Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 855
February 23, 2016
“You can’t make up the viciousness of Hollywood”: Zoe Cassavetes skewers the family industry and how it treats women over 40
Writer/director Zoe Cassavetes’ grew up in the rarefied air of Hollywood. Her late father is the maverick independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, and her mother is the incomparable actress Gena Rowlands. Her sophomore feature, “Day Out of Days,” now available on VOD, is a caustic look at the life of Mia Roarke (Alexia Landeau), a 40 year-old actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Mia’s ex, Liam (Alessandro Nivola), has left her for a younger woman. Her agent Annabelle (Brooke Smith), claims to be behind her, but gets her a job on a lousy horror movie, directed by the abusive Tark (Vincent Kartheiser). The put-upon Mia is also caring for her mom (Melanie Griffith) who has an addiction to pills. Cassavetes, who co-wrote the film with Landeau, shows the difficulties women of any age face in Hollywood, specifically, and in the world, in general: being belittled, and humiliated, settling when they should be thriving, and dealing with macro- and micro-aggressions as well as idiots in work and romance. “Day Out of Days” will strike a nerve with viewers who can see through to the phoniness of Hollywood, as well as those who know what they want, only to have it be just out of reach. Cassavetes chatted with Salon about her life, her film’s heroine, and her career, as well as her observations on Hollywood. Given that you grew up in the industry, why did you choose to make this film? Do you feel it’s biting the hand that feeds you? Or did you “take your pain and put in the film?” as Mia is told to do in one scene? I think it’s an interesting subject—not only being an actress, but getting older and losing your power of youth. You question who you are, and what you want, and if you’re living the life you wanted. I think being an actress is a good story for that because of the pressures of the job, but the film is more about the humor and getting older than about the industry. You can’t make up the viciousness of Hollywood. It’s a good forum for having a little fun, and it can be a little cruel and push the levels in a way people can relate to. The film shows the challenges an actress faces in Hollywood. Can you talk about the difficulties of being a female director and getting your film released? I think that it’s difficult for more than just women or minorities. It’s a tough business! I wanted to do something the way I wanted to do it. I think it’s a choice to make something hard, and I wanted a relatively unknown actress to be my star. The talent should be explored, not recycled. I had to give up some things to get some of things I wanted. I am psyched to get my movie out. The world is changing, and the platforms [VOD vs. theatrical] are changing. It’s not necessary for your film to be in the theater to be seen. I don’t have to do every film like that. I’m trying to be adaptable. I have guy director friends who are in the exact same position. When you go outside the lines, you have a harder time. What observations do you have about celebrity and fame? Depending on what viewers bring to the film, it can celebrate the industry or satirize it. I think people are really curious about Hollywood and the “inside story,” and that kind of business. People feel close to the industry and making movies. Instead of making a social commentary about women, I wanted to show it. I have tons of friends who were stars in the 1990s and when they turned 40, they lost jobs. It’s the natural wave for the younger stars to come up. How hard it must be to have that attention shined on you and then taken away? I didn’t plan a satire, but things were funny because they were so audacious—Vincent Kartheiser’s character yelling at Mia, for example. These things happen. Is it her, or is it the world against her? She has to come to some sort of decision. She has a light to go towards, and it’s up to her to make the best decisions. One job can save your life. It’s crazy to live like that! Mia experiences harassment from several industry people over the course of the film. What are some of the most shocking things you’ve heard as an actress or from an actress? When I was young, and trying to be an actress, a guy said, “Brush your hair, get a manicure, and iron your shirt.” It was the best thing anyone ever said to me. I realized I didn’t want to be an actress after that. All actors have horror stories. They have to wait for someone to give them something to do. It puts them in a vulnerable position. When you take a job, you don’t know how crazy or weird people are—they should be professional—but reputations can be built on bad behavior. You become desensitized. You go through that all your life. For some people, maybe it’s mechanical, a low-grade insult. Did your mother and/or siblings, Xan and Nick (both filmmakers), offer advice or help in shaping “Day Out of Days”? My mom read it. We were going through all these incarnations of the script and then got it together and made the film fast. Once we hit go, it was 20-hour days figuring out how to do this. My family was always curious, and we talked about movie stuff—we’re a crazy movie family. We help cast each other’s films, and play that game. We’re involved in each other’s films, but we give each other space. Can you talk about casting? You have Melanie Griffith, the daughter of a famous actress, playing Mia’s mother; Eddie Izzard playing a famous actor, and even a sly turn by B-movie star Laurene Landon. What prompted you to choose the performers you did? Did you feel some of them echoed Mia’s story? Sometimes when you start a project, you become a genius after: Of course that mirrors that! I just wanted Melanie. I wanted her voice in my film, and feel her presence. Part of the perks of the job is to get people you want in it. Eddie, too. When I wrote that part, and I thought about Eddie, I didn’t want anyone else. I was lucky he said yes! Lorene was amazing. She was supportive and understanding. And Brooke Smith was awesome-sauce! How did you and Alexia approach creating Mia? She is sympathetic even when she is most pathetic. Her frustrations are palpable because of Alexia’s strong performance. I had the luxury of doing my first short film with Alexia, and we had a freedom to do anything we wanted. It was un-tethered. Her ability to say everything without saying anything is one of her greatest talents. And a film about this—showing Mia’s interior—we were focused on this whole person. It wasn’t just that she’s an actress, or divorced…. We’re not always appropriate all the time. What do we do when we are alone, and isolated, and you don’t feel good about yourself? Everything turns inward. It’s how do you turn it around—especially after a series of humiliations—that tests you. Mia doesn’t know how to do anything else. Acting is all she’s ever done. She has to change and take giant leaps and start being a real person. Mia learns about balancing life and work. What did you learn about the life-work balance making this film? You don’t when you are shooting, you don’t. It’s “I’ll get to this in a bit…” You are very in the moment, and you live/work moment to moment. You aren’t thinking about the water and power bill, you are just in the moment. I love that it’s that intense. Then you go to long periods of writing, or editing, and that’s hard too. You need to get back to the set. But then you have your family and friends, and I cook…But as you get older, you see what’s important—it’s the people in your life.Writer/director Zoe Cassavetes’ grew up in the rarefied air of Hollywood. Her late father is the maverick independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, and her mother is the incomparable actress Gena Rowlands. Her sophomore feature, “Day Out of Days,” now available on VOD, is a caustic look at the life of Mia Roarke (Alexia Landeau), a 40 year-old actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Mia’s ex, Liam (Alessandro Nivola), has left her for a younger woman. Her agent Annabelle (Brooke Smith), claims to be behind her, but gets her a job on a lousy horror movie, directed by the abusive Tark (Vincent Kartheiser). The put-upon Mia is also caring for her mom (Melanie Griffith) who has an addiction to pills. Cassavetes, who co-wrote the film with Landeau, shows the difficulties women of any age face in Hollywood, specifically, and in the world, in general: being belittled, and humiliated, settling when they should be thriving, and dealing with macro- and micro-aggressions as well as idiots in work and romance. “Day Out of Days” will strike a nerve with viewers who can see through to the phoniness of Hollywood, as well as those who know what they want, only to have it be just out of reach. Cassavetes chatted with Salon about her life, her film’s heroine, and her career, as well as her observations on Hollywood. Given that you grew up in the industry, why did you choose to make this film? Do you feel it’s biting the hand that feeds you? Or did you “take your pain and put in the film?” as Mia is told to do in one scene? I think it’s an interesting subject—not only being an actress, but getting older and losing your power of youth. You question who you are, and what you want, and if you’re living the life you wanted. I think being an actress is a good story for that because of the pressures of the job, but the film is more about the humor and getting older than about the industry. You can’t make up the viciousness of Hollywood. It’s a good forum for having a little fun, and it can be a little cruel and push the levels in a way people can relate to. The film shows the challenges an actress faces in Hollywood. Can you talk about the difficulties of being a female director and getting your film released? I think that it’s difficult for more than just women or minorities. It’s a tough business! I wanted to do something the way I wanted to do it. I think it’s a choice to make something hard, and I wanted a relatively unknown actress to be my star. The talent should be explored, not recycled. I had to give up some things to get some of things I wanted. I am psyched to get my movie out. The world is changing, and the platforms [VOD vs. theatrical] are changing. It’s not necessary for your film to be in the theater to be seen. I don’t have to do every film like that. I’m trying to be adaptable. I have guy director friends who are in the exact same position. When you go outside the lines, you have a harder time. What observations do you have about celebrity and fame? Depending on what viewers bring to the film, it can celebrate the industry or satirize it. I think people are really curious about Hollywood and the “inside story,” and that kind of business. People feel close to the industry and making movies. Instead of making a social commentary about women, I wanted to show it. I have tons of friends who were stars in the 1990s and when they turned 40, they lost jobs. It’s the natural wave for the younger stars to come up. How hard it must be to have that attention shined on you and then taken away? I didn’t plan a satire, but things were funny because they were so audacious—Vincent Kartheiser’s character yelling at Mia, for example. These things happen. Is it her, or is it the world against her? She has to come to some sort of decision. She has a light to go towards, and it’s up to her to make the best decisions. One job can save your life. It’s crazy to live like that! Mia experiences harassment from several industry people over the course of the film. What are some of the most shocking things you’ve heard as an actress or from an actress? When I was young, and trying to be an actress, a guy said, “Brush your hair, get a manicure, and iron your shirt.” It was the best thing anyone ever said to me. I realized I didn’t want to be an actress after that. All actors have horror stories. They have to wait for someone to give them something to do. It puts them in a vulnerable position. When you take a job, you don’t know how crazy or weird people are—they should be professional—but reputations can be built on bad behavior. You become desensitized. You go through that all your life. For some people, maybe it’s mechanical, a low-grade insult. Did your mother and/or siblings, Xan and Nick (both filmmakers), offer advice or help in shaping “Day Out of Days”? My mom read it. We were going through all these incarnations of the script and then got it together and made the film fast. Once we hit go, it was 20-hour days figuring out how to do this. My family was always curious, and we talked about movie stuff—we’re a crazy movie family. We help cast each other’s films, and play that game. We’re involved in each other’s films, but we give each other space. Can you talk about casting? You have Melanie Griffith, the daughter of a famous actress, playing Mia’s mother; Eddie Izzard playing a famous actor, and even a sly turn by B-movie star Laurene Landon. What prompted you to choose the performers you did? Did you feel some of them echoed Mia’s story? Sometimes when you start a project, you become a genius after: Of course that mirrors that! I just wanted Melanie. I wanted her voice in my film, and feel her presence. Part of the perks of the job is to get people you want in it. Eddie, too. When I wrote that part, and I thought about Eddie, I didn’t want anyone else. I was lucky he said yes! Lorene was amazing. She was supportive and understanding. And Brooke Smith was awesome-sauce! How did you and Alexia approach creating Mia? She is sympathetic even when she is most pathetic. Her frustrations are palpable because of Alexia’s strong performance. I had the luxury of doing my first short film with Alexia, and we had a freedom to do anything we wanted. It was un-tethered. Her ability to say everything without saying anything is one of her greatest talents. And a film about this—showing Mia’s interior—we were focused on this whole person. It wasn’t just that she’s an actress, or divorced…. We’re not always appropriate all the time. What do we do when we are alone, and isolated, and you don’t feel good about yourself? Everything turns inward. It’s how do you turn it around—especially after a series of humiliations—that tests you. Mia doesn’t know how to do anything else. Acting is all she’s ever done. She has to change and take giant leaps and start being a real person. Mia learns about balancing life and work. What did you learn about the life-work balance making this film? You don’t when you are shooting, you don’t. It’s “I’ll get to this in a bit…” You are very in the moment, and you live/work moment to moment. You aren’t thinking about the water and power bill, you are just in the moment. I love that it’s that intense. Then you go to long periods of writing, or editing, and that’s hard too. You need to get back to the set. But then you have your family and friends, and I cook…But as you get older, you see what’s important—it’s the people in your life.Writer/director Zoe Cassavetes’ grew up in the rarefied air of Hollywood. Her late father is the maverick independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, and her mother is the incomparable actress Gena Rowlands. Her sophomore feature, “Day Out of Days,” now available on VOD, is a caustic look at the life of Mia Roarke (Alexia Landeau), a 40 year-old actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Mia’s ex, Liam (Alessandro Nivola), has left her for a younger woman. Her agent Annabelle (Brooke Smith), claims to be behind her, but gets her a job on a lousy horror movie, directed by the abusive Tark (Vincent Kartheiser). The put-upon Mia is also caring for her mom (Melanie Griffith) who has an addiction to pills. Cassavetes, who co-wrote the film with Landeau, shows the difficulties women of any age face in Hollywood, specifically, and in the world, in general: being belittled, and humiliated, settling when they should be thriving, and dealing with macro- and micro-aggressions as well as idiots in work and romance. “Day Out of Days” will strike a nerve with viewers who can see through to the phoniness of Hollywood, as well as those who know what they want, only to have it be just out of reach. Cassavetes chatted with Salon about her life, her film’s heroine, and her career, as well as her observations on Hollywood. Given that you grew up in the industry, why did you choose to make this film? Do you feel it’s biting the hand that feeds you? Or did you “take your pain and put in the film?” as Mia is told to do in one scene? I think it’s an interesting subject—not only being an actress, but getting older and losing your power of youth. You question who you are, and what you want, and if you’re living the life you wanted. I think being an actress is a good story for that because of the pressures of the job, but the film is more about the humor and getting older than about the industry. You can’t make up the viciousness of Hollywood. It’s a good forum for having a little fun, and it can be a little cruel and push the levels in a way people can relate to. The film shows the challenges an actress faces in Hollywood. Can you talk about the difficulties of being a female director and getting your film released? I think that it’s difficult for more than just women or minorities. It’s a tough business! I wanted to do something the way I wanted to do it. I think it’s a choice to make something hard, and I wanted a relatively unknown actress to be my star. The talent should be explored, not recycled. I had to give up some things to get some of things I wanted. I am psyched to get my movie out. The world is changing, and the platforms [VOD vs. theatrical] are changing. It’s not necessary for your film to be in the theater to be seen. I don’t have to do every film like that. I’m trying to be adaptable. I have guy director friends who are in the exact same position. When you go outside the lines, you have a harder time. What observations do you have about celebrity and fame? Depending on what viewers bring to the film, it can celebrate the industry or satirize it. I think people are really curious about Hollywood and the “inside story,” and that kind of business. People feel close to the industry and making movies. Instead of making a social commentary about women, I wanted to show it. I have tons of friends who were stars in the 1990s and when they turned 40, they lost jobs. It’s the natural wave for the younger stars to come up. How hard it must be to have that attention shined on you and then taken away? I didn’t plan a satire, but things were funny because they were so audacious—Vincent Kartheiser’s character yelling at Mia, for example. These things happen. Is it her, or is it the world against her? She has to come to some sort of decision. She has a light to go towards, and it’s up to her to make the best decisions. One job can save your life. It’s crazy to live like that! Mia experiences harassment from several industry people over the course of the film. What are some of the most shocking things you’ve heard as an actress or from an actress? When I was young, and trying to be an actress, a guy said, “Brush your hair, get a manicure, and iron your shirt.” It was the best thing anyone ever said to me. I realized I didn’t want to be an actress after that. All actors have horror stories. They have to wait for someone to give them something to do. It puts them in a vulnerable position. When you take a job, you don’t know how crazy or weird people are—they should be professional—but reputations can be built on bad behavior. You become desensitized. You go through that all your life. For some people, maybe it’s mechanical, a low-grade insult. Did your mother and/or siblings, Xan and Nick (both filmmakers), offer advice or help in shaping “Day Out of Days”? My mom read it. We were going through all these incarnations of the script and then got it together and made the film fast. Once we hit go, it was 20-hour days figuring out how to do this. My family was always curious, and we talked about movie stuff—we’re a crazy movie family. We help cast each other’s films, and play that game. We’re involved in each other’s films, but we give each other space. Can you talk about casting? You have Melanie Griffith, the daughter of a famous actress, playing Mia’s mother; Eddie Izzard playing a famous actor, and even a sly turn by B-movie star Laurene Landon. What prompted you to choose the performers you did? Did you feel some of them echoed Mia’s story? Sometimes when you start a project, you become a genius after: Of course that mirrors that! I just wanted Melanie. I wanted her voice in my film, and feel her presence. Part of the perks of the job is to get people you want in it. Eddie, too. When I wrote that part, and I thought about Eddie, I didn’t want anyone else. I was lucky he said yes! Lorene was amazing. She was supportive and understanding. And Brooke Smith was awesome-sauce! How did you and Alexia approach creating Mia? She is sympathetic even when she is most pathetic. Her frustrations are palpable because of Alexia’s strong performance. I had the luxury of doing my first short film with Alexia, and we had a freedom to do anything we wanted. It was un-tethered. Her ability to say everything without saying anything is one of her greatest talents. And a film about this—showing Mia’s interior—we were focused on this whole person. It wasn’t just that she’s an actress, or divorced…. We’re not always appropriate all the time. What do we do when we are alone, and isolated, and you don’t feel good about yourself? Everything turns inward. It’s how do you turn it around—especially after a series of humiliations—that tests you. Mia doesn’t know how to do anything else. Acting is all she’s ever done. She has to change and take giant leaps and start being a real person. Mia learns about balancing life and work. What did you learn about the life-work balance making this film? You don’t when you are shooting, you don’t. It’s “I’ll get to this in a bit…” You are very in the moment, and you live/work moment to moment. You aren’t thinking about the water and power bill, you are just in the moment. I love that it’s that intense. Then you go to long periods of writing, or editing, and that’s hard too. You need to get back to the set. But then you have your family and friends, and I cook…But as you get older, you see what’s important—it’s the people in your life.
