Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [37]
General is short for “general meeting,” which is one of the most vague and dreaded Hollywood inventions. It essentially means “I am curious about you, but I don’t want to have a meal with you, and I want there to be little expectation of any tangible outcome from our meeting.” Most of the time with generals, neither person knows exactly why they are meeting the other person, and so you talk about L.A. traffic patterns and which celebrities are looking too thin these days. The meetings are fun if you like chatting, which I do, but frustrating if you like moving forward with your life, which I also do. But usually you get a free bottle of water.
I was incredibly nervous meeting Greg, because his reputation preceded him. Even my dad knew who he was, because of the opening credits in King of the Hill, one of the only animated shows he didn’t think was destroying the minds of American youth. Greg had been on the staff of The Harvard Lampoon, a writer for Saturday Night Live (where he was writing partners with Conan O’Brien), The Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and created King of the Hill. If he’d died after just doing that, people still would have been sad to read his obituary. When I met him, he had just turned forty.
I got to the meeting early. It was held at the King of the Hill offices in Century City. Century City is a commercial business area with lots of gleaming high-rises. To help you visualize it, this is the area where Alan Rickman held all those people hostage in Die Hard. A bored twentysomething guy greeted me at Reception. Actually, he did not greet me. It took him a full minute or so before he looked away from his computer game to acknowledge me standing nervously in front of his desk. When people show a lack of excitement to see me, I compensate by complimenting the hell out of them. It always exacerbates the problem, but I cannot stop. I focused on his tidy work area.
ME: What a clean desk. If it were mine it’d be a disaster, ha ha.
RECEPTIONIST GUY: This isn’t my desk. They moved me here when the season ended. I literally have nothing to do with this desk.
We stared at each other for a few moments, until he told me to sit down next to a full-size cutout of Peggy Hill.
Marc had warned me that Greg was “a little quiet and pensive,” but no one could have warned me just how quiet and pensive. Greg is the frequent perpetrator of crazy-long pauses in conversation. Like, minutes long. My meeting with him was about two and a half hours, but if you transcribed it, it would have had the content of a fifteen-minute conversation. Greg would reference all kinds of books and articles, and instead of paraphrasing them, like any normal lazy person, he’d insist on going online and finding the exact line or quote from the secondary source, adding another five-minute silent section to the meeting, during which he wordlessly surfed online. Later I would realize this is Greg’s signature style. He likes to take in people past the point where they can be putting on a show to impress him. Or, this is my interpretation. He might just have been zoning out and forgot I was there.
Greg’s a very low-key guy, with the bearing of a gentle, athletic scientist. We talked about New Hampshire, our dads, books, and elaborate Indian weddings. It was fun, and I unexpectedly learned a lot. I remember leaving the meeting with a few printouts; one was MapQuest directions to a diner Greg loved eating at, called John O’Groats, and the other was an article about the history of the architecturally interesting library where Greg went to high school.
Now, I should give some context of that year in television. NBC had high hopes for three comedies that year: Committed, a show about eccentric friends living together in New York City; an animated show, Father of the Pride; and Joey, the spin-off of Friends. I could not get meetings with any of these hot shows. Like, not even close. Marc hustled and got me a meeting