Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

by Mindy Kaling

  I immediately stood up, dried my hands, handed some cash to the puzzled woman, and raced back to work. I quietly entered the writers’ room and sat down.

  My friend and fellow writer Lee Eisenberg looked at me quizzically and texted: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

  I texted back: THE BATHROOM.

  Greg did not acknowledge my absence, or find out that I’d kicked his car, and it blew over. The bottles of water remained mine, bwah ha ha! That evening, when I had my nightly chat with my mother on the way home from work, I made the mistake of telling her about what had happened. I was hoping to get consoled for a bad day at work. Instead she yelled at me. “Are you crazy? You owe everything to Greg Daniels!” Mom always says “Greg Daniels,” as though there were a few people at work with the first name Greg and I might not know who she was talking about. (There aren’t.) “Greg Daniels took a chance on you and changed your life! Don’t fight with Greg Daniels!” Dad got on the phone from the upstairs line, as he always does. He agreed with Mom. “I know you get upset, Min. But you have to be professional.” I am still trying to follow this terrific advice, only somewhat successfully, five years later.

  The season six writers and editors.

  STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY

  It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?”

  I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.”

  Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys.

  Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.

  WHERE I WORK

  Many people assume The Office is shot in Scranton, Pennsylvania, because we take pains to shoot on locations that are green and East Coast–looking. Other people think we shoot on a picturesque studio lot like you see on the tour of Universal Studios, where Jaws is swimming happily near the Desperate Housewives cul-de-sac and down the block from an immolating car from the Backdraft set. Not so.

  Anyone who comes to visit the set of The Office always says the same thing when they leave: “Holy crap, that was scary!” This is because we shoot at the end of a dead-end street on an industrial block of Panorama City, in the San Fernando Valley, which sounds great—who doesn’t love panoramas? But don’t be fooled! The name is a trick. At one point Panorama City was part of Van Nuys, but Van Nuys did whatever the opposite of secede is to it. Expelled it? I’ll put it this way. Van Nuys took one look at Panorama City and was like, “Uh, get your own name. We don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  Rainn Wilson, violent ogre.

  We’re at the end of a block with a gun parts warehouse, a neon sign store, and a junkyard. Our street is also a favored drag-racing strip for competitive, bored Mexican teenagers. We’re always having to stop filming and wait for the noise to die down from junkyard dogs barking and gun parts being drilled. Come to think of it, there might actually be an immolating car around here once in a while. Take that, Universal Studios!

  I love our set because we are isolated from other shows. Isolation is good, because there are no distractions to the work, and believe me, I get distracted easily. There is no cool shopping or dining or anything near us whatsoever, so we can only focus on working on the show. It makes us feel sequestered and secluded, which I think is good for creativity. Also, I can run out at any time and buy my gun parts.

  KELLY KAPOOR GETS GIFT BAGS

  When I started attending events associated with The Office, I started to receive gift bags. I’d recall breathless accounts from magazines of gifts like sapphire earrings, lifetime memberships to fancy gyms, gift certificates for total facial reconstruction plastic surgery, week-long stays at wildlife reserves where you get to touch the lions, and $500 jars of miracle face cream made from human placenta. It seemed like the greatest racket ever, and in 2006, I started to participate in it.

  The way it works is you go to an awards show for which you’ve spent a crazy amount of money getting dressed up. After you win or lose in your categories, there is a nontelevised portion of the evening where you and every other person at the event gets herded into a giant windowless room and fed a hot buffet of food on par with a medium-fancy bar mitzvah. The thing is the food tastes insanely good because you’ve not eaten anything all day. After mingling for a little while, and mentally ranking the gowns of the other actresses so you can call your mom and give her the scoop, you trade in a parking ticket–like stub to some stressed-out looking woman at the exit and she gives you a black canvas bag packed with goodies. You get really excited. And then you open it up.

  What I Have Gotten in My Gift Bags Over the Years

  • protein bars

  • a personal hygiene spray that I can only describe as a butt freshener

  • socks with individual toes

  • a travel-size tube of toothpaste for “women’s teeth”

  • a SpongeBob SquarePants keychain

  • a mechanical pencil (kinda cool, but it was instantly stolen when I took it to work)

  • weird coffee pods that work only if you buy the coffee machine that the pods are made for

  • tan silicone cutlets you glue to your real breasts

  • a crotchless girdle meant to hold your back fat in

  • a children’s book written by a lead in the original Beverly Hills 90210

  • a diabetes cookbook (I actually love this)

  The gift bags are junk bags. I’m not telling you this to complain, but rather to relieve you of any romantic notions you might have of them. Use those romantic notions for something else, like thinking about the significance and grandeur of our National Mint. Not only would you never purchase any of the stuff in these gift bags, but you would not even give it to a relative you have a chilly relationship with. There is, however, one excellent perk we get on our show: I’ve enjoyed an endless supply of free paper, paperclips, envelopes, and office supplies since joining The Office, because I steal props on a regular basis.

