“I can’t go on, Kim. I just can’t.”
We were sitting in the middle of my kitchen floor, the linoleum tiles covered with DVDs stacked five feet high around us. Kim was operating the label maker (that took us two days to figure out how to set up), and I was filling out my fiftieth customs form of the day. By hand. I’d never sent anything overseas before, or I’d have told our international customers to go to hell. No offense.
Kim reached over and patted my shoulder.
“We’re almost finished. Two more piles for today!”
“But it’s so much. My hand is cramping. I . . . I can’t do it anymore. Whose idea was this DVD thing in the first place? Oh, God, it was mine. Why do people in Israel want to watch our show? I can’t fill out another form, I just can’t!” Tears exploded from my face.
If you live in Israel and received a Guild season 1 DVD and your ink was smudged, now you know why. I’d reached my manual labor tipping point.
Over the summer of 2008, we continued taking meetings about the show, but at that point we’d stopped counting on a big company to come in and help us keep filming. We knew we could keep The Guild going. All by our lady lonesomes.
Of course, we needed to somehow get money to back-pay the cast so they’d keep working with us. (A year seemed kind of excessive to go without being compensated.) I hadn’t had an acting job in a while because I was so busy online cheerleading for the show 24/7. So all that was a problem . . . yeah . . .
“We could make a DVD and sell it to fund another season? Would that work?” During a breakfast burrito brainstorming session with Kim, I threw that out, not knowing how it could be achieved, but it sounded smart to my ears.
Kim thought about it for a second. “People like DVDs. Yeah! Let’s do it.”
At that point we were high on our own independence. Empowered anarchists. We could do anything!
Oh, boy.
I wrote season two of the show while Kim tried to figure out how to make a DVD from scratch. (Jane had moved on after season one to direct other things.) Heads up: There are jobs that you can DIY, and there are others that are worth paying someone else to do. DVD fulfillment is one of those you should NEVER TRY BY YOURSELF UNLESS YOU THINK PUNCHING YOURSELF IN THE FACE IS A FUN WEEKEND ACTIVITY.
I changed the PayPal button on the website to be a preorder for the DVD and estimated we’d sell around a hundred copies. There were more than a thousand orders in a week. It was a sphincter-puckering windfall. The plan had always been to send them out ourselves, but never at that volume. After endless stuffing and addressing of envelopes and the inevitable “Oops, Kim! I forgot to charge people shipping!,” I’d reached my limit.
Kim sat down next to me and tried to calm me down, as usual.
“Would you rather be at a fast-food commercial audition?”
“No.”
“Would you rather have sold the show and have other people tell us what to do?”
“No.” Sniff.
“Then we’ll finish these DVDs, back pay the cast, then invest our share back into the show, and start shooting again. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Yes. Good plan. Yes.”
“Maybe we can ask some volunteers from Twitter to come help us with the labeling.”
“Better plan, yes.”
“Give me the customs forms, I’ll do the rest.”
Kim grabbed my pile of papers and shoved the return address stamper at me instead. “Stamp for a while. It’s therapeutic. Pretend you’re mushing it on somebody’s face.”
I stamped a few dozen packages imagining I was mushing the face of that particularly annoying douche-suit guy I’d met, and it helped. She was right. Damnit.
As the DVD orders slowed to a trickle, I finished writing the script for The Guild season two and we prepped to shoot the first episode on our DVD savings. It was going to be the shoestring way again, with only a few hoagies to split amongst everyone for lunch, but that was the only way to do it. We’d go for as long as we could! Or something plan-ish like that.
The week before we started shooting, I got a call from our snazzy Hollywood agent, George.
“Felicia, do you know Xbox?”
“Uh, of course I do. I’m a gamer. Duh.”
“They want to talk about making new Guild episodes.”
Ugh. I was so burned on meetings at that point, I got uppity.
“You know how I feel about . . .”
He was used to my antiestablishment tirades and interrupted before I could build up to my “strident” voice.
“They’re willing to be flexible. Just take the meeting, please.”