Official Book Club Selection (23 page)

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really cool. Is Kelsey Grammer going to produce it?”

“Why should I pay him to do it?”

Yes! I’m disputed territory in an NBC war!

Well, we started talking about writers, and then it was all about the script phase. They paired me with a seasoned sitcom writer and we collaborated on a script, but then she got another job. A week went by. Then months. The scripts weren’t getting done, and then when they did, nobody at NBC would look at them. Then I was back in that situation where calls weren’t being returned, and here I was with an NBC deal and they’re not doing anything with me. It’s called development hell, or as I like to call it, the unemployment line.

Things changed when NBC’s cable division head Jeff Gaspin called me in for a meeting. (The reason I mention him by name, as if you guys give a shit, is because I ran into him recently at a party. First of all, his lovely wife Karen is really why I have a television career. She thinks I’m hysterically funny, and tells Jeff that, as he is not able to figure it out on his own yet. Shout out, Karen!) I, of course, thought the meeting was going to be, “We’re ordering six episodes of your new sit-com!” Instead it was Gaspin being the bearer of bad news from Zucker. The purpose of the meeting was to convince me to let go of my dream of having a million-dollar-an-episode, live-audience, scripted sitcom and consider instead a $200,000-per-episode, unscripted reality show. And could my house be the set for free? “ The Osbournes are really big,” he explained.

Now, I may have been a fan of reality TV and had my brief stint on MTV, but in my head I thought No, I’m a sitcom person. That’s my training. That’s my history. That’s who I am. I should have a scripted show. You don’t need me for a reality show. You can pick any stripper or little person or freaky Christian who wants to have twelve kids and build a reality show. My training is in stand-up comedy specials and situation comedy. You need me because I know how to find good writers and build a cast and think up story arcs. I really thought situation comedy was my wheelhouse. By the way, what the fuck is a wheelhouse? I can’t believe I just used that expression. I am a Hollywood douche bag. I meant to say “Situation comedy is in my wheel-guesthouse.”

“We’re not going to do an expensive sitcom,” NBC said. “We think we can do a show with you where we don’t have to pay writers or have a set.”

“It sounds like you’re just trying to get a really big show for next to nothing,” I said.

They never really answered that, but that’s what it was.

I wanted a show and I wanted to work, so I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

NBC didn’t do it.

But now I was determined. I had begun thinking about how to do a reality show that wasn’t the lowest common denominator. At one point Carolyn Strauss, who was then head of programming at HBO, said to me, “I really think you could have a show where people follow you around. You say funny stuff all the time, and that could be the basis for a show.”

HBO was never going to give me a reality show, but if someone there was saying it, it must mean NBC’s instincts were good, even if their follow-through wasn’t so commendable. But boy, was I getting frustrated. My stand-up show was doing well, but it wasn’t leading to anything. It was driving me crazy. Then my agents at UTA got bored and wouldn’t take my calls.

I started to think about this bizarre position I was in: a hard worker, a showbiz professional, confident of my ability to entertain, but somebody for whom the spotlight always seemed just out of reach. All around me were people like Paris Hilton who were apparently cover-worthy celebrities, so famous and untalented, and the bane of my existence. Yeah, that’s right, I was bitter. Paris Hilton? Not that funny. And reality TV was turning out people like this all the time. I remember getting invited to a charity event around the time the original Bachelor was airing, and I found myself waiting in line with Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano to get a chance to talk to the show’s star, Alex Michel. I turned to Ray and said, “What’s happened to us?”

“I promised my wife I’d talk to him,” he said sheepishly.

It felt like a sea change was taking place, where lines were being drawn on who was big and who wasn’t big enough. I remember I got to go to the American Idol finale for the first season, when it was the hottest new show since … well, the first season of Survivor. Anyway, I was famous enough to score tickets to American Idol, but when I got there, I saw Camryn Mannheim and Jenny McCarthy in the first few rows. I was in row twenty-six. “Okay, no biggie,” I told myself. “I have a ticket to the party afterward. I’m in.”

I go to the party, and I run into Jenny and Roseanne Barr, and they’re wearing wristbands. My little freckled wrist is bare.

