Just a Geek (5 page)

The first call is at 11:15 a.m., to be a regular on this WB show called
The Young Person's Guide To Being A Rockstar
. It's to play a gay drummer. (Why does everyone think I'm gay?). The second call is at 4:45 p.m., for a movie called
Waiting . . .
that is just about the funniest ^%$#ing script I've read in over a year.

I'm completely excited, since I have way too much free time right now and I would like to work. (You know, actors are the only people who are unhappy when they're not working. Unlike most "normal" people, who can't wait for a break from work . . .) The only problem was, Tuesday was Ryan's birthday and I was really torn about what to do. I need to work and I really like both of these projects, but I really wanted to be part of Ryan's 12th birthday party, which was a trip to the beach with some of his friends.

I went over and over it and made the tough choice to take the auditions and see Ryan that evening.

Well, on my way to the first audition, I got a call from my agent and she told me that the afternoon session was canceled! So I went from my first audition (where I kicked ass, thank you very much . . . I'm told that I'm "in the mix" which is Hollywood-speak for "we're considering you") to the beach. I must have been quite the vision in my jeans, Sketchers and black socks, walking down the sand.

Long story short, it was awesome. We skim-boarded, played football and wiffleball and barbecued hot dogs in the parking lot, which was majorly against the beach parking lot rules (yes! breakin' the law! breakin' the law!).

When we got back, I had e-mail waiting for me from my friend Roger Avary. Roger is one of the coolest people on earth and a fucking rad writer and director.

Roger won an Academy Award for writing
Pulp Fiction
and is pretty much responsible for everything good that Tarantino has ever taken credit for. Roger also wrote and directed my absolute favorite movie that I've ever worked on,
Mr. Stitch
. To get back to my point: I e-mailed Roger, because he's doing a new movie and I asked him if I could be in it, because he is the most fun director EVER and always makes good movies. He e-mails me back and tells me, "of course," and sends me the script (which ^%$@*ing ROCKS, by the way) and we're hooking up this week.

So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

That's all for right now, kids. I'm going back to work on the new, improved, easy-to-remember website!

How about some e-mail for your uncle willy?

How about that pathetic plea for attention? Yeah, that's nice. Prove To Everyone said I was bored, which was partially true, but he stopped me before I could continue with, "I'm scared, and I'm horribly depressed. I am a husband and stepfather who can't provide for his family. I `used to be' an actor when I was a kid."

The total absence of acting work was hard on my ego, but it was also a terrible financial strain on my family. My wife and I often borrowed money from my parents, and she was working over 40 hours a week just so we could have food on our table. I felt guilty that I didn't go with them to the beach for Ryan's birthday, and I told myself that if we hadn't been getting calls from bill collectors every day, I would have blown the auditions off to spend the entire day with him. But the insistent voice of the collectors was nothing compared to the Voice of Self Doubt and my good friend Prove To Everyone That Quitting
Star Trek
Wasn't A Mistake. They were the real reason I went on the auditions, which didn't result in any work, because the part I was "in the mix" for went to someone who was—wait for it—
edgy
, and the other was already cast when I got there.

When I e-mailed Roger Avary and I told him that I wanted to work with him again, I meant it.
Mr. Stitch
was an amazing experience and Roger is a talented writer/director, as well as a great person to be around. However, Prove To Everyone knew that this movie, called
The Rules of Attraction
, would be noticed by Hollywood when it was released. If Roger gave me a part in his movie, I would silence Prove To Everyone, The Voice of Self Doubt, and the Voice of Bill Collectors.

For the first time in years, I had some hope that my stalled acting career would begin to climb again. I relaxed a little bit, and when I wrote in my weblog, Prove To Everyone took a break, and I was able to talk some more about my stepkids.

14 AUGUST, 2001

Kids Are Cool

Tonight, while I was sitting here, cursing up a storm while I tried to get the new site closer to operation, my stepkids decided that they wanted to watch
The Mummy
on DVD.

I told them that they could, but Ryan had to shower before he could start it and Nolan would have to wait for him.

