by Mark Duplass
From: mark duplass
To: jay duplass
Subject: RE: xmas eve
dude. dupiss face johnson. thank u for having the heart and balls to say that. I have been wanting to broach this subject for a long time and have been kinda scared to say it. and u just kinda blew it open for me and I’m really glad u did. can I just say…
I wish u and katie were closer and I wish me and jen were closer.
I know we love each other and it works but…I wish what u wished too. I wish we were all soul mates.
From: jay duplass
To: mark duplass
Subject: RE: xmas eve
ha! me too. I totally feel you on this. it sucks. and I don’t know how to fix it.
From: mark duplass
To: jay duplass
Subject: RE: xmas eve
me neither. but I’m glad we’re talking about it. and I’m glad we had a rad xmas eve together where it all came straight out of the oven like we imagined it would when we wrote the cookbook, sleeping in our twin bed together 35 years ago.
From: jay duplass
To: mark duplass
Subject: RE: xmas eve
maybe we can talk a little before we do these bigger family get-togethers and try to plant some seeds of fun. ie, I think the little singalong thing u did at the piano helped to set the mood.
some ideas:
—as the kids get older, sharing seminal movies together that we all loved as a family. raising arizona, rocky, hoosiers.
—big charade game with interfamily teams
(I’m already hating these ideas and they feel forced. probably can’t control this and just have to get lucky.)
last idea: get mom really stoned and just sit in the corner and watch her.
YOU ARE A woman. You are twenty-seven years old. You are overweight. You wear a poly-blend light pink hooded sweatshirt that says “U Maine” on the front and a pair of men’s mesh basketball shorts. These clothes are very comfortable. You changed into them a half hour ago from your work uniform. You work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is what you also ate for dinner tonight. Like last night. You make $15,492 per year as a fry cook. You also make $598 a month from the state of Maine welfare system. You are underpaid, but you keep your job at KFC because the benefits are good. Because you have three children under the age of nine. And because you take care of them by yourself after your dickless husband, Chad, ran off with your hairdresser, whose name is Stacy but everyone calls Pumpkin because of her big, round, gushy ass.
Tonight you are very, very tired. Like last night. But tonight there is a Vikings marathon on TV that you have been looking forward to. You’ve actually thought about it somewhat obsessively all day. You just need to get the kids into the bathtub, wash them, get their teeth brushed, help them pick out their outfits for tomorrow, read books to two of them, and make sure the nightlight is perfectly positioned for all three to sleep with, and then you will have one hour to yourself in front of the TV before you fall asleep. It doesn’t matter that you fall asleep on the couch, because you live in a small one-bedroom apartment and the kids all share the bedroom. Your bedroom is the living room. Your bed is the couch. You know this is all temporary. Actually, you hope this is all temporary.
The children are particularly difficult tonight. You do not know whether it’s them or whether you are just tired and impatient. You don’t really care. You just need to get them to sleep as quickly as possible so that you can get to the TV. To see Vikings. But your youngest is unrealistic about what her share of the covers should be. She keeps dragging them to her side and robbing her older brother of his share. Your older daughter watches with dead eyes from her sleeping bag on the floor as your son elbows your youngest and she begins to cry, much more loudly and dramatically than the offense justifies. This infuriates you, which in turn scares your children. It stops the conflict but makes you feel worse, that their fear of you is what it took to make them get along. You can’t think about this too much. You know these thoughts are not helpful and only make the butterflies in your chest wake up (you often get butterflies in your chest that make you feel nauseated and scared of the world).
At last they fall asleep. At last you plop onto the couch and turn on the TV. But the remote is broken. So you now have to drag your ass off the couch to turn the TV on manually. But, still, the TV doesn’t turn on. And now the butterflies are waking up, because you realize there may be something wrong with the TV. You unplug it and plug it back in. Still nothing. You test the plug with a lamp. Shit. The lamp works in the same plug. It’s not the plug. You change the remote batteries by stealing some good double A’s from your son’s remote-control truck. Those good batteries don’t make the TV work either.
You become very quiet as the butterflies take over your chest and the fear of the world returns. You begin to cry. And you become angry at yourself that a broken TV can make you cry. So you lay yourself down on the couch and close your eyes. And you will yourself to sleep. To put this day behind you. You lay there for twenty minutes, fighting the butterflies. But you can’t win. You try so hard. But they are too strong. And you are too upset about this TV. It was all you wanted tonight, and some…someone took it from you.
Strangely, someone inside of you wakes up. A new person. And she starts to tell you that you deserve that TV. That there are new ones at Walmart less than four miles away. That the kids are old enough to sleep alone for thirty minutes while you make a quick run to get a new TV. A big one. So that you can have what you want and deserve. The other people inside of you, the ones that you already know and have known for years, argue with this new person. They tell her that you need to save your money for a down payment on a house, school funds, your children’s futures. But those existing people are also fighting the butterflies, so their voices are not as strong and clear as this new voice. This new voice already has you out the door and into your ex-husband’s truck, which he left you as a parting gift. This new voice already has you down the road and stopping at the Irving for a forty-eight-ounce Dr Pepper, which you slurp with surprising speed. This new voice explains to you, finally, that your need for these sodas stems from when your father gave them to you when you and he used to dig for mussels at his cousin Joe’s house off Wyman. That the sugar and caffeine give you a sense of power and warm love that you desperately need. And this all makes sense to you as you park the truck and bathe in the warmth of Walmart’s famous entrance heaters that always say, “Welcome and come in and get your comfort because it’s right here inside.”