“The Danish Girl” hypocrisy: If you want a major award for playing a trans woman, better make sure you’re up for Best Actor
Recently, Rebel Wilson accidentally proved you can be strikingly tone-deaf and oddly prescient at the same time. During this month's BAFTA Awards, the “Pitch Perfect” and “How to Be Single” actress ignited a firestorm of controversy for what many believed was a joke intended to mock transgender people. Wilson joked about the Oscars’ lack of diversity, a widespread topic of debate over the past few months. “I have never been invited to the Oscars because, you know, they are racists," Wilson quipped. “But the BAFTAs have diverse members. And that's what we all want to see in life, isn't it? Diverse members. One day I hope to return here to win a BAFTA myself. I have already been practicing my transgendered [sic] face.” Wilson’s joke was incredibly inartful (note: “transgendered” is not a word, “transgender” is), and she was appropriately criticized on Twitter for it. “[I]'ve been practicing my cisgender face so i don't get harassed & assaulted in public!” wrote trans writer and personality Tyler Ford. Nicolette Mason, who is a contributing editor at Marie Claire, seconded the outrage: Did Rebel Wilson seriously say she was practicing her ‘transgender face’ at the BAFTAs? Stop it. Right now.” Rebel Wilson might have put her foot in her mouth, but in drawing attention to the hypocrisy of awards season, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t onto something. What we missed in the outrage is that Wilson was right: As a cisgender actor, she’s far more likely to get nominated for an award for playing a trans person than an actual trans person. While actresses like Hilary Swank and Felicity Huffman have both earned kudos for transgender roles, those who live the experiences they portray on screen aren’t nearly as lucky. At the BAFTAs, Eddie Redmayne was shortlisted for best actor for his performance as transgender painter Lili Elbe in “The Danish Girl.” Left off the list were actresses Mya Taylor and Kitana “Kiki” Rodriguez, who have received little attention for their performances in the transgender buddy comedy “Tangerine,” the Sundance hit famously filmed on an iPhone. Outside of recognition from niche groups like the Gotham and Indie Spirit Awards, the pair were snubbed by nearly every awards group in existence. (That, of course, included the Oscars, which has also nominated Redmayne for best actor.) This is despite the fact that Taylor’s performance received major kudos from critics, nabbing fifth place in this year’s prestigious Village Voice Film Poll on the Best Supporting Actress list. Because of the massive critical love from “Tangerine,” Taylor and Rodriguez were the first trans actresses to ever receive their own film awards push. On the groundbreaking campaign, the film’s producers, Jay and Mark Duplass, said, “One thing that has become apparent to us as we look at this stuff, it seems that the TV Academy has embraced what’s happening in the trans movement with ‘Transparent’ and ‘Orange is the New Black.’ We feel that the film Academy is a little behind on that front.” The Duplass brothers are both right and wrong in that assessment—the Academy has embraced transgender stories, but only so long as they star a non-transgender (the term is cisgender) actor. In other words, performers who would compete in the opposite-gender category from the character they portray. In 2014, Jared Leto (“Dallas Buyers Club”) became the first ever person to win an Oscar — best supporting actor — for playing a trans person, but to date, no transgender performer has ever been nominated for the award. This is true also of the film category at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Critics Choice Awards—groups that unanimously honored Leto. This phenomenon is often known as “transface,” a term that refers to the casting of a performer who is not trans to portray a trans narrative. “The assumption tied to transface is that Hollywood is a discriminatory industry, which would rather cast a cisgender movie star who can be transformed to look like a transgender person through diet and cosmetics, than consider a minority actor with an authentic life experience for that role,” the Advocate’s Daniel Reynolds writes. That’s not an assumption. That’s a fact. While television actresses like Laverne Cox (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Alexandra Billings (“Transparent”) have helped break the glass ceiling for trans actresses in the industry, they remain exceptions to the rule. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Tambor has won numerous awards for playing Maura on “Transparent”—and is a shoo-in for his second consecutive Emmy Award—while Cox is still waiting for her best supporting actress trophy. When speaking about the backlash from the trans community to casting Redmayne, yet another non-trans actor in a trans woman’s role, “Danish Girl” director Tom Hooper noted that the film industry is not kind to transgender actors. “Access for trans actors to both trans and cisgender roles is utterly key,” Hooper said. “In the industry at the moment there is a problem: There is a huge pool of talent of trans actors, and access to parts is limited.” Hooper claims he worked for seven years to get “The Danish Girl” made, and the project has been in turnaround so long that, at different points in its storied production, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, and Charlize Theron were all attached. The implication is that without these actors to sell the film to financiers and awards voters, the film never would have never gotten made at all. And even if it did get produced with trans actors, it would have received the same mainstream cold shoulder as “Tangerine.” As Autostraddle’s Mari Brighe writes, this is because studio executives, awards groups, and film audiences remain “deeply uncomfortable” with the reality of actual trans people; after all, just 1 in 6 Americans actually know a trans person. Casting a non-trans performer, especially a celebrity, in that role makes these stories more palatable. “With that in mind, it’s somewhat clearer why there has been only minimal movement towards casting trans performers to play trans roles in films geared to large audiences,” Brighe writes. “While Hollywood is happy is exploit the public’s fascination with trans experiences, they’re not willing to risk their film budgets to elevate the standing of trans actors because they need to sanitize the film experience to ensure the comfort of their cis, straight moviegoers.” This is a vicious cycle: We need trans actors to help foster public acceptance, but the public won’t accept trans actors. To break that pattern, Hollywood has to stop leading from behind. Trans women need given the platform or the opportunities to have their stories embraced on the same level as the cis actors who play them. The casting decisions that lead these actresses to be passed over for the limited parts that are available to them might be just “business,” but that leads to an industry where trans people remain unemployed and shut out. There are numerous examples of this. After starring in Eric Schaeffer’s well-reviewed indie “Boy Meets Girl,” actress Michelle Hendley has just one additional credit to her name, a small part in NBC’s “The Player.” Since breaking out on “Transparent,” Alexandra Billings guested on TV’s “How to Get Away with Murder,” but her most promising film appearance is in a Denise Richards movie. Mya Taylor has booked a couple shorts. Laverne Cox might be a big star on television, but after a few featured roles (notably as Lily Tomlin's tattoo artist buddy in "Grandma"), she’s still awaiting the big-screen vehicle she deserves. These actresses deserve the ability to help tell their own stories and shape the way that cinema portrays trans narratives. Movies like “The Danish Girl” have taken small steps forward by consulting trans women behind the scenes, in order to help actors like Redmayne figure out how to most empathetically portray them. But that will be meaningless unless we allow those women to break down boundaries by actually putting them in front of the camera. It’s not people like Eddie Redmayne that will create a better, safer world for trans people. It’s trans actresses like Laverne Cox, Harmony Santana, Candis Cayne, Jamie Clayton, Calpernia Addams, Hari Nef, Jen Richards, and Angelica Ross who are doing important, life-saving work, and that deserves to finally be recognized.Recently, Rebel Wilson accidentally proved you can be strikingly tone-deaf and oddly prescient at the same time. During this month's BAFTA Awards, the “Pitch Perfect” and “How to Be Single” actress ignited a firestorm of controversy for what many believed was a joke intended to mock transgender people. Wilson joked about the Oscars’ lack of diversity, a widespread topic of debate over the past few months. “I have never been invited to the Oscars because, you know, they are racists," Wilson quipped. “But the BAFTAs have diverse members. And that's what we all want to see in life, isn't it? Diverse members. One day I hope to return here to win a BAFTA myself. I have already been practicing my transgendered [sic] face.” Wilson’s joke was incredibly inartful (note: “transgendered” is not a word, “transgender” is), and she was appropriately criticized on Twitter for it. “[I]'ve been practicing my cisgender face so i don't get harassed & assaulted in public!” wrote trans writer and personality Tyler Ford. Nicolette Mason, who is a contributing editor at Marie Claire, seconded the outrage: Did Rebel Wilson seriously say she was practicing her ‘transgender face’ at the BAFTAs? Stop it. Right now.” Rebel Wilson might have put her foot in her mouth, but in drawing attention to the hypocrisy of awards season, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t onto something. What we missed in the outrage is that Wilson was right: As a cisgender actor, she’s far more likely to get nominated for an award for playing a trans person than an actual trans person. While actresses like Hilary Swank and Felicity Huffman have both earned kudos for transgender roles, those who live the experiences they portray on screen aren’t nearly as lucky. At the BAFTAs, Eddie Redmayne was shortlisted for best actor for his performance as transgender painter Lili Elbe in “The Danish Girl.” Left off the list were actresses Mya Taylor and Kitana “Kiki” Rodriguez, who have received little attention for their performances in the transgender buddy comedy “Tangerine,” the Sundance hit famously filmed on an iPhone. Outside of recognition from niche groups like the Gotham and Indie Spirit Awards, the pair were snubbed by nearly every awards group in existence. (That, of course, included the Oscars, which has also nominated Redmayne for best actor.) This is despite the fact that Taylor’s performance received major kudos from critics, nabbing fifth place in this year’s prestigious Village Voice Film Poll on the Best Supporting Actress list. Because of the massive critical love from “Tangerine,” Taylor and Rodriguez were the first trans actresses to ever receive their own film awards push. On the groundbreaking campaign, the film’s producers, Jay and Mark Duplass, said, “One thing that has become apparent to us as we look at this stuff, it seems that the TV Academy has embraced what’s happening in the trans movement with ‘Transparent’ and ‘Orange is the New Black.’ We feel that the film Academy is a little behind on that front.” The Duplass brothers are both right and wrong in that assessment—the Academy has embraced transgender stories, but only so long as they star a non-transgender (the term is cisgender) actor. In other words, performers who would compete in the opposite-gender category from the character they portray. In 2014, Jared Leto (“Dallas Buyers Club”) became the first ever person to win an Oscar — best supporting actor — for playing a trans person, but to date, no transgender performer has ever been nominated for the award. This is true also of the film category at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Critics Choice Awards—groups that unanimously honored Leto. This phenomenon is often known as “transface,” a term that refers to the casting of a performer who is not trans to portray a trans narrative. “The assumption tied to transface is that Hollywood is a discriminatory industry, which would rather cast a cisgender movie star who can be transformed to look like a transgender person through diet and cosmetics, than consider a minority actor with an authentic life experience for that role,” the Advocate’s Daniel Reynolds writes. That’s not an assumption. That’s a fact. While television actresses like Laverne Cox (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Alexandra Billings (“Transparent”) have helped break the glass ceiling for trans actresses in the industry, they remain exceptions to the rule. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Tambor has won numerous awards for playing Maura on “Transparent”—and is a shoo-in for his second consecutive Emmy Award—while Cox is still waiting for her best supporting actress trophy. When speaking about the backlash from the trans community to casting Redmayne, yet another non-trans actor in a trans woman’s role, “Danish Girl” director Tom Hooper noted that the film industry is not kind to transgender actors. “Access for trans actors to both trans and cisgender roles is utterly key,” Hooper said. “In the industry at the moment there is a problem: There is a huge pool of talent of trans actors, and access to parts is limited.” Hooper claims he worked for seven years to get “The Danish Girl” made, and the project has been in turnaround so long that, at different points in its storied production, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, and Charlize Theron were all attached. The implication is that without these actors to sell the film to financiers and awards voters, the film never would have never gotten made at all. And even if it did get produced with trans actors, it would have received the same mainstream cold shoulder as “Tangerine.” As Autostraddle’s Mari Brighe writes, this is because studio executives, awards groups, and film audiences remain “deeply uncomfortable” with the reality of actual trans people; after all, just 1 in 6 Americans actually know a trans person. Casting a non-trans performer, especially a celebrity, in that role makes these stories more palatable. “With that in mind, it’s somewhat clearer why there has been only minimal movement towards casting trans performers to play trans roles in films geared to large audiences,” Brighe writes. “While Hollywood is happy is exploit the public’s fascination with trans experiences, they’re not willing to risk their film budgets to elevate the standing of trans actors because they need to sanitize the film experience to ensure the comfort of their cis, straight moviegoers.” This is a vicious cycle: We need trans actors to help foster public acceptance, but the public won’t accept trans actors. To break that pattern, Hollywood has to stop leading from behind. Trans women need given the platform or the opportunities to have their stories embraced on the same level as the cis actors who play them. The casting decisions that lead these actresses to be passed over for the limited parts that are available to them might be just “business,” but that leads to an industry where trans people remain unemployed and shut out. There are numerous examples of this. After starring in Eric Schaeffer’s well-reviewed indie “Boy Meets Girl,” actress Michelle Hendley has just one additional credit to her name, a small part in NBC’s “The Player.” Since breaking out on “Transparent,” Alexandra Billings guested on TV’s “How to Get Away with Murder,” but her most promising film appearance is in a Denise Richards movie. Mya Taylor has booked a couple shorts. Laverne Cox might be a big star on television, but after a few featured roles (notably as Lily Tomlin's tattoo artist buddy in "Grandma"), she’s still awaiting the big-screen vehicle she deserves. These actresses deserve the ability to help tell their own stories and shape the way that cinema portrays trans narratives. Movies like “The Danish Girl” have taken small steps forward by consulting trans women behind the scenes, in order to help actors like Redmayne figure out how to most empathetically portray them. But that will be meaningless unless we allow those women to break down boundaries by actually putting them in front of the camera. It’s not people like Eddie Redmayne that will create a better, safer world for trans people. It’s trans actresses like Laverne Cox, Harmony Santana, Candis Cayne, Jamie Clayton, Calpernia Addams, Hari Nef, Jen Richards, and Angelica Ross who are doing important, life-saving work, and that deserves to finally be recognized.
