Author: Wil

There are a lot of things I enjoy about acting, and there are a lot of things that I absolutely hate about the entertainment industry . . . but the joy of creating and the frustrations of just trying to get there are nothing compared to that feeling of “I’m part of this thing that’s bigger than all of us. I’m helping make something really cool happen.” Long after the brain cells that contain specific details of the day-to-day working are sent off to Guinnessland, that feeling of “belonging” will remain.
I’ve been in a lot of ensemble casts in my life: Stand By Me, Toy Soldiers, and Star Trek are probably the most well known of them all . . . they were all fun and rewarding, but in various ways I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. When I worked on Stand By Me, Rob Reiner always made me feel like I Belonged, like I deserved to be there, even though I was just a kid. But the other guys in the cast picked on me a lot, probably because I was sensitive and insecure. Corey Feldman was a pretty cruel fourteen year-old, so I spent a lot of that summer trying my best not to cry.
When I worked on Toy Soldiers, I was eighteen, and boy was I a know-it-all! I guess you could be kind, and say that I was passionate about my work, and that I cared deeply about the film, and you’d be correct . . . but jesus, someone should have knocked a little sense into me. However, when I look back across almost fifteen years, I can clearly recall how much fun I had hanging out with Sean Astin and Keith Coogan, and how Dan Petrie made me feel like I was a valuable part of his cast . . . but I was in sort of a dating nightmare at the time, so I wasted a lot of time dealing with that drama, and I wasn’t able to completely relax and appreciate the experience.
As I’ve written extensively in my books and on this blog, when I worked on TNG, I was a kid and they were adults. ‘Nuff said.
It wasn’t until my first ACME show, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sunday Show, that I felt like I was fully part of an ensemble cast, complete with the goofing off before the show and the drinking beers afterward, and the good-natured teasing backstage, and the whole bit. It was awesome.
When we started ACME Love Machine back in December, I knew from our first rehearsal that this was going to be the best ensemble cast ever, and the last few months of shows have been incredible. I am so proud of the show, and I love the cast so much, I start counting down to our Saturday night performance shortly after I get home from the theatre early Sunday morning.
This Saturday is our final performance, and I am extremely sad. There’s an esprit de corps in this cast that is even more pronounced than we had in Crouching Tiger, and I’m really grateful for that. I’ve been told by several people who have seen the show that, as a cast, we have an obvious affection for each other backstage that translates into something intangible — but clearly there — when we’re on stage. I’m really going to miss that.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been rehearsing the next ACME show, ACME: A Day In The Life. Chris, Matt, and I are the only actors who are continuing on from Love Machine, and even though I know and like all the people who will be in the new cast, I’ve wondered: are we going to come together as well as my current cast? Am I going to have as much fun as I did in Love Machine? Will this show be as well-attended and critically praised as Love Machine?
We had an amazing rehearsal this Tuesday for Day in the Life, and for the first time since we started pitching material several months ago, I felt it. I felt the first twinges of that esprit de corps that I love so much about Love Machine. This is going to be a great show, and it’s going to be a LOT of fun to perform. This cast is so talented, and so funny, and composed of such amazing actors (who are insanely great writers), I can’t believe that I ever had any doubts.
On the way home, I thought about all the different ensembles I’ve been in over the years, and how my experience being in them has been more about where I was in my life, and who I was at the time, than about the actual ensemble itself. The fact that I am having so much fun in this current ensemble, and I’m looking forward so much to the next one makes me very happy indeed. Maybe I’m finally at a place in my life where I am comfortable enough with myself to fully enjoy being part of something bigger than me, because I know exactly where I fit in.
When I got home well past midnight, I dropped my bag (NOT A MAN-PURSE!) on the dining room table, and walked into the back of the house. Ferris and Riley snuggled together on Nolan’s bed, Felix was in Ryan’s room, and Biko and Sketch slept together atop my bed right next to Anne.
“This,” I thought, “is why I can relax and enjoy being part of the ACME ensemble. This is the best ensemble of them all.”

