YOU: Don’t talk like that, private! You’re gonna live! We’re gonna get you outta here and you’re gonna make it and maybe someday you’ll go on to produce three animated sitcoms, and two of them will be reasonably successful!
ME: Will they … win lots of … Emmys … and be critically … acclaimed?
YOU: Let’s just … let’s just get you outta here, buddy.
I woke up two weeks later in a military hospital in Honolulu, only to find out that what I’d witnessed was you, Neil Patrick Harris, mistakenly fighting your way up a hill of our own guys. Even my own wound was from your gun. I found a note crammed in my pocket that said, “Ooops! Sowwy! —NPH,” with a little frowny-face on it. You’d written it on the back of Ohio’s last letter home, which was not a very cool thing to do.
All of which is to say that you may be charming, funny, charismatic, and insanely talented, but you’re really kind of a dick.
* * *
To do damage to a different kind of company, go HERE.
To hear from one of your costars in Seth MacFarlane’s film A Million Ways to Die in the West, go HERE.
You have a very healthy inner child, and for many years it’s been asking your outer adult to get more work in kids’ entertainment. But your outer adult needs no prodding; it’s always consciously tried to maintain a presence among multiple demographics, and no demo is more important, or adorable, than children. So the two yous form an uneasy professional alliance, and it quickly pays dividends in the form of voice-over work. Your mellifluous—or cackling, if needed—intonations can soon be heard in audiobooks, animated kids’ shows, and even video game adaptations of Batman and Spider-Man. (By the way, why is Spider-Man hyphenated and Batman not? These are the questions that keep you up at night.) Before you know it you land a big-screen role in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. You voice a mentally deficient monkey who speaks only in one- or two-word sentences that are processed through a Speak-and-Spell attached to his chest. It’s the role your larynx was born to play!
It’s a unique skill, voice-over work. It’s all about inflectional variation. You’re in a little booth with a whole bunch of audio engineers and moviemakers on the other side. When they push a button you can hear them, but otherwise you can’t hear anything. There’s a pattern to the proceedings: you say your line, then wait in silence and watch a half-dozen people huddle up and talk about you. Then after about fifteen seconds the engineer says, “Great, do it again but this time you’re happier.” So when you record Cloudy with a Chance, you end up having conversations like:
YOU: Gummy bear!
(Pause; huddle.)
ENGINEER: Great! Now like it’s the most delicious gummy bear ever!
YOU: Guuuummmmmy beeeeaaar.
(Pause; huddle.)
ENGINEER: Great! Now say it like you’re afraid of the gummy bear.
YOU: G-g-g-g-g-gummy b-b-b-ear!
(Extralong pause; huddle.)
YOU: Did I do something wrong?
ENGINEER: No, Phil was just telling us about this hot chick he’s banging.
The video-game voicing is particularly bizarre, because you’re recording not only the dialogue but the interstitial scenes. You need to read and/or come up with fifteen different little lines for when, say, the player goes to the bathroom. “So are we gonna do this or what?!?” “Gotta tinkle, tough guy?!?” By variation 15, you are absolutely out of ideas about how to taunt incontinent gamers. Then it’s on to variations 1–100 on the sound of getting punched in the face.
YOU: Oof.
(Pause; huddle.)
ENGINEER: Great! Now a harder punch.
YOU: Ooooof!!
(Pause; huddle.)
ENGINEER: Great! Now harder, right in the sternum.
YOU: OOOOOOOFFFFF!
(Extralong pause; huddle.)
YOU: Did I do something wrong?
ENGINEER: No, Phil was showing us a nasty text he just got from that chick he banged.
But you’ve always enjoyed the technical aspects of putting creative projects together. The greater the challenge, the greater the appeal. So when executive producer Jordan Kerner asks you to read the script for a movie called The Smurfs, you don’t need much convincing. The idea of interacting with computer-generated creatures has tremendous appeal to you. Plus you like the idea of creating a family movie that grown-ups would also like, so they won’t start going crazy when they hear it blaring from the backseat of their SUV for the fourth straight time. And above all, you’re flattered that, given what everyone knows about your personal life, a big company like Sony wants you to star in a potential blockbuster movie.