Ryan runs off to his room, (kids have two speeds at 12: the excited run and the sullen stalk) and shouts back to Nolan, "Make some popcorn!"

Nolan looks at me and says, "I'm really burnt out on popcorn, Wil."

"So just make some for Ryan," I replied, "that would be a really cool thing to do."

He goes into the kitchen, (he hasn't hit the two-speed phase yet) and gets out the popcorn (I can't endorse
Newman's Own
enough . . . it rules and the profits go to charity, so we all win).

I sit back at the computer, trying to make the new site look less lame (it's not coming along as well as I'd like, dammit) and Nolan calls to me from the kitchen.

"Wil! There's a lot of smoke coming out of the microwave!"

I get up and as I get closer to the kitchen, I recognize that smell that is so familiar to college dorms . . . no, not weed, jackass. The smell of burnt microwave popcorn.

Nolan is standing there, looking perplexed, like he can't figure out what is wrong with the microwave. So I stop it and asked him how long it's been in there and he tells me 4 minutes, because that's what it says on the bag. Now, whenever I make it, it's 2 minutes 25 seconds. I've gotten it figured out. But I somehow didn't pass that knowledge on to the next generation; even now, at 2:50 a.m., my house STILL smells like burning popcorn!

Well, Ryan comes out of his room and Nolan looks crestfallen.

"Ryan, I ruined the popcorn and it was the last one," he says, looking like a puppy who's just been caught chewing up your Boba Fett that was still in the blister pack.

Ryan looks at me and back to his upset little brother and he totally says, "That's okay, Nolan, I'll eat it anyway."

So we open the bag and take out a black ball of burning popcorn, toss it into the sink and Ryan pours the rest of the popcorn into our popcorn bowl. (You see, when you're married, all of a sudden you get all this stuff that only has one use. Like The Popcorn Bowl, or The Water Glasses. I don't know about you, but when I was a bachelor, I only had two bowls and about five glasses and they pulled serious double and triple duty.)

Sorry. Tangent.

So Ryan ends up sitting on the couch, eating the totally burnt popcorn and all was right with the world.

See what I mean about kids being cool? Nolan made the effort to do something for his brother and Ryan made the effort to appreciate it, even at his own peril.

I wish adults were more like that.

When I wrote about my family I felt like I was showing school pictures or vacation slides, and even though it was personal, it wasn't about my struggles in Hollywood. I liked writing about my wife and stepkids, because I knew that I was a good husband and stepfather. I didn't feel like I had anything to prove to anyone—a dramatic difference from the way I felt when I wrote about auditions and my (lack of) acting work.

I was "blogging" almost every day, and even though Prove To Everyone spoke more often than I did, more and more people were stopping by to read what I wrote.
Where's My Burrito?
was a fine place to start, but I was outgrowing Geocities. I was ready for a real website, so I bought the domain name
www.wilwheaton.net
and spent the next several weeks teaching myself how to build a website from scratch.

I thought
Where's My Burrito?
had a certain unpolished charm, but Prove To Everyone knew that if we were going to rejuvenate the acting career, we needed to have a more professional-looking presence on the Internet. The problem was, I couldn't afford to hire a designer, and I was afraid that even if I did, I would end up with a "celebrity" site that would be just be a marketing tool.

Prove To Everyone thought this was a fine idea, but I wanted to do something more than that. I compared the entries
I
wrote to the entries Prove To Everyone wrote, and saw a remarkable difference in the responses and the way I felt about them. I locked Prove To Everyone in a shed in my back yard and spent several weeks learning HTML and PHP. I bought a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, and surfed around the web for design ideas. I looked at "celebrity" sites, and "personal" sites. All the "celebrity" sites were exactly what I expected: marketing tools, controlled by publicists and professional image-meisters. But the "personal" sites felt like there was some dude sitting at a computer, putting up stuff that he thought was cool. The "personal" weblog sites gave me a window into the writer's world, and I decided that I would do the same thing.