My latest The Games of our Lives is up. This week’s game is Midnight Magic on the Atari 2600:

Your dominance at the arcade is unequaled. When you walk through the doors, Sinistar’s hunger is mysteriously sated, the robots in Berzerk fall silent, and even the feared Wizard Of Wor dares not laugh at you. Your initials, “XTC,” sit atop virtually every high-score list in the building. The other kids bring you waffle cones while you play Galaga, just to stand near you. You are a god, with one small but significant exception: pinball. And there’s another problem: That guy who hangs around the high school even though he graduated five years ago is a pinball master. Though there are only three pinball machines in the entire arcade, you can’t touch him, and he knows it.
He may have a conversion van and a sweet mustache, but he doesn’t have Atari, and he doesn’t have Midnight Magic. Lock your bedroom door, crank up some Journey, and start practicing to kick his ass.

In this week’s issue, there’s also a really cool spin on the always-hilarious Commentary Tracks of the Dammmed: Commentary Tracks of the Blessed. Checkitoutcheckitoutcheckitout.

I was attracted to Geocaching because, even though I may not probably won’t find the cache, I’ll still get to enjoy an awesome Journey. Part of my fundamental philosophy of life is that it’s about the Journey, not the Destination, so hiking is a wonderful metaphor for me.
Over at blogging.la, I found out that the Los Angeles Times has created a bunch of really spiffy printable maps to some of the greatest hikes in Los Angeles County. As Robert says at b.la, hurry and grab them before the Times puts them behind their Cone of Registration.

When I was in my very early twenties, and oh-so-very-very-with-it, I went through this phase where I just couldn’t get enough of the Beat Generation. I had always been a fan of Burroughs, (especially anything involving Doctor Benway) but that was just about the extent of it. In fact, I didn’t even associate him with the Beats until my research for Coppola’s version of On The Road spiraled completely out of control and became an obsession. I listened to Ken Nordine and Steve Allen, and I read everything from Kerouac to Neal Cassidy to Allen Ginsberg that I could get my hands on. I even spent several days with Howl, pretending I knew why it was so important. Anyway, the point is, for a couple of years, if I could have grown a goatee, I totally would have done it, man. *snap* *snap*
There are only two things that have survived from that period of my life. The first is a love of Jazz music (if you haven’t stayed up all night listening to Miles Davis, you haven’t . . . well, stayed up all night listening to Miles Davis. Sorry, bad example. But it really is cool. Oh, and when the weather warms up, there’s nothing quite like Charlie Parker, and when you love someone so much your heart aches, Chet Baker is your guy.)
The second is my desire to take images from my mind and turn them into stories. One night, I was “free-forming, man, *snap* *snap*” in my notebook (that was covered with pen drawings of stars, a piano, a mugwump, and — incongruously — a martini glass) and I came up with this short story about a guy who is so worked up about the problems of the world, he smokes cigarette after cigarette after cigarette, and composes letters to people in an effort to enlighten them. Eventually, he starts drinking, and ends up in an alcoholic coma. When the Sun comes up, it finds him the floor, surrounded by his final thoughts, beneath “an ashtray overflowing with the weight of the world.”
Over the weekend, I bought Wilco’s Summerteeth. The second third song has a lyric that goes, “The ashtray says / you were up all night.”
Woah. Did I wander into Jeff Tweedy’s cosmic creative wake one night, and not know about it until Sunday? Or did he wonder into mine, since that album was released in 1998, and I wrote that story around 1995? Maybe I hit a creative wormhole or something.
Whatever. I don’t care. This is pretty much just an excuse to blog about how fucking amazing Wilco is, and how much they’ve eaten my brains.

I was really disappointed by the story MSNBC tried to tell yesterday. I was hoping we’d discuss the empowering nature of blogs, and how anyone, even celebrities, can use blogging software to communicate with people. I hoped to point out that blogging is very egalitarian, and it doesn’t matter how famous a person is offline, if their blog just isn’t relevant or interesting, nobody will pay attention once the novelty wears off, and they’ll be stuck with little more than a promotional tool that is largely ignored. When we started out, I tried to explain that I was a “blogger with a high-profile job”, rather than a “celebrity blogger,” but they just weren’t interested in hearing that. Instead, they did everything they possibly could to turn the conversation to She Whose Name Will Not Be Spoken, Britney Spears, and other vapid media whores darlings who would probably vanish in a puff of smoke the instant the media stopped fawning over them.
I thought that MSNBC would really “get” blogs, since several of their on-air hosts have them, including Keith Olbermann, whose bloggermann is absolutely fantastic. Seriously, that guy should be on TV.
I tried my best, and I’m sad that I lost an opportunity to help introduce to a large TV audience a powerful (new-ish) way to communicate. Unfrotunately, I left feeling like it was further evidence of the Mainstream Media’s inability (refusal?) to understand what blogs truly are, and why blogs matter.
While I was on the air, I mentioned a few blogs that I think are fantastic, and a few people have asked me to link to them. So here are the ones I can remember:

• Nickerblog is written by my friend Shane Nickerson. Shane and I are part of the “I keep my blog because I want to write the way you do” club. He’s an amazing writer.
• + busblog is written by Tony Pierce. Tony just won a bloggy, which he fully deserves. When I won my bloggies, I don’t think I had earned them, yet. Tony completely earned his.
• Neil Gaiman’s Journal. Neil Gaiman gave the world an incredible gift when he created Sandman. Then, presumably because he likes us all so much, he gave us American Gods. He also gave me the greatest honor in the world when he wrote the foreword to my book Just A Geek. Like most bloggers, he writes about whatever is on his mind, but because he’s one of the finest authors in a generation, it’s always interesting.
• James Wolcott is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He clearly doesn’t need a blog, since he’s a contributing editor to a respected magazine, but he does it anyway. More evidence of why blogs matter, if you ask me.

I think I mentioned a few others, but by that point in the interview, I just wanted to get off the air and back home so I could finish my latest Games of our Lives, which is about one of my favorite games of all-time. If someone remembers and wants to link it, put it in the comments or send an e-mail, and I’ll update accordingly.
As Balance to the MSNBC piece: Salon‘s featured story today is called Attack of the Celebrity Blogs. I was hopeful that Salon would get the story right, but when I saw my name in the first paragraph, I cringed and expected the worst.
I have never been so happy to be wrong in all my life.

There are as many different types of celebrity blogs as there are celebrities: We have blogs from celebrities who have fallen out of the spotlight and who want back in, at least in some marginal way (Rosie O’Donnell); blogs from celebrities who are too big to need blogs but who still maintain them, at least in some cursory faction, to maintain the illusion of intimacy with their fans ( Gwen Stefani ); blogs from celebrities who actually seem to enjoy recording their thoughts about mundane day-to-day activities and manage to do it in a conversational, entertaining way ( Moby ); blogs from celebrities who feel strangely compelled to lecture us on the meaning of the universe ( Fred Durst ); blogs from celebrities who feel strongly about politics ( Barbra Streisand ); and, most fascinating — and most readable — of all, a blog from an actor whom few of us have thought much about in recent years but who has become a kind of touchstone for many people in the readersphere who are simply attempting to do what they want to do with their lives and finding it more difficult than they ever imagined ( Wil Wheaton, who appeared in “Stand by Me” as a child actor and in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as a teenager, and then seemingly dropped off the Earth’s surface).

The story goes on to make many of the points I had hoped to make on TV yesterday, and ends with some unbelievably kind words about me and WWdN:

The overarching point of that entry [about CSI] may be that celebrities aren’t like you and me, except when they are. WIL WHEATON dot NET is appealing because it’s written by a regular person with intelligence and a sense of humor. When he’s lucky enough to do the work he obviously loves, he also has a pretty interesting job. But while his readers leave lots of comments congratulating him on his “CSI” performance, there are plenty more who are eager to offer advice about the sick cats. In the end, that’s what writing — and reading — blogs comes down to. The Inner Self isn’t the stuff of everyday life: The cats with the kidney problems are.

Wow! How cool is that? Like I said, I have never thought of myself as a celebrity blogger. I’ve always thought of myself as a blogger who once had a high-profile job. While MSNBC completely missed that point, and chose to focus instead on viewing blogging through the traditional “celebrity” filters, Salon completely grokked it, and I’m really psyched that they chose to use my blog as a favorable example. That’s really, really cool.
. . . this has been sitting here since I got up this morning, and I’ve been reluctant to publish it because it feels like a big old “Yeah! go me! I rule!” pile of shit . . . I want to say how happy and flattered I am that Salon chose *me* as an example of Some Guy with a blog that doesn’t suck . . . but I just can’t figure out a way to quote it without feeling like I’m jerking off. I hope it doesn’t come off that way.