Hey gang-
Sorry for the late post. I'm sure everyone who is reading this has been refreshing their pages, waiting for the next morsel of wisdom to fall out of their computers... but I had to get a new fridge this morning. It's a big beautiful stainless steel special one that I got off of Craig's list for $450. A hell of a bargain considering that it lists for about a $1000 more if I bought it new.
I had this moving guy help me this morning who has two new roles on TV, one of Days of our Lives then other on Nip Tuck. So when you see an episode of Nip Tuck where a Spanish softball player thinks he has a tail and that he might be Satan, he moved in my new fridge. Only in Hollywood....
I have all sorts of things to write about today but first I thought I would get down to something that I wrote on two napkins last night when I was painting.
My girlfriend had on the HBO last night on that show.... what the fuck is it called? It's got that guy Bill who rants about super left wing views, why can't I remember his last freakin' name?
Anyway, that's not the point. He had Jeaneane Garofalo on the show. Man, she's aged in dog years. She looked like the Mummy, only if the mummy wore black-rimmed glasses.
She looks like some sort off science experiment where they took Tina Fey, cloned her, then took the clone and had her do nothing but smoke crystal meth (you smoke it right?) and not sleep. In fact, they need to have a reality TV show with this as the theme soon, someone call Fox.
I digress....
She wasn't very funny. But on that damn show, they have an audience who claps or laughs or cheers after every sentence. And after everyoe of her jokes, there was one woman who wouldn't stop laughing. I'm pretty sure that was her mother. I wasn't there so I can't tell you for sure but I'm pretty damn sure it was. Who else would laugh at this dame?
Then I started to think about it, how did she get a shot in the first place? She started in Stand up comedy, which I am sure her mother was there, paying everyone to laugh. Then I guess she got hugely popular during the slacker early 90's, where she was on Saturday Night Live and had all sorts of roles on movies like Reality Bites where she played the same character over and over. She was the cynical lady who cracked very non-funny jokes about how life sucks.
The point of this post isn't how much Jeaneane Garofalo sucks; I guess that's part of it. But really this post is about how fake studio audiences are. I should know, I was a professional studio audience person at one point in my career.
What's a professional studio audience person you might ask? Well, it's a job where you get paid very little to sit in the audience of TV shows and clap, laugh, oooh and ahhh when told to.
People outside LA are asking themselves right now, is that true? There is no way that they pay people to do that. Well yes, it's completely true. It helped keep me in my apartment the first couple of months in Hollywood.
Dayn and I found an ad on Craig's list for this illustrious position when we were trying to find real TV/Film gigs. We signed up and were immediately thrust into the worst possible professional studio audience gig, the Jerry Lewis Telethon.
8 grueling hours of watching bad variety acts from midnight to 8 AM. We saw it all, jugglers, singers that would make American Idol cast offs look like Cher, terrible comedians (but no Jeaneane Garofalo, thank God), cheerleaders at 5 AM yelling in our face. All we wanted to do was sleep....
But that wouldn't happen. They had a group of people who would come and stick you with a cattle prod when you closed your eyes. This was terribly tough for Dayn, who could fall asleep through an earthquake. In fact, I don't think Dayn has ever seen a movie the whole way through; he has that bad level of narcolepsy.
The worst part is he snores. LOUD.
Above us were a bunch of microphones intended to pick up the laughter and cheers. Instead, Dayn provided the sound of a bear growling mixed with chainsaw being shoved into the engine of Ford F150.
Needless to say, the usher decided to post up right next to Dayn and keep him well caffeinated.
We did this for several months, watching several bad talk shows (Larry Elder anyone?), bad sitcoms (According to Jim anyone?) and only one good show we wanted to go to (Best Damn Sports Show).
Our other fellow 'employees' were possibly homeless. They all smelled and were terrible conversationalists. The bosses loved Dayn and I, mainly because we had shoes with no holes in them.
All of these shows paid us about $35 a show, not great money but it was better than sitting at home playing Madden. But it got us closer to the Hollywood we wanted to be a part of, the production side of things. We watched cameramen doing their thing; stage managers, lighting guys, and we talked to them to try to figure out to break into this hard industry.
The moral of the story-
Then next time you hear an uproar of laughter or a bunch of clapping on your favorite show, realize that it’s probably some slackers who are getting paid to be there. Unless Jeaneane Garofalo is on the show, which in that case its probably her mom.
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