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Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part Three

BuzzSugar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:30:23 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. I've already told you how the series got started and passed on some tales from the set. In today's final installment, I have trivia from the show, plus news on everyone's new projects. Here goes:

Linda Cardellini still has the green Army jacket that was practically a part of her body when she played Lindsay. "I thought about bringing it," she told the audience, "but I thought I might look like a gigantic loser."
Sarah Hagan, who played the conservative Millie, was apparently a shocking amount like her character. Cardellini recalled that in one scene, Millie was supposed to ask Lindsay if Kim "fornicates," but Hagan (who, Cardellini recalled, hadn't talked much about sex at that time) accidentally asked if she "fornicated it." That take ended up in the show.
Busy Philipps only did the show because she ran into Cardellini in the airport in LA shortly before the show was supposed to start. Philipps' agent had been against her taking the role of Kim Kelly because it was initially only a guest spot for the pilot, but Cardellini - whom she'd known in college - insisted that working together would be fun.
Samm Levine and Martin Starr were both terrible about learning their lines and would typically just cram the morning of the shoot.
Linda mastered the art of never eating food on screen; in the dinner scenes, she mostly just pushes her food around and gestures with it, which Paul Feig pointed out is "very teenage girl." She said it was all because of an early job where she didn't realize that if she ate food in one take, she'd need to eat in every take; that experience turned her off lasagna for 10 years. Philipps said it took a Freaks and Geeks scene where she ate more than a dozen donuts over the course of shooting for her to learn that lesson.

To hear my favorite story from the whole discussion and see where you can find your favorite Freaks and Geeks now, just read more.

Here's my favorite story from the whole panel: Cardellini said she was once stressing out about how to play a family dinner scene, thinking all sorts of deep thoughts about acting. At one point she looked up and saw John Francis Daley just shoveling meatballs into his mouth. With his mouth full, he looked up and exclaimed, "This is the greatest job ever! All you have to do is, like, act!" Cardellini says she still thinks about that when she's stuck on how to play a scene.
Speaking of Cardellini, she's in her fifth season of playing Samantha Taggart on ER.
Samm Levine recently appeared in Sydney White with Amanda Bynes.
Feig is directing the pilot of Kath and Kim for NBC and is working on another book. He's also had a couple of brief cameos in Judd Apatow movies, including Knocked Up and Walk Hard.
Daley recently sold a screenplay that Daniel Clowes is rewriting and Terry Zwigoff of Ghost World is directing. He also started appearing regularly on Bones last fall.
Philipps is pregnant!
As for those who weren't at the panel, James Franco is in production for the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, Seth Rogen is working on Zack and Miri Make a Porno with Kevin Smith, Jason Segel stars in How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall - and, the panelists joked, Judd Apatow is counting his millions.

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Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part Two

BuzzSugar — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:30:40 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. Yesterday, I told you how the series got started; today, I have tales of what it was like on set:

While it seems like the whole cast genuinely likes each other now, that wasn't always the case. "It was really too much like high school sometimes," Cardellini said, with cliques and alliances forming and disbanding.
Daley said at the time of the show, he was "14 years old and alone," and the big kids wouldn't let him hang out with them. But, he acknowledged, it probably would have been weird to have a young teenager hanging out with actors who were out of high school.
Some of the nastiest disputes on the set came between Philipps and James Franco. At the time, Philipps said, they could barely even speak to each other: "It was legendary how much we hated each other."

To hear about the biggest dispute Philipps and Franco ever had, and to see where the characters might have gone had there been a season two, just read more.

Philipps said the worst things ever got with Franco was the day the two shot a scene from "We've Got Spirit." Her character was supposed to say something to Franco's and then whack him lightly on the shoulder. He responded by flinging her hand away, screaming "Don't you f*cking touch me!" and throwing her to the ground. Feig said he still has the copy of the film from that scene, which ended with Philipps lying on her back, alternately crying and laughing out of embarrassment, with her hands over her face: "It was like, flat on my back, wind knocked out of me assault by James Franco!" (She then pointed out that Franco recently sent her a very nice wedding present.)
Had the show continued into a second season, one potential storyline for Kim Kelly was that she would try out for the school musical, get a part, and end up getting really into high school theater. She might have also finally gotten her picture taken for the opening credits, though Philipps noted that she thought having "and Busy Philipps as Kim Kelly" in the credits instead was kind of cool.
Samm Levine said he would have pushed for Neal to lose his virginity and then lord it over Sam and Bill. Feig quickly noted that even if the show had gone for eight seasons, Neal never would have lost his virginity.
Sam Weir would have started drifting more toward the popular crowd, Daley said, and "then having that mental conflict of, 'Should I stay with my friends?'"
Martin Starr's Bill might have become a jock, especially if his mom had stayed with the gym teacher.
Somewhere down the line, Mr. Rosso might have started his own Interlochen-style school with "a lot of poetry readings, a lot of back rubbing - wink! - where everybody could learn at their own speed," Allen said.
Cardellini wouldn't reveal much about her hopes for Lindsay but said the joke on the set was always "that Lindsay comes back from the Dead pregnant."

Tomorrow: Freaks and Geeks trivia, plus what everyone involved is doing now.

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Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part One

BuzzSugar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:31:04 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and over the next few days, I'm going to share some of their best stories with you. Let's get started:

Paul Feig said that when the series began, all of the writers filled out questionnaires about their own best, worst, and most memorable high school experiences. When someone came up with something truly awful, Feig said, his reaction was: "Oh, that's a terrible story! We'll use that on the show!"
Cardellini, who played geek-turned-freak Lindsay Weir, said sometimes she'd think the stories were so awful or out there, they had to be made up. "Then you would look at Paul, and you'd see the earnest look on his face and the sadness in his eyes, and you'd realize that most of this happened to Paul."
Feig said he set the show in 1980s Michigan largely because that's what he knew best, but he also had a few specific reasons for that setting: He wanted it to be set in pre-AIDS times so that people were afraid of having sex because they were afraid of sex itself; he wanted his show to be pre-cell phone because technology restricts interpersonal interactions; and he wanted to show Midwestern life because it's so common and real.

More, including Feig's inspiration for Lindsay, if you read more

Feig said most of the characters were based on people he knew, but Lindsay was a composite character based largely on his own journey. He had been raised in a religious household, and at the time he created Freaks and Geeks, he was turning toward atheism. "Any crisis I was going through at the moment," he said, "I put onto Lindsay."
Feig believes that if the show had premiered a couple of years later, it might still be on the air. It came on right in the middle of game show mania, and it would get pummeled by Who Wants to be a Millionaire and was replaced by NBC's attempt to revive 21. It was one of the lowest-rated shows on NBC at the time, but it was still getting 7 million viewers a week, more than some current network shows.
Some members of the cast said they realized what an unusual experience it was to work on Freaks and Geeks. John Francis Daley, on the other hand, said he thought it was the norm to do shows that good, ". . . and then I did The Geena Davis Show." Busy Philipps said she didn't realize how tough things were on normal network TV shows until she appeared on Dawson's Creek, where she was told that it didn't matter if she screwed up because they'd just cut to Katie Holmes anyway.
Feig said making the show was so touch-and-go that they approached each episode as a stand-alone independent film. The final episode that aired, "Discos and Dragons," was actually shot out of sequence, so it would always be there to close the series.

Tomorrow: cliques on the set, hopes for a second season, and a fantastic James Franco story, courtesy of Busy Philipps.

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