Going Off Script (11 page)

I was on a roll. I could be writing liner notes. Then I pulled out Daft Punk. Instead of just admitting that I knew absolutely nothing about them, I decided I could bullshit my way through it, so I just started making up all kinds of lies about how they were reinventing punk music and bringing huge numbers of new fans to the genre because of their creative genius, etc., etc. The interviewers looked at me blankly. Because, I discovered later, Daft Punk had nothing to do with punk music whatsoever.

“Okay, thank you. Uh huh. Bye-bye.”

I squeaked by on savings for a few months. Then, as luck would have it, my best friend, Colet Abedi (we’d met while giving each other Bitchy Resting Face over the copying machine as low-level associate producers for a late-night syndicated gossip show that instantly tanked), got a job casting for ABC’s
The Bachelor,
and she brought me on board as a casting assistant for an upcoming project. We were going on the best girls’ trip ever—an all-expenses-paid weekend in Minneapolis to find hot guys to be potential cast mates for the show. We went out partying our first night, and all but forgot our mission when a waitress walked by our table and said “Weezer” under her breath. I looked over and spotted the band hanging out.

“I get the lead singer,” I told Colet, who had no idea who Weezer was, anyway.

“Fine, who’s the lead guitarist?” she agreed.

“Tall dude with the tats.”

Weezer seemed delighted to see us, and we proceeded to spend the whole night hanging out with them, taking it from drinks to dinner to clubbing. We were on our way to party
more back at our hotel when the topic of tattoos came up, and the lead singer (mine) said his friend (Colet’s lead guitarist) had done the ink we were all admiring. I was impressed. “He sings and is a tattoo artist? Is there anything this guy can’t do?” I said out loud. All of my date’s bandmates started laughing and saying stuff like, “Sing? Have you ever heard John sing? He is the worst!” I thought it was all band humor until one of the other guys said, “Come to think of it, none of us have good voices. Good thing we’re great tattoo artists!”

“Wait, you guys aren’t Weezer?” I asked. They looked at each other and laughed some more.

“Why would you think that?” my almost-boyfriend wondered.

“Well, because I think the waitress mentioned it when you sat down at the restaurant.” Had we misheard? Or been set up?

More laughter, accompanied by high-fives and drunken keeling-over glee. Colet and I turned away without a word and walked away, pissed that we had just wasted our whole night with a bunch of drunk Minneapolis tattoo artists. I wanted to tattoo the word
asshole
on my forehead.

“Bitches!” the spurned tattoo artists called after us.

“Screw you, non-Weezers!” I shot back.

The next day, we slapped some flyers in a few gyms and waited around for hot glistening men to come flex for us and beg to be on our show. It didn’t happen. We were perplexed. This was Minnesota. Shouldn’t it be swarming with second-generation Scandinavian studs? It was the July Fourth weekend, and we decided that the quality hot guys must be on the water, so off we headed to Lake Minnetonka. Because, yeah, everyone knows it is nationally acclaimed as the Lake o’ Ripped Bachelors. Right? Our plan was to wangle our way on to someone’s fancy boat. Once there, the flaw in our thinking became obvious: The fancy
boats were in the middle of the water. We would need a boat of our own to get to Gatsby’s yacht. Or Sven’s party pontoon. Whatever. We just needed some not-ugly men in their twenties with a pulse and all their teeth at this point.

“We’d like a pontoon,” we told the boat rental place.

“No, we’re all out.”

“Um. Okay, do you have a cigarette boat?” Clearly I had been watching way too much
Miami Vice.

“No.”

“A Scarab?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, what do you have that we can drive?”

We ended up with a little motorboat that we couldn’t manage to steer in anything resembling a straight line. Or even a lazy zigzag. We just kept spinning in circles. We’d come up to some fancy boat and pirouette in front of it like some overexcited Pomeranian about to pee on the fancy people. Nobody invited us aboard. Finally, we headed for Lord Fletcher’s Old Lake Lodge, renowned for its lively bar scene on the shores of Minnetonka. We pulled up to Lord Fletcher’s berth and crashed into it. We tried but failed to act cool as we hoisted ourselves out of our toy boat and went inside to recruit gorgeous Norwegian American bachelors. Lord Fletcher’s has six bars and something like nine dining areas, and still we struck out. Minnesota, we were forced to conclude, had a serious lack of desperate people willing to humiliate themselves on a reality show. We went back without a single candidate.

