This Will Only Hurt a Little(50)

Most of the time, the three of us hung out together. Jeff wasn’t exactly a third wheel, because it kind of seemed like Craig would be just as happy to hang out with his brother without me anywhere to be found. In fact, I felt like I was the third wheel most of the time. I seemed to embarrass Craig when I would try to join in on their jokes or talk about movies with them. He told me I laughed too loud in restaurants, asking if I always needed people to look at me. I knew that maybe he was right and I should try to be quieter, which would in turn make me more lovable to him, so I vowed silently to work on my dumb loud laugh.

In spite of all this, leaving Craig to go back to Wilmington was tough, but we made it through the season. That year, I lived at the beach and got a roommate, a friend of Michelle’s boyfriend who was working as a PA on the show. My old friend Oliver Hudson (who I’d been friends with since we spent a summer in Wisconsin when we were nineteen filming a terrible independent movie called The Smokers) did a ton of episodes, as did Bianca Kajlich and Jensen Ackles and Hal Ozsan. It was a really great year, with so many people around to hang out with, I wasn’t depressed or as lonely as I’d been in season five. Seth Rogen was cast as a guest star on the show and he came out and did an episode with me, which was fun. He and Judd had brought me back to L.A. to do two episodes of Undeclared, where I tried my best not to be jealous that I wasn’t on that show full-time, since it was so much more my people and sensibility, not to mention what felt like the entire crew of Freaks and Geeks.

I missed Craig so much and would always offer to fly him out to be with me. I was insanely jealous of any girls he was hanging out with or would mention while I was out of town and was prone to sulking on the phone, even though he assured me I had nothing to worry about.

When Dawson’s was over and I’d wrapped the show, Emily and I moved over to the Hancock Park–adjacent area of Los Angeles, into the upper floor of a Spanish duplex, just two streets away from where Rashida Jones had lived when I was on Freaks and Geeks. I loved the neighborhood and I was so much closer to Craig, which was great too. I left my longtime manager Lorraine in favor of a large management firm specializing in comedy called 3 Arts. I didn’t love my new managers the way I loved Lorraine, but it felt like an adult work decision that made sense, so I did it. I spent the summer auditioning for movies. I had done a fairly terrible pilot earlier that season that hadn’t gotten picked up.

Craig’s brother, Jeff, had pitched me an idea for a TV show for me, about a senior in high school who starts a makeup line, and I pitched it to my new manager, Mark. He liked the idea of me creating a show for myself but he thought I should work with an established TV writer, as opposed to Jeff, and said, “Look, Biz, if you get a show on the air, you can give him a job!”

Mark hooked me up with an “established writer” that 3 Arts represented who liked Jeff’s idea but what if instead we made it about a girl who’s in her twenties and inherits a bar from her estranged father? He actually sold the pitch and wrote the pilot, but it was never picked up or made. Jeff was weird about it, like I had taken his idea without giving him anything for it. I was confused. I had pitched his idea to my manager, but it hadn’t gone anywhere, which happens all the time. The show that writer sold and wrote was clearly his own idea. Plus, I made no money on any of it, I was just tentatively attached. And I had told Jeff what Mark had said, that if the other show had gotten picked up, we would’ve given him a job on it. It all seemed reasonable to me, but what did I know? I was twenty-four. But I also understood that Jeff had been waiting for something to happen career-wise and was getting antsy. I tried passing his scripts on to a few writers I knew, to see if anyone had a writer’s assistant job open. I also gave some of his specs to my manager. I thought Jeff, like Craig, was really talented and just needed a break. I wanted to help in any way I could.

Earlier that year, I’d switched agents shortly before switching managers, signing with a woman named Lorrie Bartlett at the Gersh Agency, which was still a smaller agency, but Michelle was represented there, so I felt like I was in good company. Lorrie was a badass agent who seemed to really understand me and had a similar sensibility in terms of the kinds of projects we both liked for me. She called me in late July with an audition for a new Wayans brothers movie. I remember I had passed on auditioning for Scary Movie, because I thought the audition sides were demeaning—I think I objected to acting out giving a blow job to a ghost. And then of course, the movie was so huge and made Anna Faris a star and I felt like an idiot for not understanding the humor in it and just going for it and humiliating myself. WHATEVER IT TAKES, GUYS!

Before I went in for White Chicks, I didn’t even read the script. I just looked at the sides and gave it my all for the casting director, who brought me back for Keenen Ivory Wayans later that week. When I GOT THE PART, I still hadn’t read the script. The truth was, the log line basically told me everything I needed to know. Plus, I had eventually seen Scary Movie, so I had a pretty good idea about the kinds of movies they were making. This one was filming in Vancouver, which was a much shorter flight than to Wilmington, so I was happy to go. Plus, the movie would be over in a few months and then I would be back for pilot season. Craig was going to come visit me as much as he could, and I was promised I would be able to go back to L.A. a few times.

I think the first time I really read the script was at the table read in Vancouver. I mean, there are certainly some projects where you want to really dig into the material, but seeing as how there was a stable of writers and joke writers who were punching up the script the entire time, tracking the insanity of the story of White Chicks seemed less than important. I guess if I had read it, I would’ve seen that my character’s description, which had been erased for the audition sides, was that she was the “overweight friend.” As a size 8, I was cast as the overweight friend. Maybe the joke is that the girls are so shallow that a size 8 was overweight? I choose to believe that.