23
The Guest Films
We shot Waiting for Guffman in Austin, and after the first day of shooting, we all piled into a van to go back to the hotel. I lay down in the backseat and pulled my knees to my chest, telling everyone my back hurt. “That’s from holding in laughter,” Eugene Levy said, sounding “old hat,” like a vaudevillian actor. I took a bath that night and cried from the shock of the day. It was strange improvising—like, really, this is going to work? I couldn’t remember what I even said that day.
I’ll explain a little more about the “improvisation” process, specific to Chris, if you’d like to know. Most films have a script, with the character’s dialogue written for them. Actors learn the lines and figure out the subtext, what’s “under” the line. Nowadays, though, most screenwriters don’t write like that; the style has become more literal and the dialogue constructed to serve the plot. When a movie is unscripted, the character lives without the lines of the material and this allows for real things to happen in the moment and be caught on film.
Chris says, when directing, “Don’t feel like you have to say anything.” And, “You can take your time and have space between your thoughts.” He exudes this in real life, too. He’s Zen. I mean, Jesus, he’s a lord. His full name, to be properly Anglo-Saxon about it, is Lord Christopher Haden-Guest.
For his movies, the actors are given an approximately thirty-page outline, describing what happens in each of the scenes—different “beats” to hit. I was young, like twenty-five, when we shot Guffman, and excited to work. This Is Spinal Tap didn’t impress me since I didn’t like heavy metal music, so I wasn’t intimidated by Chris or the process. We were all pretty nervous about our audition scenes, though, for the musical within the film, called Red, White, & Blaine.
The auditions were held in the high school. Bob Balaban had just arrived to play the musical director, as well as one of the judges. I’d never met him. I knew him from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he seemed very serious and intimidating. Bob Odenkirk had come to Austin for a few days to play the priest and now he was pacing the hallways in theatrical vampire makeup, with contour makeup on his cheekbones and lipstick, prepping for his song. Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara were in the hallway as well, sitting in folding chairs, and I remember doing some mime around them: you know, the hand wiping the smile up, showing “comedy,” and then the hand swiping it down to a frown, showing “tragedy.” Catherine told me she was actually nervous and I said, “Yeah, me too!” and we all told each other to break a leg.
Now, this is the genius of Catherine and Fred: in the outline for their characters, Ron and Sheila, it said, “Ron and Sheila audition for the show by reenacting their favorite coffee commercial.” It was their idea to sing “Midnight at the Oasis” and incorporate the coffee commercial into the song. Chris’s friend David Nichtern had written the song, so getting the rights was easy. It was Lewis Arquette’s choice to wear jazz shoes with his overalls. Where and how would this man who worked as a taxidermist dig up jazz shoes? That was the best. Bob babysat the Arquette kids in Chicago, so they went way back. I think that the Arquettes had vaudeville genes and the Balabans ran theaters in Chicago. Bob’s character was a beekeeper, and he had researched and prepared all this stuff. I seem to recall his entering rehearsals wearing a beekeeper’s suit. It’s absurd that none of this stuff was striking us as funny while we were rehearsing it. It was more like realizing that people are really interesting and more odd than we think.
Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to control my laughter and Chris would just stare at me and say, “Do you think you can do this?” and I’d try to pull myself together. Catherine would help me by saying, “You just got in trouble, your dog is dying, think about something sad!” (I didn’t have a dog at this point.) When Eugene couldn’t control himself, he simply walked out of a scene, just left it, the cameras still rolling. We all had to take it so seriously in order not to laugh, and then afterward, we’d let loose. Like when we were shooting the dance numbers, in the high school theater, for Red, White, & Blaine. I remember Chris got the giggles once, over nothing in particular, just everything, that he made his way down to the floor and lay on the stage, holding his stomach.
Initially, in the film, when Corky (played by Chris) didn’t get the $100,000 in funding that he needed to produce his original musical, he ended up in the ICU with a feeding drip in his arm, and we all visited him in the hospital. Catherine and I were crying, holding each other and the gifts and flowers we’d brought. Trying to get him to come around, we said, “Come back to us, Corky, please, we need you. We can’t do the show without you . . . come back, come back . . .” After this first take, Chris asked for a banana, which he put at his groin, giving Corky an erection.
