Laura Kightlinger with Jack Black
Laura Kightlinger Talks Minor Accomplishments
“It really wasn’t supposed to be an inside Hollywood show,” she said. “It was really more about this one woman’s struggle just to find any work in show business. Or not show business, in the writing aspect of it. She went to film school and had sort of an unrealistic view of what her future should be. If anything, it’s an anti-Entourage because it’s about how 90% of the people in LA that are remotely involved with the business live and that is that they’re not making it.”
Begun at Comedy Central, Kightlinger emphasized the Hollywood element when IFC expressed interest. “I think it was really just more the central character. At one point, it was that she was going to write a book and just wound up in LA because that’s where she grew up, and all this show business stuff sort of came at her as a way to make money. Like anything she wanted to do was like, ‘Well, can you turn it into a screenplay? Can you turn it into a sitcom?’ That people wouldn’t buy a book out here unless there was a way to make more money off of it in more obvious venues.”
IFC allows as much profanity as HBO. Even Kightlinger calls herself a sailor, but she’s careful with it on the show. “I think of it as language and I don’t get bent out of shape if I hear something. Sometimes some of the words are just great. You don’t want to make them any cleaner but yeah, I also think it’s kind of a cheat. It’s like too much helping along a joke if you’re saying ‘f*ckin’ this, f*ckin’ that.’ If we start out saying it and getting really casual and sloppy, then we try to cut back on it or take out- - we don’t use the version that’s really filthy because then it becomes something that you’re just saying for the sake of being naughty, for the sake of frightening people. I don’t like things that are out there just for whatever shock value they might have. I’d rather have it just be certain situations where it seems necessary.”
As a working writer herself, Kightlinger can relate to a story of writer’s block. Turning blockage into a creative script requires a more unique talent. “I guess you kind of focus on all the things around it, like all the things you do in real life to procrastinate or just to do anything that you really don’t have- - like for example, if I sit down to write, I’ll pull up a blank document, then I’ll look at e-mails that I haven’t answered in a week and a half. Then I’ll start drafting some nasty reply to the nasty e-mail sent to me because I haven’t replied. And then I’ll spend the day doing that. Then I’ll save the e-mails as a draft because I decide that it’s too nasty to send. Then I wind up going back to the document and in order to save it, I have to come up with a title. So then I’ll think of a title and then coming up with a title is half of it to me. Then I’ll pat myself on the back for a job well done and go back to bed.”
Success has not improved her habits though. “I still do everything at the absolutely last second, like I’m studying for exams.”
In the TV world, that means banking a few episodes before going to air. “I wrote it with my friend David Punch and Jeremy Kramer. They’re the funniest people I know, but it was difficult because it was just us. We did get a lot of scripts in advance. We kept saying, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to this later.’ So then the night before we’d forget or move on and go, ‘Oh shit, we have to rewrite this whole thing tonight’ or there are certain sections where while we were shooting we thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t very funny.’ Then we’d have to rewrite it on set.”
The Minor Acomplishments of Jackie Woodman airs Fridays and Sundays at 11 on IFC.
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