By Mister Mooks
I had responded to a craigslist ad seeking “big
personalities” for a major network’s Proof-of-Concept, profiling a law firm in
Staten Island. A Proof-of-Concept, I
later found out, is basically like a pilot, except instead of airing it and assessing
the public reception, only the heads of the production studio watch it and
decide right then and there if they want to make a batch of 13 episodes. Apparently that’s how you do it when you’re a
big-time network that makes new, shitty reality TV shows every other week.
Anyway, I sent them a link to some video work I’d done where
I’d played a sort of obnoxious asshole (type-casting, I’m sure), and they wrote
back saying they liked it and wanted more.
This time, they wanted to see me talking to the camera, explaining why
I’d be a “phenomenal law firm intern.” I
figured most people would be responding to this earnestly, so I took a
different approach and went full-douchebag: “Let’s break it down word by word,” I
said, and proceeded to explain that “law” represents everything about how I
live my life; “firm” represents my convictions, as well as my abdominal
muscles; and “internal”…well, like, my abs are like, inside me, too, man. I closed by mentioning, “I also know
PowerPoint and Excel.”
Apparently it went over well, so they asked me to come to
the shoot at an address in Staten Island and to be there by 2PM. And that was all they said. After asking for more info, I got a call from
one of the producers, who explained things a little more. But only a little. All I knew was that I’d be acting as though I
was coming in for an interview at the law firm.
“So this is like a documentary?” I asked. “Sort of,” he said, “in the way that Jersey Shore is a documentary, I
guess.” We talked about how I’d do a
variation of the asshole personality I showed in the video, and he made it
sound as though the two guys interviewing me would be thrown off and it’d be
funny. I’d be over-confident and
under-qualified, a perfect combination for a terrible interview.
As I drove down the West Side Highway, getting pumped to
Crown Heights Affair on Studio 54 Radio and feeling good about my tie clip, I
tried to imagine the two lawyers interviewing me. They’d be stuffy types, probably some
by-the-book tax attorneys, which is why the producer told me to be a little
outlandish in my attitude, making them uncomfortable. I looked forward to trying to explain how my
“previous work experience” (read: bartending) had thoroughly prepared me to
enter into the judicial world. They’d prolly
look at each other, like, “Whaaaaaat?”
Yeah.
The first indication that my presumptions were off-base came
when I walked into the building and saw the other “applicants” signing their
photo release forms in the lobby.
One young guy is wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, with his
bushy mess of hair tied in back. His
name is Frankie – I can tell because it’s tattooed in big letters under his
left sleeve (peeking out from under the right sleeve is a skull adorned with
roses). He tells me he got the first one
when he was seventeen, and the second one not even twenty-four hours later. It seems as though that could have been last
week. “I just woke up the next morning
and loved the way it felt in the shower, man,” he says, stroking his triceps. He must be very clean.
Then there’s a woman no younger than forty with fake tits no
smaller than double Ds. She’s wearing a
low-cut azure dress and keeps brushing her platinum-blond hair away from her oversized
designer sunglasses. Her name is Dakota. She will later share with us some story about
partying with Pamela Anderson, who at the time was snorting something or other
and encouraging her to do the same.
Dakota has to be back in Manhattan later to shoot an episode of Girls, where she claims she’ll be
playing Lindsay Lohan. This seems like a
stretch; she must have quite a range. I assume
she means Lindsay’s mother, but she repeats herself (or at least mutters
“Lindsay Lohan” again), so who knows.
Joe is a retired narcotics detective from Long Island who looks
more like a card-carrying motorcycle gang member than an ex-cop. I had actually seen him in the parking lot as
he got out of his shiny black Chrysler 300, complete with tinted windows. He wears blue jeans and a (p)leather vest
over a t-shirt, both arms covered in tattoos.
