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Good Will Something
Unlike most people, I find it easier to discuss my failures than my successes. While a good deal of them have happened in public, or have since been made public by the trial, there’s one failure in particular that remains less well known.
It was a production called Good Will Something starring, of course, my longtime partner Gary Martin Mead, and myself. The concept was simple: We’d watch Good Will Hunting (the original, in case by the time you read this there's a sequel) every night for fourteen consecutive nights. On the fifteenth, we’d gather friends and family together in our small performance space, get smashed out of our gourds, and attempt to perform the entire movie, by memory, drunk. It would, in theory, be hilarious.
It was, in practice, a catastrophe. Before I even said my first line, I vomited directly onto Gary’s grandmother, who was sitting in the second row. Even more embarrassing was that Gary and I quickly came to the realization that watching the film every night for two-weeks did very little to lodge it in our memories. And so, there we stood, hammered and soaked with urine, staring at each other without saying a word.
The audience was enraged. They blamed us for ruining yet another evening for them, and we, of course, placed most of the blame on them for giving us another chance.
The worst part of all was that Kickstarter demanded we return the full $250,000 that we raised, claiming we had not delivered the production we promised. If we hadn’t already used a large portion of the money to purchase an ice sculpture for opening night, returning the funds would not have been a problem. But we did. And it was. So we did the only thing we could. We'd make the money back by putting on the best damn version of the show we set out to do.
Thankfully, the second night was filled with tourists whose native language was not English. It was perfect. They neither read the papers nor knew what the hell we were saying. We finished the performance to rousing applause and were soon offered a contract for $100,000 to produce the show in Spanish and start touring the American Southwest immediately. Confident as we were, we demanded the full $250,000.
And you know what? They said yes.
Turning that down was probably the poorest decision of the entire episode. But, after all, it was Good Will Something, not Beuno Will Alguna Cosa or whatever the fuck they wanted to call it.
▶️ Charlamagne tha God presses Pete Buttigieg. Fearless interviewers usually have nothing to lose, either because they're independent or need to be medicated. Not so with Charlamagne, who works very much within institutional media (radio, Comedy Central), but manages to ask the obvious, tough, questions. This exchange in particular is so satisfying. Pete, just admit you're working for the CIA. (The Breakfast Club generally has become a new morning ritual and they're a great follow on Instagram).
📺 Tokyo Vice. I have a feeling that in 3-weeks everybody will be talking about this show. I watched the pilot and started dreaming in Japanese. The pilot is as strong as they come, but the subsequent episodes are a good reminder that even HBO has a hard time sustaining greatness in this endless competition to churn out content. 1-hr, crime drama, HBO Max
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