This Will Only Hurt a Little(35)
BAD REPUTATION
(Joan Jett)
“Busy Philipps, everyone!”
Almost every audition for producers or directors starts the same way, with some variation of “Say hi to Busy Philipps!” or “Here’s Busy Philipps!”
And freshman year, this was all I wanted. To hear them call my name. To get started. A few years ago, Colin Hanks told me he remembers me crying hysterically in my dorm-room bed and sobbing, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! I JUST CAN’T WAIT ANY LONGER TO BE AN ACTRESS!!”
I’m rolling my eyes right now, but that’s who I was. It’s who I am. I have a hard time just existing. I always think that if only I could be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else, then I would be happy, finally. The hole would be filled. I know that’s not how life works. But it’s always been the thing that drives me.
? ? ?
Colin and I met when my new college friends and I went to see the LMU theater department production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There was a kid in it playing Billy Bibbit, and as soon as he took the stage, I was in. Listen, I know. But there’s just something about talent—real talent—that gets me. Also, he was tall and skinny and adorable. At intermission, I looked in the program and found his name.
“Do you know him?” I whispered to my friend Joe. “What year is he?”
“That’s Colin Hanks. Tom Hanks’s son.”
After the show, Joe introduced us. I told him he was great in the play (which he was). He told me he liked my skate shoes. And, just like that, I had a crush on him.
I had a boyfriend back home, and he had a girlfriend back home. But it soon became clear that we liked each other, and we started finding ourselves in the same places at the same time. One night, we hung out at a party and then stayed up all night, walking to the bluffs that looked out over the lights of L.A. and talking until the sun came up. By seven in the morning, we had kissed and decided we would both break up with our significant others back home.
And that was that.
Around that time, one of the Barbie girls I’d met at the toy fair very sweetly offered to give me some advice about getting started in the business. I ended up meeting with her manager, Lorraine Berglund, at her home in the Valley. She was petite and stylish, and she and her husband were from London. I immediately loved her. She told me all about the kind of clients she represented and how I would need to get real headshots, since apparently the ones I’d been using in Arizona wouldn’t work for L.A. She even offered to split the cost with me, with the deal that I would pay her back when I started making money.
Eventually, she got me a meeting with Marilyn Szatmary, who was the head of a small talent agency, and who did not disappoint in terms of being intimidating. She looked at me skeptically over her desk and narrowed her eyes. “Well, you’re very attractive. But can you act? Because I don’t take on pretty people who can hit their marks, I represent actors.”
I shit you not. Twenty years later and I can hear her saying those exact words to nineteen-year-old me. In fact, I believe that I committed them to memory while I was sitting there, because I knew what a fucking iconic thing that is to say to a young actress trying to break in to this business. Marilyn Szatmary did not suffer fools.
I assured Marilyn that I was, indeed, an actor. She then asked me to prove it by coming back and auditioning for her and the rest of the agents. I was elated. And I nailed it. Just like that, I had a manager and an agent, and I was ready for everything else. But it wasn’t until the second semester of my sophomore year that the auditions started to roll in.
Dawson’s Creek had been such a huge hit that all the networks were attempting their own versions of a “teen” show, hoping they would discover the next Katie Holmes. (I wouldn’t be cast on Dawson’s Creek for three more years.) In the span of those first few months of 1998, I was sent on over ninety auditions and callbacks. It seems impossible, I know, but sometimes I would only be reading for an assistant and then I would have to come back for the actual casting director, and then they would bring me back for producers or the director. Sometimes I’d audition for the same TV show four or five times. It became essentially a full-time job. Forget about making it to Intro to World Religions or Psych 102. I was in Glendale in a random office park, reading the same angsty teen drivel for the forty-seventh time. I got very used to hearing feedback like “They want to put a pin in you” (which means they like you but aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet) and “You’re not right for the lead but they want you to come back in for the other girl.”
I had an audition one day for a pilot called The Acting Class. Lorraine told me the show was for NBC with Imagine Entertainment and Steve Martin producing, which was already exciting enough. But when I got the script, I couldn’t believe it.
Writers: Carlos Jacott and Noah Baumbach
Director: Noah Baumbach
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? NOAH BAUMBACH? FROM KICKING AND SCREAMING?! I was dying. Plus, I was perfect for it. I skipped my classes and worked on it all morning and then went in for my pre-read, which was just for an assistant. She loved it and had me come back a few hours later for the casting director, who also loved what I did and asked if I would be able to come back the next day for the director and producers. I was literally losing my shit. This was what I was supposed to be doing. I was sure of it. This was my TV show. It was poetic, really.