting major. You look at popular-culture magazines and read newspapers and the Internet tastemakers, and you evaluate charts of trends that are “popping” and “hot.” You then get in your BMW to drive over to the art studio to tell the painter that football, pulled pork, and small children in cute, miniature vehicles are really happening right now—they’re “trending.” “Can the painter put some of those in his/her painting?”
And the painter will maybe try, because maybe the painter is contractually obligated to try, even though the painter was presumably competent enough to choose his/her own subject matter in the paintings that got him/her the job in the first place. But you don’t leave it at that. You then tell the painter what kind of canvas to use, and you stand with the painter as the painting begins, and you hand her/him brushes as you suggest changes to the picture’s composition. The painter commences daubing on a cadmium orange mixed with a little primary magenta, and you say, “Hey, can we try blue, actually?” You have the temerity to tell this artist how to create his/her art, wholly forgetting an incredibly salient fact: YOU DON’T PAINT.
I don’t have to tell you, network suits, how many millions of dollars are thrown away every year on failed pilots that are often embarrassingly terrible. All I am asking you to do, here in chapter 15B of my book, is reduce your penchant for gambling by trusting your storytellers. The funny thing about the brilliant minds you have enlisted to create your “paintings” is that THEY HAVE BRILLIANT MINDS. If left to their own devices, they have the potential to paint your pictures in colors you’d never even have remotely imagined before they showed up. When you replace an actor who has been chosen by your show’s creator with a different type of actor who has been chosen by a poll in Tiger Beat magazine, or wherever teenage girls and boys now register their collective opinion, you are not thinking like a storyteller; you are thinking, instead, like a toothpaste company. You will not sell more toothpaste by adding flavor crystals or the phrase “Now more minty!” to your show. You will sell more toothpaste by allowing your show to be its own original animal, giving it its best chance to rise above the fray of mediocre dental-hygiene programming, attracting hordes of toothpaste-consuming viewers. Then we might all have something to smile about.
16
Nowadays
Mom, I can’t imagine anyone else has stuck with me this far, so I’ll launch this final set of musings in your direction, and yes, I’ll try to keep it light on the fudgin’ sailor talk. My strangely fortunate life as I now know it really commenced with the advent of Parks and Recreation, but before I dive into that multicolored dream-pool of magic pudding (not a euphemism, Mom), I want to describe an earlier event that has proved to be rather poignant for me.
Megan and I had been living together in her West Hollywood duplex for a couple of years when we made a loose compact that we would get married at some point. We knew that we would be joined at the hip in any case going forward, but we thought it would be nice to do the official secret handshake and whatnot, and also get our people together for a love party. We had also been talking about buying a house, “movin’ on up,” as it were, in the parlance of The Jeffersons. After some shopping around, we found an incredible house in the hills above West Hollywood, right next to Blue Jay Way, a street made legendary in a song by this cool band the Beatles. (Mom, I told you ’bout ’em, ’member? You like their cover of “Till There Was You” from The Music Man.)
We moved in, and it would never fail to amuse me that I was coming home to this house, a home that Megan had created and designed so that it felt like a welcoming and cozy work of art. I’d pull into the garage, covered in sawdust more often than not, and just have to giggle as I stepped into the front hallway to be greeted by three enthusiastic poodles, into this new life as a guy who lives in the finest abode.
Soon after we got settled in the new house in 2003, which included a lovely little pool in the yard, I was dumbstruck one day to realize that I had “made it”! Thanks to Megan, I was a well-off dude living in the Hollywood Hills like a king! My whole life, since high school anyway, I’d had a fantasy image of what life would be like if I ever was successful enough to have a house with a pool. The dream was simple: I would smoke some weed and listen to Neil Young and float in the pool. It had snuck up on me so sweetly that I was completely flabbergasted to realize that I had all of the necessary ingredients to make that noble dream a reality! Without dawdling, I smoked some fine California herb and put Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps on in the house and then casually flipped the switch to pipe it through our OUTDOOR SPEAKERS. Living the fucking dream, people (sorry, Mom). I made a cool drink and took my leisure like a gol-danged king, reclining on a floatie raft in the pool under the brilliant Southern California sun. It was rich. I mean to tell you, it was delicious. It lasted all of two songs.
Apparently I was an old dog by then—a robust thirty-three years old—because I was not about to learn any new tricks. As I floated in the pool, blissfully reclining to Neil’s admonition that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” I grew restless rather quickly. I took a step back and examined my prone form bobbing upon the sparkling blue water.