In editing, I guess he felt he’d taken it too far, or the whole thing went on too long (like a minute instead of twenty seconds) and so the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. In its place was a quick shot of Corky in the bathtub, with one of those funny ice packs on his head. This sort of understated subtlety runs throughout the movie. Not a lot of people notice this, but in my final interview scene, there’s a quick establishing shot of a handicapped parking space—with an empty wheelchair parked in it. What person would park their wheelchair in a handicapped parking spot and be able to leave it? I didn’t notice it, either, and I was there when we shot it.
The Guffman cast really felt like a family, a good comfortable family. Fred would smoke his cigar, looking out at the landscape of Lockhart, Texas, his mind reeling with funny things. Catherine and I came up with a lot of the choreography for the musical and had a ball. I didn’t want to watch the dailies, but everyone else was watching them, so I joined. And it was funny to see how funny funny people were when they weren’t trying to be funny. I was very sad the last day of the shoot, because I’d never see Corky again. I cried in the van and Chris held my hand. I remember seeing my first gray hairs on that film.
Soon after we wrapped, I was at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea seeing a dance piece, and I saw a man who looked just like Corky: same wig, same style of dress, same mannerisms. I was so happy to see Corky that I called Chris to tell him. That was the summer I sat out on the scaffolding of my apartment as if it were a porch and talked on my cordless phone, close to my fire escape. I’d call down to passersby that I was running for mayor and then hide to watch them look around. I had a tiny Weber grill up there, too, and barbecued.
Best in Show is a movie everyone loves. No one’s ever said they didn’t like it, and if they did I would run away from that person. I’m always shocked when I hear, “The person you played is my sister!” or “She’s just like my wife!” I mean, that’s nuts! The woman I played screamed at her husband at airports, was maniacally entitled and demanding, and threw fits and yelled at hotel managers and pet store owners. I guess we all get to that point sometimes, though? I have, obviously.
Probably the best compliment I ever received was in the parking lot of a Lowe’s hardware store in upstate New York. This man had his five-year-old son with him, and he said, pointing at me, “This is the crazy dog lady from Best in Show,” and the little kid started laughing. I mean, done. Nothing makes me happier than a five-year-old boy laughing at a grown woman acting like a five-year-old. It’s an honor to be a part of this group and to have made so many people laugh.
In addition to moviemaking, Chris can pick up any instrument and play it. He can also throw his voice, which I saw, and heard, when we had dinner together during the shoot. His mouth didn’t look like it was moving, and then the sound of his voice came from somewhere else, like a magic trick. Somewhere in his family tree he had an uncle, I think, who could throw his voice. That was his explanation. The dinner was in Vancouver, where we were filming, and Hitchcock and I shared a crème brûlée for dessert. That’s Michael Hitchcock, who played my husband Hamilton in Best in Show. I played Meg Swan. We were lawyers who’d met at Starbucks.
The script outline described Hamilton and Meg as a “catalog couple” with nothing in their homes that was personal to them. They’re both lawyers and seeing a therapist because their dog Beatrice has had anxiety since she caught Meg and Hamilton having sex. They’re very nervous because they very much want Beatrice to win Best in Show. Meg and Hamilton fell in love at Starbucks. When it comes time to shoot, the characters fill in the blanks with the history and details. So much is cut, like a scene in which Beatrice had pooped in Ham’s slipper to punish us. In the scene, I accosted the maid when I saw this very deliberate attempt Beatrice was making to communicate to me that she was upset—jealous, in fact. I held the slipper and showed it to my maid. “What is this? Do you see this? Why did she do this? Why aren’t you answering me? Were you here when it happened? What happened—tell me! Don’t I pay you? Why aren’t you speaking? You’re fired!” It didn’t make the film, but who even dreams up a dog who takes revenge by pooping in a slipper? Chris does.
