I wish I could say my experience casting The Guild helped me audition better myself—put the process in perspective as an artist and rid me of the burden to be perfect. But nah. I still enter every casting room and freeze up like a basket case.
Eventually we did find amazing people who looked adorable together and actually showed up on time, rounding out our cast in a totally balanced, free-costing kind of way. They were wonderful. I love them and will never say anything bad about them.
And I certainly won’t EVER admit that I asked my friend Sandeep to play the character of Zaboo partially because he owned two cameras we needed for filming. Nope.
[?3: Never Let a Film Crew Shoot in Your Home?]
The most expensive part of filmmaking is getting locations to film in legally. That’s why we “chose” to shoot everything in our own homes. (Choice had nothing to do with it, of course. I was just being cutesy with the air quotes.)
My house is painted like a clown car, with each room a different QUIRKY! color, so we shot the majority of the show there. For three days straight. And even though it wasn’t a big crew, having ten to fifteen people invade my private space was close to walking on the beach in a bikini without remembering to shave all the way on the anxiety scale. As an introverted person who likes everything around her to stay in its place and who personally likes to go to open houses with the express goal of sneaking a look into strangers’ medicine cabinets, I knew that every inch of my home was destined to be violated.
A lot of the stress couldn’t be avoided because we were working in such tight quarters. There’s a reason regular film stages are as big as Sam’s Club and not a small Los Angeles bungalow. One of the main character’s locations was a shed in my yard, about six feet by six feet large, with a sign “Daddy’s Doghouse” on the door. (Previous owner’s touch, promise.) Shoving cameras, lights, actors, crew members, and an active bacon griddle into an area the size of a Fiat was not optimal. I mean, the crew was mostly comprised of ladies, but even then, the BO became stronger than the San Antonio Spurs’ locker room.
I tried to preempt problems by making a calm announcement every morning, “This is my house, guys! Please treat it like your own!” But months after we wrapped, I was still finding Diet Coke cans stuck under my couch cushions and half-sandwiches ferreted in my towel closet. I’m sure no one DELIBERATELY tried to trash my home, but no matter how many times I’d say, “Please don’t give my dog any scraps; he’s gluten allergic,” he would mysteriously get diarrhea. EVERY NIGHT. I won’t even mention my frustration with male people not being able to hit the toilet while peeing. I couldn’t enter my own bathrooms without wanting to wear a hazmat suit. We never could have completed filming without opening our homes to the crew, but to this day, I still have rings on my dining room table that I gaze at with bitterness. “I put out coasters. All the time. No one used them.”
Despite the personal-boundaries issues, the set was a casual place that made it feel like we were kids playing dress-up in our homes. (Because we WERE in our own homes. Four feet away from where we slept.) That informality gave us the freedom to do things that would never happen on a professional set. Mainly because of OSHA regulations and child labor laws.
There’s a scene in the first episode where the neglectful mother character, Clara, puts her newborn baby down on the floor as she’s talking to the other guild members online. We needed to cut to the baby doing something hilarious while Clara was ignoring him. There were a ton of baby toys on set, but we couldn’t find anything that made the scene EXTRA funny. Jane tried everything. “Give him that penguin. No, it looks too cute. What about his shoe?” Kid was saccharine adorable with any object, but I knew we needed to find something extra special to make the gamer crowd laugh. STEP IT UP, BABY! GIVE US THE FUNNY!
About ten minutes in, the baby started getting cranky, and we got to the point of “It’s good enough.” I hate that point. It’s either perfect, or it’s the worst thing ever made and everyone is an artistic failure, including myself. (Yay, emotional extremes!) I started running through my house, yelling back to the crew, “Give me two minutes, feed him, tickle him, stick a boobie in him! I’ll be right back!”
After rifling through my office drawers like a madwoman, I found something perfect for the shot.
And no, it wasn’t plugged in. I’m not a monster.
[?4: Disaster Is Your Low-Budget Best Friend!?]