“What am I, an asshole? What am I gonna do, buy a yacht and just be a rich asshole floating on my yacht? Jesus, man, look at yourself. The sun is up. You should be getting something done!”
* * *
What I had learned was that I don’t achieve my happiness by taking it easy, but instead by using my time and abilities to be productive. I mainly focus my productivity in the arenas of performance and woodworking, but I also prefer to be spending time with Megan and our dogs, my friends and their kids, and my family whenever I can get to them. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to learn this for myself firsthand, or otherwise I might have spent my life wishing foolishly for that stoned pool time. That day in the pool taught me that I still just want to make things with my time, but being more f
inancially successful simply meant that I might make things whilst sporting a nicer pair of socks. Whether they’re from Sears or L.L.Bean, I still want to get ’em dirty. Or else, what am I? A goddamn layabout? A man of leisure? Fuck that (sorry again, Mom). Until these hands give out, I believe there’s work to do.
When Parks and Recreation looked like it might stick around for a little while, I was faced with a choice: Close up my woodshop and lock the doors, letting it sit dark and silent until my time freed up again, or find some help to keep that beautifully shitty old warehouse cranking out sawdust and shavings. My whole life had been spent actively participating in the healthy lives of productive communities, starting with my huge family in Minooka, followed by my theater families in college and Chicago, as well as the Evidence Room family and my circle of fellow artists in Los Angeles. It only made sense that I would now create my own sphere of support at Offerman Woodshop.
With my usual bounty of dumb luck, my friend Sam Moyer (an excellent fellow woodworker) introduced me to a small lady from Berkeley who had helped him install a kitchen. According to Sam, she had outworked the three strong men she accompanied. This was hard to believe when I met Lee, since she is about as tiny as my bride. Welp. I’ve been wrong before, and the smart money’s on my being wrong again. Lee regularly out-hoists me, and I’m not a weakling by any stretch. Beyond her brute strength, far beyond, she comes ready-made to administrate a shop with an almost eerie specificity. A lifelong woodworker, she has worked for years at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, an extremely progressive think-tank laboratory of a museum that has been scientifically challenging and educating its visitors for more than forty years. As if museum-level meticulousness wasn’t enough, she then took some further learning from the venerable College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, California, in a woodworking program created by famed furniture master James Krenov. And she’s strong as a mule, aka two Offerman boys. Lee has become so valuable to me that I would gladly exchange my right hand before losing her, and bear in mind, that’s my burger-flipping hand.
I immediately made her my new shop manager, and together we have collected a charming fellowship of elves that is ever shifting and always learning. A wonderful aspect of having a few heads in the shop at any given time is the different perspectives we all can bring to problem-solving. I look forward to all of my fellow OWS craftspeople surpassing me in experience so that I may begin to dodder in my age and lean upon their superior know-how. Any minute now. I greatly admire these peers of mine for the courageous choice of devoting their lives to making exceptional pieces in wood, even though it’s terribly difficult to eke out a living as a craftsperson. This is a shameful state of affairs, but it is all too real in our modern consumerist economy. At Offerman Woodshop we are doing our best to help foster the rebirth of handcrafted goods into the mainstream of middle-class furnishings, but there is a long way to go. We make everything by hand, meaning we will never employ computer-driven fabricating tools, such as a CNC router or a 3-D printer. Furniture by robot is the opposite of what we’re after. Factory furniture is only better in that it makes the manufacturer more profit for cheaper prices, but you get what you pay for. In every other way, our products are vastly superior, made one at a time with love and skill. I’m proud to be a part of this movement of noble handcrafting, which I believe will strengthen our society immeasurably, or at least to the point where we’re not dependent upon foreign manufacturing to make our furniture and clothing and many other items, all of a quality that renders them disposable. When we make you a table at Offerman Woodshop, we intend for your family to enjoy it for a couple of hundred years at least. Now compare the prices again with that in mind.
* * *
While the elves are having all the fun with the shed full of tools over at Offerman Woodshop, I’m toiling away at my pesky dream job at Parks and Recreation, a job that feels like toil about as much as a muskrat feels like a jellyfish. What can I say about this playground which Mike Schur and Greg Daniels have built where I can be rewarded with money and food for the hardship of watching Amy Poehler and Aubrey Plaza stare each other down like two beautiful gladiators in a battle of mighty comedy wills? Each and every cast member makes me laugh with an unadulterated delight. Amy, Adam, Rashida, Aziz, Aubrey, Rob Lowe, Retta, and Chris Pratt. Every single one. There is no one else associated with the cast who merits my admiration, I could never leave any of them out. Jim O’Heir, who plays Jerry, is also a member of the cast. Pratt is my special favorite, which I believe is also the case for most of, well, the human population. His hijinks more than any other’s leave me peeing in my britches with consistency.