And you don’t have to wander, because you know where the TVs are, and for the first time you don’t even look at prices or coupons. You simply find the biggest TV in the whole place and you ask for it to be put into your car. And you pay for it with cash. A whole month’s worth of welfare and then some. And the existing people inside of you are screaming at you and begging you not to do this, or at the very least to wait a minute and look at the prices and the coupons, but the butterflies have nearly drowned them out by now. And this new person inside is laughing and cheering and telling you how brave you are and how hard you work and how much you deserve everything you are getting for yourself.
And as you drive home, way over the speed limit, you finish your soda and throw the empty cup out the window at Pumpkin’s house. You throw that thing right out the window, just like your father used to do, and it feels good to be like him for a moment. It feels good to drive fast and throw shit and dream about all the fun you’ll have with your new TV that you’ve worked so fucking hard for.
And you walk in the door and you see your younger daughter sobbing on the couch, screaming for her mother. And you see your son staring at you with a look of utter disappointment and confusion. And then you see the oldest. Your nine-year-old. The one who is most like you. And she is angry. And she comes at you, yelling, calling you names an
d accusing you of being a terrible, terrible mother for leaving your children home alone. And you are staring at a younger version of yourself who is about to attack you and right now you just hate yourself, so before you know it you raise your right hand and slap her so hard that she hits the floor. And something about the noise of the slap and the look of betrayal on her face seems to neutralize that new person inside of you. And zap the butterflies. And you can see clearly what has happened over the past thirty-five minutes. You see it from the viewpoint of the existing people inside of you. The people who have been with you your whole life. And it looks bad. It looks and feels so bad. And you don’t know what you should do, but you do know that you are too far along this waterslide to try to climb back up. That maybe the smartest (or only) move you have at this point is to let go and cascade as quickly as you can to the bottom. To splash into the cold pool below. And then, somehow, try to pick yourself up and drag your ass all the way back up those stairs to the top of the slide. And try it again tomorrow.
HAVING YOUR SHORT film premiere at Sundance is incredibly exciting, but there is nothing quite like the moment when they call and tell you that your first feature film has been accepted. In November 2004, Jay and I got the call from a friend that we’d barely squeaked into the festival lineup with The Puffy Chair. We later learned that the head programmer at the time thought the film sucked but that all the younger programmers really liked it and pushed us through.
This is when our careers really started.
A feature film is something that can save you from being broke as shit. Which is what we were at the time and what we were looking to not be anymore. The previous Sundance had seen the $4 million sale of a small film called Napoleon Dynamite. Since we had made The Puffy Chair for $10,000 with a loan from our parents, we couldn’t help but wonder: “What if we are the breakout hit of Sundance? Is it possible that someone is going to buy our film for a multimillion-dollar price tag?” Stranger things had happened, so we both went in with cautious optimism and fairly intense cases of diarrhea.
In a random act of programming cruelty, our film wouldn’t premiere until an entire week after the festival began. So we waited. Impatiently. As other films popped and got bought. And others fizzled and disappeared. It was torture, but finally our premiere came on a Wednesday night at the Library Center Theatre (now our favorite theater in Park City). We tribed up with our parents and Katie in the middle of the sold-out crowd and waited anxiously to see if we got that first laugh. We knew that if we didn’t get it, it meant the audience wasn’t going to like our film and we’d be in for a long ninety minutes. Then something crazy happened…they laughed before the first laugh in the film. At something super subtle and nuanced. We all looked at one another and burst into tears. And watched as our movie played through the roof. Our Q&A session was a total lovefest. Buyers, agents, managers, producers, and studio executives were all swarming us and the film’s sales agents. It was the moment we had been waiting for. It was utterly surreal. We could feel it. We were going to be the breakout movie!
And then…things slowed down a bit. Everyone certainly loved the movie, but there was some hesitation on the part of buyers to purchase a film that had “no big stars and a rather rough-hewn production value.” In many ways, it seemed that everyone wanted to finance our next movie, but they were having trouble pulling the trigger on the movie that they so adamantly claimed they were in love with.
So the festival ended. And still the movie hadn’t sold. But this wasn’t an anomaly. Sometimes it took a bit of time to find the right buyer. Our sales agents kept assuring us that it would all work out eventually, but one by one all the big buyers were passing, and soon we were hoping for any paycheck, let alone a multimillion-dollar sale.
