Needless to say, I didn’t get the gig. Winona Ryder did, and I’m betting she improv’d the shit out of that scene.
Improv can be scary, but bears are worse.
OnAnchorman,during the bear pit scene, one of the animals we were working with was busy being a bear and I thought it moved in my direction. I shrieked, a totally reasonable response to being near a very large animal, however innocent it was. Someone—thank you, my savior—picked me up off my feet and swept me right out of there pronto. I was understandably rattled, my body shaking. May I remind you, those animals are not small! As an apology for my near-death experience—it wasn’t near-death, but I’m a Drama Queenfrom Laurel Canyon™—the producers bought me a then state-of-the-art flip phone with a video camera. Before they presented it to me, the entire cast and crew recorded funny videos for me. Adam McKay proudly handed it to me.
“This is what I get for almost dying for your movie?” I joked.
Still, it meant a lot becausetheyall meant a lot. I missed them after we wrapped. (Not the bear.) We created something really special. Over the years, our careers have grown and morphed in different ways—cheers to Steve Carell being famous as fuck, go Brick!—but we always stayed in touch.
After the firstAnchorman, Paul Rudd even stayed in my home. Rudd, his wife Julie, and their son moved into my house on the hill in Laurel Canyon because he was filmingThe 40-Year-Old Virginwith Carell, and I moved to a beautiful brownstone in Manhattan while on Broadway forSweet Charity.
That how it’s always been with theAnchormancast. We’ll always be one big, crazy, happy family.
Always.
For what it’s worth, I would argue thatWake Up, Ron Burgundy—the uncensored, cutting-room-floor version ofAnchorman—is even better than the original movie. It was essentially the first movie we made. That film included the amazing Alarm Clock bank robbery scene, in which I got to see Amy Poehler in action for the first time. She’d just started onSNL,and I remember asking Adam who this hysterical woman was. She and Maya Rudolph did a hilarious riff about the werewolf mask Maya was wearing while robbing the bank (“I am a ma’am, ma’am… How many werewolves do you see aroundhere wearing a skirt?… None!”). It was clear Amy was going to be a star. But test audiences had wanted more of the news team and the love between Veronica and Ron, so an entire month of shooting was shelved to make what becameAnchorman.Alas, the powers that be didn’t releaseWake Up, Ron Burgundytheatrically—it’s part of the bonus DVD, et cetera—because if they had done so, they would have had to pay us for it.
It’s often forgotten thatAnchormanwasn’t a commercial success right out of the gate. When it hit screens on July 9, 2004, it was deemed a total flop. The initial weeks were tough. The first weekend numbers were disappointing enough that a friend of mine, who ran part of DreamWorks, the studio that released the movie, called me on the first Monday crying. “We flopped,” he said. By its third week, it had dropped to the sixth spot.
Two years later, though, I got an enormous check from the DVD and VHS sales. Will and I always laugh that it became the gift that kept on giving. As it grew, and as generations of kids and people started to find it, it became what it is now. A smash hit. A cult classic. Grossing nearly $100 million worldwide.
We created something amazing, and then we did another one, and another.
Bing bang boom.
TWELVE
METATARSAL #5
IN2004, IFLEWto New York and auditioned for twelve hours for the role of Charity Hope Valentine in a Broadway revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields, and Neil Simon musicalSweet Charity.This was the show that was originally directed and choreographed by none other than my hero, Bob Fosse, and when it premiered on Broadway in 1966 it had starred his then-wife, the legendary Gwen Verdon. Now there was a chance I could be Charity, too. It had been an incredible few years in my career. But this was about to be a pinnacle.
I was riding theAnchormanhigh when the chance to be in the musical came my way. It doesn’t matter who you are, though—you don’t just jump into that role. Charity Hope Valentine, “the girl who wanted to be loved,” is a character who barely ever leaves the stage. If you’re not dancing as Charity, you’re dancingandsinging. And if you’re not dancing and singing, you’re acting and crying and tryingto make people laugh, all at the same time. It’s one of the hardest roles in all of Broadway, and certainly the hardest I had ever done.
I wanted it. Dance had been my number one love, all my life, and this was my chance to do what I’d been working toward since childhood.
I started in the prestigious Julie O’Connell Dancers at age ten and danced with them for the next five or six years. We did tap, ballet, jazz—everything. If ever I was depressed, my mom would say, “When was the last time you went to class? It’s been a week? That’s why. You need to go.”
It was the 1980s, so we wore neon unitards, leg warmers up to our thighs, headbands, and wide belts. We danced to eighties pop, some of which was pretty terrible (here’s looking at you, “Neutron Dance”). Then, one day, I was walking through the Debbie Reynolds Studios in North Hollywood, where we rehearsed, when I heard a very different kind of music coming from one of the other studios: Studio F. I think it was a Melissa Etheridge song, but whatever it was, it was a siren call to me. I peeked in to watch, and my whole body froze.
What is this?I thought.
Leading the class was a dancer named Doug Caldwell. Doug’s work mixed ballet and modern, though I’m loath to use the word “modern” because that is its own thing. Doug’s style was something entirely new: fluid and beautiful, with every fingertip, every part of the body, emotionally in tune. Here was a man doing something that was filled with passion and love and spirituality.
Doug had been a ballet dancer, but he didn’t have the best turn-out, so he switched to choreography and teaching. It was the same story as Bob Fosse, who also had horrible turn-out. He’d pivoted to create his mind-bending dance filled with uncanny turn-in and angular poses, an art form all its own.
Doug Caldwell had invented an entirely new and beautiful form of expression, too, a place where balletic and modern met, but not flexed-foot modern. He drew gorgeous lines, which led to what was known as “the reach.” Lyrical, as Doug’s creation would come to be known, would eventually lead to contemporary, which is now the big thing. Back in the mid-eighties, lyrical was just getting started as a dance form all its own. I could feel the soul through every movement the dancers made, the arms reaching for something, a yearning in the body that amplified the inner yearnings we dancers so often carried.
I was hooked instantly.
I found Julie O’Connell the next day, determined to chase this new art form. “I have to do this other thing now,” I said. She understood and gave me her blessing.
I was fifteen years old.
Going to class with Doug was church for me, for all of us—eventually we’d actually call it “church.” Doug’s dancers stuck with him for years. We would see the young ones come in and stay, and then more young ones, and more. But there was a core group of us that had always been there, each with our own spot for his warm-ups. If anyone even put their towel down near my spot, or any of our spots, we’d pick it up and move it.This is my spot,I’d think. I was always to the left of the mirror, first row.
That was my spot for thirty years of dance with Doug Caldwell, from sixteen to my mid-forties. I had started dancing when I was three and have been in dance classes ever since, often for twenty-five hours a week in the summers when I wasn’t acting. I loved it. It waslife. I would eat a huge bowl of pasta Parmesan to get the carbs. Sometimes I’d go to work atMarried… with Children,leave, and head straight to dance class until eleven o’clock at night. It saved me.
Some days I’d take as many as five classes: Doug’s class, Alex Magno’s class, and three others. I relished Alex’s technical and challenging warm-ups. He was a Brazilian dance teacher, and his class was all sensuality. When I was older, I’d act as his assistant, modeling the warm-up for everyone.
