Pedestrian catches up with the Melbourne-based author, broadcaster and screenwriter to discuss television, transporting Women of Letters to America, auditioning for Big Brother and why the agent of Sarah Silverman wishes she was dead (probably).
So what made you want to bring Women of Letters to America? Basically it started when my friend Glenn Dickie who runs the Aussie BBQ showcase at SXSW said that we should try and bring the show to SXSW. He tried to get us over there last year but last year was pretty hectic for us already. He gave us more lead this year and we eventually said ‘yes’ but thought we might as well do L.A. and New York while we’re there and travel around a bit. So here we are now a week and a half out and I possibly won’t have any hair left. But, you know, it’s all an adventure.
What process did Michaela and yourself go through to source the speakers? Well the longlist was this fanciful collection of amazing names like Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. And we were like, “Yep, she’ll be easy to find – hilaryclinton@whitehouse.com or something like that”. But trying to find their management online was far harder than we had anticipated. In Australia you can Google “Ida Buttrose management” and you practically get her home address. Australia’s so lax with security, we’re such a trusting nation. But over there you can’t even find out who their reps are and you find out eventually through some weird fan stalker site that they’re with William Morris Endeavor and you go to that agency and there’s no email addresses on their website. I guess America’s a nation of stalkers so they protect their talent but it means that getting requests through is really tough. So we had to go through speaker agencies and they aren’t official reps so all of their requests need to be paid. We sent through our standard request with our electronic press kit and they said “Well she starts at $10,000 a day” and you go “Well, we don’t pay anyone. We’re a charity and we don’t pay anyone and we don’t even pay ourselves. We’re paying our own way over here,” and they just didn’t get that concept and said that they couldn’t pass the request on. And some of them started at $150,000!
Was the headliner Susan Orlean’s services as hard to procure as the Ghost Orchid? She was one of the first people we got, amazingly. It’s so funny you say headliner because I posted the list up on Facebook yesterday and not one of my friends identified the same person as the headliner. It appeals to a lot of different people. Susan was great. Michaela booked her and she’s a big animal lover so she loved that the money went to a rescue shelter and she’s just been glorious from the start.
I think if Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe for playing you in a major motion picture then you’re the headliner. Yeah we tried to get her as well and wondered if would be weird having both of them on the same stage. Kind of like The Matrix folding in on itself. What was great about Susan was that right at the start we had to cold call people and that was the toughest bit. But once we started to get some people on board – like Susan Orlean – then you’re approaching agents with a list of talent and they’re instantly more interested in what you have to say. Because without that you’re just getting knock back after knock back or just silence. We got a lot of silence. I think Sarah Silverman’s agent probably wishes I was dead. The amount of times I was just like “Hey it’s Marieke again, haven’t heard back from you, did you get my last email?”. Just being a serial pest.
That’s hilarious. Not to Sarah Silverman’s agent it’s not.
What aspect of Women of Letters are you most proud of? I can honestly say it’s the thing that I’m most proud of in my whole career. It resonates even more deeply with me because it has nothing to do with my career. It’s not about furthering my career or my writing or any of that. As an animal rights activist, it’s about raising money for charity and for something we believe very strongly in – and we’ve raised over $250,000 to date – combined with this very moving human quality. It’s just an amazing passion project. I mean, there’s some full on moments of catharsis on that stage. People share some vulnerable, heart-wrenching stuff. And we certainly didn’t expect that when we first put it on. The first time that someone talked about something deeply personal and cried onstage that really stunned us. Because we never though “Yep, this will be great. Chicks are gonna share their feelings and they’re going to cry”. We never thought it would be that. And I think that happens because we make a point to never record the shows. We don’t podcast, or video or live tweet. The stage is a really safe place for the readers and if they don’t want their letter to go further than that stage, it won’t. I’m really proud of that as well.
Can you point to a specific instance of personal illumination? Absolutely. Michelle Law who is the Brisbane writer Ben Law’s sister. She did our first ever Brisbane show and it was a Letter To My Most Treasured Possession. She’s a really funny writer. She’s like Ben Law. She’s very dry and self-deprecating and she was telling the story of how she had stress related Alopecia as a teen and she wore a wig, her most treasured possession. And she was poking fun at the fact that she was living on the Sunshine Coast and she was Asian, and she had acne and she was bald. So she was telling the story and everyone was laughing and she joked about how she used to call it Chief Wiggum and everything. And then she started from being very light and funny to saying how at night her family would kiss her bald head and tell her that it didn’t matter to them. And she just went from zero to complete sobbing, there wasn’t even a crack in her voice or a moment for her to gather herself, she just went from speaking to completely breaking down. The room was just really still. No one knew what to do because it came out of nowhere. Then her Mum got up from the audience and stood next to her and put an arm around her. Then Ben got up and stood on the other side and they stood there – I’m going to start crying again – and they stood there until she finished her letter. That was just incredible. One of the most moving things I’ve seen.
I want to cry just hearing about that. You should have been there. Michaela always teases me because I get very emotional and very proud of what we’ve created. I cry at every show. I always say that she’s an emotionless husk because she never cries. Though she was caught crying onstage at our January show and I’ve never let her live it down. Cate Kennedy’s letter destroyed her. So maybe she does have a soul after all.