Because that’s what it is, a potential blockbuster. You know very well that the chance to star in a giant “tentpole” movie doesn’t come along every day. When choosing actors, studio heads and casting directors look at lists showing how your most recent movies have done financially. If you want to be in the next David Fincher movie (and you are), it helps to show that your last three films have grossed over $800 million. So The Smurfs is not only a job, but an investment. And sure enough it ends up breaking your streak of big-budget disappointments. It makes over $550 million worldwide, opens number one at the box office in France, Germany, Mexico, and Brazil, and spawns a sequel that takes in over $347 million. That’s a lot of green … from a lot of blue!1
For a kids’ movie, The Smurfs is pretty intense. The interaction with the technology requires laser precision. On one typical day of shooting, you sit in an otherwise empty living-room set. The director, Raja Gosnell, says, “Okay, the Smurfs are going to come in and jump up on the couch, and then one’s going to jump down onto the chair, and you’re going to pick him up in your hand and set him over on the other chair and then talk to everyone in their different places.” The crew sets up little gelatinous figures that are the actual size of the Smurfs. Then right before you film, you look in the eyes of the little figurine you’re “talking” to, and they put a dot at the end of your eyeline so that when they add the Smurf later you’ll appear to be staring right at it. When Raja yells, “Action!” you talk to a dot representing Papa Smurf, then “follow” him to your cupped hand, which he will eventually be standing on. All the while you wear an earpiece to hear the voice-over actors doing their dialogue in a different room.
And that’s just dialogue and blocking. There are other, more elaborate scenes, like the one where the Smurfs tickle you. That one’s kind of embarrassing because, of course, no one is actually tickling you. You’re just wearing a T-shirt with lots of monofilament strips attached to it being pulled by effects guys. It’s a slow, technical process, but it’s much freer than voice-over work in one respect: the animation hasn’t been done yet, so you have the ability to actually affect how things will be drawn. For example, the script calls for you to order the Smurfs into a suitcase, but you ad-lib a mime of one slipping and falling and you picking him up and throwing him in, and they wind up animating in that joke to match your motion. It’s neat to do stuff like that, to work with talented costars like Jayma Mays and Hank Azaria and (in the case of Smurfs 2) Brendan Gleeson. That one’s more fun to shoot because you get to do effects. You wear a body harness in front of a giant green-screen soundstage as they hoist you on cables and you do front flips and back flips and spins. You’ve never felt more like an acrobat, even, that time in Berlin when you felt up an acrobat.
* * *
To innocently hang out with your kids, go HERE.
To not-so-innocently feel up an acrobat that time in Berlin, go HERE.
To hear from Amy Sedaris, a friend you made on the set of the movie The Best and the Brightest, a small independent film that is otherwise not mentioned anywhere in this book, go HERE.
* * *
1Thanks to eight-year-old Timmy Weissbard of Seattle, the winner of the “Write a Joke for Neil Patrick Harris’s Book!” kids’ competition, for that joke. (Yes, that was the best joke you received.)
After hosting the Tonys again in 2012, the p
roducers ask you back the next year for a fourth (but hopefully not final) time. The show is moving back to Radio City Music Hall, and you feel it’s important to acknowledge the change of venue, the fact that the awards are back in their traditional battleship-sized home. So one day while driving you come up with the idea of a song called “Bigger.” You hear it as kind of like an Irish drinking song with an oompah, South Parky chorus that would just be “It’s bigger, it’s bigger, it’s something something something,” and then you do a bunch of fast talking, and then more “it’s bigger, it’s bigger,” and you keep adding more people and more business and more craziness onstage until by the end the stage is filled with everybody—not just the casts of the nominated shows, but the Statue of Liberty, the Naked Cowboy, the awkward Elmo who haunts Times Square, everybody. And those are the vague marching orders you give Lin-Manuel Miranda, the star and songwriter of In the Heights, and Tom Kitt, the composer of Next to Normal. Basically you give them the title—“Bigger”—and a directive—“bigger.” And they proceed to crush it, to write an opening number whose scale, size, and sheer biggitude outbig all previous biggings. There’s no bigness like this bigness like no bigness you know.