* * *
It’s all completely stupid, by the way. The beauty of our jobs is that we are allowed to behave in a juvenile manner of an ilk that the rest of polite society has been forced to eschew because of a development called “maturity.” To wit: One day we were shooting the episode “Two Parties,” and all the boys were at the freaky aroma bar called Essence, where every cocktail comes in some crazy form, like a mist or a lotion or a flash of light.
Pratt’s character, Andy Dwyer, received a “beer” that he ordered, which was inexplicably in the form of a sphere of cotton candy. Pratt proceeded to sculpt a vagina (very masterfully; he’s a talented visual artist with an apparently intimate knowledge of the female genitalia) in his cotton candy, which, it must be noted, is not the easiest medium for sculpture. He then proceeded to subtly display his cotton-candy vagina to us, nibbling and licking it for our edification, as we all tried to maintain a straight face because we were on camera performing our scenes. By the end of the take, he had eaten the entire sphere, maybe a ball with an eight-inch diameter. That’s a fair amount of sugar to put in a lad, even a large boy like Christopher. Well, you get along to the sixth or seventh take, and you realize that there have been six or seven more balls of cotton candy with subsequent vaginas, all dutifully consumed by Mr. Pratt.
Now it’s go time. When he gets sugared up, he completely becomes a five-year-old in terms of hyperactivity and volume and hilarity, which has not escaped the notice of our producers. I have not had this confirmed, but I believe every third or fourth script finds Andy Dwyer in close proximity with some form of candy or cake or other sugar-based item. Pancakes with syrup, a bowl of Skittles, several racks of pork ribs slathered in sweet BBQ sauce, you name it. Seems like something more than coincidence to this investigator. Whatever the provenance, nobody is complaining, because “candy Pratt” is better than any cartoon, and I’ve seen The Ren & Stimpy Show and The Big Snit.
So the day was really fun and long (which just translates as more hours of fun), until we finally finished up the shooting at an ice cream parlor, again with all the boys, bachelor party–style. Everyone got to order his ice cream of choice, which didn’t really suck as far as “things you have to do at work,” but here is a bonus tip for aspiring actors: Whenever you get to enjoy an indulgence in a filmed medium, just remember that you might have to “enjoy” that treat as many as twenty times in a row, once per take. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made myself green in the face by deciding to smoke heavily throughout a scene, only to be ready to go gills-up by the fourth take. You want to take it easy.
With that in mind, I asked for one little scoop of butter pecan in a sugar cone. My plan was to eat just the small scoop of ice cream and none of the cone, so I’d end up with a nice dessert of maybe six small scoops of ice cream. Rob Lowe and Adam Scott, sagacious veterans, chose to just barely nibble at theirs so they wouldn’t be forced to overeat if the scene ran long.
They chose wisely, it turned out, as we ended up moving the cameras a couple of times, with six or so takes per camera position, so your author ended up eating twenty-one small scoops of ice cream. I was pretty happy, honestly, with about the first fourteen scoops or so, but then they began to hurt. The price of showbiz. If I was feeling beyond bloated, I can’t imagine what discomfort Pratt was enduring, having chosen a la
rge scoop of strawberry in a waffle cone, one per take. His seventh or eighth sugar buzz of the day kicked into high gear, which made the literally creamy vaginas he was now sculpting into his strawberry treat even more hilarious. Bear in mind that an ice-cream cone involves tongue work rather than sculpting by hand, which was the case with the cotton candy. I thought I was going to need hospitalization, he was making me giggle-cry so deep and long. And it is for performing activities like this that I receive a healthy salary. How could I ever lose sight of what a lucky son of a bitch I am?
This acting job has literally put more bacon in my belly than any butcher shop. It has caused more Lagavulin whisky to course through my veins than any well-stocked public house. I miss my time at the shop, but my role of Ron Swanson only requires my presence on an average of three days a week, which leaves me two days at the shop. We even shot an episode at my goddamn shop! (“The Possum,” in case you’re curious.)
At the time of this writing, we have completed ninety glorious episodes and are gearing up to produce another twenty-two this coming season, which will be called season 6. I have met a lot of great writers in my day, but I could never have dreamed that I would run into writers like Mike Schur and his gang of smarty-pantses. If you like Ron Swanson, then imagine how I must feel when I open a new script and see lines of dialogue like “When I eat, it is the food that is scared.” It’s like Christmas every week, if your folks got you a present every week that was better than your fondest wish.
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living Page 28