Donald Trump will never fire Katrina Pierson: Five of the craziest things the controversial spokeswoman has said on the campaign trail
Donald Trump's national campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson has served as a lighting rod of controversy ever since joining the Republican's presidential campaign back in November. Despite her short time on the campaign trail, and even shorter commitment to Trump (she was a vocal Ted Cruz backer in 2012), Pierson has shown a shared liking of the outrageous bluster her boss is known to frequently employ that makes her a unique campaign standout and undoubtedly a favorite the former reality TV star turned Republican leader. With Pierson back in the headlines today as her candidate is set to face off in the Nevada caucuses tonight, Salon has gathered some of the former cable news pundit's lowlights while stumping for the Donald on our airwaves: On Trump's ban on Syrian refugees: "So what? They’re Muslims!” Defending her boss' unconstitutional ban on Muslims and call to end all relocation of war torn Syrian refugees to the U.S., Pierson exhibited a complete lack of awareness while arguing with fellow conservative commentator S.E. Cupp on CNN. "There really is something new about banning an entire religious group from the country,” Cupp remarked, pushing back on Pierson's assertion that Trump's “morally repulsive, unconstitutional, and un-American" ban is in keeping with American customs. Pierson quickly shot back, arguing that “never in American history have we allowed insurgents to come across these borders!” “No one’s talking about allowing insurgents,” Cupp replied. “You’re talking about not allowing regular Muslims.” “Yes,” Pierson said, “from Arab nations. But you know what? So what? They’re Muslims!” “‘So what?'” Cupp asked incredulously. “That’s not the America we live in.” On her bullet necklace: "I'll wear a fetus next time"
https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" During a December interview on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor," Pierson again debated a fellow conservative commentator, Kurt Schlichter, arguing that the U.S. "should not be afraid to use nuclear weapons" under a President Trump.
https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" During a December interview on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor," Pierson again debated a fellow conservative commentator, Kurt Schlichter, arguing that the U.S. "should not be afraid to use nuclear weapons" under a President Trump.
https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" During a December interview on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor," Pierson again debated a fellow conservative commentator, Kurt Schlichter, arguing that the U.S. "should not be afraid to use nuclear weapons" under a President Trump. Pierson complained that most Republicans are happy to push for "perpetual wars," but are all bark and no bite when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, according to Mediaite.
"What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" she asked. To which an exasperated Schlichter replied: "The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing! You want to scare the hell out of the other side.”
The nuclear triad refers to the three ways nuclear weapons can be used: strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles or submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
On her 2012 tweet referring to President Obama as a half-breed: I do "not at all" regret it When some of Pierson's antics on behalf of Trump began to be noticed, her public record came under increased scrutiny. Last month, Pierson was grilled about her 2012 tweet referring to President Obama as not a "pure breed" by CNN's Brian Stelter. “Do you regret that?” Stetler asked her. “Would you like to retract that?” “Not at all,” Pierson responded, explaining that “these tweets — I’m an activist, and I’m a half-breed. I’m always getting called a half-breed.” Pierson continued to defend herself: “On Twitter, when you’re fighting with liberals and even [the] establishment, you go back at them [with] the same silliness they’re giving you." “You’re telling me,” Stetler replied, that “that was just silliness?” “Absolutely,” Pierson replied. https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "LBJ didn't give the Great Deal because he loves black people" In a recently released preview of the new We TV reality show "Sisters in Law," about African-American, female lawyers, Pierson makes a guest appearance at party hosted by a cast member in Texas before being booted from the home after engaging in a debate over Republicans' record on race upon introduction. "Just like LBJ didn’t give the Great Deal because he loved black people," a obviously confused and defensive Pierson retorted after the party hostess remarked that Republican “like a dirty word” to her. "That was the Civil Rights Act, honey, not the 'Great Deal,'" hostess Rhonda Willis snaps back. "But it wasn’t because he loved black people," Pierson continues, holding on to her confusion of FDR's "New Deal" with LBJ's signing of the Civil Rights Act or perhaps his "Great Society." “I’ve tolerated you, your ignorant opinions, your lack of education, and your lack of knowledge on very basic things like the Civil Rights Act,” a frustrasted Willis finally tells Pierson in the scene. “I’m now sick of hearing from you, and I want you to leave. Goodbye!” After Pierson's exist, Willis adds: “She is so dumb. I’ve spent most of my career making sure that people’s rights that were given to them under the Civil Rights Act, that they actually have those rights, that they can utilize those rights. And this idiot comes into my house, and she doesn’t even know what it is, and she thinks it’s called the ‘great deal.’” According to Buzzfeed, the scene was filmed at the end of July 2015. Pierson wasn't hired by the Trump campaign until November. So, while Pierson will likely never be removed from team Trump for crossing the line with any of her incendiary campaign rhetoric that so aligns with the candidate she is paid to speak on behalf, if she finds herself stealing the spotlight from the Donald one too many times with one of her zany comments, she may find herself like Ted Cruz's national spokesman, Rick Tyler, this week -- out of a job.Donald Trump's national campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson has served as a lighting rod of controversy ever since joining the Republican's presidential campaign back in November. Despite her short time on the campaign trail, and even shorter commitment to Trump (she was a vocal Ted Cruz backer in 2012), Pierson has shown a shared liking of the outrageous bluster her boss is known to frequently employ that makes her a unique campaign standout and undoubtedly a favorite the former reality TV star turned Republican leader. With Pierson back in the headlines today as her candidate is set to face off in the Nevada caucuses tonight, Salon has gathered some of the former cable news pundit's lowlights while stumping for the Donald on our airwaves: On Trump's ban on Syrian refugees: "So what? They’re Muslims!” Defending her boss' unconstitutional ban on Muslims and call to end all relocation of war torn Syrian refugees to the U.S., Pierson exhibited a complete lack of awareness while arguing with fellow conservative commentator S.E. Cupp on CNN. "There really is something new about banning an entire religious group from the country,” Cupp remarked, pushing back on Pierson's assertion that Trump's “morally repulsive, unconstitutional, and un-American" ban is in keeping with American customs. Pierson quickly shot back, arguing that “never in American history have we allowed insurgents to come across these borders!” “No one’s talking about allowing insurgents,” Cupp replied. “You’re talking about not allowing regular Muslims.” “Yes,” Pierson said, “from Arab nations. But you know what? So what? They’re Muslims!” “‘So what?'” Cupp asked incredulously. “That’s not the America we live in.” On her bullet necklace: "I'll wear a fetus next time"
https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" During a December interview on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor," Pierson again debated a fellow conservative commentator, Kurt Schlichter, arguing that the U.S. "should not be afraid to use nuclear weapons" under a President Trump. Pierson complained that most Republicans are happy to push for "perpetual wars," but are all bark and no bite when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, according to Mediaite.
"What is the point in having a good nuclear triad if you are afraid to use it?" she asked. To which an exasperated Schlichter replied: "The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing! You want to scare the hell out of the other side.”
The nuclear triad refers to the three ways nuclear weapons can be used: strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles or submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
On her 2012 tweet referring to President Obama as a half-breed: I do "not at all" regret it When some of Pierson's antics on behalf of Trump began to be noticed, her public record came under increased scrutiny. Last month, Pierson was grilled about her 2012 tweet referring to President Obama as not a "pure breed" by CNN's Brian Stelter. “Do you regret that?” Stetler asked her. “Would you like to retract that?” “Not at all,” Pierson responded, explaining that “these tweets — I’m an activist, and I’m a half-breed. I’m always getting called a half-breed.” Pierson continued to defend herself: “On Twitter, when you’re fighting with liberals and even [the] establishment, you go back at them [with] the same silliness they’re giving you." “You’re telling me,” Stetler replied, that “that was just silliness?” “Absolutely,” Pierson replied. https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... https://twitter.com/KatrinaPierson/st... "LBJ didn't give the Great Deal because he loves black people" In a recently released preview of the new We TV reality show "Sisters in Law," about African-American, female lawyers, Pierson makes a guest appearance at party hosted by a cast member in Texas before being booted from the home after engaging in a debate over Republicans' record on race upon introduction. "Just like LBJ didn’t give the Great Deal because he loved black people," a obviously confused and defensive Pierson retorted after the party hostess remarked that Republican “like a dirty word” to her. "That was the Civil Rights Act, honey, not the 'Great Deal,'" hostess Rhonda Willis snaps back. "But it wasn’t because he loved black people," Pierson continues, holding on to her confusion of FDR's "New Deal" with LBJ's signing of the Civil Rights Act or perhaps his "Great Society." “I’ve tolerated you, your ignorant opinions, your lack of education, and your lack of knowledge on very basic things like the Civil Rights Act,” a frustrasted Willis finally tells Pierson in the scene. “I’m now sick of hearing from you, and I want you to leave. Goodbye!” After Pierson's exist, Willis adds: “She is so dumb. I’ve spent most of my career making sure that people’s rights that were given to them under the Civil Rights Act, that they actually have those rights, that they can utilize those rights. And this idiot comes into my house, and she doesn’t even know what it is, and she thinks it’s called the ‘great deal.’” According to Buzzfeed, the scene was filmed at the end of July 2015. Pierson wasn't hired by the Trump campaign until November. So, while Pierson will likely never be removed from team Trump for crossing the line with any of her incendiary campaign rhetoric that so aligns with the candidate she is paid to speak on behalf, if she finds herself stealing the spotlight from the Donald one too many times with one of her zany comments, she may find herself like Ted Cruz's national spokesman, Rick Tyler, this week -- out of a job.
No, Bernie Sanders isn’t doomed: Why Hillary Clinton’s Nevada win doesn’t mean it’s over
Hillary Clinton’s Nevada win was a rude buzzkill for Bernie Sanders supporters still high from his commanding win in New Hampshire earlier this month. Worse yet were the stark headlines uniformly depicting the five-point loss as evidence that the upstart democratic socialist’s delegate math might be insurmountable: Clinton retained overwhelming support from black voters while the huge youth turnout Sanders needs didn’t materialize. This is all true. But a note to Sanders supporters: Chill out. Don’t panic. That Sanders is the underdog, and that he needs to convince a much larger share of black voters to break towards him, isn’t news, because it is not new. We knew that last week. The vast majority of states haven’t voted yet. The fight is still on. Sanders is still making his case. Clinton could still stumble. For Sanders, it will be an uphill battle. But much, much less of one than it looked like just a month ago. I don’t quibble with the basic findings of political reporters and poll wizzes. But news consumers are also citizens, and not merely gamblers on betfair.com. They should not allow their own political aspirations to be reduced to a horse race. Those of us in the citizenry make political decisions, hopefully, for more substantive reasons than the odds of winning. The predictions of these analysts are likely sound, but they are based on the current status quo. Political activists on the left already know that real transformation comes only when that status quo is upended. That’s always been true. And that’s the Sander’s campaign central challenge—as it should be. The media-driven expectations and momentum game has sent the Democratic primary on a wild ride. Remember that for many months, the conventional wisdom was that Sanders would be a fringe protest candidate. That was a fair prediction based on the status quo. Sanders, however, predicted otherwise. “I think people should be a little bit careful underestimating me,” Sanders said last April when he announced his candidacy, news that inaudibly landed on page A21 of the New York Times. By September, Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan found that while “The Times has not ignored Mr. Sanders’s campaign…it hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.” Sanders was gaining strength, but later that fall, Clinton came back from months of being rattled by the email scandal and a possible Biden run and stood down Republican inquisitors over Benghazi, reassuring nervous party leaders that she was a solid establishment candidate. It was only in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, as the polls suddenly tightened, that the media really began treating it like a real two-way fight. After achieving a virtual tie in Iowa and blowing Clinton away in New Hampshire, the close loss in Nevada, where Sanders trailed considerably until recently, is being painted as decisively bad news for Sanders. And it might turn out to be just that. But as both Sanders and Trump have proved, this year’s race has so far as yet defied conventional wisdom at more turns than not. Looking ahead over the next few months, conventional wisdom could very well be proven wrong again. Clinton remains the favorite. Sanders remains the underdog. None of this should change the Sanders’ campaign basic goal of fighting for every delegate possible nationwide—even if and when a win becomes mathematically impossible. Every Sanders supporter has a right to cast their vote and send a message about what direction the party and American politics will likely be heading, if not this year then in the years to come.Hillary Clinton’s Nevada win was a rude buzzkill for Bernie Sanders supporters still high from his commanding win in New Hampshire earlier this month. Worse yet were the stark headlines uniformly depicting the five-point loss as evidence that the upstart democratic socialist’s delegate math might be insurmountable: Clinton retained overwhelming support from black voters while the huge youth turnout Sanders needs didn’t materialize. This is all true. But a note to Sanders supporters: Chill out. Don’t panic. That Sanders is the underdog, and that he needs to convince a much larger share of black voters to break towards him, isn’t news, because it is not new. We knew that last week. The vast majority of states haven’t voted yet. The fight is still on. Sanders is still making his case. Clinton could still stumble. For Sanders, it will be an uphill battle. But much, much less of one than it looked like just a month ago. I don’t quibble with the basic findings of political reporters and poll wizzes. But news consumers are also citizens, and not merely gamblers on betfair.com. They should not allow their own political aspirations to be reduced to a horse race. Those of us in the citizenry make political decisions, hopefully, for more substantive reasons than the odds of winning. The predictions of these analysts are likely sound, but they are based on the current status quo. Political activists on the left already know that real transformation comes only when that status quo is upended. That’s always been true. And that’s the Sander’s campaign central challenge—as it should be. The media-driven expectations and momentum game has sent the Democratic primary on a wild ride. Remember that for many months, the conventional wisdom was that Sanders would be a fringe protest candidate. That was a fair prediction based on the status quo. Sanders, however, predicted otherwise. “I think people should be a little bit careful underestimating me,” Sanders said last April when he announced his candidacy, news that inaudibly landed on page A21 of the New York Times. By September, Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan found that while “The Times has not ignored Mr. Sanders’s campaign…it hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.” Sanders was gaining strength, but later that fall, Clinton came back from months of being rattled by the email scandal and a possible Biden run and stood down Republican inquisitors over Benghazi, reassuring nervous party leaders that she was a solid establishment candidate. It was only in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, as the polls suddenly tightened, that the media really began treating it like a real two-way fight. After achieving a virtual tie in Iowa and blowing Clinton away in New Hampshire, the close loss in Nevada, where Sanders trailed considerably until recently, is being painted as decisively bad news for Sanders. And it might turn out to be just that. But as both Sanders and Trump have proved, this year’s race has so far as yet defied conventional wisdom at more turns than not. Looking ahead over the next few months, conventional wisdom could very well be proven wrong again. Clinton remains the favorite. Sanders remains the underdog. None of this should change the Sanders’ campaign basic goal of fighting for every delegate possible nationwide—even if and when a win becomes mathematically impossible. Every Sanders supporter has a right to cast their vote and send a message about what direction the party and American politics will likely be heading, if not this year then in the years to come.
