Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (14 page)

The season six writers and editors.

STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY

It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?”

I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.”

Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys.

Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.

WHERE I WORK

Many people assume
The Office
is shot in Scranton, Pennsylvania, because we take pains to shoot on locations that are green and East Coast–looking. Other people think we shoot on a picturesque studio lot like you see on the tour of Universal Studios, where Jaws is swimming happily near the
Desperate Housewives
cul-de-sac and down the block from an immolating car from the
Backdraft
set. Not so.

Anyone who comes to visit the set of
The Office
always says the same thing when they leave: “Holy crap, that was scary!” This is because we shoot at the end of a dead-end street on an industrial block of Panorama City, in the San Fernando Valley, which sounds great—who doesn’t love panoramas? But don’t be fooled! The name is a trick. At one point Panorama City was part of Van Nuys, but Van Nuys did whatever the opposite of secede is to it. Expelled it? I’ll put it this way. Van Nuys took one look at Panorama City and was like, “Uh, get your own name. We don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Rainn Wilson, violent ogre.

We’re at the end of a block with a gun parts warehouse, a neon sign store, and a junkyard. Our street is also a favored drag-racing strip for competitive, bored Mexican teenagers. We’re always having to stop filming and wait for the noise to die down from junkyard dogs barking and gun parts being drilled. Come to think of it, there might actually be an immolating car around here once in a while. Take that, Universal Studios!

I love our set because we are isolated from other shows. Isolation is good, because there are no distractions to the work, and believe me, I get distracted easily. There is no cool shopping or dining or anything near us whatsoever, so we can only focus on working on the show. It makes us feel sequestered and secluded, which I think is good for creativity. Also, I can run out at any time and buy my gun parts.

KELLY KAPOOR GETS GIFT BAGS

When I started attending events associated with
The Office,
I started to receive gift bags. I’d recall breathless accounts from magazines of gifts like sapphire earrings, lifetime memberships to fancy gyms, gift certificates for total facial reconstruction plastic surgery, week-long stays at wildlife reserves where you get to touch the lions, and $500 jars of miracle face cream made from human placenta. It seemed like the greatest racket ever, and in 2006, I started to participate in it.

The way it works is you go to an awards show for which you’ve spent a crazy amount of money getting dressed up. After you win or lose in your categories, there is a nontelevised portion of the evening where you and every other person at the event gets herded into a giant windowless room and fed a hot buffet of food on par with a medium-fancy bar mitzvah. The thing is the food tastes insanely good because you’ve not eaten anything all day. After mingling for a little while, and mentally ranking the gowns of the other actresses so you can call your mom and give her the scoop, you trade in a parking ticket–like stub to some stressed-out looking woman at the exit and she gives you a black canvas bag packed with goodies. You get really excited. And then you open it up.

What I Have Gotten in My Gift Bags Over the Years

• protein bars

• a personal hygiene spray that I can only describe as a butt freshener

• socks with individual toes

• a travel-size tube of toothpaste for “women’s teeth”

• a
SpongeBob SquarePants
keychain

• a mechanical pencil (kinda cool, but it was instantly stolen when I took it to work)

• weird coffee pods that work only if you buy the coffee machine that the pods are made for

• tan silicone cutlets you glue to your real breasts

• a crotchless girdle meant to hold your back fat in

• a children’s book written by a lead in the original
Beverly Hills 90210

• a diabetes cookbook (I actually love this)

The gift bags are junk bags. I’m not telling you this to complain, but rather to relieve you of any romantic notions you might have of them. Use those romantic notions for something else, like thinking about the significance and grandeur of our National Mint. Not only would you never purchase any of the stuff in these gift bags, but you would not even give it to a relative you have a chilly relationship with. There is, however, one excellent perk we get on our show: I’ve enjoyed an endless supply of free paper, paperclips, envelopes, and office supplies since joining
The Office,
because I steal props on a regular basis.

BECOMING A LITTLE BIT FAMOUS

When you have it as good as I know I do, work-wise, you rarely have time to enjoy your fabulous good fortune, because you’re too busy worrying about when it will run out. After the first season of
The Office,
I remember Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, and I got turned away from a party thrown by a famous magazine at a fancy hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The party coordinators didn’t think being on
The Office
warranted our getting in. We stood and watched the
One Tree Hill
cast waltz in with no problem. The PR people at the party regarded us with the disdain normally reserved for on-set tutors for child actors. (For the record, there is usually no one weirder on a set than the tutor for child actors. They tend to be aging hippie ladies with inappropriately long hair tied coquettishly in a messy gray braid, and an all-denim outfit that would put Jay Leno to shame.)

Luckily, I was not in the aging child-tutor stage for long, though. Midway through season two, we were finally getting recognition due to our track record of a dozen great episodes, and people were into us. It was glorious. The highlight was one Saturday, when I was vacuuming my car at a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard during the Gay Pride parade and a group of gay veterans in uniform shrieked, “Oh my God, it’s Kelly Kapoor!” The guys at the gas station thought I was hot shit.

This is a photo of when I directed “Michael’s Last Dundies,” which I also wrote. In this moment I am explaining what comedy is to Will Ferrell. (
photo credit 14.5
)

Being the “It” show in season two presented its own challenges, though. A common refrain we heard was “I disliked your first season, but by the second season you really came into your own.” I think people thought their compliment meant more if they tempered it with something insulting first. As if I were to say, “I initially thought you were ugly, but then you walked closer to me and I realized you were pretty.” I love our first season. I think it is a little dark and really funny. I found the phrase “came into your own” especially weird, as though
The Office
finally developed breasts or something.

WHAT WE HAVE TO BE SCARED ABOUT

What’s coming up next is a perennial fear in the television world. Some people who work in the industry confidently ignore all new good shows, saying, “There’s room for lots of good television. That won’t affect us,” but that’s simply not true. There’s room for a little good scripted television and many, many reality TV shows about monitored weight loss. If the science were there to genetically clone Jillian Michaels, our network would just be different filmed iterations of obese people losing weight, all day long. My friend Charlie Grandy once joked that it is only a matter of time before there is a category at the Emmys for “Best Extreme Weight Loss Program.”

In the spring, when the networks trot out their lineup of new shows, you may idly think, Meh, maybe I’ll try this one or DVR that one, but I get a little paranoid trying to figure out whether any newcomer is going to beat us into a painful death by primetime scheduling. I’ve made a list of potential shows that I believe would kill
The Office
in the ratings:

•
I Want to Be Able to Walk for My Wedding!:
Jillian Michaels helps a morbidly obese couple confined to their sofa lose weight for their nuptials.

•
I Want to Be Able to Walk When I Officiate a Wedding!:
Jillian Michaels helps an obese priest, confined to his parish, officiate a wedding.

•
Obese Priest:
A priest who eats too much dessert helps a group of at-risk, but hilarious teens.

•
Sing-Sing-Sings!:
A singing competition in Sing Sing prison.

•
The Weekly Hangover:
A reality show where three friends are chloroformed and put in a random dangerous situation, like in the movie
The Hangover,
and have to piece back what happened to their lives.

•
Interspecies Friendships:
Have you ever seen that YouTube video where the elephant is friends with the collie? Or the one where the turtle and the hippopotamus are best friends? I could watch those for hours. These are the buddy comedies people crave.