In the meantime, I did a few acting jobs in LA, including Very Bad Things, the first movie Peter Berg directed and wrote. It was a crazy, dark comedy about a group of friends who accidentally kill a prostitute in Vegas at a bachelor party. Christian Slater, Cameron Diaz, and Jon Favreau starred—great actors, great script, and a great role for me, getting an opportunity to be funny in a whole different way than I had before. But the thing that is burnt into my memory is a prank I played when we were shooting on Halloween in the middle of the desert. It was a night shoot from five in the afternoon to seven in the morning, a horrible scene where we dug a shallow grave and buried body parts that we had chopped up and wrapped in plastic. I love Halloween and I have a very special mask I like to wear on occasion, which looks kind of like a demented version of Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine. It fits tightly so it looks realistic, especially because your eyes are very clearly seen. Although it has decent hair, I like to wear it with a hoodie and sometimes stuff a pillow in my belly to make the body language even weirder. But the key to the character is silence. My six-footfour body wearing this creepy mask with an odd smile is scary enough, but when you add in the incredible uncomfortableness of the silence, people start squirming. Anyway, I brought the mask that night and when I had a break, I went into my dressing room, changed into the mask and my hoodie, and started silently roaming the set. Everyone stared at me uncomfortably, but no one said a thing. I snuck back into my room, changed back into my costume, and returned to the set. My next break, I did the same thing. This time I got a few comments like, “Who the fuck are you?” and “Are you part of the crew?” I came back to set and heard people talking about who it could be. Somebody asked me if it was me, and I said no, I hadn’t even seen it. To get them off my scent, I let my stand-in in on my mischief. He put on the mask and hoodie and paraded around for a minute while I was on set, so people could see it couldn’t possibly be me. I thought I was home free.
I made two more visits to the set, both of which became much more dangerous than I had anticipated. The next-to-last lap I took around the set was cut short as I ran into Peter, the director. He yelled, “Who the fuck are you? This is not cool! Not cool at all! You know some people have issues with clowns, okay! We don’t need any fucking clowns here! Now get the fuck out of here!” (Evidently Peter has major issues with clowns, which was something I did not know about him.) I headed back to my camper to change but was met by Jeremy Piven, who played my little brother in the movie. Jeremy grabbed me and pushed me into the side of one of the Winnebagos, telling me I was a pussy and too scared to show my face. I did notice he was too big a pussy to take the mask off my face, but I really thought he was going to punch me. I made it back to my room and changed. Things were getting tense on the set. It was Halloween night, in the pitch-black desert, we were burying body parts in a shallow grave lit only by car headlights, and there was a creep in a mask stalking the crew. I probably should have quit then, but I pushed it. My last foray came at lunch time, which was probably midnight. The crew were eating at picnic tables in the desert when I came sauntering around the edges of the lunch area, only to realize they definitely did not think this was funny anymore. The Teamsters, the grips, and the electricians all got up from their tables and came toward me. I was completely shitting myself, but they were afraid of me too. I was terrified they would rip the mask off and find out it was me this whole time. But they didn’t know if I had a weapon or rabies, so they just kept circling me. We worked our way far enough from the lunch area that we were on the edge of the dark desert. They retreated a bit, and I kept silently smiling and nodding as I drifted out into the night. I circled back the long way, got back to my room, changed clothes, and went to lunch. We finished the second half of the day at dawn, when they called “Wrap.” The crew knew my car was a white, 1992 Cadillac DeVille (I loved that car!), and I did a lap around everyone before I drove away, wearing my mask and hoodie, and being cursed by each and every one of them.
(Crazy follow up to the story—years later, it was Halloween again. By now I had bought three more identical masks because I loved them so much, and I convinced Laure to go out with me, both of us wearing the masks. The street next to ours was the best Halloween street in Malibu, and we had just finished scaring people and getting dirty looks from our friends and neighbors, who had no idea who these two creepy characters were. We were heading back down our very dark, dead-end street when a car came down the road toward us. Laure and I decided to give one more scare before we went home. We stood in the middle of the street, forcing the car to stop, with the two of us just standing silently in the headlights. The driver got out of the car, and it was Peter Fucking Berg! Hardly anyone ever drove down our dead-end street, and for some reason, right now, Peter Berg was on my street? What the fuck?! It turned out he was friends with our next-door neighbor and was going to say happy Halloween to their kids. It also turned out that he still had an issue with clowns, because as I took my mask off and introduced him to Laure and laughed at the amazing coincidence of it all, he was not laughing. He was kind of upset and freaked out. And he never hired me for another movie either.)