February 22, 2016
“Here for the right reasons”: Why people really agree to go on “The Bachelor”
Anyone who has watched ABC's "The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette" or "Bachelor in Paradise" has seen a contestant come under fire for being "there for the wrong reasons," typically referring to fame. The oft-cited "right reason" to compete for the Bachelor or Bachelorette's heart and hand is "to find love." But are the majority of competitors truly on the show for romance? And if they are, why do they choose a filmed 25-person competition over dating off camera with typical odds? “Television gets in the way of finding real romance,” said University of California at Davis sociologist Laura Grindstaff. “It's a visual medium. You're not getting to know their personalities as well as you might in other circumstances, so it's much easier for people to succeed when they're very good-looking and they're aiming to promote themselves and their own performances.” “Reality Steve” Carbone, who has blogged about the Bachelor franchise for 12 years and spoken to over 50 contestants, agreed. “I'm almost putting the number at 100 percent — they're all out to build a brand,” said Carbone. “They don't care about having a spouse. They know they have a one-in-25 shot. It’s not about that. It's basically about getting out of town, free travel, meeting girls that are going to be lifelong friends, and about 78th on their list is finding a husband.” “The people that I have acquaintance with really get off on the fact that strangers on the Internet compliment them," Carbone continued. "They’re feeling this assurance every day, like, ‘Oh, my God, you looked so pretty’ or ‘I love your crop top.’ And they love it because in their boring lives, they don't get compliments.” Carbone pointed out that social media celebrities can get paid for promoting products on their accounts. Confirming this theory, two-time "Bachelorette" runner-up Nick Viall told Bustle he was building his Instagram following to make money off his page. The rare exceptions, Carbone said, are contestants who were “naive to the process and didn't realize the opportunities that could come from it.” Such was the case for Stephanie Simons, who entered "The Bachelor" in 2005. “Going on reality TV was the perfect little escape from reality,” she said. “We were all fueled by high hopes… and the chance to go to Paris, all expenses paid.” The show’s staff enticed potential contestants, she added, “making you feel like they've scoured the ends of the Earth to find your true match.” “We were locked in a hotel room for days, and the crew talked about nothing but this mystery guy,” she recounted. “They talked him up incessantly as though he was the man with the golden undies, and they threw the word ‘soulmate’ around a lot. I later heard they 'discovered' him at a dive bar in Tennessee and gave him a makeover. … Nowadays, it's different and contestants aren't as naive as I was.” Carbone maintains that these innocent contestants only existed during the show’s nascent years. More recent competitors, who can witness former cast members’ lives on social media, are without exception fame-seeking, he said — and he doesn’t think they’re fooling themselves. "They know deep down this is really why they're doing it, but they would never admit it publicly because people wouldn't like them,” he said. Not so for former Bachelor Prince Lorenzo Borghese, who unapologetically admits he went on "The Bachelor" and five more reality shows to further his cosmetics business and animal rescue organization. “I wanted to promote my charity work and my business, and it's a great platform for that. It gives you a voice,” he explained. “And if anyone tells you they did it just to find love, they're lying to you.” Borghese sees no problem with his motives, since he was also open to getting married. “I think if you can do two things at one time, where you can maybe find your spouse and promote your brand, why wouldn't you? If you're just going on there to find love, go on Match.com.” It might be tempting to assume that anyone who would date in a setting where their every move, at least outside the bathroom, could be caught on camera and used as fodder for drama is in it for the publicity as Grindstaff, Carbone and Borghese theorize. But maybe there’s a more complicated story to tell about why people date on reality TV. University of San Francisco sociologist Joshua Gamson agreed fame is often a factor — but observed another, more benevolent possible motive at work. “If their goal is to date, ['The Bachelor'] seems in some ways an efficient way to go about it because it's structured and there are tests,” he said. “In the real world, there isn't a format.” Few people get guaranteed face time with an eligible, pre-screened bachelor or bachelorette assessing them as a potential spouse from the get-go, he explained. Although online dating provides some transparency into what people are seeking, there's no itinerary of date activities or two-month timeline to get engaged, nor is there an opportunity to watch your date handle various situations on TV before you even meet. Though contestants' chances are at 1-in-25 when they enter, some prefer that to completely unknown odds, said Gamson. Competitors can watch their chances rise with each episode, and if they’re in the final two, they know there’s a 50 percent chance they’ll get engaged. Normally, daters have no idea whom they're up against or whether there will be a proposal if they're the last left standing. Leslie Hughes, who competed on Sean Lowe’s "Bachelor" season in 2013, observed another upside of televised dating: Contestants are cut off from everything else. “There is no distraction,” she said. “You don't have cellphones. You don't have music. You don't have books. You can’t check your phone. That is an advantage to fall in love quicker.” Desiree Siegfried, who appeared on Lowe’s season as well before meeting her husband, Chris, as the Bachelorette, said she also benefited from the show’s structure, since its stars are forced to date people who aren’t their usual type. “You are meeting people that you would never normally meet — and maybe even guys you would never even think about dating,” she said. “But you're put in this to find out more about them.” But even Bachelor Nation sweetheart Siegfried admits she didn’t enter "The Bachelor" with a “here to find love” mentality. “I was recently out of a relationship and moved to LA, and I just wanted a change,” she said. “I was like, ‘that looks like an adventure,’ and that was the only reason I applied. I thought it was a joke.” Siegfried said her husband, who was recruited while walking around Seattle, had a similar attitude. “We didn't really have a clue what to expect,” she recalled. “I think it's perfectly fine to go into it thinking that it will be a fun adventure. But, with that said, you have to be open.” On Siegfried’s season, the men performed a song called “All the Right Reasons” to assure her they were there to fall in love. But in her mind, that’s not the only “right reason.” In fact, she’s skeptical when "Bachelor" contestants come in expecting romance. “There's quite a few girls who will just build up this connection in their heads before even meeting [the Bachelor], and I don't know if that's necessarily the right way to go about it,” she said. Love — or at least the expectation of it — may not be the “right reason” after all. Perhaps the purest incentive to go on "The Bachelor" is the adventure that beckoned Siegfried. After all, pursuing outcomes other than love doesn’t preclude the possibility of finding it. Even cynical Reality Steve admitted that people fall in love on dating shows. “All this show does is allow two people who wouldn't normally meet to meet,” he said. Indeed, seven marriages — and zero divorces — have come out of "The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette" and "Bachelor in Paradise" (if you count Bachelor Jason Mesnick, who married his runner-up). “It's a weird way to fall in love, but it's got this intensity to it,” said Gamson. “If you believe you're meant to be with somebody and fate brings them your way, there's no reason to think a TV show couldn't be that hand of fate.”Anyone who has watched ABC's "The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette" or "Bachelor in Paradise" has seen a contestant come under fire for being "there for the wrong reasons," typically referring to fame. The oft-cited "right reason" to compete for the Bachelor or Bachelorette's heart and hand is "to find love." But are the majority of competitors truly on the show for romance? And if they are, why do they choose a filmed 25-person competition over dating off camera with typical odds? “Television gets in the way of finding real romance,” said University of California at Davis sociologist Laura Grindstaff. “It's a visual medium. You're not getting to know their personalities as well as you might in other circumstances, so it's much easier for people to succeed when they're very good-looking and they're aiming to promote themselves and their own performances.” “Reality Steve” Carbone, who has blogged about the Bachelor franchise for 12 years and spoken to over 50 contestants, agreed. “I'm almost putting the number at 100 percent — they're all out to build a brand,” said Carbone. “They don't care about having a spouse. They know they have a one-in-25 shot. It’s not about that. It's basically about getting out of town, free travel, meeting girls that are going to be lifelong friends, and about 78th on their list is finding a husband.” “The people that I have acquaintance with really get off on the fact that strangers on the Internet compliment them," Carbone continued. "They’re feeling this assurance every day, like, ‘Oh, my God, you looked so pretty’ or ‘I love your crop top.’ And they love it because in their boring lives, they don't get compliments.” Carbone pointed out that social media celebrities can get paid for promoting products on their accounts. Confirming this theory, two-time "Bachelorette" runner-up Nick Viall told Bustle he was building his Instagram following to make money off his page. The rare exceptions, Carbone said, are contestants who were “naive to the process and didn't realize the opportunities that could come from it.” Such was the case for Stephanie Simons, who entered "The Bachelor" in 2005. “Going on reality TV was the perfect little escape from reality,” she said. “We were all fueled by high hopes… and the chance to go to Paris, all expenses paid.” The show’s staff enticed potential contestants, she added, “making you feel like they've scoured the ends of the Earth to find your true match.” “We were locked in a hotel room for days, and the crew talked about nothing but this mystery guy,” she recounted. “They talked him up incessantly as though he was the man with the golden undies, and they threw the word ‘soulmate’ around a lot. I later heard they 'discovered' him at a dive bar in Tennessee and gave him a makeover. … Nowadays, it's different and contestants aren't as naive as I was.” Carbone maintains that these innocent contestants only existed during the show’s nascent years. More recent competitors, who can witness former cast members’ lives on social media, are without exception fame-seeking, he said — and he doesn’t think they’re fooling themselves. "They know deep down this is really why they're doing it, but they would never admit it publicly because people wouldn't like them,” he said. Not so for former Bachelor Prince Lorenzo Borghese, who unapologetically admits he went on "The Bachelor" and five more reality shows to further his cosmetics business and animal rescue organization. “I wanted to promote my charity work and my business, and it's a great platform for that. It gives you a voice,” he explained. “And if anyone tells you they did it just to find love, they're lying to you.” Borghese sees no problem with his motives, since he was also open to getting married. “I think if you can do two things at one time, where you can maybe find your spouse and promote your brand, why wouldn't you? If you're just going on there to find love, go on Match.com.” It might be tempting to assume that anyone who would date in a setting where their every move, at least outside the bathroom, could be caught on camera and used as fodder for drama is in it for the publicity as Grindstaff, Carbone and Borghese theorize. But maybe there’s a more complicated story to tell about why people date on reality TV. University of San Francisco sociologist Joshua Gamson agreed fame is often a factor — but observed another, more benevolent possible motive at work. “If their goal is to date, ['The Bachelor'] seems in some ways an efficient way to go about it because it's structured and there are tests,” he said. “In the real world, there isn't a format.” Few people get guaranteed face time with an eligible, pre-screened bachelor or bachelorette assessing them as a potential spouse from the get-go, he explained. Although online dating provides some transparency into what people are seeking, there's no itinerary of date activities or two-month timeline to get engaged, nor is there an opportunity to watch your date handle various situations on TV before you even meet. Though contestants' chances are at 1-in-25 when they enter, some prefer that to completely unknown odds, said Gamson. Competitors can watch their chances rise with each episode, and if they’re in the final two, they know there’s a 50 percent chance they’ll get engaged. Normally, daters have no idea whom they're up against or whether there will be a proposal if they're the last left standing. Leslie Hughes, who competed on Sean Lowe’s "Bachelor" season in 2013, observed another upside of televised dating: Contestants are cut off from everything else. “There is no distraction,” she said. “You don't have cellphones. You don't have music. You don't have books. You can’t check your phone. That is an advantage to fall in love quicker.” Desiree Siegfried, who appeared on Lowe’s season as well before meeting her husband, Chris, as the Bachelorette, said she also benefited from the show’s structure, since its stars are forced to date people who aren’t their usual type. “You are meeting people that you would never normally meet — and maybe even guys you would never even think about dating,” she said. “But you're put in this to find out more about them.” But even Bachelor Nation sweetheart Siegfried admits she didn’t enter "The Bachelor" with a “here to find love” mentality. “I was recently out of a relationship and moved to LA, and I just wanted a change,” she said. “I was like, ‘that looks like an adventure,’ and that was the only reason I applied. I thought it was a joke.” Siegfried said her husband, who was recruited while walking around Seattle, had a similar attitude. “We didn't really have a clue what to expect,” she recalled. “I think it's perfectly fine to go into it thinking that it will be a fun adventure. But, with that said, you have to be open.” On Siegfried’s season, the men performed a song called “All the Right Reasons” to assure her they were there to fall in love. But in her mind, that’s not the only “right reason.” In fact, she’s skeptical when "Bachelor" contestants come in expecting romance. “There's quite a few girls who will just build up this connection in their heads before even meeting [the Bachelor], and I don't know if that's necessarily the right way to go about it,” she said. Love — or at least the expectation of it — may not be the “right reason” after all. Perhaps the purest incentive to go on "The Bachelor" is the adventure that beckoned Siegfried. After all, pursuing outcomes other than love doesn’t preclude the possibility of finding it. Even cynical Reality Steve admitted that people fall in love on dating shows. “All this show does is allow two people who wouldn't normally meet to meet,” he said. Indeed, seven marriages — and zero divorces — have come out of "The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette" and "Bachelor in Paradise" (if you count Bachelor Jason Mesnick, who married his runner-up). “It's a weird way to fall in love, but it's got this intensity to it,” said Gamson. “If you believe you're meant to be with somebody and fate brings them your way, there's no reason to think a TV show couldn't be that hand of fate.”
