Yes Please (26 page)

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Note from Mike:
We didn’t technically watch together—you were in New York and I was in L.A.—but you did call me after every game and scream things like “ORTIIIIIIIIIIIZ” into my voice mail.

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Note from Mike: Somebody Did Something: The Story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox
. It was every e-mail, text, and phone message our friends had sent me about the Red Sox from September 2003 to December 2004. I had it printed and bound and gave it out to my friends as a holiday gift. It totally made Seth Meyers cry.

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Note from Mike:
Whom I had not spoken with in two years, but who knew how important the victory would’ve been to me.

Mike also knows all of the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot. I know this because he sang them into his cell phone while pretending to take a call on the dance floor at my wedding.
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Needless to say, he has a lot of skills.
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Note from Mike:
Currently enjoying the fact that this took place before every human in the world had an HD video camera in their pocket.

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Note from Mike:
Two, really: compiling e-mails and “Baby Got Back”–related dance bits.

Before Mike left
SNL,
he, Seth, and I sat in his office and watched the brilliant Christmas finale of Ricky Gervais’s UK version of
The Office
. We all wept in our hoodies.
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I don’t remember if Mike had already signed on to join producer Greg Daniels on the American reboot at that point.
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I remember thinking that an American version of
The Office
was a terrible idea.
⁹
Then I heard that Greg Daniels, Mike Schur, and Steve Carell were involved and still thought it was dicey. Then I saw it and realized it was amazing.

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Note from Mike:
The moment Dawn returned to the office and kissed Tim I jumped up out of my chair and involuntarily thrust my hands in the air, like my team had won the Super Bowl. Poehler clapped and cheered. Everyone in the room had a cathartic moment of pure joy. I remember thinking later that I wanted to write something someday that would make people feel that good. Many of the romantic and emotional story lines on
Parks and Rec
have been my attempt—my and the other writers’ attempt, I should say—to reach that bar.

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Note from Mike:
I had not.

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Note from Mike:
So did I. So did everyone, except, thank God, Greg Daniels.

In early 2008, Mike and Greg called me to ask if I’d be interested in working on a show they were creating once I left
SNL
. Greg now had a deal with NBC to develop a new series, rumored to be an
Office
spinoff, and had asked Mike to do it with him. We talked vaguely about ideas, but mostly just about how fun it would be to do something together. Greg’s deal meant that the new show had been ordered straight to series with a thirteen-episode guarantee. Most shows start by making a pilot episode. When the pilot is done, a group of mysterious people gather in a room and weigh its merits, consult various oracles, and then send white papal smoke out of the holy chimney when it is decided it will become a series. Being ordered straight to series was great news because it meant we were able to skip that mysterious and painful pilot process, but on top of that, the first episode was slated to air after the Super Bowl, TV’s most coveted slot. It was a remarkable and rare opportunity, a home-run decision for any actor. Then I got knocked up and figured the whole thing was a bust.

Mike and Greg started working on what would become
Parks and Recreation
and a few months later decided to ignore my “delicate condition” and pitch me the idea anyway.
¹⁰
Mike called me as he stood on the balcony of his house chain-smoking, a detail he has asked me to not put in my book.
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He told me about a character he and Greg had created called Leslie Knope. She was an extremely low-level Parks and Recreation Department employee who had big dreams. She was inspired by the “Yes We Can” spirit of Obama’s recent election. She believed that it only took one person to make a difference. She wanted to effect change, she wanted to someday be president, but most importantly, she wanted to turn an empty lot in her town into a park.
^12,
13

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Note from Mike:
By this point, with the idea pretty fleshed out, Greg’s and my general feeling was: Poehler or bust, pregnancy be damned.

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Note from Mike:
Damn it, Poehler.

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Note from Mike:
It’s so interesting to think about it this way, now, as we near the end—it was, at the beginning, really that simple: a woman who wanted to make something out of nothing.

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Note from Mike annotating previous note:
No, I’m not crying. Shut up.

The show was going to be shot in the single-camera documentary style that was working so well for
The Office
. At this point I had no experience with this documentary/mockumentary-style format. Before
SNL,
I had done a few multicamera shows as a guest star or featured regular. On “multicam” shows, you shoot with three or four cameras in front of a studio audience, and you can hear people laughing—like
Cheers
or
Seinfeld.
Sometimes you shoot things without an audience, but at least once a week you have a “tape night” where an audience comes in and actors feed off the energy and laughs. My first television job was a tiny part in an episode of
Spin City
—which was a multicam show—in 1996. I didn’t meet Michael J. Fox, but Richard Kind was kind. Two years later I had a part on a show called
Sick in the Head,
a pre–
Freaks and Geeks
Judd Apatow–produced pilot starring David Krumholtz, Kevin Corrigan, Andrea Martin, and Austin Pendleton. It was not picked up to series. The pilot process can be rough going.

