Will and Grace and Bryan

Upscale is not a word that people usually apply to me, or the way I dress. Most of the time I am usually wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Nevertheless, I was booked on Will and Grace as an Upscale Classy Bar Patron. I was excited to work on W&G, because my friends who worked on it said that it is fun and everyone is really nice to you.

I get to the studio and report at my assigned time, 11:00am. I notice that there are only 15 or so extras and that this is the only scene that we appear in. I was hoping that we might only work a couple of hours and then go home. Usually, sitcoms tape on Fridays, but what I didn’t know is that W&G tape on Tuesdays, and that our scene was the last one. So I settled in for a long day.

The biggest excitement came when a small fire started on a curtain in the back of a set. A light was sitting too close to it. They cleared out most of the people from the sound stage and let us take a break, which turned into a 5-hour break because we never went back in to rehearse. We stayed in a room in a production building across that street from the soundstage.

They fed us a FANTASTIC dinner! I guess being one of the higher rated shows on television allows them to pull out all of the stops for their cast and crew. Then they started taping the show around 5pm.

What was really cool about that show was that they would shoot a scene, and then they would take a ten-minute break. During the break, a group of about 10 people that composed the writing team would stand around and come up with about 3 new jokes for the scene. Then they would shoot the scene again with the new jokes in. I was really impressed that these people could just come up with a bunch of funny stuff that quickly. It also seemed really cool that their job is to write funny television shows, which is something that I would love to do.

There is a person who “warms-up” the audience before the show and during the breaks in taping. They play games with the audience, talk about the show, and have people sing to the band that was playing at the top of the audience section. One of the things he told the audience was that the usual price to produce one episode of a prime time sitcom was usually 1 million dollars. The price tag for an episode of W&G is 4.5 million an episode, with most of that money being spent on the 4 principle actors.

The only thing of note that happened to me during the taping happened right before we filmed our scene for the second time. The writers had put their heads together and come up with some new jokes. One of the jokes was for Karen to say,

“I told her everything, except for the fact that I think Robin Williams shines in dramatic parts”

Then the last line of the scene they had for her was,

“I haven’t been this teary-eyed since Bicentennial man”
Debra Messing and Megan Mullally were discussing the last line with the director Jim Burrows. They both thought they could come up with a different Robin Williams movie that was funnier than Bicentennial man. They were standing right next to me and I heard them coming up with different movies. My first thought was Jacob the Liar, but I don’t think anyone saw that movie. So I thought Moscow on the Hudson was such and old movie and a funny title that it would be a good replacement, but of course I didn’t say anything. Debra and Megan kept trying to come up with another movie and Jim had moved on to get ready to shoot. They were discussing the movie where Robin was the teacher at a prep school and one of his students was Robert Sean Leonard but they couldn’t come up with the title.

I never talk to the actors on set, but for some reason I leaned over and said,

“It’s Dead Poets Society”

“That’s it” Debra said. “Jim, what about Dead Poets Society?”

“No,” he replied, “we’ll come up with something else.

Then they shot the scene and the last line was,

“I haven’t been this teary-eyed since Moscow on the Hudson”

I should stick to writing I guess.