Imaginary Problems, Extraordinary Coincidences

A TV writer reflects on her shitty summer of magical realism.

and

Dec 29, 2023

Fridays are usually reserved for reruns, but since it’s the last Friday of 2023, I’m rolling out an original essay by a world-famous writer. Yes, today you’ll be entertained by none other than Julieanne Smolinski, who many of you may remember as the artist formerly known as “Boobs Radley” on the platform formerly known as “Twitter,” but to me, she’s just “Julieanne” or “J-Bones” or “Boom Boom” or “My Wife.” She wrote this to help her navigate a minor depressive episode she had over the summer, so that is why it qualifies as a Small Bow essay. I delightedly blab about the “margarita with double salt” story you’re about to read to anyone who’d listen, so I’m glad to give it a wider audience and finally have it on the record for posterity. I sincerely hope you love it as much as I do and return to it often when the world seems like an impossibly dark and devastating place to live.

Also, It was our 5th wedding anniversary yesterday, so be sure to say nice things in the comments. Off we go! — AJD

IMAGINARY PROBLEMS,

EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCES

***************************

by

Julieanne Smolinski

I'm one of those people who likes to pick the restaurant. My friend is one of those people who doesn’t want to be taken to any restaurant where he can’t order a cocktail before dinner. So on the second day of the writer’s strike, when the union called a member meeting downtown, I chose the closest place to the Shrine Auditorium with a full bar. I had no other reason to choose this place; I’d never been there before, and it’s actually in a part of town that’s so out of my way that I actively avoid visiting if I can help it. But I figured we could walk to the meeting after we ate.

When we arrived, the restaurant was completely empty except for the staff. Everyone was in formal wear and busying themselves with cleaning imaginary crumbs off of spotless white tablecloths and otherwise waiting for the call to pack up because the place was going to be shuttered for non-payment of rent.

We ordered our drinks, they arrived, and we were just joking about the wisdom of coming to a place with white tablecloths and formally dressed servers, because we were freshly on strike and not going to have an income for the foreseeable future. Then, we were silenced by the arrival of a tall man. Despite the relatively large restaurant being completely void of people, he was seated in a booth directly next to us. He was so physically striking and dressed in such a way that at first, I genuinely thought he was a magician.

Around this time in LA there was endless talk about the strike — what the WGA’s terms were, what we all thought the terms should be instead, which writers were being the most annoying on Twitter, and whether the strike was going to last two weeks or two months. My friend and I didn’t talk about any of this, though, because when you are sitting three feet from Nicolas Cage it is hard to concentrate on anything else. Leave alone the fact that I have seen “Raising Arizona” roughly 20 times and “Moonstruck” at least quadruple that. I am, additionally, a person who has used the internet for the past 20 years, where his celebrity has been refracted almost endlessly and often obnoxiously. If you walked into someone’s home and they had a couch cushion with Nicolas Cage’s face on it, you wouldn’t be shocked that the cushion existed but that someone still had the cushion after likely buying it on Etsy in, say, 2013. We know about the dinosaur skull and the money stuff and the Elvis stuff. But I don’t want to flatten the man into some sort of sensation. I’ve read the interview he gave in a Vegas Italian restaurant where he says, “what is an octopus? $80? Nobody goes broke buying an octopus!” maybe 10 times. Nicolas Cage is not a curiosity. Nicolas Cage is a true artist larded with real, actual, American cultural import.

But he is a little mystical. The man sews actual Egyptian artifacts into his suit jacket. So when I heard him order a “margarita, double salt,” I made my friend confirm that this was indeed happening and not some kind of dream-fantasy scenario. Being near a famously eccentric famously famous person in an empty restaurant is exciting under normal circumstances, but was especially for me because only weeks before, I had been desperate to get in touch with Nicolas Cage.

In high school, my sister’s friend had one of those fun, woo-woo moms who was always dispensing cosmic-sounding bits of advice, one of which was “Coincidences are the universe’s way of reminding you it has order.” In other words, when you see a license plate with your mom’s initials and your best friend’s birthday, it means you are “on the right track.” I’m a person who did a lot of yelling about science in the past few years, but I’m also one who has dressed as Stevie Nicks for multiple Halloweens. I think whether or not you believe in an ordered universe largely depends on your threshold for silliness and how you feel about the song “Gold Dust Woman.” I tend to believe the woo-woo stuff more than I don’t, because I’m weak and afraid of death and disorder. And besides, rulers make bad lovers.

It would not say this was a year of order for me, generally. But it was a year of coincidences. It was a year of Nicolas Cage.

In December of 2022 I was Christmas shopping for my kids at the kind of retail outfit that only exists in Burbank, California. It’s a collectibles shop next to a 60-year-old Italian restaurant. They have a life-sized Swamp Thing costume and a vast stock of memorabilia that ranges from cheap (Darth Maul underpants, Moana night lights) to expensive (a ride-on coin-operated Spider-Man sports car, Robocop’s bones, etc). It’s big and harshly lit and my children love the crabby, neurologically eclectic men who work there. I was going through their small collection of vintage posters when I found an original 27x40 inch one-sheet for “The Big Chill.”

