Jerry is looking out the window at the wedding next door. Molly is on the couch with a migraine from the helicopters.

JERRY

What do these people have in common with Barbra Streisand?

MOLLY

What does anybody have in common with Barbra Streisand?

JERRY

What does James Brolin have in common with Barbra Streisand?

MOLLY

They have something in common, evidently.

JERRY

How could they? I mean she’s music and movies and he’s like . . . Love Boat and AAMCO commercials.

MOLLY

They’re in love.

JERRY

I know. I meant—

MOLLY

That’s why people get married.

JERRY

It’s just a strange combination.

MOLLY

I’m sure they are very much in love.

JERRY

I know. But how do those two people find each other?

MOLLY

They’re lucky.

JERRY

He sure is lucky.

MOLLY

They found each other.

JERRY

He is one lucky son of a bitch.

MOLLY

They love each other! They need each other!

JERRY

Why? Why do those people need each other? How do they get so lucky?

MOLLY

Because people . . . people who need people . . . are the luckiest people in the world!!! . . . I don’t know. What are you asking me for!?

DEEP DIVING INTO MALIBU

In the wake of the success of Celebration for Education, Laure and I formed a nonprofit organization called Malibu Foundation for Youth and Families, whose mission is to improve the lives of the kids and families in Malibu. Robyn Gibson joined the board, as did a core group of dedicated parents, school administrators, teachers, and other involved citizens. We held town meetings to hear what the needs and concerns of the people were. Number one on the list was that in Malibu, there was nothing for kids to do after school except hang out and surf. Kids were getting into drugs and trouble with too much time on their hands while their parents were still at work. We set our sights on starting a teen center of some kind. It was daunting to think about how to set up the infrastructure for something like this, with teachers and aides and activities and insurance, and so many unknowns. As a social worker, my dad had worked a lot with Boys & Girls Clubs of America and suggested we talk to them. Laure and I met with Allan Young, who ran the Boys & Girls Club in Santa Monica, and we were blown away! The club served five hundred kids a day with food, homework help, a gym, sports leagues, and dance classes. The place was buzzing with young people energy. Laure and I saw what our dream of a teen center actually looked like. Allan dedicated his life to the Boys & Girls Club mission, serving on the national committee as well as running his club. He knew the trouble kids can get into in every kind of community if they are not given constructive options like going to the club, and he offered to help us get one up and running in Malibu. He told us we needed three things to get started—a piece of land, a building (and the money to build it), and three years of operating expenses in the bank. The last thing you want to do is build a club, have the kids love it, and then have to shut it down. The principal of the high school and middle school agreed to let us have a small corner of the blacktop on the school campus, a perfect spot that kids could just walk to after school. The dad of a kid on our baseball team was a major real estate developer and said he would give us two of the construction trailers he was using at the building site for the landmark Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. I drove downtown to see them. They seemed pretty small, but good enough to get us started. Now we just needed the money. Laure and Robyn went into overdrive on their fundraising and were very successful. With the star power of Mel behind us, and an incredibly important mission that was easy to understand and support, we met with the wealthiest people in Malibu to give our pitch. We continued to have town hall meetings to raise awareness and get smaller donations as well. It was impossible to do fundraising outside of Malibu. It is a very tough sell to ask people to give to the “poor children of Malibu.” But the people who lived in our hometown knew that this club was vital to the youth and families of Malibu and were generous. It was important to have everyone in the community invested in this, both emotionally and economically, so every donation, from five dollars to five thousand dollars, was equally significant.

Mel and I became good friends through all of it, spending a lot of time together with our families. He was very idiosyncratic. He had a shaman of some sort, Dr. Hung, who had him drinking all kinds of weird concoctions, including a daily shot of liquid which came out of a jug filled with dead snakes and vines, which was supposed to promote long life and strong boners. He took me to his country club to play golf and we had a lot of laughs. Robyn and Mel gave us their estate in Connecticut to celebrate our anniversary. It was an amazing English castle on a hundred acres of rolling countryside, complete with sheep, sheepherders, gardens, stone walls, creepy statues, giant fireplaces, and ancient stone stairs that led to an actual dungeon, which they had remodeled into a state-of-the-art screening room. We loved every minute of it. Our families were committed to serving our community and we had good times together making things happen.

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.