“He was your average Joe”: The police and the media coddle another white killer
On Saturday, a 45-year-old white man named Jason Brian Dalton allegedly went on a shooting spree in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Uber driver has been charged with six counts of murder and two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. In too many ways, this is the new normal in America. CNN framed the reactions to the Kalamazoo murder spree in the following way:
"This is your worst nightmare," Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Paul Matyas told CNN affiliate WOOD-TV. "When you have somebody just driving around randomly killing people." "We just can't figure out the motive," said Hadley. "There's nothing that gives us any indication as to why he would do this or what would have triggered this. The victims did not know him, he did not know the victims." ... "For all intents and purposes, he was your average Joe. This was random," said Hadley. Getting appeared to struggle at times for the right words, if there were any, at Sunday's press conference. "There is this sense of loss, anger, (and) fear," he said. "On top of that, how do you tell the families of these victims that they were not targeted for any other reason than they were a target?" Getting said he was confident that Dalton acted alone, and that there is no connection to terrorism.There is a standard script used by the American corporate news media—and among the public and many elites—to discuss tragedies of this type. It is familiar. We know its vocabulary and narrative. The white man who commits an act of mass gun violence was “disturbed” or “mentally ill.” He was a “lone wolf.” Alternatively, he is a “family” man who was living “the American Dream.” Politicians and the corporate news media caution the American public to “wait for all the facts” before arriving at any conclusions. Republicans and the right-wing news entertainment complex demand that “we” should not “politicize” gun violence. On cue, the gun lobby and its supplicants recite tired and untrue mantras such as “a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun” and “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” And of course, one of the most problematic and dangerous parts of the script that is used to discuss mass shootings by white men in America is how those happenings are all so “unpredictable” and “random.” Gun violence is treated as an inevitability, something akin to a storm or “act of God.” In reality, it is the result of systematic failings of public policy, the overwhelming power of the gun lobby, and an inability on the part of the American people to hold their elected leaders accountable to the people’s will. (A new and even more perverse “logic” has also been summoned on social media and elsewhere to discuss the Kalamazoo gun rampage. Apparently, Jason Brian Dalton is not a “mass shooter” because his killing of six people and wounding of two others took place not in one isolated event, but rather over several hours.) Those who deviate from the boundaries of this script are often met with outrage and blind anger. Ultimately, to discuss the relationship between guns, white men, masculinity and mass violence in America is verboten. This is the lethal output of white privilege and the white racial frame in combination with one another. There are voices that deviate from the script, those of us who dare to point out troubling questions about the nature of fairness and justice along the color line. For example, white men with guns who kill multiple people are somehow miraculously taken into custody by police unharmed, yet black and brown people who do not have weapons, and have committed no crime, are routinely killed by heavily militarized police who are in “fear for their lives.” Likewise, white men like Cliven Bundy (and others) can point live firearms at America’s police and other law enforcement agents with relative impunity. A person of color (or someone marked as a “Muslim”) doing the same thing would be met with extreme and lethal force. What these dissenting voices are pointing out, in their own 21st century version of “parrhesia,” is that the relationship between guns, masculinity, whiteness, democracy and notions of “freedom” constitutes a very particular and specific form of privilege that is usually denied to other groups in the United States. To be “white” in America is the ultimate freedom to be an individual. Consequently, when white men commit horrible acts of mass gun violence there is no public demand for group accountability or introspective thought about what is “pathological” about “white culture”; white men as a group are most certainly not held responsible or stigmatized for mass shootings; there will be no discussions in the corporate news media about “white crime.” Saturday’s act of mass murder in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is also an opportunity to highlight how the narrative of “random” gun violence can itself be a reflection of white (male) privilege. To that end, I offer a question. Can an American who happens to be Muslim commit an act of random gun violence that kills multiple people? As a matter of empirical fact, the answer is clearly “yes.” A person from any ethnic or racial background can commit an act of violence, one that seemingly has no motive other than to inflict harm, and where the victims do not know one another. However, the news media and America’s other opinion leaders would treat the same event as an inherently political act of terrorism. Where the alleged mass killing of six people in Kalamazoo by Jason Brian Dalton has been greeted with relative silence by the corporate news media and politicians, the same event by a “Muslim” or someone else marked as the Other would be a source of mass panic and fear. The concept of “race” has been described by social scientists, historians and philosophers as a way of marking identities in such a manner as to answer pressing political concerns, respond to socio-political anxieties, or to demarcate who has power and what groups and individuals do not. In the post 9/11 dystopian neoliberal nightmare version of the United States of America, to be perceived as “Muslim” is to inhabit a body and cultural identity that is marked as inseparable from “terrorism” until 1) proven otherwise and 2) to the satisfaction of the White Gaze. This irrational bigotry does many different types of political and social work. On one hand, it is a formula for success used by proto-fascist, racially resentful nativists in the Republican Party and the broader right-wing political-entertainment machine. The notion of Muslims as “terrorists” also blunts and obscures any significant public discussion about (and interventions against) mass gun violence and its connections to toxic and aggrieved white masculinity. The inability to have these discussions is one more example, among many, of how racism hurts white people. The mass killings in Kalamazoo, Michigan, were the 42nd such event in the United States during 2016. Most victims of gun violence and other crimes are intra-racial. White men are, with several notable exceptions such as the Chattanooga massacre, largely killing other white people in America’s mass shootings. Since Sept. 11, 2001, right-wing domestic terrorists have killed more Americans than “Muslim terrorists.” The right-wing media and Republican political elites have worked very hard to suppress and deflect any discussion of that fact. White men are approximately 30 percent of the American population but are responsible for approximately 64 percent of mass shootings. Yet it is considered impolitic, or an act of “reverse racism,” to publicly discuss and seek explanations for that phenomenon. Gun violence is a public health crisis in the United States. Mass shootings by (mostly) white men are an acute example of this public sickness. The American people and their leaders lack the will to confront those dual problems because to do so would involve asking very difficult questions--the answers to which many of us are extremely afraid.
Michael Pollan has no answers: Yet another patronizing appeal to “cook real food” won’t solve our broken system
If you’ve read anything by Michael Pollan, you know a certain hazard to his work on American food culture: It makes you feel guilty to eat most things. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” will destroy your comfort with processed food and Whole Foods alike, through the combined critique of industrial corn processing, mechanized organic growing practices, and the shipment of produce from all over the world to everywhere else in the world, just to get a peach in the off-season. Pollan has become a cornerstone of American foodie culture, up there with legendary Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters—those chefs and writers who not only think that their methodology of cuisine tastes better, but also that it is ethically and morally better for the world, either through preserving the environment, immortalizing traditional practices, or contributing to the holistic and spiritual health of being human. It’s a compelling argument. Pollan has, at this point, been making it for years. Pollan followed up the best-selling and much-lauded “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” with “In Defense of Food,” “Food Rules" and in 2013, “Cooked,” which is the work the Netflix docuseries is based on. They all build off of the same dilemma outlined in “Omnivore”—how to eat, knowing what we know, with the time and limited resources we have. In “Cooked,” Pollan challenged himself to cook, as he challenges the reader to, as well. That takes him to bread, barbecue and beer, among other adventures. “Cooked,” the series, mixes Pollan’s own journey with a brief history of cooking—exploring why we cook what we do with the cross-disciplinary intensity that has become his hallmark. Pollan’s journeys take him from studying microorganisms with a cheesemaking nun in Connecticut to hunting and cooking goannas, a type of lizard, with the Martu people of Australia. He explores both the biology of cooking and the anthropology of it, and where “Cooked” succeeds best is in its incredible production values—journeying across the world to film Moroccan women baking bread or a North Carolinian pitmaster barbecuing a whole pig; time-lapse cinematography of the mold blooming on the rind of a ripening cheese; illustrations and demonstrations of the scientific principles that combine to create cooking. It’s a beautiful four-part series, with a lot of money poured into it; a significant step above the mass-produced cooking shows that crowd reality television. The problem is that if you know even just a little bit about this field, Pollan comes off as patronizing; if you don’t know anything about it, it’s hard to imagine Pollan’s screen presence inviting you into the world of socially conscious food culture unless you are a great deal like him—white, male, well-off. (An anecdote about Pollan’s childhood pig in the first episode, “Fire,” centers around one of Pollan’s summers on Martha’s Vineyard and an adventure with neighbor and fellow pig-owner James Taylor, the legendary folk singer.) Pollan makes worthy efforts to explain why people have chosen shortcuts around cooking—such as the gender imbalance of food, the low prestige of cooking, and the incredible amount of time it can take up—but his idealistic solutions sometimes elide those exact concerns. In India, he points to the legendary tiffin system as a way to get homecooked food at convenience—without acknowledging well, I think, the typically female and low-paying labor that goes into those meals. Similarly, Pollan often champions what is termed elsewhere “slow food”—sustainably and humanely raised meat, baking your own bread, slowly cooking a homemade stew for long midday hours—even as he explains how financially infeasible these options are for so many Americans. Pollan’s personal journey, and his advice, are aimed at a specific stratum of the American public—one that is steadily eroding—to conceal a sadder problem, which is that the American food system is so deeply flawed that only great upheaval could fix it. No one wants to eat terrible food, or to feed it to their children. It’s that terrible food is so often the cheapest, easiest or fastest food to obtain. Pollan’s exhortations aren’t falling on deaf ears, but I think they are falling on ears who know, already, what they can or can’t do to address the problem.
“My friends and I are indoor kids”: Paul Rust on “Love’s” dorky movie themes, working with Judd Apatow and subverting rom-com clichés
Near the beginning of the third episode of Netflix’s new series “Love,” a Dr. Drew-like radio host (Brett Gelman) gives his producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) some advice about how to recover from the end of a relationship. “The best thing you can do right now — don’t try to feel better,” he says. “Just feel. Feel it all. Today and tomorrow. Just pass through it. Because maybe something positive has happened. Maybe you needed to clean out some emotional space for something good. Something new.” And that, more or less, is what “Love” — and, frankly, love — is all about. We sat down with Paul Rust, who stars in the series and co-created it with wife Lesley Arfin and director/producer Judd Apatow, to talk about creating their first TV show, working with Apatow, and how music came to be such an important element of the story. The show is barely out and you’re already writing and getting ready for Season 2. Do you have a start date for production? We start shooting March 1. I’m trying as much as I can to be in the writer’s room right now. Once we start shooting, I’ll be on set almost all the time. What did you do today? Today we had the latest draft of the first and second episodes for the second season. Judd [Apatow] came in and gave his final tweaks for those two episodes. Did you and Lesley write a pilot and take it around to studios, or did you have Judd Apatow involved at the idea stage? My manager [Christie Smith] knew that Lesley had written on a couple of seasons of “Girls,” and I was co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” with Paul Reubens, which Judd was producing. Leslie and I came up with a movie idea and pitched it to Judd, and Judd really liked the relationship and the dynamic but thought that a movie wouldn’t explore the relationship as fully as he wanted. So the three of us got together and wrote the pilot together. You and Lesley Arfin are married. How much of the story came from you writing about your own relationship? We used ourselves initially as a jumping-off point, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t make it entirely biographical because it wouldn’t be compelling television. [Laughs.] Lesley and I are more mature than the couple on the show, and Judd encouraged us to dial our maturity back to give them more ways to get in their own way. So it became more about past relationships and other people we knew. Please tell me the “Carlito’s Way” thing — the cringe-y scenes where you’re sitting around with friends writing theme songs for movies — is not an actual thing. Noooo. [Laughs.] We are dorks and we do get together and do movie marathons, but we don’t do the song thing. The closest thing we do is a horror movie marathon on Halloween that get progressively scarier. We start with something like a Disney movie and end with “Faces of Death.” We were trying to capture the idea that my friends and I are indoor kids. I hear people describing some film and TV shows lately as “honest,” and I wonder a lot of times if they’re buying into the idea that they’re watching something like a performed documentary about the writer’s life. I see that a lot too. I wonder if it’s because we’re five or 10 years out from reality TV being one of the predominant ways we watched stories, and maybe the fiction side saw something about capturing “reality” on camera and that people want something more sophisticated and more real. I don’t really like the term “honest.” If something entirely replicates reality, I kind of feel like what’s the point? With our show, I think there’s an attempt to make things feel truthful, but we don’t show somebody stuck in L.A. traffic every time they go somewhere because that would be boring. There’s a line in the first episode where someone says, “Love doesn’t just happen. We have to choose it.” Did you set that up as a false premise to knock down or to prove out over the course of the series? Some people have interpreted the title of the show — “Love” — as ironic. For me, it’s sincere. The idea that we have to agree with love is a genuine statement about love. It takes a while for them to admit that they even like each other. You’re not entitled to it. Love takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of music in the show. Did you have a playlist of things you really wanted to use, or was it more a function of a music supervisor telling you what you could afford? It was both. We had some songs we wanted to use, and we worked a lot of it out in editing. Judd was a big part of that that. There’s a Gravediggaz song in the second episode that Lesley wrote into the script. In the fourth episode, we’re at this party and play “Jet” by Wings. I was driving to work that day and listening to Jet, and as soon as I sat down in the writers’ room Judd said, “Hey, let’s use ‘Jet’ by Wings in this scene.” Did you have to learn how to play that song? I did. I had to learn it. They guy who plays the guitar in that scene is Mark Everett from Eels, which is a band that I’ve loved for a long time. He helped me a lot. I mean, it’s Paul McCartney. He’s a pretty good bassist. That’s an episode where you see Gus’ friends in one place and Mickey’s friends in another. You are in this huge web of L.A. comedy writers/actors/stand-ups. Did you put those groups together, or was that more casting? That was interesting. All the people who play Gus’ friends on the show are friends of mine from the Upright Citizens Brigade. A couple of people — Neil Campbell and Mike Cassady — have been friends of mine going back to the University of Iowa 15 years ago. When we got to casting the party, most of those are people that Lesley knew. There’s a professional skater and a photographer and musicians — a lot of people being their authentic selves. And at the end of that episode you’ve got Rich Sommer and Kyle Kinane and you and Gillian Jacobs in one of the best scenes in the series. Rich is so good. And John Slattery was directing, so we had this nice mini-“Mad Men” reunion. You had several directors who are also good actors like Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Showalter. And Joe Swanberg, who has done a lot of acting. Dean Holland, who directed a lot of episodes for “Parks and Rec,” directed the first two and the last two episodes. Maggie Carey, who directed “The To Do List,” directed an episode, and she’s coming back to do two episodes in the second season. Were the rom-com tropes like the meet-cute and the best friend these elephants in the room that you had to navigate, or did you not think about it like that? It’s tough — and I’m not the first person to say this — but clichés exist because they actually happen in real life. We didn’t want to break rules just to break rules. Some of those rules are there because it’s how people meet and how people have conflict. But we had a lot of conversations around how to do things. Gus and Mickey meet when she forgets her money and he buys her some cigarettes, and we asked, “Are we saying that he gets into her world by buying her something? Is that fucked up?” So Gus offers, “You don't have to pay me back,” and she’s like, “Don’t be a fuckin’ hero.” So we call things like that out more than in some other romantic comedies. Gillian Jacobs was good on “Community” at carrying a lot of baggage without wearing it on her face. Did you want a version of that for “Love”? Gillian is an amazing actor, and I thank my lucky stars that we were able to have her on our show. We wrote the part with her in mind because of the very thing you’re saying. The thing I liked about her on “Community” was that she could play somebody who was broken or hurting but not performing it in a way that defends what the character is doing. On “Love,” I think you can have empathy for her even as a character who rubs people the wrong way. I think an example of that is that I was never really sure whether she was clear on whether she’s an alcoholic or not. It wasn’t just denial or an elaborate coping mechanism. Yeah, it’s a confusing thing. I’m sure it’s confusing for a lot of people. Drinking or taking a substance to escape makes you ask whether escaping is a bad thing. We go to the movies to escape. We eat food to escape. And we didn’t want her to be a TV-movie-of-the-week alcoholic. We wanted it to be more gray and real. Text messaging and social media is something that’s pretty pervasive in society but isn’t inherently cinematic. Did you have a lot of discussion about how to communicate that by showing people on their phones or putting the text on-screen like some other shows have done? We talked about it a lot. People use text and use Instagram, and we wanted to involve that in the show. We decided not to do text on the screen or hearing voice-over of what people were typing because we didn’t want the show to be slick. I love seeing that in “House of Cards” and “Sherlock,” but it didn’t feel right for our show where we’re trying to get how the characters see the world. How weird was it for your wife to be sitting just off camera while you’re taking your shirt off and climbing into bed with someone? Like Hey, why can’t you bring some of that home! [Laughs.] Surprisingly, it was never uncomfortable. Lesley is an artist, and she understands. I was more in my head about it than she was. She said she wanted to tell a story and not to get too in-my-head about it.Near the beginning of the third episode of Netflix’s new series “Love,” a Dr. Drew-like radio host (Brett Gelman) gives his producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) some advice about how to recover from the end of a relationship. “The best thing you can do right now — don’t try to feel better,” he says. “Just feel. Feel it all. Today and tomorrow. Just pass through it. Because maybe something positive has happened. Maybe you needed to clean out some emotional space for something good. Something new.” And that, more or less, is what “Love” — and, frankly, love — is all about. We sat down with Paul Rust, who stars in the series and co-created it with wife Lesley Arfin and director/producer Judd Apatow, to talk about creating their first TV show, working with Apatow, and how music came to be such an important element of the story. The show is barely out and you’re already writing and getting ready for Season 2. Do you have a start date for production? We start shooting March 1. I’m trying as much as I can to be in the writer’s room right now. Once we start shooting, I’ll be on set almost all the time. What did you do today? Today we had the latest draft of the first and second episodes for the second season. Judd [Apatow] came in and gave his final tweaks for those two episodes. Did you and Lesley write a pilot and take it around to studios, or did you have Judd Apatow involved at the idea stage? My manager [Christie Smith] knew that Lesley had written on a couple of seasons of “Girls,” and I was co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” with Paul Reubens, which Judd was producing. Leslie and I came up with a movie idea and pitched it to Judd, and Judd really liked the relationship and the dynamic but thought that a movie wouldn’t explore the relationship as fully as he wanted. So the three of us got together and wrote the pilot together. You and Lesley Arfin are married. How much of the story came from you writing about your own relationship? We used ourselves initially as a jumping-off point, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t make it entirely biographical because it wouldn’t be compelling television. [Laughs.] Lesley and I are more mature than the couple on the show, and Judd encouraged us to dial our maturity back to give them more ways to get in their own way. So it became more about past relationships and other people we knew. Please tell me the “Carlito’s Way” thing — the cringe-y scenes where you’re sitting around with friends writing theme songs for movies — is not an actual thing. Noooo. [Laughs.] We are dorks and we do get together and do movie marathons, but we don’t do the song thing. The closest thing we do is a horror movie marathon on Halloween that get progressively scarier. We start with something like a Disney movie and end with “Faces of Death.” We were trying to capture the idea that my friends and I are indoor kids. I hear people describing some film and TV shows lately as “honest,” and I wonder a lot of times if they’re buying into the idea that they’re watching something like a performed documentary about the writer’s life. I see that a lot too. I wonder if it’s because we’re five or 10 years out from reality TV being one of the predominant ways we watched stories, and maybe the fiction side saw something about capturing “reality” on camera and that people want something more sophisticated and more real. I don’t really like the term “honest.” If something entirely replicates reality, I kind of feel like what’s the point? With our show, I think there’s an attempt to make things feel truthful, but we don’t show somebody stuck in L.A. traffic every time they go somewhere because that would be boring. There’s a line in the first episode where someone says, “Love doesn’t just happen. We have to choose it.” Did you set that up as a false premise to knock down or to prove out over the course of the series? Some people have interpreted the title of the show — “Love” — as ironic. For me, it’s sincere. The idea that we have to agree with love is a genuine statement about love. It takes a while for them to admit that they even like each other. You’re not entitled to it. Love takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of music in the show. Did you have a playlist of things you really wanted to use, or was it more a function of a music supervisor telling you what you could afford? It was both. We had some songs we wanted to use, and we worked a lot of it out in editing. Judd was a big part of that that. There’s a Gravediggaz song in the second episode that Lesley wrote into the script. In the fourth episode, we’re at this party and play “Jet” by Wings. I was driving to work that day and listening to Jet, and as soon as I sat down in the writers’ room Judd said, “Hey, let’s use ‘Jet’ by Wings in this scene.” Did you have to learn how to play that song? I did. I had to learn it. They guy who plays the guitar in that scene is Mark Everett from Eels, which is a band that I’ve loved for a long time. He helped me a lot. I mean, it’s Paul McCartney. He’s a pretty good bassist. That’s an episode where you see Gus’ friends in one place and Mickey’s friends in another. You are in this huge web of L.A. comedy writers/actors/stand-ups. Did you put those groups together, or was that more casting? That was interesting. All the people who play Gus’ friends on the show are friends of mine from the Upright Citizens Brigade. A couple of people — Neil Campbell and Mike Cassady — have been friends of mine going back to the University of Iowa 15 years ago. When we got to casting the party, most of those are people that Lesley knew. There’s a professional skater and a photographer and musicians — a lot of people being their authentic selves. And at the end of that episode you’ve got Rich Sommer and Kyle Kinane and you and Gillian Jacobs in one of the best scenes in the series. Rich is so good. And John Slattery was directing, so we had this nice mini-“Mad Men” reunion. You had several directors who are also good actors like Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Showalter. And Joe Swanberg, who has done a lot of acting. Dean Holland, who directed a lot of episodes for “Parks and Rec,” directed the first two and the last two episodes. Maggie Carey, who directed “The To Do List,” directed an episode, and she’s coming back to do two episodes in the second season. Were the rom-com tropes like the meet-cute and the best friend these elephants in the room that you had to navigate, or did you not think about it like that? It’s tough — and I’m not the first person to say this — but clichés exist because they actually happen in real life. We didn’t want to break rules just to break rules. Some of those rules are there because it’s how people meet and how people have conflict. But we had a lot of conversations around how to do things. Gus and Mickey meet when she forgets her money and he buys her some cigarettes, and we asked, “Are we saying that he gets into her world by buying her something? Is that fucked up?” So Gus offers, “You don't have to pay me back,” and she’s like, “Don’t be a fuckin’ hero.” So we call things like that out more than in some other romantic comedies. Gillian Jacobs was good on “Community” at carrying a lot of baggage without wearing it on her face. Did you want a version of that for “Love”? Gillian is an amazing actor, and I thank my lucky stars that we were able to have her on our show. We wrote the part with her in mind because of the very thing you’re saying. The thing I liked about her on “Community” was that she could play somebody who was broken or hurting but not performing it in a way that defends what the character is doing. On “Love,” I think you can have empathy for her even as a character who rubs people the wrong way. I think an example of that is that I was never really sure whether she was clear on whether she’s an alcoholic or not. It wasn’t just denial or an elaborate coping mechanism. Yeah, it’s a confusing thing. I’m sure it’s confusing for a lot of people. Drinking or taking a substance to escape makes you ask whether escaping is a bad thing. We go to the movies to escape. We eat food to escape. And we didn’t want her to be a TV-movie-of-the-week alcoholic. We wanted it to be more gray and real. Text messaging and social media is something that’s pretty pervasive in society but isn’t inherently cinematic. Did you have a lot of discussion about how to communicate that by showing people on their phones or putting the text on-screen like some other shows have done? We talked about it a lot. People use text and use Instagram, and we wanted to involve that in the show. We decided not to do text on the screen or hearing voice-over of what people were typing because we didn’t want the show to be slick. I love seeing that in “House of Cards” and “Sherlock,” but it didn’t feel right for our show where we’re trying to get how the characters see the world. How weird was it for your wife to be sitting just off camera while you’re taking your shirt off and climbing into bed with someone? Like Hey, why can’t you bring some of that home! [Laughs.] Surprisingly, it was never uncomfortable. Lesley is an artist, and she understands. I was more in my head about it than she was. She said she wanted to tell a story and not to get too in-my-head about it.Near the beginning of the third episode of Netflix’s new series “Love,” a Dr. Drew-like radio host (Brett Gelman) gives his producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) some advice about how to recover from the end of a relationship. “The best thing you can do right now — don’t try to feel better,” he says. “Just feel. Feel it all. Today and tomorrow. Just pass through it. Because maybe something positive has happened. Maybe you needed to clean out some emotional space for something good. Something new.” And that, more or less, is what “Love” — and, frankly, love — is all about. We sat down with Paul Rust, who stars in the series and co-created it with wife Lesley Arfin and director/producer Judd Apatow, to talk about creating their first TV show, working with Apatow, and how music came to be such an important element of the story. The show is barely out and you’re already writing and getting ready for Season 2. Do you have a start date for production? We start shooting March 1. I’m trying as much as I can to be in the writer’s room right now. Once we start shooting, I’ll be on set almost all the time. What did you do today? Today we had the latest draft of the first and second episodes for the second season. Judd [Apatow] came in and gave his final tweaks for those two episodes. Did you and Lesley write a pilot and take it around to studios, or did you have Judd Apatow involved at the idea stage? My manager [Christie Smith] knew that Lesley had written on a couple of seasons of “Girls,” and I was co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” with Paul Reubens, which Judd was producing. Leslie and I came up with a movie idea and pitched it to Judd, and Judd really liked the relationship and the dynamic but thought that a movie wouldn’t explore the relationship as fully as he wanted. So the three of us got together and wrote the pilot together. You and Lesley Arfin are married. How much of the story came from you writing about your own relationship? We used ourselves initially as a jumping-off point, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t make it entirely biographical because it wouldn’t be compelling television. [Laughs.] Lesley and I are more mature than the couple on the show, and Judd encouraged us to dial our maturity back to give them more ways to get in their own way. So it became more about past relationships and other people we knew. Please tell me the “Carlito’s Way” thing — the cringe-y scenes where you’re sitting around with friends writing theme songs for movies — is not an actual thing. Noooo. [Laughs.] We are dorks and we do get together and do movie marathons, but we don’t do the song thing. The closest thing we do is a horror movie marathon on Halloween that get progressively scarier. We start with something like a Disney movie and end with “Faces of Death.” We were trying to capture the idea that my friends and I are indoor kids. I hear people describing some film and TV shows lately as “honest,” and I wonder a lot of times if they’re buying into the idea that they’re watching something like a performed documentary about the writer’s life. I see that a lot too. I wonder if it’s because we’re five or 10 years out from reality TV being one of the predominant ways we watched stories, and maybe the fiction side saw something about capturing “reality” on camera and that people want something more sophisticated and more real. I don’t really like the term “honest.” If something entirely replicates reality, I kind of feel like what’s the point? With our show, I think there’s an attempt to make things feel truthful, but we don’t show somebody stuck in L.A. traffic every time they go somewhere because that would be boring. There’s a line in the first episode where someone says, “Love doesn’t just happen. We have to choose it.” Did you set that up as a false premise to knock down or to prove out over the course of the series? Some people have interpreted the title of the show — “Love” — as ironic. For me, it’s sincere. The idea that we have to agree with love is a genuine statement about love. It takes a while for them to admit that they even like each other. You’re not entitled to it. Love takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of music in the show. Did you have a playlist of things you really wanted to use, or was it more a function of a music supervisor telling you what you could afford? It was both. We had some songs we wanted to use, and we worked a lot of it out in editing. Judd was a big part of that that. There’s a Gravediggaz song in the second episode that Lesley wrote into the script. In the fourth episode, we’re at this party and play “Jet” by Wings. I was driving to work that day and listening to Jet, and as soon as I sat down in the writers’ room Judd said, “Hey, let’s use ‘Jet’ by Wings in this scene.” Did you have to learn how to play that song? I did. I had to learn it. They guy who plays the guitar in that scene is Mark Everett from Eels, which is a band that I’ve loved for a long time. He helped me a lot. I mean, it’s Paul McCartney. He’s a pretty good bassist. That’s an episode where you see Gus’ friends in one place and Mickey’s friends in another. You are in this huge web of L.A. comedy writers/actors/stand-ups. Did you put those groups together, or was that more casting? That was interesting. All the people who play Gus’ friends on the show are friends of mine from the Upright Citizens Brigade. A couple of people — Neil Campbell and Mike Cassady — have been friends of mine going back to the University of Iowa 15 years ago. When we got to casting the party, most of those are people that Lesley knew. There’s a professional skater and a photographer and musicians — a lot of people being their authentic selves. And at the end of that episode you’ve got Rich Sommer and Kyle Kinane and you and Gillian Jacobs in one of the best scenes in the series. Rich is so good. And John Slattery was directing, so we had this nice mini-“Mad Men” reunion. You had several directors who are also good actors like Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Showalter. And Joe Swanberg, who has done a lot of acting. Dean Holland, who directed a lot of episodes for “Parks and Rec,” directed the first two and the last two episodes. Maggie Carey, who directed “The To Do List,” directed an episode, and she’s coming back to do two episodes in the second season. Were the rom-com tropes like the meet-cute and the best friend these elephants in the room that you had to navigate, or did you not think about it like that? It’s tough — and I’m not the first person to say this — but clichés exist because they actually happen in real life. We didn’t want to break rules just to break rules. Some of those rules are there because it’s how people meet and how people have conflict. But we had a lot of conversations around how to do things. Gus and Mickey meet when she forgets her money and he buys her some cigarettes, and we asked, “Are we saying that he gets into her world by buying her something? Is that fucked up?” So Gus offers, “You don't have to pay me back,” and she’s like, “Don’t be a fuckin’ hero.” So we call things like that out more than in some other romantic comedies. Gillian Jacobs was good on “Community” at carrying a lot of baggage without wearing it on her face. Did you want a version of that for “Love”? Gillian is an amazing actor, and I thank my lucky stars that we were able to have her on our show. We wrote the part with her in mind because of the very thing you’re saying. The thing I liked about her on “Community” was that she could play somebody who was broken or hurting but not performing it in a way that defends what the character is doing. On “Love,” I think you can have empathy for her even as a character who rubs people the wrong way. I think an example of that is that I was never really sure whether she was clear on whether she’s an alcoholic or not. It wasn’t just denial or an elaborate coping mechanism. Yeah, it’s a confusing thing. I’m sure it’s confusing for a lot of people. Drinking or taking a substance to escape makes you ask whether escaping is a bad thing. We go to the movies to escape. We eat food to escape. And we didn’t want her to be a TV-movie-of-the-week