  BECOMING A LITTLE BIT FAMOUS

  When you have it as good as I know I do, work-wise, you rarely have time to enjoy your fabulous good fortune, because you’re too busy worrying about when it will run out. After the first season of The Office, I remember Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, and I got turned away from a party thrown by a famous magazine at a fancy hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The party coordinators didn’t think being on The Office warranted our ge
tting in. We stood and watched the One Tree Hill cast waltz in with no problem. The PR people at the party regarded us with the disdain normally reserved for on-set tutors for child actors. (For the record, there is usually no one weirder on a set than the tutor for child actors. They tend to be aging hippie ladies with inappropriately long hair tied coquettishly in a messy gray braid, and an all-denim outfit that would put Jay Leno to shame.)

  Luckily, I was not in the aging child-tutor stage for long, though. Midway through season two, we were finally getting recognition due to our track record of a dozen great episodes, and people were into us. It was glorious. The highlight was one Saturday, when I was vacuuming my car at a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard during the Gay Pride parade and a group of gay veterans in uniform shrieked, “Oh my God, it’s Kelly Kapoor!” The guys at the gas station thought I was hot shit.

  This is a photo of when I directed “Michael’s Last Dundies,” which I also wrote. In this moment I am explaining what comedy is to Will Ferrell. (photo credit 14.5)

  Being the “It” show in season two presented its own challenges, though. A common refrain we heard was “I disliked your first season, but by the second season you really came into your own.” I think people thought their compliment meant more if they tempered it with something insulting first. As if I were to say, “I initially thought you were ugly, but then you walked closer to me and I realized you were pretty.” I love our first season. I think it is a little dark and really funny. I found the phrase “came into your own” especially weird, as though The Office finally developed breasts or something.

  WHAT WE HAVE TO BE SCARED ABOUT

  What’s coming up next is a perennial fear in the television world. Some people who work in the industry confidently ignore all new good shows, saying, “There’s room for lots of good television. That won’t affect us,” but that’s simply not true. There’s room for a little good scripted television and many, many reality TV shows about monitored weight loss. If the science were there to genetically clone Jillian Michaels, our network would just be different filmed iterations of obese people losing weight, all day long. My friend Charlie Grandy once joked that it is only a matter of time before there is a category at the Emmys for “Best Extreme Weight Loss Program.”

  In the spring, when the networks trot out their lineup of new shows, you may idly think, Meh, maybe I’ll try this one or DVR that one, but I get a little paranoid trying to figure out whether any newcomer is going to beat us into a painful death by primetime scheduling. I’ve made a list of potential shows that I believe would kill The Office in the ratings:

  • I Want to Be Able to Walk for My Wedding!: Jillian Michaels helps a morbidly obese couple confined to their sofa lose weight for their nuptials.

  • I Want to Be Able to Walk When I Officiate a Wedding!: Jillian Michaels helps an obese priest, confined to his parish, officiate a wedding.

  • Obese Priest: A priest who eats too much dessert helps a group of at-risk, but hilarious teens.

  • Sing-Sing-Sings!: A singing competition in Sing Sing prison.

  • The Weekly Hangover: A reality show where three friends are chloroformed and put in a random dangerous situation, like in the movie The Hangover, and have to piece back what happened to their lives.

  • Interspecies Friendships: Have you ever seen that YouTube video where the elephant is friends with the collie? Or the one where the turtle and the hippopotamus are best friends? I could watch those for hours. These are the buddy comedies people crave.

  I actually think I might create Interspecies Friendships. A smart, small observational show about two animals who are friends against all odds. It’ll be a tough sell at first, but by season two it’ll really come into its own. But it’ll never be as good as the original British version, Interspecies Chums.

  Franchises I Would Like to Reboot

  BY NOW YOU’VE seen what a savvy Hollywood person I am and wonder when I will be making my big jump from television to film. Here’s where I explain everything and tell about some of my most exciting film projects in the pipeline.

  Nobody likes it when Hollywood reboots beloved franchises. When I was hired to write for the NBC remake of the classic BBC show The Office, everyone had the immediate physical reaction of being around someone who had just farted.

