This Will Only Hurt a Little(60)
After the Oscars, for which Brokeback ridiculously lost Best Picture to Crash (don’t come at me, Crash sucks), we picked up Marc in our limo and headed out to all the parties starting at Vanity Fair’s. We had been there no less than ten minutes when I noticed Quentin Tarantino looking at us and making his way over. I stepped to the side so he could come into our group and congratulate Michelle, as I’d grown so used to doing. A few times, even, it was assumed I was their publicist and people would ask me if it was okay to talk to them. At one party, a well-known actor asked me to go get him a drink before Heath intervened and spared me from being the dude’s cocktail waitress.
“Uh. Actually, Busy’s our friend,” he said. “She doesn’t work for us.”
So, obviously, at the Vanity Fair party, I expected Quentin to be coming over to talk to M or Heath, but instead he beelined for me.
“You’re Busy Philipps!” he said. “I fucking love you, man.”
Flabbergasted, I laughed nervously, and Michelle smiled and put her arm through mine protectively. “Ummm. Yeah?” I said. “You’re Quentin Tarantino, obviously.”
“Man, can I just tell you? I’m fucking obsessed with you! You’re such a badass! I LOVE Love, Inc.! I’ve seen every episode, I had my assistant get them for me on DVD.”
I mean. What do you say to that? Except to call bullshit, which is what I did.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
He shook his head. “No! Really! I love it! The whole thing with Mike Smith and then the other Mike Smith, man? Genius!”
Now he was referencing specific story lines. He wasn’t fucking with me? I mean, from knowing who he is I probably don’t need to tell you that he then went on and talked at great length for some time about Love, Inc. and then Freaks and Geeks, which he said he found AFTER Love, Inc. since I was on that show, as well. He told me about a project he had coming up and that he wanted me to audition for it. I was over the moon. What?! Quentin Tarantino wanted me to audition for him?? It seemed crazy but I was beyond flattered and couldn’t wait to call Lorrie Bartlett in the morning and tell her the story.
M and Heath basically had to move to L.A. during the awards season, which thrilled me and made Michelle uneasy, since Los Angeles has never been her favorite city. The traffic and paparazzi and perceived superficiality always made her feel unsafe. But being there with her new family and me and being recognized for her talents in a real way for the first time allowed her to be able to have fun. One afternoon, Marc and I were hanging when my phone rang.
“Are you and Marc at his house?” she asked.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“Heath wants to go to this fancy sushi place. We can’t bring a five-month-old in there. Can we drop Matilda with you for an hour or so?”
Next thing you know, Heath and Michelle handed us the baby and zipped away to get sushi. Marc and I spent the next two hours playing pretend parents with my sweet little Matilda, making her laugh, giving her a bottle, and swaddling her up in a towel because we didn’t have a blanket. I knew she liked to be swaddled—I had watched Michelle and Heath expertly do it a hundred times—but it would be a few years until I would have to perfect my own swaddling.
Even though the show wasn’t the greatest sitcom of all time (Quentin Tarantino’s review notwithstanding), I was grateful for the weekly paychecks from Love. Inc. since I was in the middle of buying my first house. My business managers were attempting to get me to stay under a certain number on the house, but of course I fell in love with a home way out of my price range that I forced them to make happen for me. In retrospect, I should have held off on buying altogether, but I had already started looking when Marc and I began dating, and it seemed silly not to go through with it simply because I had a new boyfriend who owned his own house, even taking into consideration how serious we already were. Plus, I thought I should live alone as an adult before I got married, not that Marc and I were engaged. We weren’t, but it seemed like it was heading in that direction. I mean, I had already made the decision and all of his friends were in the middle of friend wedding season—you know, those two years where seemingly every single person in a friend group gets married and every weekend is another wedding. Weddings were in the air for Marc and his crew. But for my close friends, too. Michelle had Matilda, and my best friend from high school, Kate, had been married for a year already.
After Love, Inc. was canceled, I decided I’d had enough of my breakup-trauma red hair and slowly started getting it back to blond. My birthday was coming up again, and I thought maybe Marc and Lizzy and I would all just have the party together, since his birthday is a week after mine. He was super weird about including me in their big party that they had at the Chateau Marmont together every year. At first he tried to say that it would add too many people, then he said that it wasn’t really even up to him, he’d have to ask Lizzy. And then he said, don’t you just want your own party?? My feelings were hurt, but what could I say? The joint birthday party predated me, so I didn’t really have any right to get mad about it. But I was. Heath and Michelle offered to host a party in their new house in Hollywood for me, with Heath hiring a DJ he liked and a bouncer to keep Hollywood party crashers out.
As promised, Quentin Tarantino called me in for his new movie, titled Death Proof. There were very specific instructions that actresses were to come in cutoff jean short shorts, a tank top and flip-flops. Every girl I knew going in for it rolled their eyes at the request but we all obliged, a waiting room full of scantily clad clones, looking like we were ready for a day at the beach. Quentin read all of the parts opposite me, which was a bit eccentric but obviously what he liked to do. After I did the reading, he explained to me that I was such a badass but this part wasn’t right for me. Because he had written another role with me in mind, the part of Jungle Julia, the African American heroine of the picture.