With the personal nature of your writing and social media and your careers in broadcasting and television do people feel like they know you? And that construct of who you are in their head, how close is that to real you? I do think they do. Particularly because my last book was built on a series of personal anecdotes. They were personal and honest but they were such a tiny portion of my life and personality that the figure who emerges is far more reckless and up for anything than the person I am today. I’m quite a sedate person these days. It was more a reflection of my 20’s than who I am now. I live a very quiet life. So there’s this certain expectation that I’m this booze-soaked hedonist. When the book came out I had a lot of people coming up to me saying “You’ll love this. I once had sex with a dog,” and I’m like “I don’t want to hear that!”. People think I’ll find it hilarious because I’ve written about sex before. I found that quite shocking. So there’s definitely a bit of dissonance there.
What do you watch on television? I don’t watch much television. Monday nights on ABC obviously, because I’m an ABC nerd and you just have to switch to Monday nights on ABC and leave it until Q&A comes on and you can start yelling. I watch Big Brother. I’ve been very open about that poor habit of mine for many years now. It’s my hobby and I was bereft the last few years it was off air. I get quite into it. That’s terrible, isn’t it? I’m a Gemini. I watch sophisticated political discourse and Big Brother. That’s my personality in a nutshell. Tolstoy and Who Magazine. Recently I’ve been getting into Come Dine With Me because I really like watching people make food who aren’t doing it to get famous and who aren’t professionals. That’s like my spirit animal. I feel everything inside me go quiet when I hear its theme music start.
Do you think you have a personality that would be conducive to winning Big Brother? No. People hate me too easily so I wouldn’t last at all. Years and years ago, so maybe 2006, I was trying to get my friends on the show so I would know someone on Big Brother. I really liked the idea of going on stage with Gretel and talking about my friend in the house. I was trying to strong-arm around four of my friends into doing it but they turned around and said that if they were going to do it I had to audition too. Then, and I don’t know how this happened, I got through about seven rounds and it started getting serious. I had to fill out this massive questionnaire and there was another full day at The Hilton in Melbourne where you had to do team building exercises and I thought ‘I’m never going to go on it so I can’t actually see this through’ because it would be really shitty to do that whole audition process. But it got further than I would have liked. A lot further. So Big Brother, Come Dine With Me and Monday nights on ABC.
Are you thinking about working on anything in the TV world again? Well after the second season of Laid I needed a bit of a break from doing my own stuff because your feelings always get really hurt. It’s a really hard process. Especially in television because there’s so many people between you and your work. Whereas writing books for example what you want to say is what you want to say. I sort of wrote for a lot of other people’s shows as a gun for hire. Kirsty Fisher and I have just been approached by a UK company who really liked Laid and are interested in it. So I don’t know what’s happening there and whether they’re going to remake it there or not. They wanted to look at some of our other projects so we went through some of our old stuff and came up with a few ideas which we really want to do together. So we’re both refreshed, ready and keen to work together. Our plan is to be writing something in the second half of this year.
And NBC expressed interest in Laid before that. That was so weird. They just take it and you never see it again. Everyone’s like “that’s great NBC,” but we had nothing to do with it. Also in America the pilot episode we saw, no one died in the first episode. And we thought ‘that’s weird’. The whole premise of the show is that her boyfriends die off, that’s the hook. And they said “Yeah, but in America you need the series to potentially run to 200 episodes. How many boyfriends can die?”. So with that focus on longevity I think it really lost its original steam and idea. With American television you need to add 20% more hope.
You said your feelings got hurt. Was the broadcast version of Laid vastly different to the version on the page and in your head? Oh yes. It’s hard to separate the two now especially after two seasons and now that I see the actresses when I imagine the characters. But as a TV writer you just get used to the long slow art of saying goodbye, or compromise or seeing the vision change. If I’d written Laid as a book I’d know exactly what it would like and now it looks like what it looks like. That’s a difficult and interesting question.
It’s funny because you would assume the ABC would be less encumbered by those commercial imperatives. Oh no, they’re as beholden to that as everyone else I think. Everyone wants to rate. Everyone wants a success story and they’re very cautious about that. But they were really great with us. Debbie Lee was our EP when she was still head of comedy and she was very supportive and open. No one meddled with us at all which is why we got away with a lot of gross shit on our show. No one stopped us. At that time there were so many great weird short-run comedies. Outland and Lawrence Leung and The Librarians – all these really weird six episode shows. I feel like that era of dark, low-rating short-run comedies is over.
That’s sad. I think it’s really sad too. They had so much room to breathe and it wasn’t about smashing ratings so I’m really interested to see what the next chapter of ABC comedy is, how broad the demographic is and what they’re aiming for.
Finally, you gotten the anthology of autobiographic humour-based essays out of the way. What’s next? I’ve got a second book due out at the end of this year which I have to finish. I’m scared to talk about it because I’m only halfway through and I’ve got this terrible feeling that I’ll vocalise what it’s about and my editor will hate it or I’ll just change tack completely. Know that I am working on one but god knows what it’s going to be.
Thanks for your time Marieke. Thank you.