I took this as one of those signs from the universe, because right then I was in the early stages of making a pilot for network television, and in the pilot I had written a joke about a gigantic vintage “Big Chill” poster. At the time, I was very open to signs from the universe, because I had never made a pilot before and I was that particular combination of excited and scared that makes pridefully rational women visit psychics. This was a big professional opportunity for me and so I was naturally on the constant verge of vomiting.

In the script, Julia, a prickly working mother who has difficulty making friends with the other parents, ends up at the house of a “cool mom” named Amanda. I am a prickly working mother who has difficulty making friends with other moms and I once heard a woman tell me that her four-year-old son’s favorite movie actor was Buster Keaton, which made my eyes about roll out of my face.

Here’s the joke in the original form:

INT. AMANDA’S HOUSE - LATER
The moms carry glasses of wine as Amanda leads a tour of her home like a museum docent. She pauses at the door of her son’s room.
AMANDA
And this is Bird’s room. Of course, we let him design the whole thing.
JULIA
A six-year-old chose a vintage “Big Chill” poster?

So, in December of 2022, I bought the poster and stuck it in a drawer, feeling like something a little talismanic had happened. I am ashamed to say that while they were ringing me up, I was thinking something along the lines of, “This will make a great story someday, perhaps when I’m sitting in front of this framed poster in my office.” There are of course exceptions, but TV pilots are very difficult to execute; I have working in TV for just long enough to fall into the sweet spot between optimistic and not totally delusional. At some point I went out to dinner with my sister to celebrate, and explained to her that I didn’t have impostor syndrome. “Impostor Syndrome” is when you think you are an impostor, whereas I know I am one. Because she is my older sister, she helpfully pointed out that I am not in Doctors Without Borders, and that I should perhaps remember that my job is to create imaginary problems for imaginary people. But my sister is not in “the biz,” so I ignored her, and called my beloved old boss, who — unlike my sister— has made hit movies and television shows. He told me to try to enjoy the experience. “Remember,” he said, “more people get struck by lightning than make a pilot for broadcast television.” Then he added, “You’ll probably wish you’d picked the lightning, though.”

Here’s the thing, though — studio legal departments are almost hysterically lawsuit-averse. In fact, that’s their entire job. Someone needs to be in charge of saying, “Hey, on page thirty, when Marcus laughs so hard he chokes on a mouthful of Sunny Delight? We can’t do that. That could conceivably be seen as pejorative to Sunny Delight and the Sunny D family of brands.”

So, many times, even though you like a joke about a movie or a brand of snack food or even a made-up person’s funny name, you cannot keep it, because there is a small chance that that chip or person may sue you. Unreasonable as it seems, legal departments do not find the average sitcom joke an acceptable financial risk, no matter how funny it may be to the writers. (If you’re interested, there’s a wonderful “30 Rock” joke about television clearance departments. Google “Jerry Bananaseed.”)

Often you can get away with making the joke if the person or entity is portrayed in a positive light. On “Grace and Frankie,” we had a running bit about Lily Tomlin’s character’s borderline erotic obsession with Del Taco, a mid-tier California American-style-Mexican fast food chain. Del Taco allowed us to do this because the character said things like, “It’s 11:55 PM, if we hurry, we can still make it to Del Taco” or “The bleeding isn’t that bad, but I should go to the ER. Do you think we have time to stop at Del Taco?” or “Everyone loves Del Taco!” We didn’t do this because we were being insincere or meta, we just legitimately thought it would be funny if anybody loved Del Taco this much. Eventually, someone from Del Taco reached out to the show and asked for the names of all the writers. We assumed that this was for some kind of metal-plated “Free Del Taco for life” card, and that five years of our idiocy had paid off. Del Taco sent mugs with our names on them and a mildly confused note.

Anyhow, in the spring of 2023, I got an email from the lovely and talented art department working on the pilot, warning me that “The Big Chill” poster joke in the script was never going to fly. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, the rights to “The Big Chill” were not owned by the parent company of the network that was making the show, and studios are kind of pains in the asses about sharing. And two, if the poster has someone’s face on it, you have to reach out to every actor who owns the face (or their estate) and ask for permission to use it. “The Big Chill” famously has an ensemble cast, and every poster involved a lot of faces.

I was bummed but I also think few jokes are genuinely untweakable. For this gag to work, the movie on the poster just had to be one it would be absurd for a little kid to like. Legal sent over a list of movie posters we could use. I was delighted to see “Wild at Heart” on the list, both because I love that movie and because I liked the idea of a first-grader watching one of David Lynch’s medium-accessible films and thinking “Yeah, this is the stuff.” I ran the new version of the joke past all of the many gifted executive producers on the show. Everybody thought it was a pretty ideal replacement.