B
ack in L.A., Colet and I were driving down Beverly Boulevard one Friday afternoon, talking about our career hopes like we often did, when I felt this sense of despair swamp me.
I’d been in L.A. for four years, and nothing was happening. I had no money. No one was hiring me. Everything was falling through. The few opportunities I had fizzled quickly. I had gotten on television exactly one time, and that was only because the ship was going down and the producer had nothing to lose: I had been a lowly associate producer for a late-night
National Enquirer
syndicated gossip show, and on the brink of cancellation, my boss told me I could report a piece about the eighties making a tiny comeback. I went all out, dressing like Madonna and roller-skating down the boardwalk of Venice Beach with a boombox on my shoulder, making an absolute idiot of myself as I called out to gawkers, “Hey, the eighties are back, didn’t you hear?” The cute spoof was all I had to show for my on-air aspirations. I was a total loser, and my world felt small and pathetic.

“I’m done,” I told Colet. “I’m never going to make it here.”

Colet was having none of it. If I wanted a pity party, she was not going to RVSP.

“Giuliana, you can’t give up hope! What’re you going to do?”

“Maybe go home?” I ventured.

“And marry Richard?” she scoffed. I shook my head. It wasn’t as if Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, or any real Weezers were going to carry me off on a white horse.

“I need a sign,” I declared. Colet was deeply spiritual. She was into crystals and oils and energies and all sorts of weird shit I don’t understand. A sign was something she could relate to. My spirituality was more traditional, but I had my superstitions, too. Bizarre as it sounds, my phone rang as if on cue, interrupting our contemplation of my future. I glanced at the number but didn’t recognize it.

“Get it,” Colet suddenly urged.

“Nah, I don’t know the number. I don’t mess with unknown numbers.”

“You have to answer it!”

I picked up the call and heard a woman’s voice.

“Giuliana?” she asked. “This is Gina Merrill.”

“OH MY GOD,
the
GINA MERRILL?” I shouted back. “I’ve been sending you tapes for years, did you get them?”

Gina was a talent recruiter at E! Entertainment. Surprised by my fangirl reaction, she couldn’t immediately confirm that she’d gotten my previous six thousand pieces of mail, but she had gotten the latest tape, with my LOAD work and the goofy eighties-is-back piece.

“Can you come in on Monday to audition for a week?” she wanted to know.

I stayed calm long enough to get a time and place, then hung up so Colet and I could scream with excitement.

“I know this is it,” I said. The turning point.

The first thing I did was trade in my Jetta for a Jeep Cherokee, taking out a loan to pay for it. I was that sure that my fortunes were about to shift.

I was supposed to report to E! on the Miracle Mile at 6:30 on Monday morning. I showed up fifteen minutes early, carting a big suitcase full of clothes and shoes, curling irons, and my Miss Maryland Caboodles case full of makeup. The office building was all high ceilings and marble floors, silent and empty. No one was there, and a sign said they didn’t open until eight a.m. After some confusion and calling around, I discovered I was at the wrong reception area. The executive producer, Peggy Jo Abraham, came to fetch me. She looked surprised by my suitcase.

“What’s all this stuff?” she asked.

“My hair and makeup and clothes,” I replied.

“We have hair and makeup and wardrobe,” Peggy explained.

Whoa.

It got even better as I walked through the newsroom and caught sight of popular anchors Jules Asner and Steve Kmetko, and was ushered into a cubicle and given a temporary password.
I soon learned from a friendly assignment editor named Maureen that I was the thirty-ninth person to try out for the job.
And the last,
I silently vowed.

Nowadays, when you see a segment of a host interviewing a celebrity, he’s most likely reading questions that a producer writes. A small hive of broadcast worker bees perform all the vital tasks and make the necessary decisions that go into each segment. Back in 2001, though, it was all on the reporter. We were expected to come up with questions, log the tape, find the best moments, do our own research, write our own scripts, and choose the clips to go with them—all before the show went live at 4:00 p.m. Pacific time.

My first day on the job, I was assigned to report on that night’s premiere of
Summer Catch,
a movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel. In the movie, a character played by Wilmer Valderrama has an affair with his friend’s mom, played by Beverly D’Angelo. When Wilmer came up to me on the red carpet at the premiere, I thought it was a stroke of genius to ask him:

“So, do you like moms in real life?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Wilmer said playfully.

“You know,” I went on, “do you
do
moms in real life?”