alcoholic. We wanted it to be more gray and real. Text messaging and social media is something that’s pretty pervasive in society but isn’t inherently cinematic. Did you have a lot of discussion about how to communicate that by showing people on their phones or putting the text on-screen like some other shows have done? We talked about it a lot. People use text and use Instagram, and we wanted to involve that in the show. We decided not to do text on the screen or hearing voice-over of what people were typing because we didn’t want the show to be slick. I love seeing that in “House of Cards” and “Sherlock,” but it didn’t feel right for our show where we’re trying to get how the characters see the world. How weird was it for your wife to be sitting just off camera while you’re taking your shirt off and climbing into bed with someone? Like Hey, why can’t you bring some of that home! [Laughs.] Surprisingly, it was never uncomfortable. Lesley is an artist, and she understands. I was more in my head about it than she was. She said she wanted to tell a story and not to get too in-my-head about it.Near the beginning of the third episode of Netflix’s new series “Love,” a Dr. Drew-like radio host (Brett Gelman) gives his producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) some advice about how to recover from the end of a relationship. “The best thing you can do right now — don’t try to feel better,” he says. “Just feel. Feel it all. Today and tomorrow. Just pass through it. Because maybe something positive has happened. Maybe you needed to clean out some emotional space for something good. Something new.” And that, more or less, is what “Love” — and, frankly, love — is all about. We sat down with Paul Rust, who stars in the series and co-created it with wife Lesley Arfin and director/producer Judd Apatow, to talk about creating their first TV show, working with Apatow, and how music came to be such an important element of the story. The show is barely out and you’re already writing and getting ready for Season 2. Do you have a start date for production? We start shooting March 1. I’m trying as much as I can to be in the writer’s room right now. Once we start shooting, I’ll be on set almost all the time. What did you do today? Today we had the latest draft of the first and second episodes for the second season. Judd [Apatow] came in and gave his final tweaks for those two episodes. Did you and Lesley write a pilot and take it around to studios, or did you have Judd Apatow involved at the idea stage? My manager [Christie Smith] knew that Lesley had written on a couple of seasons of “Girls,” and I was co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” with Paul Reubens, which Judd was producing. Leslie and I came up with a movie idea and pitched it to Judd, and Judd really liked the relationship and the dynamic but thought that a movie wouldn’t explore the relationship as fully as he wanted. So the three of us got together and wrote the pilot together. You and Lesley Arfin are married. How much of the story came from you writing about your own relationship? We used ourselves initially as a jumping-off point, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t make it entirely biographical because it wouldn’t be compelling television. [Laughs.] Lesley and I are more mature than the couple on the show, and Judd encouraged us to dial our maturity back to give them more ways to get in their own way. So it became more about past relationships and other people we knew. Please tell me the “Carlito’s Way” thing — the cringe-y scenes where you’re sitting around with friends writing theme songs for movies — is not an actual thing. Noooo. [Laughs.] We are dorks and we do get together and do movie marathons, but we don’t do the song thing. The closest thing we do is a horror movie marathon on Halloween that get progressively scarier. We start with something like a Disney movie and end with “Faces of Death.” We were trying to capture the idea that my friends and I are indoor kids. I hear people describing some film and TV shows lately as “honest,” and I wonder a lot of times if they’re buying into the idea that they’re watching something like a performed documentary about the writer’s life. I see that a lot too. I wonder if it’s because we’re five or 10 years out from reality TV being one of the predominant ways we watched stories, and maybe the fiction side saw something about capturing “reality” on camera and that people want something more sophisticated and more real. I don’t really like the term “honest.” If something entirely replicates reality, I kind of feel like what’s the point? With our show, I think there’s an attempt to make things feel truthful, but we don’t show somebody stuck in L.A. traffic every time they go somewhere because that would be boring. There’s a line in the first episode where someone says, “Love doesn’t just happen. We have to choose it.” Did you set that up as a false premise to knock down or to prove out over the course of the series? Some people have interpreted the title of the show — “Love” — as ironic. For me, it’s sincere. The idea that we have to agree with love is a genuine statement about love. It takes a while for them to admit that they even like each other. You’re not entitled to it. Love takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of music in the show. Did you have a playlist of things you really wanted to use, or was it more a function of a music supervisor telling you what you could afford? It was both. We had some songs we wanted to use, and we worked a lot of it out in editing. Judd was a big part of that that. There’s a Gravediggaz song in the second episode that Lesley wrote into the script. In the fourth episode, we’re at this party and play “Jet” by Wings. I was driving to work that day and listening to Jet, and as soon as I sat down in the writers’ room Judd said, “Hey, let’s use ‘Jet’ by Wings in this scene.” Did you have to learn how to play that song? I did. I had to learn it. They guy who plays the guitar in that scene is Mark Everett from Eels, which is a band that I’ve loved for a long time. He helped me a lot. I mean, it’s Paul McCartney. He’s a pretty good bassist. That’s an episode where you see Gus’ friends in one place and Mickey’s friends in another. You are in this huge web of L.A. comedy writers/actors/stand-ups. Did you put those groups together, or was that more casting? That was interesting. All the people who play Gus’ friends on the show are friends of mine from the Upright Citizens Brigade. A couple of people — Neil Campbell and Mike Cassady — have been friends of mine going back to the University of Iowa 15 years ago. When we got to casting the party, most of those are people that Lesley knew. There’s a professional skater and a photographer and musicians — a lot of people being their authentic selves. And at the end of that episode you’ve got Rich Sommer and Kyle Kinane and you and Gillian Jacobs in one of the best scenes in the series. Rich is so good. And John Slattery was directing, so we had this nice mini-“Mad Men” reunion. You had several directors who are also good actors like Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Showalter. And Joe Swanberg, who has done a lot of acting. Dean Holland, who directed a lot of episodes for “Parks and Rec,” directed the first two and the last two episodes. Maggie Carey, who directed “The To Do List,” directed an episode, and she’s coming back to do two episodes in the second season. Were the rom-com tropes like the meet-cute and the best friend these elephants in the room that you had to navigate, or did you not think about it like that? It’s tough — and I’m not the first person to say this — but clichés exist because they actually happen in real life. We didn’t want to break rules just to break rules. Some of those rules are there because it’s how people meet and how people have conflict. But we had a lot of conversations around how to do things. Gus and Mickey meet when she forgets her money and he buys her some cigarettes, and we asked, “Are we saying that he gets into her world by buying her something? Is that fucked up?” So Gus offers, “You don't have to pay me back,” and she’s like, “Don’t be a fuckin’ hero.” So we call things like that out more than in some other romantic comedies. Gillian Jacobs was good on “Community” at carrying a lot of baggage without wearing it on her face. Did you want a version of that for “Love”? Gillian is an amazing actor, and I thank my lucky stars that we were able to have her on our show. We wrote the part with her in mind because of the very thing you’re saying. The thing I liked about her on “Community” was that she could play somebody who was broken or hurting but not performing it in a way that defends what the character is doing. On “Love,” I think you can have empathy for her even as a character who rubs people the wrong way. I think an example of that is that I was never really sure whether she was clear on whether she’s an alcoholic or not. It wasn’t just denial or an elaborate coping mechanism. Yeah, it’s a confusing thing. I’m sure it’s confusing for a lot of people. Drinking or taking a substance to escape makes you ask whether escaping is a bad thing. We go to the movies to escape. We eat food to escape. And we didn’t want her to be a TV-movie-of-the-week alcoholic. We wanted it to be more gray and real. Text messaging and social media is something that’s pretty pervasive in society but isn’t inherently cinematic. Did you have a lot of discussion about how to communicate that by showing people on their phones or putting the text on-screen like some other shows have done? We talked about it a lot. People use text and use Instagram, and we wanted to involve that in the show. We decided not to do text on the screen or hearing voice-over of what people were typing because we didn’t want the show to be slick. I love seeing that in “House of Cards” and “Sherlock,” but it didn’t feel right for our show where we’re trying to get how the characters see the world. How weird was it for your wife to be sitting just off camera while you’re taking your shirt off and climbing into bed with someone? Like Hey, why can’t you bring some of that home! [Laughs.] Surprisingly, it was never uncomfortable. Lesley is an artist, and she understands. I was more in my head about it than she was. She said she wanted to tell a story and not to get too in-my-head about it.Near the beginning of the third episode of Netflix’s new series “Love,” a Dr. Drew-like radio host (Brett Gelman) gives his producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) some advice about how to recover from the end of a relationship. “The best thing you can do right now — don’t try to feel better,” he says. “Just feel. Feel it all. Today and tomorrow. Just pass through it. Because maybe something positive has happened. Maybe you needed to clean out some emotional space for something good. Something new.” And that, more or less, is what “Love” — and, frankly, love — is all about. We sat down with Paul Rust, who stars in the series and co-created it with wife Lesley Arfin and director/producer Judd Apatow, to talk about creating their first TV show, working with Apatow, and how music came to be such an important element of the story. The show is barely out and you’re already writing and getting ready for Season 2. Do you have a start date for production? We start shooting March 1. I’m trying as much as I can to be in the writer’s room right now. Once we start shooting, I’ll be on set almost all the time. What did you do today? Today we had the latest draft of the first and second episodes for the second season. Judd [Apatow] came in and gave his final tweaks for those two episodes. Did you and Lesley write a pilot and take it around to studios, or did you have Judd Apatow involved at the idea stage? My manager [Christie Smith] knew that Lesley had written on a couple of seasons of “Girls,” and I was co-writing “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” with Paul Reubens, which Judd was producing. Leslie and I came up with a movie idea and pitched it to Judd, and Judd really liked the relationship and the dynamic but thought that a movie wouldn’t explore the relationship as fully as he wanted. So the three of us got together and wrote the pilot together. You and Lesley Arfin are married. How much of the story came from you writing about your own relationship? We used ourselves initially as a jumping-off point, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t make it entirely biographical because it wouldn’t be compelling television. [Laughs.] Lesley and I are more mature than the couple on the show, and Judd encouraged us to dial our maturity back to give them more ways to get in their own way. So it became more about past relationships and other people we knew. Please tell me the “Carlito’s Way” thing — the cringe-y scenes where you’re sitting around with friends writing theme songs for movies — is not an actual thing. Noooo. [Laughs.] We are dorks and we do get together and do movie marathons, but we don’t do the song thing. The closest thing we do is a horror movie marathon on Halloween that get progressively scarier. We start with something like a Disney movie and end with “Faces of Death.” We were trying to capture the idea that my friends and I are indoor kids. I hear people describing some film and TV shows lately as “honest,” and I wonder a lot of times if they’re buying into the idea that they’re watching something like a performed documentary about the writer’s life. I see that a lot too. I wonder if it’s because we’re five or 10 years out from reality TV being one of the predominant ways we watched stories, and maybe the fiction side saw something about capturing “reality” on camera and that people want something more sophisticated and more real. I don’t really like the term “honest.” If something entirely replicates reality, I kind of feel like what’s the point? With our show, I think there’s an attempt to make things feel truthful, but we don’t show somebody stuck in L.A. traffic every time they go somewhere because that would be boring. There’s a line in the first episode where someone says, “Love doesn’t just happen. We have to choose it.” Did you set that up as a false premise to knock down or to prove out over the course of the series? Some people have interpreted the title of the show — “Love” — as ironic. For me, it’s sincere. The idea that we have to agree with love is a genuine statement about love. It takes a while for them to admit that they even like each other. You’re not entitled to it. Love takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of music in the show. Did you have a playlist of things you really wanted to use, or was it more a function of a music supervisor telling you what you could afford? It was both. We had some songs we wanted to use, and we worked a lot of it out in editing. Judd was a big part of that that. There’s a Gravediggaz song in the second episode that Lesley wrote into the script. In the fourth episode, we’re at this party and play “Jet” by Wings. I was driving to work that day and listening to Jet, and as soon as I sat down in the writers’ room Judd said, “Hey, let’s use ‘Jet’ by Wings in this scene.” Did you have to learn how to play that song? I did. I had to learn it. They guy who plays the guitar in that scene is Mark Everett from Eels, which is a band that I’ve loved for a long time. He helped me a lot. I mean, it’s Paul McCartney. He’s a pretty good bassist. That’s an episode where you see Gus’ friends in one place and Mickey’s friends in another. You are in this huge web of L.A. comedy writers/actors/stand-ups. Did you put those groups together, or was that more casting? That was interesting. All the people who play Gus’ friends on the show are friends of mine from the Upright Citizens Brigade. A couple of people — Neil Campbell and Mike Cassady — have been friends of mine going back to the University of Iowa 15 years ago. When we got to casting the party, most of those are people that Lesley knew. There’s a professional skater and a photographer and musicians — a lot of people being their authentic selves. And at the end of that episode you’ve got Rich Sommer and Kyle Kinane and you and Gillian Jacobs in one of the best scenes in the series. Rich is so good. And John Slattery was directing, so we had this nice mini-“Mad Men” reunion. You had several directors who are also good actors like Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Showalter. And Joe Swanberg, who has done a lot of acting. Dean Holland, who directed a lot of episodes for “Parks and Rec,” directed the first two and the last two episodes. Maggie Carey, who directed “The To Do List,” directed an episode, and she’s coming back to do two episodes in the second season. Were the rom-com tropes like the meet-cute and the best friend these elephants in the room that you had to navigate, or did you not think about it like that? It’s tough — and I’m not the first person to say this — but clichés exist because they actually happen in real life. We didn’t want to break rules just to break rules. Some of those rules are there because it’s how people meet and how people have conflict. But we had a lot of conversations around how to do things. Gus and Mickey meet when she forgets her money and he buys her some cigarettes, and we asked, “Are we saying that he gets into her world by buying her something? Is that fucked up?” So Gus offers, “You don't have to pay me back,” and she’s like, “Don’t be a fuckin’ hero.” So we call things like that out more than in some other romantic comedies. Gillian Jacobs was good on “Community” at carrying a lot of baggage without wearing it on her face. Did you want a version of that for “Love”? Gillian is an amazing actor, and I thank my lucky stars that we were able to have her on our show. We wrote the part with her in mind because of the very thing you’re saying. The thing I liked about her on “Community” was that she could play somebody who was broken or hurting but not performing it in a way that defends what the character is doing. On “Love,” I think you can have empathy for her even as a character who rubs people the wrong way. I think an example of that is that I was never really sure whether she was clear on whether she’s an alcoholic or not. It wasn’t just denial or an elaborate coping mechanism. Yeah, it’s a confusing thing. I’m sure it’s confusing for a lot of people. Drinking or taking a substance to escape makes you ask whether escaping is a bad thing. We go to the movies to escape. We eat food to escape. And we didn’t want her to be a TV-movie-of-the-week alcoholic. We wanted it to be more gray and real. Text messaging and social media is something that’s pretty pervasive in society but isn’t inherently cinematic. Did you have a lot of discussion about how to communicate that by showing people on their phones or putting the text on-screen like some other shows have done? We talked about it a lot. People use text and use Instagram, and we wanted to involve that in the show. We decided not to do text on the screen or hearing voice-over of what people were typing because we didn’t want the show to be slick. I love seeing that in “House of Cards” and “Sherlock,” but it didn’t feel right for our show where we’re trying to get how the characters see the world. How weird was it for your wife to be sitting just off camera while you’re taking your shirt off and climbing into bed with someone? Like Hey, why can’t you bring some of that home! [Laughs.] Surprisingly, it was never uncomfortable. Lesley is an artist, and she understands. I was more in my head about it than she was. She said she wanted to tell a story and not to get too in-my-head about it.