  The thing is at least we were trying to remake something that was excellent. What I have never understood is the rebooting of already terrible things. For example, take The Dukes of Hazzard. This was a show whose two greatest claims to fame were (a) a car that consistently jumped over large objects at critical moments, and (b) introducing Americans to the Daisy Duke short-shorts, which single-handedly lowered the average age of sexual intercourse in this country by several years. I loved the show as a four-year-old, but even then I kind of knew The Dukes of Hazzard was for kids. I thought, This is good for me, or a five-year-old, tops. So, when it got remade as a movie, I didn’t quite understand.

  But then I heard how much money it made and I thought, I need to get in on this, pronto. Here are some franchises I would like to reboot, for the love of the franchise and a little bit for the love of the money I think they would make.

  A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

  Unfortunately, a bit of an uphill battle here. As fun and frothy as this movie was, it was based on an actual historical event. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was a real thing. Also, I would reboot this movie only if I can play the Rosie O’Donnell part, and I’m pretty sure there weren’t many Indian women in the United States in the 1940s.

  THE HULK

  I feel like if they’re going to remake this every two or three years anyway, I want to get a shot at one.

  OCEAN’S FIVE

  Let’s be real here. The first Ocean’s film—not the 1960’s Ocean’s 11; how old do you think I am?—was great, but there were already four too many guys in it. Don Cheadle had, like, three lines in the entire movie. The films that came after Ocean’s Eleven, where they kept adding people, were hard to follow. There were so many characters doing different Vegas-related missions. It made you feel like someone behind the scenes was out of control, like, oh my God, if we don’t stop this person, all of the Screen Actors Guild is going to be in Danny Ocean’s gang. That’s why we need to do a prequel and cut out the ragtaggiest of the ragtag bunch. We do that Benjamin Button backward-aging special effect magic on Clooney, and bam! We’ve got a summer blockbuster.

  VAN HELSING

  Why was this movie so bad? It had all the ingredients of a great movie. The subject material (handsome European professor annihilates vampires) is the stuff dreams are made of. Hugh was in prime Jackman when he played smoldering Van Helsing. The lovely Kate Beckinsale was there, too, as pale beautiful lady friend or whatever. Why wasn’t this a killer movie and a classic? I could so redo this, with the same cast, and make it a better movie. I’m throwing down the gauntlet, Van Helsing.

  And speaking of movies about regular people destroying magical creatures:

  GHOSTBUSTERS

  I always wanted the reboot of Ghostbusters to be four girl-ghostbusters. Like, four normal, plucky women living in New York City searching for Mr. Right and trying to find jobs—but who also bust ghosts. I’m not an idiot, though. I know the demographic for Ghostbusters is teenage boys, and I know they would kill themselves if two ghostbusters had a makeover at Sephora. I just have always wanted to see a cool girl having her first kiss with a guy she’s had a crush on, and then have to excuse herself to go trap the pissed-off ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or something. In my imagination, I am, of course, one of the ghostbusters, with the likes of say, Emily Blunt, Taraji Henson, and Natalie Portman. Even if I’m not the ringleader, I’m definitely the one who gets to say “I ain’t afraid a no ghost.” At least the first time.

  Contributing Nothing at Saturday Night Live

  I WAS A dreadful guest writer on Saturday Night Live. Not like, destructively bad or anything, just a useless, friendl
y extra body in the SNL offices eating hamburgers for free, like Wimpy from Popeye.

  I came into the show during the hiatus between seasons two and three of The Office. My friend Mike Schur, who had worked at SNL before The Office, recommended me to Mike Shoemaker, a producer over there. Mike Shoemaker and some others had liked an episode of The Office I’d written called “The Injury,” where Michael grills his foot accidentally in a George Foreman Grill. Mike Shoemaker graciously invited me to write there for a few weeks. I later found out that most guest writers were there as a kind of “audition” for a permanent writing job, and they came prepared with lots of hilarious sketch ideas, even some partially written. But since I was coming straight from my Office job, I didn’t have time to prepare, even if I had known I was supposed to.

  I guess that’s not entirely true. I was prepared in my own way, which is to say, I had packed several fashion-forward outfits that I bought from Nordstrom Rack with my mom, all of which were rendered useless immediately. Writers and actors at SNL looked cool but casual. When I heard of a “television writing job in New York City,” I imagined a Gossip Girl–type aesthetic. My outfits of button-down shirts, an ironic broach, men’s ties, kilts, and gold high-tops were completely stupid in the face of Seth Meyers’s subtly awesome gray T-shirts and Levi’s or whatever.