But the title is a hubristic affront to the awards-show gods, and sure enough simply coordinating the rehearsal schedule proves a monumental task. The song features 121 people, including the partial casts of no fewer than nine Broadway shows. Couple that with Actors’ Equity’s strict policy limiting the number of hours actors can work, and you end up with an insanely compressed amount of time. Prior to the last frantic weekend, there is only one day when the entire cast is available. Thankfully, the brilliant director-choreographer Rob Ashford has the creative imagination to meld the varied theater throngs into a seamless vision of Broadway splendor, but to bring it to life every second counts. When you arrive at rehearsal you’re told, “Hi, we literally have eleven minutes to do this, so let’s go, we’re gonna start here, here’s the cast of Kinky Boots, they move here, you do this, then you stand here, sing the lyric, take four steps there, they go off, enter the cast of Motown, you meet them, you move here, great, let’s try it. 5, 6, 7, 8, now here’s when 75 more people will be coming on, some orphans, a coupla tap-dancing kids, the gang from Pippin—hey, that reminds me, how’d you feel about jumping through a hoop?”
That’s right. You literally jump through a hoop. The universal metaphor for ridiculous tricks becomes your reality.
And still you want bigger. You’re drunk on bigness. You demand ever greater biggitude. So you throw in some actual magic. Recruiting your usual partner in magical crime Ed Alonzo, you jump a bunch of steps and get into a big giant box wheeled onto the center of the stage. On cue, a rope is pulled, the four sides flop down accordion-style, and you’re gone. You practice the trick over and over but it takes you forever to escape and you keep missing the musical cue. But you keep at it and, thank God, when you do it live, it works like a son of a bitch. The walls open and you’re gone and, lo and behold, the camera spins around to find you walking up the aisle, at a seemingly impossible distance from the stage, gallivanting with a bunch of Newsies.
How did you do it? You’re not going to tell you. Magicians never share their secrets, even with themselves.
But the hardest thing to pull off is the lyric. Lin-Manuel is such a master wordsmith, his flow so exuberantly dense, that as the broadcast nears you keep asking him to remove prepositions, articles, and any other not-strictly-necessary words just so you can take breaths. Thus,
Well, if it isn’t Pippin!
becomes
[Gasp for air] It’s Pippin!
The lyrical climax is a feat of verbal dexterity so difficult you can do it only by just staring at the teleprompter and not moving. You plant yourself while everyone dances around you and just think, Dear god, please get all these words right. And you do.
And the words are worth it.
There’s a kid in the middle of nowhere, who’s sitting there living for Tony performances,
Singin’ and flippin’ along with the Pippins and Wickeds and Kinkys, Matildas and Mormonses.
So we might reassure that kid
And do something to spur that kid
’Cause I promise you all of us up here tonight we were that kid …
And now we’re bigger!
That’s Lin-Manuel in his soul. That’s exactly what he believes. Listening to that, you get the same goose-bumpy feeling when you watched him in In the Heights. Those words and the way he pops his rhythms are sublime.
You use his lyrical genius in the closing number too. It’s the fourth time you’re doing one of these end-of-the-show recap numbers and you’re out of ideas. Then Glenn the director suggests Lin write a rap to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.” Someone proposes getting 452-time Tony-winner Audra McDonald to do the Alicia Keys sections of the song with you. Lin prepares the choruses in advance, but he and his frequent writing partner Tommy Kail write the verses during the show.
As often happens, you find yourself rooting for certain people to win solely because you have a great joke ready for them. Lin is particularly rooting for winners with exactly three syllables in their names, because it fits nicely with the “Yellow cab / gypsy cab / dollar cab” rhythm in Jay-Z’s original. So he’s happy when Tracy Letts and Judith Light win. But when Courtney B. Vance gets a Tony he informs you, “As far as you’re concerned, he’s Courtney Vance. No B.”