25 “facts” that really aren’t: You’ve heard them all your life and they just aren’t true
There are scientific facts that most of us accept as true. The Earth is round. Check. E=MC squared. Check. Humans evolved from apes. Not exactly. It might come as a surprise that science doesn’t necessarily back many scientific “facts.” Here are 25 facts that ain’t necessarily so. 1. Humans evolved from apes. Evangelicals will be relieved to note that humans did not evolve from apes. Of course, that has never been the scientific claim that human evolution is based on. Humans and apes (chimps, most closely) share almost identical DNA (98.8% the same). What this means is that somewhere down the line, humans and apes shared a common ancestor, some of whose offspring evolved, over millions of years, into today’s apes, and some of whose offspring evolved, over millions of years, into us. 2. Milk builds strong bones. The advertising campaigns for milk (“Got milk?”) have been some of the most popular and successful marketing in modern history. It is gospel among most people that milk builds strong bones and teeth. However, it’s not true. Many studies over the years have failed to find a link between milk consumption and a lower incidence of bone fractures. 3. Eating ice cream when you have a cold makes you more congested. A prevailing myth about dairy in general and ice cream in particular is that consuming it increases mucous production. Eat up. According to the National Institutes for Health, there is, “no statistically significant overall association can be detected between milk and dairy product intake and symptoms of mucus production in healthy adults, either asymptomatic or symptomatic, with rhinovirus infection.” 4. Sugar makes children hyperactive. The longstanding belief among parents of all persuasions is that sugar makes their kids crazy. The popular anecdotal example tends to be the children’s birthday party, where kids are loud, raucous and overly excited, with the blame pointing squarely at the sugary treats they have consumed. Truthfully though, no scientific evidence firmly links sugar to hyperactivity. The reason for the party hijinks more likely rests on the general excitement of kids being surrounded by their friends in a celebratory environment. The National Institute of Mental Health states that, "The idea that refined sugar causes ADHD or makes symptoms worse is popular, but more research discounts this theory than supports it." 5. The 5-second rule applies to food dropped on the floor. It's okay to eat food you drop on the ground as long as you grab it within five seconds of the drop, or so the myth goes. Believe this fact at your own risk. If the dropped food item is dry, and the surface of the floor is clean, you’ll probably survive. But if the food item is moist, or if the ground is not clean, bacteria will be swarming the food practically upon impact, and there is no telling if that bacteria is harmless or not. 6. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. No one believes this one anyway, but just to clarify, apples don’t protect you from anything in particular (well, maybe scurvy). They have plenty of fiber and vitamin C, and they make a healthier snack than candy, but in lieu of a flu shot, not so much. 7. Honey is healthier for you than refined sugar. Just because your candy bar is sweetened with honey instead of sugar, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s healthy. Most scientists agree, sugar is sugar. The body processes honey essentially the same as high fructose corn syrup. The only advantage to honey may be that the caloric count may be lower, since honey tends to be sweeter than sugar and thus less of it is used in the product. And, by the way, brown sugar is just white sugar with a bit of molasses mixed in. There are some traces of nutrients in the molasses, but not enough to even remotely call it a health product. 8. Sharks do not get cancer. The popular myth that sharks don’t get cancer, popularized by a nutritionist, I. William Lane, in the early 1990s, led to a health supplement craze of consuming powdered shark cartilage in the hopes of staving off or curing cancer. Not only does this not work, it has helped lead to the needless slaughter of millions of sharks in the past decades. And guess what? Sharks do too get cancer. Tumors have been found on many species of sharks. 9. Sharks must continually swim or they die. Not only do sharks get cancer, but they can stop swimming and they won’t croak. At least most of them can. While a few species do have to keep moving to pass water over their gills, most can hang out just fine. However, all sharks do lack swim bladders, so if they stop swimming, they sink. 10. Frogs give you warts. No, they don’t. Frogs and toads may look bumpy, but those aren’t warts, and you can’t catch them. Humans give you warts. Or more specifically, the human papillomavirus, which is usually passed around by shaking the hand of an infected person. 11. Bats are blind. Bats do use their sonar (echolocation) to find their way around, but they are not blind. In fact, their eyesight is almost as good as a human’s. 12. Poinsettias can kill you. The widespread belief that the popular Christmas plant, the poinsettia, is a deadly plant that will kill your pets or you if consumed is false. It’s not exactly edible, and it may make you a bit queasy, but its deadliness is a myth. 13. Organic fruits and vegetables are safer and more nutritious. It has been widely believed for the past several decades that organic foods are both safer and more nutritious than conventionally grown foods. There are valid reasons why organic may be a better choice for the consumer, chiefly the negative environmental impact that conventional farming has on the soil and water, and birds and wildlife. However, safer and more nutritious are not among the reasons to go organic. Organic food, contrary to popular belief, is not necessarily pesticide-free. Many organic foods are grown using natural pesticides that are as unsafe to the human body as chemical pesticides. And in any event, the amount of pesticide residue on both organic and conventional foods is tiny and safe for human consumption. Meanwhile, almost 100,000 studies were reviewed on the nutritional content of organic, and the consensus is that organic has no more nutritional value than conventional. 14. Dropping a coin from the Empire State Building could kill a person. A coin dropped from the height of the Empire State Building, or any tall skyscraper, will gain quite a lot of speed, up to 50 miles per hour, but the most it will do is cause a wicked sting. No manslaughter charges need be filed. 15. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Sure it does. The same Empire State Building you dropped the coin from suffers around 100 lightning strikes a year. 16. Water conducts electricity. While it is true that if you are taking a bath and you drop a live electrical wire into the tub, you are in for a hot time, the real truth is that pure water is a poor electrical conductor. The reason we are shocked in our water is that regular tap water contains lots of other stuff, like dirt, minerals and the like, that are conducting the electricity. 17. Diamonds are formed from coal. Many of the comic nerds among us fondly recall scenes of Superman squeezing a lump of coal and turning it into a diamond. Unfortunately, the science is a little off. In fact, diamonds are formed about 90 miles deep in the Earth, made from compressed carbon. Coal is only about two miles down. 18. People in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat. Maybe way, way back this was true, but by the Middle Ages, most learned people believed the world was round. Certainly Columbus knew his trip was fraught with danger, but falling off the Earth wasn’t one of his concerns. 19. Carrots give you better vision. Carrots contain lots of vitamin A, which is an essential nutrient for the eye. Not getting enough vitamin A will certainly impact the health of your eyes, but there is no evidence that eating lots of carrots will improve your vision. 20. Hair and nails grow even after you die. Once you die, your biological processes cease. No more growing. This myth appears to be due to the fact that the body dries out and shrinks after death, making it appear as though the nails and hair have grown. 21. You only use 10% of your brain. This myth is 100% wrong. People use all their brain. The idea that an organ like the brain would evolve and be 90% useless is ridiculous on the surface. In fact, the brain is so active that although it comprises only 3% of body mass, it uses 20% of the body’s energy. 22. Right brain is creative, left brain is logical. It’s true that the left side of the brain (which controls the right side of your body) seems to be responsible for processes like language and math skills, while the right side of your brain (which controls the left side of the body) controls things like spatial relationships and music processing. But the brain is an incredibly complex organ, and the simplistic notion that one side is dominant over the other is wrong. There are plenty of left-handed people (right-brained) who are analytical (look no further than the professorial Barack Obama), and plenty of right-handed people (left-brained) who are artistic. No scientific study has shown that overall right or left brain dominance is a real thing. 23. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Human beings are comprised primarily of water, so keeping hydrated is certainly an important goal. However, there is no scientific study that has ever come to the conclusion that eight glasses of water is the magic number. People should drink water when they are thirsty, and water is preferable to calorie-laden sodas and juices. 24. Drinking alcohol kills brain cells. Actually, drinking a lot will screw up the connections between your brain cells, but your brain cells remain intact. 25. Outer space is freezing cold. The vacuum of space is cold in some places, like the furthest reaches of the universe. In other places, though, like in the sunlight near Earth, it can get quite hot. Like 250 degrees Fahrenheit hot. Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and American history.
There are scientific facts that most of us accept as true. The Earth is round. Check. E=MC squared. Check. Humans evolved from apes. Not exactly. It might come as a surprise that science doesn’t necessarily back many scientific “facts.” Here are 25 facts that ain’t necessarily so. 1. Humans evolved from apes. Evangelicals will be relieved to note that humans did not evolve from apes. Of course, that has never been the scientific claim that human evolution is based on. Humans and apes (chimps, most closely) share almost identical DNA (98.8% the same). What this means is that somewhere down the line, humans and apes shared a common ancestor, some of whose offspring evolved, over millions of years, into today’s apes, and some of whose offspring evolved, over millions of years, into us. 2. Milk builds strong bones. The advertising campaigns for milk (“Got milk?”) have been some of the most popular and successful marketing in modern history. It is gospel among most people that milk builds strong bones and teeth. However, it’s not true. Many studies over the years have failed to find a link between milk consumption and a lower incidence of bone fractures. 3. Eating ice cream when you have a cold makes you more congested. A prevailing myth about dairy in general and ice cream in particular is that consuming it increases mucous production. Eat up. According to the National Institutes for Health, there is, “no statistically significant overall association can be detected between milk and dairy product intake and symptoms of mucus production in healthy adults, either asymptomatic or symptomatic, with rhinovirus infection.” 4. Sugar makes children hyperactive. The longstanding belief among parents of all persuasions is that sugar makes their kids crazy. The popular anecdotal example tends to be the children’s birthday party, where kids are loud, raucous and overly excited, with the blame pointing squarely at the sugary treats they have consumed. Truthfully though, no scientific evidence firmly links sugar to hyperactivity. The reason for the party hijinks more likely rests on the general excitement of kids being surrounded by their friends in a celebratory environment. The National Institute of Mental Health states that, "The idea that refined sugar causes ADHD or makes symptoms worse is popular, but more research discounts this theory than supports it." 5. The 5-second rule applies to food dropped on the floor. It's okay to eat food you drop on the ground as long as you grab it within five seconds of the drop, or so the myth goes. Believe this fact at your own risk. If the dropped food item is dry, and the surface of the floor is clean, you’ll probably survive. But if the food item is moist, or if the ground is not clean, bacteria will be swarming the food practically upon impact, and there is no telling if that bacteria is harmless or not. 6. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. No one believes this one anyway, but just to clarify, apples don’t protect you from anything in particular (well, maybe scurvy). They have plenty of fiber and vitamin C, and they make a healthier snack than candy, but in lieu of a flu shot, not so much. 7. Honey is healthier for you than refined sugar. Just because your candy bar is sweetened with honey instead of sugar, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s healthy. Most scientists agree, sugar is sugar. The body processes honey essentially the same as high fructose corn syrup. The only advantage to honey may be that the caloric count may be lower, since honey tends to be sweeter than sugar and thus less of it is used in the product. And, by the way, brown sugar is just white sugar with a bit of molasses mixed in. There are some traces of nutrients in the molasses, but not enough to even remotely call it a health product. 8. Sharks do not get cancer. The popular myth that sharks don’t get cancer, popularized by a nutritionist, I. William Lane, in the early 1990s, led to a health supplement craze of consuming powdered shark cartilage in the hopes of staving off or curing cancer. Not only does this not work, it has helped lead to the needless slaughter of millions of sharks in the past decades. And guess what? Sharks do too get cancer. Tumors have been found on many species of sharks. 9. Sharks must continually swim or they die. Not only do sharks get cancer, but they can stop swimming and they won’t croak. At least most of them can. While a few species do have to keep moving to pass water over their gills, most can hang out just fine. However, all sharks do lack swim bladders, so if they stop swimming, they sink. 10. Frogs give you warts. No, they don’t. Frogs and toads may look bumpy, but those aren’t warts, and you can’t catch them. Humans give you warts. Or more specifically, the human papillomavirus, which is usually passed around by shaking the hand of an infected person. 11. Bats are blind. Bats do use their sonar (echolocation) to find their way around, but they are not blind. In fact, their eyesight is almost as good as a human’s. 12. Poinsettias can kill you. The widespread belief that the popular Christmas plant, the poinsettia, is a deadly plant that will kill your pets or you if consumed is false. It’s not exactly edible, and it may make you a bit queasy, but its deadliness is a myth. 13. Organic fruits and vegetables are safer and more nutritious. It has been widely believed for the past several decades that organic foods are both safer and more nutritious than conventionally grown foods. There are valid reasons why organic may be a better choice for the consumer, chiefly the negative environmental impact that conventional farming has on the soil and water, and birds and wildlife. However, safer and more nutritious are not among the reasons to go organic. Organic food, contrary to popular belief, is not necessarily pesticide-free. Many organic foods are grown using natural pesticides that are as unsafe to the human body as chemical pesticides. And in any event, the amount of pesticide residue on both organic and conventional foods is tiny and safe for human consumption. Meanwhile, almost 100,000 studies were reviewed on the nutritional content of organic, and the consensus is that organic has no more nutritional value than conventional. 14. Dropping a coin from the Empire State Building could kill a person. A coin dropped from the height of the Empire State Building, or any tall skyscraper, will gain quite a lot of speed, up to 50 miles per hour, but the most it will do is cause a wicked sting. No manslaughter charges need be filed. 15. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Sure it does. The same Empire State Building you dropped the coin from suffers around 100 lightning strikes a year. 16. Water conducts electricity. While it is true that if you are taking a bath and you drop a live electrical wire into the tub, you are in for a hot time, the real truth is that pure water is a poor electrical conductor. The reason we are shocked in our water is that regular tap water contains lots of other stuff, like dirt, minerals and the like, that are conducting the electricity. 17. Diamonds are formed from coal. Many of the comic nerds among us fondly recall scenes of Superman squeezing a lump of coal and turning it into a diamond. Unfortunately, the science is a little off. In fact, diamonds are formed about 90 miles deep in the Earth, made from compressed carbon. Coal is only about two miles down. 18. People in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat. Maybe way, way back this was true, but by the Middle Ages, most learned people believed the world was round. Certainly Columbus knew his trip was fraught with danger, but falling off the Earth wasn’t one of his concerns. 19. Carrots give you better vision. Carrots contain lots of vitamin A, which is an essential nutrient for the eye. Not getting enough vitamin A will certainly impact the health of your eyes, but there is no evidence that eating lots of carrots will improve your vision. 20. Hair and nails grow even after you die. Once you die, your biological processes cease. No more growing. This myth appears to be due to the fact that the body dries out and shrinks after death, making it appear as though the nails and hair have grown. 21. You only use 10% of your brain. This myth is 100% wrong. People use all their brain. The idea that an organ like the brain would evolve and be 90% useless is ridiculous on the surface. In fact, the brain is so active that although it comprises only 3% of body mass, it uses 20% of the body’s energy. 22. Right brain is creative, left brain is logical. It’s true that the left side of the brain (which controls the right side of your body) seems to be responsible for processes like language and math skills, while the right side of your brain (which controls the left side of the body) controls things like spatial relationships and music processing. But the brain is an incredibly complex organ, and the simplistic notion that one side is dominant over the other is wrong. There are plenty of left-handed people (right-brained) who are analytical (look no further than the professorial Barack Obama), and plenty of right-handed people (left-brained) who are artistic. No scientific study has shown that overall right or left brain dominance is a real thing. 23. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Human beings are comprised primarily of water, so keeping hydrated is certainly an important goal. However, there is no scientific study that has ever come to the conclusion that eight glasses of water is the magic number. People should drink water when they are thirsty, and water is preferable to calorie-laden sodas and juices. 24. Drinking alcohol kills brain cells. Actually, drinking a lot will screw up the connections between your brain cells, but your brain cells remain intact. 25. Outer space is freezing cold. The vacuum of space is cold in some places, like the furthest reaches of the universe. In other places, though, like in the sunlight near Earth, it can get quite hot. Like 250 degrees Fahrenheit hot. Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and American history. 