One afternoon, before we went to Vancouver, Hitchcock was in an animal training class, which I skipped, because I felt that for Meg, the dog didn’t really “matter,” it was her attachment to the dog that mattered—her projections of herself onto Beatrice. After Hitchcock’s training class, we had lunch with Chris (his process is a whole other form of “laid-back”), and he said, “What if you two had braces?” Hitchcock and I were like, “Mmmhmmm, yeah, okay.” So Michael got a retainer with the braces attached, which gave him a lisp, which suited his character, and I got real braces since I didn’t want a lisp.
Our dog was originally supposed to be a pointer, which was very J.Crew, so we were ready to go shopping there. But then Chris heard that pointers were too difficult to train, so we switched to a Weimaraner, which seemed very Banana Republic to us. At that point, Banana Republic had ventured far away from their safari “chic traveler” gear of the eighties and landed in the gray/slate/taupe period: cashmere wool capes, pointed shoes (very Weimaraner), and cashmere key-chain balls. I could put that gray cape on and slouch and feel brittle and sad that Hamilton wasn’t paying enough attention to me.
The poodle who originally played Rhapsody in White got fired. The system chewed that poodle up just to spit her out. No matter that she was a champion standard poodle; in fact, and this is the truth, it was her “star power” that got her fired. She was naturally strong-natured, as poodles can be. Their hair is puffed up and then sprayed with Aqua Net, which sometimes makes their hair break (a risk the groomers take), and if they didn’t get all this attention, perhaps they’d be less bitchy. Now, that is a generalization, I know, and I love poodles, despite this. But anyway, Jane Lynch and Jennifer Coolidge’s poodle got the heave-ho, and since I wasn’t filming on the day of the new-poodle auditions, I got to sit in on the contenders and document them. It was a very big deal, that day in a conference room at the Sutton Place Hotel, and two days later, Rhapsody in White was recast by some bitch.
I remember having lunch with Chris one day, and he said, “That’s a nice sweater,” and I was in a bad mood and said quickly, “It’s Banana Republic,” and he said, “Okay.” I caught myself being in character. Funny stuff happens around Chris. It’s not just that people are trying to be funny around him, to impress him; these moments just seem to happen in normal situations, like in an elevator. He’ll watch and observe and make “mmhmm” sounds to the everyday people all around him, like people who have the same hair as their dogs, or a grown man with a Little Lord Fauntleroy wig as hair. I had a neighbor who dressed like a new age version of Paddington Bear. She made me laugh with joy when I saw her. And men over sixty who wear Crocs with socks and shorts and baseball caps? They look like sweet five-year-old boys wearing baby shoes. Those shearling Ugg boots have beautiful women looking like garden gnomes with Barbie doll–top bodies.
I was at a place I like called Peacefood, and there was a cauliflower special, and I asked the waitress to tell me about it, and she said, “It’s a vegetable that tastes like broccoli, but it’s white.” When I was getting coffee at a breakfast deli, the lady behind the counter said, “What can I help you with?” The customer ahead of me said, “I’m Oatmeal,” like that was her name. People are so funny when they don’t know what they’re saying.
Before we enter into a scene, on any of his movies, the main direction from Chris is “This isn’t too far from the truth. People are really like this.” The irony is that he inspired an ironic or postmodernist position in comedies today, but he couldn’t be further away from irony. The other irony is that for such funny movies there’s disappointment for the actors when they see the final product, since so much of everyone’s performance gets cut. After the premiere of Best in Show in Toronto, the actors weren’t laughing as much as calculating or comparing what was shot to what was sacrificed to move the plot. The ratio of the material produced to the bit that’s kept feels out of proportion. There’s no clause with the Writers Guild of America for improvising being seen as writing but maybe one day there will be. As is the case on Woody Allen’s films, no one gets paid anything, so you do it for the sake of the art. Chris doesn’t do the awards circuits, so great performances worthy of them are left to legacy. I’m thinking of Catherine in For Your Consideration, who was so funny and painful, just genius. Life imitated art for her that year because like in the film, there was talk in the biz of her receiving an Oscar nomination. He gives us our very own medals, though, made especially for the production, with the title of the movie written on a round medallion that hangs by a red, white, or blue ribbon. I have four of those medals and a few Oscars of my own. They’re the souvenir-sized ones from LAX, but still, it’s something.
