Sorry, that subject line sounds dismissive. I think Laura Kightlinger is hilarious, don’t get me wrong – in fact, she was throwing out great lines left and right during the IFC panel – but I just didn’t really get into the episodes of “The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman” that I screened…but, y’know, it’s probably just something to do with me being really sexist. On the other hand, however, I absolutely fell in love with “The Business,” which would explain why I was so excited to ask a few questions of Kathleen Robertson on this panel.
Robertson said that the opening credit sequence of “The Business,” where the cast sings and dances, was fun but scary because “I had to actually sing! It was typical in sort of the style that we shoot which is — Phil just basically came up to me one day and said, ‘You’re going into that room and you have to sing this song,’ like in 5 minutes, and I had to learn it. But it’s great for the show. It’s clever. We create these things on sort of a spontaneous, low budget, that it’s amazing what comes out of it.”
Robertson wasn’t willing to offer up any experiences she’d personally gone through with real life Vics, Tonys, or Rufuses, but she did confirm that, while the characters might seem extreme or heightened, “they’re not. There really is a Vic; there really is a Tony.” When pressed, however, she did finally relate a disturbing Hollywood anecdote of her own. “I probably shouldn’t be saying it without thinking about it,” she began, “but I did a movie in Bulgaria, and I showed up for the first night and there was a huge party that the producers were throwing and there were about eight girls that walked in, and they were about 12, and they were — they were basically gifts to the actors. Not particularly funny, but pretty gross.” (Quizzing her about specifics proved pointless; she merely smirked and replied, “I don’t remember the movie or the actors.”)
As far as who inspires her own character, Robertson unabashedly called out the show’s producer, Brandi Ann Milbradt. “Brandi is an independent film producer,” explained Robertson, “and my character coincidentally is an independent film producer. I was kind of pulling clothes off of her back and watching the way she would move and walk and her energy, and her personality is really sort of strong and really interesting, and she has all of these sort of interesting behavioral things, and I just kind of stole them. I kind of stole from her, and I also sort of — you know, female executives and female writers and producers and directors, unfortunately there aren’t as many as we wish and we hope that there will be in the future. You sort of have to look — I mean it’s so rare that you work with a female producer or director still in this day and age. It seems crazy, but that was one of the things that sort of drew me to the character and interested me about her, because I think that the sort of plights a young woman who wants to be a producer in this industry is very sort of different than what it is if you’re a man, unfortunately, still.”
Mary Kay Place has a semi-regular role on “The Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman,” having served not only as an actor but as a director as well…but, to hear Laura Kightlinger tell it, it hasn’t been all wine and roses.
“Mary Kay directed, I think, the most difficult episode of the season,” reveals Kightlinger. “It was the last episode. We had a lot of elderly people in a bar. They wanted direction, and they were great actors, but they couldn’t always hear direction. Mary Kay had to shout a lot. There was one woman who — she was a background actor, and she needed to change her colostomy bag. Mary Kay didn’t want to make a big deal of it, but she said, ‘Listen, if all the background actors have to leave and change their bags, or what have you, then what are we stuck with, foreground actors.’ She hung on for as long as she could. She got the to the hall, and that’s where — that’s, I guess, what you call literal shit storm. That’s what I think it’s like to direct with Mary Kay. She’s like a contained shit storm. She’s fantastic. She’s energy, she’s excitement, and she’s amazing. I love her. You know what I’m saying. It was really difficult, and there’s also a woman who had an oxygen tube. I told Mary Kay — I said, ‘She’s not going to wear that. It looks like hell.’ She said, ‘You’re right. You’re right. It looks like a prop.’ She went over and said, ‘If you need a prop to breathe, then you’re not really breathing.'”
Okay, it’s very possible that virtually nothing in that story is true. But that doesn’t make it any less funny.