Then of course the legal department said something like, “We actually shouldn’t have put that one on the list. But if you reeeeeeeally want to use the poster, you’re going to have to get approval from the actors.” The actors being of course, Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, two people who seem honestly pretty busy already.

That’s important because some artists, even really big busy ones, like to personally approve this stuff and others just have their representatives read the script to see what the context is and to ensure that they get the Del Taco treatment.

This was not an unclearable obstacle, but we were under a bit of a time crunch. The pilot was going to shoot in a few weeks and they needed to be able to get the actual vintage poster and frame it and hang it in the fake house where Judy Greer was pretending to live. Laura Dern’s people got back to us pretty quickly.

But, as you may know, Nicolas Cage is pretty much always either making a movie or promoting a movie, sometimes two at a time. It seemed like he was a case of one of those actors who likes to personally approve of his face getting used on stuff. I do not begrudge him this one bit, even when this put us a little under the gun.

I went back to check on the timeline and I have a bunch of emails from the pilot’s clearance team that say things like “We are still trying very hard to track down Nicolas Cage” and I imagine it is the least fun job you can possibly have that involves typing that sentence. The other producers and I started asking questions like, “Who do we know who is going to be near Nic Cage soon” or “Is he at Comic-Con or something?” which is generally not a good sign that you’re making progress through the usual, standard, contacting-representatives avenues.

Of course, the pilot was just a pilot, and all of this hand-wringing was contingent on the show getting ordered to series and aired on television. And we couldn’t just shoot it and hope for the best, because sadly, legal departments do not love the “We’ll just fix it in post” joke.

If you’re saying to yourself, “It’s not even that good of a line,” or thinking that the sane thing to do would have been to just cut or replace the joke entirely, you’re correct. But this was my hill, as they say. I had already blown $35 on a giant poster of Tom Berenger and Glenn Close embracing in a wicker chair. I had come too far.

About a month after we wrapped shooting on the pilot, we got word from Nicolas Cage’s team. Did I leap into my husband’s arms when I got the text that he was “cool with it?” Did I later compare the feeling of relief to seeing my children for the first time after their birth? What can I say? I was elated. That day, I did not choose lightning.

As it happens, though, it turned out to be a year of waiting and uncertainty, and of strange and stranger things. It was a hard, bad six months for thousands of people. In our house, there were high highs and low lows. My son lost his first tooth, my daughter started kindergarten, and my three-year-old mysteriously learned all of the lyrics to “All-Star” by Smash Mouth. I picketed, I went to lunch at diners with old friends from old shows who I never normally get to see, which was wonderful. I compulsively bought $7 pants on eBay. I don’t cry that often but last summer I spontaneously burst into full sobs after I stepped in dog poop. My husband yelled at me for crying in front of our children. I got a Fitbit.

All the time, during this constant loss of control over my own destiny, I looked for signs, for thumbs-up from the universe.

Over the course of the strike, we learned our pilot was not picked up. Somewhere the “Wild at Heart” poster is in a landfill, covered in diapers and coffee grounds. I mean, not really. It was nice and they framed it and everything, so I’m sure it’s in a prop warehouse or somebody took it home. It’s sad but… that’s show business, baby, et cetera et cetera. I am insanely gratified for the experience and heartbroken it is over and ready to do it all again, if I’m ever that lucky.

I read an interview with Cher once that I think about a lot. She said you'll be shocked by the things you won't even remember caring about in five years. I think in five years what I will remember about this year is that I experienced the first two days in my life where I was ever incapable of getting out of bed because of what I now understand to be my first real brush with depression. The other is "a margarita with double salt."

That day back in May, at the steakhouse downtown by the Shrine, I told my friend the story of the joke and the poster, and what my sister’s friend’s wacky mom said about coincidences. My friend is what I like to call “culturally Catholic,” which means he grew up in the church but is now an atheist who believes in divine mystery and that he is bad for masturbating. (There are a lot of these in the entertainment business.) He told me that the universe had definitely sent us to the booth next to Nicolas Cage that day, or that perhaps by searching for him for so long, I had drawn him to me, or me to him, or us together. That whatever desperate searching I was doing was in fact working, even if not in the way I wanted. This was a few martinis in, but it felt correct. Uncertainty is everywhere, even the silliest and most nebulous correlations feel important even when we are in our most rational mood. But usually, it’s when things suck a little with me and the world that I reach for these things the most.

A few minutes after Nicolas Cage sat down, Crispin Glover walked in and sat down across from him. “Have you ever heard of Buzzfeed?” Nicolas Cage asked him. The waiter came by with some bread.

*******

Julieanne Smolinski is a TV writer in Los Angeles. She lives a blessed life with her dreamboat husband, three children, two dogs, and one cranky lobster. She sometimes writes for her own damn Substack, The Minimizer.

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Embrace

by Billy Collins

***************

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.