Chapter 2. WIL WHEATON dot NET

I OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED WIL WHEATON DOT NET
on August 23, 2001. It didn't occur to me at the time, but that would have been River Phoenix's 30th birthday.

Word of its existence spread quickly around the Internet, and I was asked to give interviews to several popular websites, including Salon, Wire Slashdot and BBspot. Prove To Everyone did most of the talking, but I managed to get a few words in myself. I began to get e-mails from people I . . . uh . . . admired, like Asia Carrera. Friends who I hadn't talked to in years heard about it around the water cooler, or in the chatroom, or via the prison grapevine, and got back in touch.

Here is an early review of WWdN from Chris Pirillo's
Lockergnome
, a very popular and respected technology and Internet culture newsletter:

Wil Wheaton

http://www.wilwheaton.net/

{Stand by him} He was the scrawny writer in
Stand By Me,
and then he became Wesley Crusher of the
Starship Enterprise.
If you mention the name "Wil Wheaton" to anyone in my generation, they'll know exactly who you're talking about. But what has this actor been up to lately? You can find out at his official Website—written, designed and maintained by Wil (himself ). And ya wanna know what makes it cool? He isn't afraid to kick back and let his hair down. He's actually a pretty funny guy. Just goes to show you that who you see on screen isn't always who that person is in real life. Dude, he always seemed so mellow . . . walking along those railroad tracks
.

Chris Pirillo was one of the first people to "get" that I was just a geek, and when I saw myself reviewed favorably by him, I was euphoric. Yahoo's Net Buzz for August 31, 2001 mentioned
"The triumphant return of Wil Wheaton!"
That made me
and
Prove To Everyone happy.

The interviews created a lot of buzz around the Internet, and thousands of people came to my site to see what the big deal was. Ironically, many people praised the honesty and humor, and admired the insights into my personal life.

Unfortunately, the reaction wasn't entirely positive. Several people viciously attacked me for all sorts of reasons, mostly related to my work on
Star Trek
. Sentiments like, "You ruined
Star Trek
, and your blog is stupid! Shut up, Wesley!" were very popular. Many people e-mailed me, in great detail, about what a washed-up, has-been loser I was.

These personal attacks hurt. A lot. They hurt so much, I almost abandoned the website before it really got going. In retrospect, I should have ignored them, but it's hard to drink in praise and discard criticism. The opinions of anonymous strangers shouldn't have mattered to me, but their comments struck at the heart of my own insecurities: my deep-seated fears that leaving
Star Trek
had been a huge mistake and that I'd never be able to leave Wesley behind.

"Why am I doing this?"
I wondered one morning while I read the hate mail.

"Because we're going to show them all,"
Prove To Everyone said.
"We're going to prove to everyone that you didn't make a mistake by quitting
Star Trek!
You're going to get that part in Roger's movie, then you're going to get more parts in other movies! Producers will read your site and see how popular you are. This time next year, we'll be drinking Pina Coladas in Cancun."

"I don't think I want to do this,"
I said.
"I'm pretty sure I put up with enough personal attacks when I was on
Star Trek."

"Here, let me write for a while,"
Prove To Everyone said.

24 AUGUST 2001

Audition Update

If you've read the old weblog, you may remember an entry I made about some auditions. Here is the status of those auditions:

The Young Person's Guide To Being A Rockstar
: I was "in the mix," which is Hollywoodspeak for "we're considering you until someone bigger comes along." Apparently, someone bigger came along.

Waiting . . .
: I had the audition for this last week and the casting director told me that the director has someone in mind, but she thought I did such a great job, she was going to send the director my tape and try to change his mind.

Since it's been a week, I guess he was pretty committed. However, this is one of the funniest movies I've ever read. Ever. I really hope the guy they cast gets gangrene (and recovers, of course), so that they call me and put me in it.

Rules of Attraction
: This is my friend Roger Avary's movie, based on Brett Easton Ellis' novel. Roger and I have been friends since I worked on
Mr. Stitch
with him. We talked about three weeks ago and Roger offered me the COOLEST ROLE EVER in the film, "A Junkie Named Marc."