You Can’t Be Serious(95)
At each juncture in the story, Officer Parker looked more crestfallen. By the end, he seemed fully depressed. His eyes were brimming with a quiet disappointment as he let out a long, delicate sigh. “Kal Penn only makes $11,000 for a movie?”
“This project was about the art!” I shot back.
“Apparently.”
Officer Parker awkwardly took the bills into a back room and verified that they were, thankfully, real. As he handed the stack of cash back to me, he whispered, “You guys should make another one of those movies. Maybe Harold & Kumar Smuggle a Tiny Amount of Money into America,” and burst out laughing to himself once more.
1?Immigrant Indians and their children rarely ask for ice. You get more drink that way.
2?If I can even use such an absurd phrase to describe something that’s still so one percent.
3?I heard yes!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (pea) COCK BLOCKED
I’m standing in a lofty writers’ room on the third floor of a modern glass building at the edge of the Universal Studios lot, completely fulfilled. I’m making a comedy for NBC, one of America’s most iconic television networks, the one I used to watch Family Ties, Seinfeld, Diff’rent Strokes, and NewsRadio on. This comedy is mine, I cocreated it, I’m acting in it, I’m executive producing it. As if I needed one, I get a reminder every morning about how blessed I am and how far I’ve come when I pull onto the lot and slide into my own parking spot with my name on it right next to my own trailer. I smile so widely with such deep happiness and gratitude that I let out a little laugh. Every morning.
At the end of each day, my smile is even bigger. It reflects the creativity of the talented cast and writing team I’ve spent all day with. It still feels surreal to have been able to hire what we’re told is the most diverse writers’ room and cast in network television history. And because of this diversity, I find that I never have to justify myself or set up a cultural reference point. I never have to overexplain that actually no, this joke I pitched has no ethnic or racial signifiers. In this group of talented artists, I just get to be.
When I leave in the evenings, I don’t head out the way I came in. I always back out of my parking spot and go a few hundred feet past our soundstage, so I can drive through Back to the Future’s Courthouse Square. This home of the famous clock tower that powered Marty and Doc through space-time happens to be just past our building, so I make the pilgrimage each night, taking Middle School Me along. I roll down the windows and the warm California air runs across my face, drying my still-wet skin, a result of the makeup wipes that close out each shooting day. I usually drive a full loop and a half around Hill Valley, through the square once, then past the sign that says LYON ESTATES before disappearing through a parking lot bordering facades of a Brooklyn street, and onto Lankershim Boulevard and the 101 Freeway. I live each day with the excitement of what it means to be part of this world. Television is magic. I am fulfilled by my reality beyond measure.
* * *
Designated Survivor (the political conspiracy drama on Netflix in which I played a press secretary) was going into its third and final season when I began to work on a pitch for a long-simmering idea for my own sitcom. The basics were this: A down-and-out guy who is trying to get his life in order ends up teaching a US citizenship class to pay his rent; I wanted it to be forward-looking, aspirational, and patriotic. I was somewhat influenced by my childhood love of shows like Head of the Class and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Rather than being overly edgy or cynical (as lots of great comedy can be), those shows always had a way of making the audience feel good by the time they turned off their televisions at night. It wasn’t just the episodes that I loved, it was the experience of watching them—gathering around the TV with the whole family on a specific night of the week, at a particular time; going to school the next morning and repeating some of the funniest lines with my friends, knowing that they too had watched the episode with their families at the very same time.
I wanted to re-create that feeling—uniting audiences into laughing in a way that celebrates the best of who we are—in a way that actually reflects America’s diversity. I had dabbled with pitching and selling a few pilots in the years before. The process was something I really enjoyed, but none of the projects I created ever made it past the script stage.
The closest I came was probably the year after my White House sabbatical ended. I had sold a concept for a comedy about young staffers at the United Nations. The humor was a blend of intelligent and stupid, and when it came time for notes, the network seemed to always get stuck on the silliest jokes, like one I borrowed from marines on a USO tour I was on years ago: In a scene in which an African ambassador is on the treadmill at the UN gym, the camera pans over to notice his T-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan “I was all up in Djibouti.” (That’s the whole joke and I love it.) “It’s funny,” the network said during that week’s notes session, “but we don’t think most of the audience will know what Djibouti is or how to pronounce it. Can you change the name of the country to, like, France or something?”
“What do you mean? ‘I was all up in your France’ doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just make it a joke about a country people know.”
In the end, they didn’t move beyond the script stage of development, giving me the polite yet frustrating, “It’s great but doesn’t fit with our other scripts. We’re passing on this.” (That’s the network equivalent of It’s not you, it’s me. Except that, in this case, it’s actually them.)