He has a permanent tan covering his bald head and a bronze goatee to
match. Occasionally he takes a drag from
his electronic cigarette held between ringed fingers. At most, he might be 5’7”. Back in the parking lot, we just nodded to
each other solemnly, but he will quickly reveal himself to be anything but the
quiet serious type as he jokes with and pokes at everyone else on set.
You get the idea.
Everybody else was similarly ridiculous in some way – a black girl in
skin-tight pants with a fashion haircut; an Ecuadorian woman in a cocktail
dress that looked like Angelina Jolie method-acting a junkie role; a pudgy
hipster dude with big bifocals and an Amish beard. When he tells us he lives in Spanish Harlem,
Joe says, “The [100]23? I used to do
Narcotics up there.” The hipster replies,
“Yeah, man…I do a lot of narcotics up there, too.”
So first they film us downstairs, walking into the building
and waiting for the elevator. By “they”
I mean the one girl who holds a camera and the intern who tells us when to walk
in, one by one. I start to wonder where
the rest of the crew is (or if there even was a crew), and why they wouldn’t
just let us go upstairs and meet the guys in the firm. Don’t they want to go over what they want us
to say to each other? Other questions arise
among us “applicants” – is this an audition, or is this the actual shoot? Is there a real internship opportunity? How many of us will they take? I don’t care one way or another about most of
these inquiries. I just want to have
fun. But it looks like some of my fellow
interviewees wouldn’t say no to a real job offer after all.
Finally, we go upstairs to the office, and it becomes even clearer
that I won’t be dealing with the uptight brand of lawyers I’d anticipated. The first hint is the gorgeous cleavage of
the heavily made-up Italian receptionist, who, after a double-take, I determine
is not here as an actress. She is a
staple of the office, and I knew this because she is included in a few of the
many – at least a dozen – hand-drawn portraits of the proprietors of the
firm. Now, by “portraits,” I really mean,
“caricatures that you get for ten bucks from a guy on the sidewalk in Times
Square,” and by “proprietors,” I mean “Mario and Lou.” I thought of asking why there isn’t the muzak
version of the Godfather soundtrack
playing over the stereo, but for some reason I figure that won’t go over well.
They film us again one by one, this time walking in the
office door and reciting to the receptionist, “I’m here for the internship.” After this they pile us all into a conference
room to hang out while they set up for the actual interviews. The ten or so of us sit around the big
conference table, and are mostly moody and silent. I’m sitting next to Joe, whose occasional
hits from his e-cig waft over me, smelling like some kind of fruity concoction,
oddly enough. Small talk starts among
us, and Joe launches into war stories from his Narco days, including the
time he got shot. “Gimme your hand,” he
tells the black fashionista, who shrieks when he presses her fingers to his
ribcage. Apparently the bullet is still
inside, as Joe tells us, “Because it calter—cawtah?—caulterized to the major
organs.” He then shows us the stab wound
on his arm but (fortunately) refrains from showing us the one on his “buttocks.”
Meanwhile, Dakota talks about her time in LA, where she
worked at some charity events for Playboy.
She mumbles something that includes the phrases “week-long” and “scrabble
game,” and I can’t stop myself from saying I’m not surprised a scrabble game at
the Playboy mansion takes a whole week to finish. Everyone laughs and she tries to explain that
it was a “scramble, not scrabble,” but I prefer my version. When I mention that I have to get back to the
city for work later in the evening, she asks me, “What are you, a stripper?” Joe then puts on a lispy voice and puts his
hand on my thigh. I tell everyone Magic Mike was actually based on my life, not Channing Tatum’s. We all laugh.
We’re having a good time.
Another hour and change goes by before we’re moved to the
hallway to finally begin the slew of interviews. They
line us up and tell us we’re going to go in one by one, to be ourselves, and
just have a nice chat with “the guys,” who are still yet to be seen. At first I thought this was to prevent us
from knowing what we were getting into, but a quick look at the lineup makes me
realize I’ve got this backwards. I
imagine what it’s going to be like for them when Dakota walks in with her
silicon spilling out of her dress, using the phrase “never convicted” when
relating her previous experience with the law.
