CHICAGO — People are weird everywhere. But there’s a specific sort of weirdness that comes to the fore when it’s a small town, where eccentricities seem to exist in high relief. The Fox mockumentary series “Welcome to Flatch,” now in its second season, is all about capturing that.
Paul Feig is one of the show’s executive producers. “Whereas a city is sometimes about how impersonal everything is, a small town is about how personal everything is,” he said. “When (creator) Jenny Bicks and I took it around to different networks, everybody said: You can’t make fun of small towns. And we’re both from small towns, the last thing we would do is make fun of them. We just want to have fun with the people that are in small towns, because we all knew extreme personalities where we lived and those are the most interesting people and the funniest people, too.”
Feig is an actor, writer and producer, but he is probably best known as the director of movies such as “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and 2016′s “Ghostbusters,” as well as TV shows including “The Office” and “Arrested Development.”
When asked about a worst moment in his career, he talked about “the first time I got fired from a showbiz job.”
My worst moment …
“When I was living in Detroit, I was doing TV commercials for my dad’s army surplus store. I was 15 and wanted to be a filmmaker so he was like, ‘Why don’t you make some commercials for my store?’ So I wrote these things and shot them and starred in them and they were ridiculous.
“Because of that, these local stations were trying to be nice to my dad because they wanted him to keep spending money on running these commercials. And one of the local VHF channels was going to do a locally produced soap opera. And I wanted to be an actor, that was my whole thing. And I wanted to be on that soap opera. So my dad was pushing them to hire me, but they didn’t have any use for me as an actor. What they said was: We need a boom operator for the show.
“A boom operator is part of the sound department. On the set, somebody has to hold the microphone over the actors so you can hear them. It’s all handheld on a long pole, but in the old days they used to have this thing, it was a big platform on wheels that had a crane arm (with the microphone on the end) that hung out over the actors. So as the boom operator, you would get on top of this platform and swing this crane arm back and forth over the actors. And then you had another handle that you pulled or pushed, which would turn the microphone to point at whichever actor was speaking at the moment.
“I’d seen enough movies about Hollywood to be like, wow, that sounds glamorous! How cool! Recording every sound! It will be very exciting!
“So I get there and, to me, it’s a very professional set up. One of the actors was actually Bruce Campbell, who went on to fame for the ‘Evil Dead’ movies. There was a lot of Detroit showbiz royalty on that show at the time. I think it was called ‘Generations,’ it was on Channel 20.
“So there I am, I get up on the boom. They’re rehearsing for a scene. They’re doing their thing, acting their hearts out and I’m turning the handle back and forth and the microphone is swinging back and forth and I’m feeling like I am in absolute showbiz.
“An hour in, we get this note that they’re hearing a squeaking sound. So we continued on and they said: ‘We keep getting that squeaking sound.’ So they start getting mad at me. And I’m like, I’m just turning the handle! And they’re like, ‘Well, there’s something wrong with it because it’s squeaking — you gotta fix it.’
“And I was thinking, what? I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m an actor! I’m 16, so first of all it’s probably illegal for me to be doing this. Child labor, let’s just say it.
“What happened was, the people at the station got them to hire me, but I don’t think anybody told them that I was just basically the idiot son of one of their advertisers. So they looked at me like I knew what I was doing. I was a favor, but nobody told them, so they looked at me like I was the pro: You’re the sound guy, fix it.
“So they all go to lunch and they leave me. I’ve got WD-40 and I’m spraying the thing, I’ve got a screwdriver and I’m tightening stuff. It was ridiculous, I was like a monkey pounding on an engine with a hammer. So I’m listening to it and I don’t hear anything, so I’m kind of proud, I think I fixed this.
“They come back from lunch and we start shooting again and of course it’s still squeaking! And now they’re furious with me. And I don’t know what I’m doing, this is not my thing!
“So they ended the day early. And then the call came in and my dad had to tell me: ‘They said they don’t need ya tomorrow.’ And it was like, oh my God, I just got fired from my first job!
“So I thought I was ruined and washed up at 16.”
What was Feig’s mental state at the time?
“I went from elation of ‘wow, I’m getting into showbiz’ — which was my goal since I was five — then sheer sweat on the back of your neck terror as things start to go poorly, then devastation that I couldn’t fix the problem, and then complete anger that I was put in that situation, and then extra devastation that I was out of the business. I’m ruined. This is it.
“Because back then, this was before the internet, showbiz just seemed like it happened on another planet.
“My next-door neighbor and I would make Super 8 movies all the time, sci-fi movies and comedies, that was the only outlet I had. And then I was suddenly in the only professional setting in Detroit that I knew of, and just as quickly I was drummed out of it. So I was like, how do I get back into showbiz?
“Looking back I’m like, why did I care about the boom? I didn’t want to be a boom operator. But I just thought it would be exciting and somehow it would lead to me being able to write and direct. That I would be discovered operating the boom. I had no realistic idea of how the business worked.
“The next summer, I moved out to California and became a tour guide at Universal Studios and I was convinced, now that I was in Hollywood, that I was going to be discovered on the tour because I was so hilarious. Pretty much every tour guide thought that and we were so delusional because the last place they would look to cast people was on the tour.
“But you would also have actors taking the tour who thought they would be discovered! I think people are much more savvy now because there are so many shows about showbiz. But this was the ‘70s and you were like, maybe some mystical thing will happen and I’ll be plucked from obscurity.
“I got that job because my dad had a friend out in Hollywood who managed the comedian Jeff Altman and these two women from Japan who were a singing duo called Pink Lady, and they had a variety show on TV called ‘Pink Lady and Jeff’ — this is really old, this is back in the day when they gave everybody a variety show.
“So I said to my dad, ‘Tell your friend I want to work in Hollywood! I’m an actor.’ And what he did was he sent me a copy of Variety. And back then, they would put out a big chart of all the studios and how to contact them. So Icold-called every studio in Hollywood and said, ‘I’m an actor, do you need any actors?’ And they would go, ‘Well, no.’
“I went through the entire list and the last one I got to was Universal Studios, and they said, ‘Well, we’re just about to hire the next round of tour guides for the summer.’”
The takeaway …
“That I didn’t want to be a boom operator. I didn’t want to be a technician, I wanted to be in charge creatively, whether it was going to be as an actor or a writer or a director.
“But it made me see that I was not cut out to be one of the support team. My ambitions were too big, I think.”
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