And you’re ecstatic when the award for best play goes to Christopher Durang, because it gives you an excuse to include
The ’80s came back with a bang, not ’cause Cyndi Lauper sang,
It’s because the best play was by Durang, Durang.
Fantastic opening number,1 fantastic closing number, and that’s not even mentioning making out with Sandy the dog from Annie on national television. It’s your favorite awards show. By far. So far.
* * *
To host the Emmys later this same year, go HERE.
To hear from the man who hosted the Oscars earlier this same year, go HERE.
* * *
1And the next year, Lin and Tom win a well-deserved Emmy. It’s the third straight year one of your Tony songs wins an Emmy. You’re either hiring, or sleeping with, all the right people.
Sesame Street is one of the greatest and most satisfying experiences of your professional life. So when Big Bird calls you out of the blue to say he wants to discuss another possible project for you, you jump at the chance.
It’s a beautiful day, so you decide to take a nice leisurely stroll to Big Bird’s house in the mountains. You start wondering what he has in mind. You lose yourself in happy speculation.
Suddenly you notice the world slowly, inexplicably turning white all around you. Looking up, you realize you have stumbled onto a steep alpine mountain. You are in an avalanche!
You desperately struggle to escape, but your efforts only cause you to sink deeper. You look around for something to pull yourself out of the avalanche with. A cord attached to an ice-tree dangles tantalizingly a few feet in front of you, but you can’t quite reach it.
With your last breath you scream, “Help me, Big Bird!” but your cry is quickly throttled by the densely packed snow filling your throat. The last thing you see is Big Bird running to you wailing, “No, Neil! Not before we shoot Sesame Street 2: Days of Grover Past!”
Your body is never found.
THE END
It’s a typical day. After a quick jaunt on the jetty boat to the restaurant overlooking St. Tropez—where you and a dozen beautiful young people savor a lunch of locally caught fish, ripe tomatoes the size of your head, and $400 bottles of txakolina (a delightfully refreshing dry Basque wine)—you reboard the 150-foot yacht for a sunny, champagne-filled cruise back to the colossal mansion on the hill with the commanding views of both the French Riviera and the Alps. Then, after a dip in the massive marbled azure infinity pool commanding the front terrace, you walk past the entire bedroom that’s been converted i
nto a storage room for china, pause to admire a coffee table whose smooth glass top is supported by a life-sized female mannequin in bondage on all fours, then make a quick pit stop in the gilt-and-marble bathroom before finally climbing the set of Carrara marble stairs for cocktails and dinner with Bono.
No, seriously.
You are really doing this.
You are doing this, and all kinds of indescribable other things like this, and you’re doing them for an entire week, and you’ll probably be doing them for one week a year every year for the rest of your life.
You shit you not.
You are doing this because you and your partner David (Burtka) have become very close friends with Sir Elton John and his partner David (Furnish), and you now have a visa to Eltonworld, which depending on how one looks at it is either realer or more fantastic than Disney World, but inarguably spanglier.
As you ascend the staircase, you reflect on your history with the man. You first meet him in 2009. You’re backstage at the Tony Awards, and there’s a guy sitting in a chair, and he reaches out his hands to you, and Oh your god it’s Sir Elton John. He kisses you on the lips and tells you he’s glad you’re hosting, that he had a thing for you when you were on Doogie Howser, and that you should hang out sometime. You say that sounds amazing, walk away, and squee.1
Then a few months later, at the banquet for Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year, one of whom you inexplicably are, you feel a tap on your shoulder. It’s David Furnish stopping by to say hello. And inviting you over to his table with Elton. And giving you a card with their phone numbers and e-mail addresses on it. But when the squeeing subsides, you and (your) David get into the same prolonged discussion of etiquette you’ve had before: when one gay couple asks another out for dinner, is it the same as a date? If so, does it seem desperate to call them that night? Do you wait a day? Three days? Oh, and what if the other couple is David Furnish and Elton John? What would you even say when you called back? “Hi, one of the greatest songwriters of the twentieth century, it’s Neil and David from the Time magazine gala! Wassssuppp?!? You down for Applebee’s?” In the end you’re so paralyzed by insecurity you never call them.