“What are those?” I ask.

“They’re for the VIP party,” they say.

I don’t get access to the party within the party? Ugh. I literally had a conversation with Camryn where we were on two sides of the rope. Trying to save the day, she said to me, “Hey, I’ll distract the security guy and you can sneak in.”

“Uh, no,” I said. “I don’t want to sneak in like some no-name gate crasher to the wristband party. I’m okay out here.”

It was experiences like this (and too many others to tell here) that helped me realize what exactly I was, the insider as outsider. I could get invited to celebrity parties, but not to the VIP circle within those parties. I got invited to red carpet events, but I’d get there early, when the photographers first arrive, in order to get my photo taken. I had an agent who didn’t return my calls, but who was happy to send me e-mails hoping I’d rescue a one-legged blind dog. “I have two dogs already,” I’d write her back. “But I do need a job.”

It was an A-list world, and my life was the D-list.

And then it dawned on me: That’s the show!

My husband Matt and assistant Jessica were two people who understood “Lights, camera, be yourself!” (Photo: Michael Grecco/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

So get this, back in 2004 I was so D-list that I couldn’t even get my then agents to go to pitch meetings with me to sell a show about how I was on the D-list.

Isn’t that a catch-22? Isn’t it ironic? Like that traffic jam when I’m already late? Or ten thousand spoons when all I need is a knife? Whatever, Alanis.

Apparently, I wasn’t what they call “an earner.” You know how on The Sopranos the wiseguys talk about who’s an “earner,” how they can’t kill somebody if he’s an “earner,” how they’re debating whether or not to put up with an “earner”? Let’s face it, the big agencies have giant movie stars like Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith, clients pulling in $40 million a year, and their agents get 10 percent of that. I wasn’t pulling in even $1 million a year. No agent wanted to waste their time with me when they could be going to a Scientology retreat with Tom Cruise and John Travolta. (Or Will Smith, if he’s been recruited by now!)

Anyway, armed with what I thought was a great idea for a reality show, I was only able to get three pitch meetings: with TBS, VH1, and Bravo. TBS and VH1 weren’t too impressed with me being by myself and not dragging either an agent or a big-time producer to the meeting, so they passed. I finally got my agent to come with me to the Bravo meeting, but only because he knew the cable channel’s president, Lauren Zalaznick. And what do you know? The show, which we eventually called Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, got signed that day.

It’s tough sometimes for me to justify the 10 percent I have to pay an agent. They certainly don’t do 10 percent of my job. They don’t do a quarter of 1 percent. But they’re a necessary evil, and if that agent had not been with me at that meeting, I don’t know that I would have sold the show. He didn’t even say anything, either. He just sat there. Nice work if you can get it. In fact, that guy’s not even an agent anymore. Fuck him, I’m with William Morris now. I hear this William Morris character is in it for the long haul. I haven’t gotten him on the phone yet, though.

Well, I went home and found my assistant Jessica and my husband Matt in the office they shared and broke the news. “Get ready to put on mic packs,” I said, “because you’re gonna be on a reality show.”

Wait, I’m married? I’ll get to that story in the next chapter. Stay focused, people.

Basically, I was offering myself up to be followed night and day by cameras. I hooked up with a production company called Picture This, run by a guy named Bryan Scott and a woman named Marcia Mulé. They’re both gay. Check, and check. They weren’t the most experienced producers in the world, but I figured what they lacked in experience, they could make up in gayness. And their idea was that naturally funny things seemed to happen to me because I gravitated toward bizarre D-list situations. We arranged it so that they’d shadow me for six months, which would be edited down to six episodes. That comes out to a month of taping, and taping, and taping, for every forty-four minutes of content. To put this in perspective, I believe Sober House, which is nine episodes long, shoots for a whopping fifteen days. My next show, incidentally, will be called Kittens Purring, and I will shoot forty episodes in two days at a local pet store. Stay tuned.

