Category: Television

super fun happy slide!

Posted on By Wil

This week’s contribution to the LA Daily is now online, and ready to send you screaming gleefully down a super fun happy slide into a waiting mob of vampires with overbites:

I spent the first two thirds of my life working as a full-time actor, but about five years ago, my primary focus shifted from acting to writing. A funny thing happened on my way to being a full-time writer, though: I started working a lot as an actor, both on camera (CSI, Criminal Minds) and with my voice (Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes). This has lead to a pretty standard question when I do interviews: “What do you like more, acting or writing?”

“It’s a lot like asking a parent which child they love more,” goes my standard response, “the truth for me is that I love both of my children for different reasons, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to love one more than the other. However, it is impossible for me to imagine my life without them in it.”

My acting career has spanned just a few months shy of thirty years. During it, I’ve worked with awesome people, complete douchebags, famous people who were intimidating, famous people who were gracious, famous people who were on their way down, and soon-to-be famous people who were on their way up. This week, I thought it would be fun to combine my actor side with my writer side, and tell a story about one of those people.

Totally unrelated to this week’s column: I made a cameo appearance in Something Positive yesterday. It’s pretty awesome.

(Comments are closed on this post, to encourage commenting at the Weekly.)

on the importance of maintaining one’s grip on reality

Posted on By Wil

Tim Kring speaks:

In any case, “Heroes” creator Tim Kring said Monday that “there is nothing in the works for him at this point – although a bunch of us over here are big fans of his and would love nothing more than to find some part for him.”

So there’s 10 ways to look at this:

0) It ain’t gonna happen.

1) It may happen in the mysterious future.

As I’ve gotten e-mails and comments about this all day, something’s come up that I want to make painfully clear: It’s really important to me is that this is not misunderstood as some pathetic, desperate attempt to land a role on a show that I’ve had two chances to audition for and totally tanked both times because I wanted it so badly. That’s not how I operate, and I can’t imagine that it would ever have the desired result if it was.

Instead, I hope that this whole thing will be seen the way I’ve seen it: as something cool that happened thanks to Twitter, and as an example of how profoundly our lives have been changed by the technological advances of just the last few years – we really are living in the future, you know.

In which wil goes “O_o” but retains his grip on reality

Posted on By Wil

I thought I’d completed this week’s LA Daily column on Friday, but when I opened it up yesterday afternoon to give it one final look, I realized that it didn’t work at all. It’s fine for a blog post (and will likely show up here sooner or later) but it just doesn’t work as a column.

As you can imagine, I panicked, and spent the next five hours trying to come up with something to replace it. (Pro Tip: The hard part isn’t writing the column; the hard part is figuring out what the hell to write about every week.)

Around 10 last night, I stopped banging my head against my desk and took a sanity break online. While I was looking at TotalFark, TwitterFox popped up with the following Tweet:

@wilw we need you to cameo on HEROES. how bout it? Let me know, it’s Greg Grunberg from Heroes. Parkman.

Normally, I’d think this was a prank, but my friend David (who plays Eric Doyle on Heroes) mentioned to me last week that he’d joined Twitter, and that he was following me and Greg Grunberg. So I went O_o and replied:

@greggrunberg How cool and random to hear from you … we have a mutual friend in @dhlawrencexvii! I’d love to be on your show, for serious.

I think I replied appropriately, right? Considering that the alternative was something like OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG, and all.

A few minutes later, he replied:

@wilw I’m sure Tim would LOVE to have you. I will talk to him tomorrow and see what he thinks.

I couldn’t put it into 140 characters, but I’m pretty sure I know what Tim’s going to think, and it’s going to rhyme with “No way, that guy sucks.” See, I’ve had two opportunities for good roles on Heroes, and both times I was so excited about the opportunity, I completely tanked the audition. It was like the audition was a cute little bunny, and I was Lenny Small. I mean, I fucked them up badly. It was embarrassing. The room I read in at Universal is still blocked off by the HazMat control team because the stink I left there is so horrible.

I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t love it, especially if I got to play a villain, but I’m keeping my squee level really under control at the moment. I’ve done this long enough to know that actually working on Heroes is a real long shot for me. But if it does happen, it would be super awesome on countless levels, not the least of which is the whole thing happened because of Twitter, which pleases my inner geek greatly.

in which i once again praise and thank mst3k

Posted on By Wil

A few months ago, my dad gave me a copy of a James Michener book called The Eagle and the Raven. “Read the introduction,” my dad said. “I think it will speak to you.”

He was right. The introduction was all about how Michener saved everything he cut out of his novels, and described how the book I held in my hands was born from material he’d cut out of a different book he’d written years before. I never throw away anything, and it was spiffy to read that one of my behaviors as a writer is mimicked by someone who probably cut more words out of his novels than I’ll write in my entire life. I thought about this earlier today when I came across a file called introduction.odt, which I assume it was going to be an introduction to something, at some time:

When I was twenty or twenty-one, I read an interview with Joel Hodgson, one of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000. He was asked about the uncommonly high number of obscure references and jokes that were lost on a large portion of the audience. Those obscure jokes were one of the main reasons I loved MST3K so much, so I paid very close attention when Joel said that they didn’t ask themselves, “Will anyone get this joke?” but instead they said to each other, “the right people will get this joke.” That philosophy was and continues to be a very strong influence in my writing, so

and then it just ends. I can’t remember where I was going with this, or what it was for (I didn’t check the date stamp on the file before I reflexively saved it after opening it this afternoon) but it remains true: MST3K was a huge influence on me during some of my formative years.

The MST3K crew reunited recently to give an interview to my old stomping grounds, The AV Club, and in it, Joel said:

No one was saying, “Don’t put that in, no one will get that.” We had a very open architecture in the writing room. The only person that could remove any joke was basically an individual who said, “I have a problem with that joke, it offends me.” And then we would throw it out, no questions asked.

I’m doubt that Joel or anyone from MST3K will see this, but I want to publicly thank them all, not just for entertaining me during the exciting rock climbing portion of my youth, but for inspiring me to never worry about trying to be all things to all people.

I got some important work done today, and I’m going to celebrate by watching something from the 20th anniversary box set, probably First Spaceship on Venus .

Oh, while I’m talking about MST3K: People who can make this happen, please get Lost Continent and Rocketship X-M onto DVD, mmmkay? I haven’t seen them since 1990, and after waiting all this time, my lungs are aching for air.