“I don’t know what you mean!” Wilmer coyly insisted. We both laughed it off, and he moved on.

The next day, I was sitting with my editor, Don, when the moms riff came up. Don swiveled in his chair and fixed me with a hard look.

“You can’t put that in there.”

“Yes, I can!” I objected. It was a great bit. No way was I losing it.

“No,” he insisted. “You’ll get fired and so will I, and I don’t want to lose my job over this.”

“I got it approved,” I countered. Don was dubious.

“No way. Who approved it?”

“Peggy.”

“Peggy approved this.”

“Yes!” Technically, this was true: Peggy read all of our scripts before they went on air and signed off on them. I had submitted this one to her. With ellipses where the words “do moms” would have been. Even as a cub reporter, I knew full well that the sly innuendo was too racy for most networks, E! included.

That afternoon, I was almost bursting with excitement, waiting for my piece to come on. I was already rehearsing humble thank-yous in my head for all the kudos I was going to get. In the newsroom, everyone was watching the monitors as usual when that afternoon’s show went live. My segment came on, Wilmer and I had our little exchange, and it was over. I glanced around expectantly. No one congratulated me. The newsroom, in fact, was briefly, weirdly silent.

“Told you,” said Don, before walking away.

Phones started ringing all over the place, including back in my cubicle. Peggy summoned me to her office. The managing editor, Eddie Delbridge, was waiting there with her.

“What was that?” Eddie demanded. “What did we just see?”

“That was the premiere of
Summer Catch
!” I answered brightly. Sometimes if you pretend nothing is wrong, nothing is. Okay, it almost never really works like that, but it’s worth believing for the one time in 42 million that it does. I needed it to be that time.

“I did
not
approve that!” Peggy said.

“Can I have my script again?” I asked, stalling for time.

“I have your script,” Peggy said. “It says ‘Do you…in real life.’ ”

“Mmmm, yes,” I said, trying to sound preoccupied and reporter-like. “In fairness, Peggy, I meant to go write it out. Thank you so much for catching that!”

Eddie cut in.

“Thank
you
so much, but you can get your stuff and go now.”

“Oh,” I said, still all innocence and bafflement. “I don’t have a few days left? It’s only Tuesday.”

I didn’t have any days left. My E! audition was officially over. Candidate number thirty-nine was going down in flames. I went outside, got into my most-likely-to-be-repossessed Jeep, and started crying. I called Colet.

“I screwed up,” I wailed. “It’s over. E! is the only place I can work. It’s exactly what I do.”

Colet lined up another gig, casting this time for a cheesier, raunchier
Bachelor
-like show, with a small budget to hire an assistant. We were in business again, and another scouting trip was on the horizon. This time, we knew we had to rethink our strategy. Then it came to us.

Miami.
Why hadn’t we thought of that before? If ever there’s a place outside of L.A. to find attractive, shallow, desperate, vain people, it’s Miami! We booked ourselves a room at one of the cool hotels and announced open calls at Crunch Fitness. If the guys passed our audition there, they could come to our hotel room for an interview. First, everyone had to fill out our questionnaire: Did you ever contract an STD? How do you feel about threesomes? Foursomes?

Howard Stern had nothing on us. Colet and I tried not to look at each other and fall into giggling fits during the interviews, but we weren’t entirely successful.

“Okay, Joseph, I see your first sexual encounter was at thirteen. Can you tell us about that?”

Colet and I were sharing the king-size bed back in our hotel room, and one morning I woke up to the ringing phone. Colet answered. “What? What?” I heard her say. She sounded panicked. “Jules, turn on the TV!”

I hit the remote, and the screen filled with the terrifying image of the second World Trade tower collapsing in smoke and dust.
Colet and I sat in bed that entire day, watching it all unfold. We couldn’t go home; flights were grounded. My parents had told me the day before that they were going up to New York to see Monica and her year-old daughter, Alexa. I tried calling but couldn’t get through. I was freaking out, watching TV, thinking New York was about to be bombed into oblivion at any moment, that my sister, niece, and parents would all perish. After several hours of frantically trying everyone’s cell phone, I finally reached Monica. She was hysterical. She was holding her baby, safe in her apartment uptown, while the sky filled with smoke and the chaos unfolded on the streets below. Mama and Babbo were with her, petrified and in tears, too. Once we were able to get a plane back to California, I spent the entire flight digging my nails into Colet’s arm, convinced that everyone on board was a terrorist.