…

I did have a template in my mind for how I wanted the show to be: Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. That MTV series was a big deal at the time, and I knew Jessica Simpson a little from the D-list circuit, meaning we’d see each other at charity events where we both performed. What I liked about Newlyweds was that it seemed to accurately portray how the couple really was, capturing what was genuinely funny about her—this affable girl who said ridiculous things—and charming about him. It was driven by their personalities, by them doing what came naturally as opposed to putting up a front of how they thought they should act.

I called Joe Simpson, Jessica’s dad, thinking, I’ll get the lowdown, cause he produces that show!

He never got back to me. As if I needed any more proof of my show concept: When Joe Simpson is too big to return your call, you know you’re D-List.

No matter, though. I ran into Nick and Jessica at some benefit gig in Jamaica before we’d started shooting The D-List, and we had a conversation about what was in store for me.

“Okay, what boundaries did you set for your show?” I asked.

Jessica told me, “Well, we don’t let them shoot in our bathroom or our bedroom, because we have to have one place in the house that’s completely private, where the cameras will never go. So if we feel we’ve had it, the crew knows the minute we cross that threshold, they’re gonna stop shooting.”

Sounds good, I thought. I’ll do that.

That little rule went out the window immediately. If Matt and I were walking down the hall toward our bedroom and talking, and he’s in the middle of a word as we cross into the bedroom, how was that gonna work? Well, it wasn’t. So what eventually got instituted was a policy of no restrictions or boundaries of any kind. Is that even a policy? All I know is there were countless times when somebody walked in on me when I was peeing. Or I’d be in a room getting changed, and the crew guy taking lunch orders would walk in.

“Hey, Kathy, do you want the chow mein or … Oh! Sorry!”

Yeah, that’d be my tits you’re seeing … again. Luckily I didn’t have any dignity to begin with.

Truth be told, it was all incredibly experimental, since we didn’t really know what we were doing. The way that first season was story-boarded was, I handed over my online calendar of dentist appointments, stand-up gigs, auditions, Botox injections, awards shows, talk show appearances, and whatever else was going on, to the producers, and I’d say something like, “On this date, I’m hosting a hospital benefit at a ritzy hotel where Warren Beatty is getting an award. If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.” Then the producers would go try to clear the locations and get permission to shoot. If you’ve seen season one of my show, you’ll remember that at that benefit event I ran out when Beatty was accepting his award so I could have a moment with him for the D-List cameras. What you didn’t know is how extremely D-list that gambit truly was: Beatty, who didn’t know who the fuck I was, only agreed to be photographed or filmed for the event while onstage. That meant the only way to get him in any capacity was to bum-rush him post-acceptance speech, before he reached the wings. He paused for a moment, shook my hand, and smiled, while I furiously said, “Blah blah holy shit, tee hee, dick joke, time’s up.” Or something to that effect. But hey, I got my three seconds shaking his hand! Now that’s pretty D-list.

It’s a delicate balance, filming a reality show. The three of us—Matt, Jessica, and I—weren’t used to having eight extra people around us all the time, and the crew—made up of people who had worked on bigger budget shows like The Apprentice, The Amazing Race, and Survivor—wasn’t used to a house being anything but a set. They were more accustomed to having a catering area, a built set, and a room full of monitors where producers are watching all the camera shots. A real show, in other words, not a fucked-up ghetto camcorder operation like this.

Plus, there’s something about the experience that I feel like a lot of reality people aren’t entirely honest about. When I hear people from other shows say, “After the first day, I forgot the camera was there!” I don’t know what they’re talking about. I never forget. I mean, I got used to it, meaning the people and the equipment. But no matter how hard I tried not to say stuff that was too heinous, it didn’t work. I’m not able to censor myself, anyway, but there were definitely many times when I’d say something on camera, and then five seconds later think, Aw shit, I’m gonna regret that, the network’s gonna love it, I’m not going to be able to get it cut, and then I’ll be in a fucking fight with [insert trashed celebrity name here].

The experience of having cameras on you all the time increased my admiration for Howard Stern, since he’s on the air at least four hours a day without a filter. He tells a great story where Gayle King confronted him about something he’d said about her on the show, and his response was, “Do you think I can even remember what I said today, much less four months ago?”