In the meantime, Katie and I (who both starred in the film) decided to go to Los Angeles for a few months to ride the wave of the film’s critical popularity. Jay would go back to New York, where we were all living at the time, and take all the East Coast meetings. This was an early example of what would become our “divide and conquer” approach, which we have since mastered. Sort of.
It turned out that most of the business happens in L.A. (go figure), so Jay spent a ton of time flying out there, sleeping on Katie’s and my couch, and taking rounds of meetings all over Los Angeles with me. And everywhere we went the message was the same: “We LOVED The Puffy Chair. What’s your next movie? We want to make it!” It all seemed so simple. We had literally hundreds of options of producers and studios who all seemed to be clamoring to make our next film.
During this time, we were also traveling to film festivals around the world in support of The Puffy Chair. And while those festivals would pay for our travel, put us up, and feed us, we certainly weren’t making any money, and we had yet to pay back our parents’ $10,000 loan for the movie. In short, we seemed to be in demand, but we couldn’t figure out how to actually make money.
So we started pitching new movie ideas. And we took a TV show idea around town that was about my life in bands. All the TV studios who’d said, “We want your next project,” rejected it. As it turned out, they didn’t want our next project, they just wanted the option to buy our next project. Which meant that we would pitch them an idea, they would turn it down, and they would then ask to buy our next one after that. Rinse and repeat. We also were approached to rewrite some of the studios’ broken scripts that they had in their back catalogue and were looking to breathe new life into. To bring that “honest, raw, emotional comedy” to it that we had put into The Puffy Chair. Great! We’ll do that! So we took their broken scripts and made pitches to deepen them. Make them, ideally, more true and honest. Those pitches were also rejected. As most of those pitches involved losing the very ridiculous set pieces that were making the scripts broken in the first place. It seems they were all for emotional honesty, as long as we didn’t get rid of the “diarrhea out the fourth-floor window” set piece.
Meanwhile, almost all of the buyers had passed on The Puffy Chair by now, and six months had elapsed since Sundance. It was starting to look like an old film that no one wanted to buy. We weren’t able to get any jobs in L.A. And all the noise around us was starting to quiet.
So we started to panic. I, in particular, became afraid that if we didn’t act quickly we would lose our momentum. We both were looking to build a normal life with our girlfriends. Get married. Find a way to make money. And it all seemed to be slipping away.
Then, in late fall 2005, we finally got a legitimate offer on The Puffy Chair. And it was good, $150,000. It included a TV sale and a nice DVD release. But it wouldn’t go into theaters. Our sales agent and good friend Liesl Copland presented it to us, and without blinking we both said, “WE’LL TAKE IT.” But she urged us to pause. She did have one more offer for us to consider. It was a combined offer for a small (at the time) but reputable theatrical company called Roadside Attractions and a new digital-space pioneer called Netflix that was renting DVDs through the mail. This offer would take our movie into theaters, get it reviewed, and give us a chance as directors to really pop in the world. It would be more of an investment in our future. Painfully, it was a “no advance” offer. This meant that we got no money upfront but would share the profits if the film was a success.
And it hit us like a ton of bricks. We had $150,000 on the table with that first offer. The chance to pay back our parents. To share the rest of the profits with our cast and crew. Rent money for at least two years if we lived cheaply. It offered so much. But Liesl knew, and we knew deep down, that we had to take the long play. We had to go with Roadside Attractions and Netflix. Roadside would put us in theaters. Netflix would advertise us on the inside of their DVD mailer envelopes. They were even discussing getting into the business of streaming their movies online, and we could be pioneers in that space with them.
So with heavy, sad hearts, we turned down the $150,000 (FUCK YOOOOUUUUUUUU!) and went with the Roadside/
Netflix deal. It almost killed us to do it. But even our parents, who would have to wait over a year to get paid back, were supportive of the move. And in the end, Liesl was right. What those companies did in terms of getting our film into the world and our names along with it proved to be invaluable in launching our careers. And even though the money part was tough to give up, we ultimately made more on the backend due to how well the film performed, particularly on Netflix’s new streaming service.
We were feeling emboldened. We were feeling that indie film would take care of us if we stayed true to it. That we didn’t need Hollywood one bit. And then, because life is a strange person with many strange hats, within two weeks of this realization we were offered our first deal to write and direct a multimillion-dollar feature film with a major studio.
THERE’S A MOMENT that happens on nearly every film set. The sun is going down. The day is coming to a close. Everyone has been working for eleven hours. Time is running out. And there is still one more scene to shoot. And everyone knows that there is not enough time to shoot the scene. Or at least shoot it properly. This is the point where the director, profusely sweating and stressed out to the core, approaches the cast and puts on a fairly convincing smile….
“So I’ve been thinking about this scene and…I know we discussed shooting this from both sides in a variation of close-ups, medium shots, dolly and Steadicam moves, but…the more I think about it, that might be overkill. And…I’m thinking…it might actually be more poignant if we just back off and shoot it all in one big wide shot? Just…one shot. You know? Kinda, just…let the words and you guys as actors do your thing and I’ll just stay out of the way. Right?”