I finally got a not-shitty-at-all draft of Barbra’s Wedding finished, and I wanted to see how it would play in front of an audience. Dan Lauria, the actor who played the dad on The Wonder Years, also ran a very cool theater in Hollywood called the Coronet. Dan loved the play and offered to let me do a reading there. Through my Steppenwolf Theatre connections, I reached out to Laurie Metcalf, one of the greatest actresses ever. She agreed to do the reading with me, and I went over to her house to rehearse. I had worked on every single line of dialogue for months, and I thought I knew just how it should play, but holy shit, was I wrong. I thought it was a play about Jerry losing his shit and melting down as he realizes what a failure he has been, with Molly being the stable one, trying to calm Jerry and getting frustrated at him. But from the very first beat, Laurie played Molly just as fucked up as Jerry, suppressing her rage at the wedding next door by cooking the most elaborate lunch she can think of. Laurie said the dialogue completely differently than I expected to hear it, finding jokes I didn’t even know I had written, emotions that I had not anticipated. And her fresh take made me perform Jerry in a way that surprised me and brought the show to life as only the best actors in the world can.
We performed it to a sold-out audience at the Coronet and brought the house down. There were producers and a director from Steppenwolf at the show, and they were all interested in getting the play done. They thought it needed work but wanted to help me develop it. I couldn’t have been happier, and I was inspired to get back to work on the next draft. The director had directed a great play by Steve Martin, and one day I got a call from Steve, who had read my play. I was shocked to be on the phone with him, and even more surprised when he told me how much he liked it. He said, “But it isn’t finished.” I agreed it still needed work, but he said, “That’s not what I mean. You’re ending the play too soon. The play is about this marriage, and you haven’t resolved that part of the play yet. You end the play with a cry for help from Jerry, which is funny, but is not the correct ending for the play. You need to write more and finish the story of Jerry and Molly.” It was such a brilliant note, and such a confidence-builder to be taken seriously as a writer by one of my comic heroes. I had rewritten a lot of movie scripts, but Barbra’s Wedding was 100 percent my own voice, and that it was connecting with people was so creatively satisfying. I got back to work on the next draft, but I also wanted to try writing something else, to see if I could do it again.
I had been pursued by Les Moonves, the head of CBS, about starring in a TV series. At this time, there was a strict line between working in television and the movies, and my whole career had just been in the movies. There was something tempting about doing a steady show in LA, but I hadn’t read anything good. So I began to write a TV series for myself called Community Center. Keeping it simple, it was about a guy named Danny who runs a Boys & Girls Club, has two kids, Henry and Sophie, a father named Lenny (my dad’s name) and an administrator at the club named Chicki (my mom’s nickname). I made Danny in a happy divorce so there could be funny dating stories as the show progressed, so no Laure character. The focus of the show was on Danny raising his teenage kids, as well as stories about the wonderful things that go on in community centers all over the country. The story and script just flowed out of me, and I was really proud of it. I sent it to Les Moonves and told him this was the show I wanted to do. Les was very complimentary about the show but said he was going to pass for now because he had already decided on the TV pilots he was going to make that season. He said he had one new pilot he wanted to make that he really loved and asked me if I would read it. Since he was kind enough to read my script, I decided to read his. It was called Partners, a word that still triggers PTSD in me.
TELEVISION—SUCCESS, WRAPPED IN DISASTER
Partners was a comedy about a cop with a wife, teenage kids, and an annoying and wild partner. It was well-written, and when CBS turned down my show and immediately offered me this one, I was open to it. They offered me a boatload of money, made me an executive producer, promised casting approval, and agreed to shoot the series in LA, although the pilot would be shot in Vancouver. They had a big-name director, Brett Ratner, and big producers like Barry Sonnenfeld attached as well, and it was being produced by Columbia Television, and so I said yes. We cast great actors, including Jeremy Piven, who I had just worked with on Very Bad Things. He brought a lot of passion and was funny and wild, and I thought we would have a great chemistry. But when we got to Vancouver and began shooting, trouble began as well. Brett and Jeremy behaved very erratically on set, showing up hours late, yelling at people, and seeming unnaturally jacked-up on something. But the worst part was that some of the women on the set confided in me that Brett and Jeremy were sexually harassing them, and they were afraid. I was an executive producer on the show as well as the star, and I took all of this unprofessional behavior very seriously. I didn’t want to confront Brett or Jeremy directly because I had to work with them both up close and personal, and I wanted the show to be good, so I passed on the information to the other executive producers. They told me to just keep quiet about it and they would handle it. The misbehavior continued throughout, but we finally finished the show and came back to LA. I was called into a meeting with the other executive producers, as well as the head of Columbia Television, to discuss the show and the issues I had with Brett and Jeremy’s behavior on and off the set. They were angry with me for bringing it up because they thought the show had a good chance of getting picked up and they didn’t want any controversy to hurt our chances. I said I didn’t want that either, but if we did get picked up, we needed to make some changes to our team because I didn’t want to do a show with people who disrespect other people that way. A top-level executive at Columbia yelled at me, “Don’t you say a word about this!”
