I. The first shot of a new scene that establishes the location for the audience. You know how on Seinfeld there’s always a shot of the exterior of the diner before they cut inside and we see the gang slowly ruining their lives? That’s the establishing shot!
II. After the first wide “master shot” of a scene is done, the subsequent camera angles (close-ups, two-shots, etc.) are considered coverage. You know the opening sequence of Boogie Nights? It’s the opposite of that.
the mayor of squaresville
I like to tell people that I’m a square. It’s a charming way to warn someone that I’m a finicky little brat without freaking them out. I got to work with Lisa Kudrow recently, and when she told me she thought she was probably an even bigger square, I maintained that couldn’t be true. We traded stories for a while, trying to out-straitlace each other.
For example, I told her about the time my friend found out I’d never seen a movie without paying and he forced me to sneak in to Iron Man. I did not enjoy the film at all; I felt guilty the entire time. And when I found myself at dinner with Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. a year later, I confessed my crime and insisted on giving them cash or buying them something on the menu of commensurate value. Lisa knew she’d found an uptight, apple-polishing soul sister. We held a little election to see who would be the ruler of Squaresville, if such a miraculous place existed. I was elected mayor and she, my loyal deputy. To be fair, the thing was rigged in our favor since we were the only two people organized enough to bother voting.
I happen to love rules. I love having a plan. I love a film set that’s run like a well-oiled machine. I thrive in structure; I drown in chaos. I love rules and I love following them. Unless that rule is stupid. And yes, I have felt qualified, no matter my age, to make that determination. Scrupulous people don’t enjoy causing trouble, but they can be defiant as hell.
As an adult, being square is more or less an acceptable personality trait. The only time I desperately wanted to be rebellious was in adolescence. I wanted to be Rizzo, not Sandra Dee! I had to will myself to break rules when I could stomach it. While I’ll admit I enjoyed the thrill, I was not “the bad kid.” In fact, aside from the following stories, I was a painfully typical example of “the good kid.” During free period, even on the rare Maine sunny day, I’d stay in the cafeteria and do my Latin homework. Not because I was smart, but because I assumed the fabric of the universe would disintegrate if I didn’t. But the qualities that made me a square as a teenager—dedication, independence, maturity—led me to break the biggest rule of all. I committed systematic genocide. (Is she kidding? Let’s read on and find out!)
My adolescent flirtations with rule-breaking were alternately facilitated and foiled by my brother, Mike. Mike was a genuine cool kid. Not a “popular” kid; a wiry, quick-witted, slightly dangerous, well-liked kid. He’d been bullied in middle school but at fifteen he shot past six feet, got into good music and minor drug use, and stalked around the school in baggy white tees and fitted baseball caps. He had that feral look about him that was specific to the early 2000s, like the actors in the movie Kids (a movie I should not have watched before puberty). Like me, he had a strict sense of justice, so he had no interest in being unkind or intimidating people who were perfectly harmless, but he once beat up a friend for trying crystal meth and promised it would happen again if he slipped up. He was like a sheriff or an angsty Robin Hood. He’d be the first to point out what a loser I was, but wouldn’t let anyone else say a word against me. He once made a kid apologize to me after making a crack about my size. (“I didn’t know you were Kendrick’s sister.”) When I got home, Mike asked, “Did Spencer apologize to you today?”
“Yeah, he did! And do you know what I said back?”
“Don’t tell me, dude. I know it’s gonna be something lame.”
It was something lame, so I’ll spare him the embarrassment of putting it in this book.
I got better grades than Mike, but only because, as every teacher said, he didn’t “apply himself.” He eschewed all extracurricular activities in favor of hanging out in a park downtown that a local paper described as being full of “undesirables.” That wasn’t a description of the unsavory types that my brother might find there, that was a description of my brother. He drove states away to go to raves, which he called “parties,” because only your parents and alarmed-looking blond ladies from the news said “raves.”