Episode Report Card 4 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT "Everybody knows about Television Without Pity."
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 13 | Aired on 08.29.2005
That must make it tricky too. Do you ever have situations where you want to get a character for a specific episode but that actor isn't available? Yeah, that happens a lot. In fact, um, you know, like in my episode, "Rainbow of Her Reasons," there was a scene…that last scene that -- in fact, I think you knew it. Somebody knew it. You called her…what did you call her? You called Brett [Paesel] something, you called her "not Bettina." Oh, "Bet-two-na." Yeah, how did you know that? I think there was something on the board where someone said Kathy Bates was sick… Yeah, that happens. That woman, Brett, is a friend of mine, she's like, somebody who's, like, four years ago, when the producers were saying, like, "Nobody's gonna dance around with her shirt off." [laughs] I have a friend, Brett, she loves to take her shirt off. She's always taking her shirt off at parties. She's a great actress, too, she's produced her own show, she's talented and funny, so I knew that she would do that. But when we were shooting that, Kathy was sick, and so, yeah, that was that scene where it was supposed to be Kathy. Kathy was supposed to tell Ruth that Sarah had left. Yeah, that happens all the time. You know, we'll have a scene where somebody's supposed to be there or sign up that they're supposed to be there and they can't make it, we have to change. Yeah, Patty Clarkson is rarely available. Jeremy Sisto's schedule often made us have to change, when he couldn't be used. Only guest stars, though. Regular actors have to be there all the time. Right. So, I have to ask kind of a standard, obligatory, boring cliché question: What do you want your funeral to be like? Oh, that's not boring or cliché at all. I figured you'd get asked that all the time. I really don't. Really? Yeah. I mean, you know, the show has affected me a lot. I now really want what Nate had. That is a real thing you can do. A guy here named Tyler Cassity, he has a funeral home and a mortuary and a cemetery called Hollywood Forever. He's a really amazing guy who also comes from a funeral family. He's the gay brother to the straight brother. He, like, immediately felt like someone had, like, known about his life and like told people and they created Six Feet Under about him. Oh. [laughs] But he's this kind of like, funeral visionary, this really amazing guy, and he told us about these -- he is doing that in Northern California. He has pieces of land and he's teaming up with preservationists, people who are trying to get the land so they can -- so you can go and spend time with somebody who's died but not be in a cemetery. And they've got these, um, what are they called? They're like these little kind of iPods, they operate like GPSes. You stand over the spot where your loved one is buried and a little sort of picture of them comes up and you can walk through this place that just looks like a nature preserve. And you have a bunch of people buried there but you can't tell. I like that. I want to go there.