I said I wasn’t going to say anything.
“Don’t you say a fucking word to anyone, or we’ll sue you, do you understand?!” Sue me? Where the fuck did that come from? The threat sent a chill down my spine.
“I’m not going to say anything.”
“You better fucking not, or we will sue you!”
“I’m not going to say anything! And stop saying you’re going to sue me.”
“Don’t you tell your agent, Les Moonves, or anybody else because we have a lot of money riding on this and I will sue you if you fuck this up!” I left that meeting very shaken and surprised at how it went down. The number of times he brought up suing me was crazy, no matter how many times I told him I was not going to say anything to anyone. This was obviously way before the MeToo movement started helping people call out sexual harassment on the set, so I just curled up in a ball and shut my mouth. (Interestingly, both Brett and Jeremy have been caught up in MeToo revelations, both publicly accused of sexual harassment in the last few years, as has Les Moonves, the head of CBS.) A few days before CBS was going to announce whether our show had been picked up, I got a phone call from one of the executive producers. I picked up the phone and he immediately started yelling.
“Did you call Les Moonves? Did you call Les Moonves and tell him you didn’t want to do the show?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Did you call Les Moonves and tell him you didn’t want to do the show? Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t do that. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Les Moonves said you called him and told him you don’t want to do the show!”
“I didn’t call Les Moonves. Why would he say that?”
“He said you called him in New York.”
“How the fuck would I call him in New York? I have no idea how to call Les Moonves and never would call him anyway. So Les Moonves is lying.”
This stopped the producer’s ranting at me.
“Well then what the fuck is going on?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll call you back.”
I hung up in shock, blindsided and with no idea what was happening. The producer called back.
“Les said he didn’t speak to you, but you left him a message at his hotel that said you don’t want to do the show.”
“A message? I left him a message at his hotel? In my voice?”
“No. A message with the operator.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I didn’t leave him a message. Why the fuck would I do that?”
“Because you don’t want to do the show.”
“Yes, I do. Look, I have no idea what’s going on here or who left a message at Les Moonves’s hotel, but it was not me. Have Les call me and I will tell him that I didn’t leave any message and somebody is fucking around here, and I do want to do the show.”
A little while later, Les Moonves called and I explained to him that I did not call him or leave him a message.
“I didn’t think it was you. It was weird to get this message in my box.”
“Very weird. I don’t know what is going on, but I hope you pick up our show.”
“We’ll see. I like the show but, honestly, right now it is on the bubble.”
We said a very nice goodbye and I called the producer back and told him that the conversation went well, we cleared up that bizarre incident, and that the show was in the running. But my level of paranoia kicked into overdrive. Who the fuck left a message for Les Moonves with my name on it?
The day came for the announcement and Partners did not get picked up. I was disappointed because I thought it was a good show and good part, and I was hoping the Brett and Jeremy situation would get cleared up once we got a commitment for the series and went into production. But those feelings of disappointment quickly changed into terror when I got a call from my agent saying that Columbia Television was suing me for twenty-five million dollars for sabotaging the show. The next day there was an article in the LA Times with my fucking picture next to it saying the same thing, along with the accusation that I had called Les Moonves and told him not to pick up the show. Twenty-five million?! If you added everything I had in the world, it would come to about six million, so I didn’t know where I was going to come up with the extra nineteen million! They were going to wipe me out, everything. Our house and our savings were at risk, along with my reputation. I had no idea what to do. My new agent at ICM was absolutely no help, afraid and wanting to stay on the good side of Columbia Television—fucking wimp. All of a sudden, I had to find a lawyer, which I knew nothing about. I hooked up with a tough and smart litigator who thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and he was not only going to fight them tooth and nail but countersue them as well. He put together a case, getting phone records to prove there was no phone call or message from me, getting Les Moonves to give a deposition to testify about his phone call with me, and developing his countersuit against Columbia, claiming they were defaming my character and trying to blame me for the financial loss they suffered when the show didn’t get picked up. It was good to have someone fighting for me, but Jesus, it was so expensive! I had to pay for his time at hundreds of dollars an hour, his assistant’s time, photocopying, parking, and who knows what else. It felt like I was going to end up owing the lawyer twenty-five million dollars before it was over. I started to experience anxiety like I have never felt, bad enough that I got a prescription for Xanax (which didn’t do much of anything). Plus, they wanted me to hire a publicist so I could get my story out in the press and defend myself and my reputation. But that would be another huge expense, and I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. I just wanted it to go away. So I called my old friend Joe Roth and asked him how to make it stop. He said, “You need a rabbi.”
“A rabbi?”