And here I thought I was the one brought in to throw a wrench in the interview
process. Now I realize I’m the
straightest of the bunch.
The first “applicant” goes in, and I’m up next. The producer I spoke with on the phone comes
over to make sure we’re on the same page about my “character,” and we agree I
should go in there with the mentality of someone who thinks he already got the
job, assuming this interview is just a formality. Now that there is an attitude I can pull
off. The first guy comes back after no
time at all, says it went “smooth,” that the guys are pretty nice. The crew readies the set for my turn, and
then I go in.
The receptionist with the beautiful bosom leads me to the
corner office and introduces me to Mario and Lou, who both sit behind a big
desk. In the corners of the room are two
cameramen, whom I’ve been instructed not to look at. I sit down across the desk after shaking
hands and them doing the stereotypical “Heys” and “Ohs” and “Hey-ohs” that you’d
get from the cast of Goodfellas. Lou, the larger of the two, has a cue ball-head
and wears a suit from the Big & Tall section of Men’s Wearhouse. Mario’s at least a foot shorter with plenty of
gel in his hair, and it takes me a second to realize he means “law” when he
says “lorr.” I strike my cross-legged,
furrow-browed pose and we get into it.
They look at my resume (my actual one – the producers had
liked the idea that I actually had previous work experience, unlike my fellow “applicants,”
I guess), and ask me why I want to work in law.
I launch into a rapid-fire monologue about the importance of the legal
system in society, permeating the values whose foundation was established with
the writing of the constitution in 1776…at some point Lou cuts me off, saying, “Whoa,
did you like, memorize that speech, or something?” “Careful, Lou,” Mario says. “Pretty soon this guy’s gonna be sitting in
your chair.”
There’s some other chit-chat and then one of them asks, “You
know, you’re a smart guy, you went to Columbia…if you wanna practice law, why
aren’t you in law school?” I think for a
second and then tell them I just want to work in a law firm, and I didn’t think
you had to go to law school for that. “I
mean, for instance,” I ask, “did you guys even go to law school?”
The seconds of silence that follow, along with the daggers
shooting out of their eyes, make me think of cement shoes and fish wrapped in
newspaper. But it turns out they were mostly
shocked, not just angry, and mutter out something about how of course they went
to law school. Still, I’m glad the
cameramen are there as witnesses.
Anyway, that about wraps up the interview, and I pretend to not
understand. “So I’ll be starting next
week, or…?” They laugh and throw me out.
I walk back into the hall with my “applicant” friends,
feeling good about having fun. Then the producer
comes out and repeats something I said in there, saying that it was hilarious, and
that everybody in the monitor room (a separate office where the producers and
director had been watching everything on screens) was cracking up, dying with
laughter. He goes on to say the VP of
Talent was in there and wants to keep in touch.
“She gloms on to people,” he says.
“Like Joe out there – we’ve been in talks with him for a long time now.” What do you know – ol’ Joe is gonna be a
star, too. I stroll out of the office
and get back in the car to whoop and holler along to more disco as I drive back
to Manhattan, thinking about what kind of facial expression I should use when
they put me up on billboards to promote the show. Sorry, did I say, “show?” I mean shows, plural. After all, they’re gonna glom.
A day later I realize that there is no show and might not
ever be…and even if there is one, I won’t necessarily be in it…and aside from
all that, I worked that day for free, not even for a few bucks for gas…and who
knows if there really was anybody in the monitor room at all? Do they just say that shit to everybody? What was in that sheet of paper I signed but
didn’t read at the beginning of the day?
So here I am, back in the office for another day of regular
old Reality, where I play Jim and there’s no Pam but there are plenty of
Michael Scotts. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted. Stay tuned for my series finale!
(GUNSHOT)
(SLUMP)