I had a little more experience in shows that shot single-camera style. Single camera usually means using one camera and shooting each side of the scene separately—in other words, if two people are talking, you shoot over one of their shoulders and do a bunch of takes where only the person on camera is really performing. Then you stop, they adjust all the lights, and the cameras turn around and shoot the other person. It’s extremely tedious and slow. It means long hours and lighting setups, and it feels like shooting a traditional movie. Years before, I had worked on a single-camera pilot called
North Hollywood,
which was also not picked up to series. Though looking back, it made sense that the show didn’t go—it starred a bunch of losers named Kevin Hart, Jason Segel, and January Jones and was produced by the obviously talentless Judd Apatow. That’s right. I am the common denominator in two failed Judd Apatow projects. Judd Apatow with me: zero dollars. Judd Apatow without me: two hundred trillion dollars.
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¹⁴
  
Note from Mike:
Roughly.

Mike and Greg explained their idea for a new mockumentary style. It seemed like a hybrid of
Spinal Tap,
the British
The Office,
and something entirely original. Scenes would be blocked and rehearsed almost like a play, with entire scenes performed top to bottom many times. Two or three cameras would find the action and just follow the actors as they moved around. Actors often didn’t know when they were on camera or where the cameras were. “Spy shots” lent a sense of intimacy to moments. Actors were allowed to look into the camera to show their reactions to things and spoke directly to the camera with “talking heads,” used to further the story or display another side of what a character was feeling.
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,
¹⁶
Camera operators were very close or very far away but a dynamic part of the action. We would shoot eight or nine pages in a twelve-hour day, which is about double what one shoots on a feature film. There were very few makeup touch-ups or lighting adjustments.
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Improvising was encouraged and accommodated, and if you tried something new the camera could swing and catch it.

¹⁵
  
Note from Mike:
Characters on mockumentary shows look at the camera for different reasons. For Michael Scott, it would be because he had just done something humiliating and then suddenly remembered that there were cameras there—his looks were often conveying: “Uh-oh.” Ben Wyatt (like Jim Halpert from
The Office
) often looks to camera as a plea, like “Can you believe what I have to deal with?” Andy Dwyer looks to camera like it’s his best friend and he wants to share how awesome something is. And so on. My point is that when we created the character of Leslie, we imagined that her relationship to the camera was one of guarded caution—she had political aspirations, and people with political aspirations both (a) like being on camera but are also (b) acutely aware that one slipup or inappropriate recorded moment can ruin their careers. In the beginning, Leslie had that cautious relationship with the cameras, but as time went on, Amy just kind of stopped looking at them. Amy and I never really discussed this, nor was it a conscious decision on the part of the writing staff—it just kind of stopped happening. I thought about why it was happening toward the end of season 2, and I realized that Leslie had evolved into a character for whom there was no difference in her private and public thoughts, motives, or feelings. Amy had made her into a completely consistent, hearton-her-sleeve character who was not embarrassed or ashamed by anything she ever said or did in any scenario. I remember thinking that was great, and from that moment on I used that as a North Star for writing Leslie—it became a mission statement that we would never write a story that involved her being ashamed of how she felt. It’s a pretty badass character trait, I think, and it only works because of the supreme sincerity of the actress who embodies it. (Don’t cut that part, Amy. I know you want to, because it seems braggy or something to have someone else’s notes be about how awesome you are, but don’t cut it, because it’s true, and everyone else can just deal with it.)

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Note from Amy:
You’re the boss.

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Note from Mike:
We told our excellent crew in the first week of shooting that we would be asking them to do things that would ordinarily get them fired. We told the makeup artists and hairstylists not to rush onto the set to fix minor problems. We told the director of photography and the grips and electricians to light the scenes as quickly as they could and not to worry about perfect shadow removal and things like that. The whole point of this style is to maximize the amount of time actors are in front of the camera, acting. This only works if you have a cast full of people who are willing to sacrifice Hollywood magic for maximal comedy—who are, in short, not vain, and who would rather be funny than look flawless and perfect. This is one of my favorite things about the entire cast—every single one of them was happy to make that deal.

Mike told me that once I shot a show like this, I would never want to shoot a TV show any other way again. This has proven correct. He sent me the script and it took me five minutes to realize Leslie Knope was the best character ever written for me.
¹⁸
My motto has always been “Do work that you are proud of with your talented friends.” My other motto is “I need to keep working or the government will seize my boat.” Both of these things helped me say “yes please.”