LAUREN BITTNER: I’m hooked.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you need me to unhook you?
LAUREN BITTNER: Wait… I’m actually caught, this could only happen to me. All right, that was a close one.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s funny in its own right.
LAUREN BITTNER: That’s funny; I almost needed to be rescued.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, you know, you don’t see that very often. Most people have mastered sitting. Lots of people are still working on it.
LAUREN BITTNER: Lots of things people have mastered that I’m still working on; I still sort of haven’t gotten yet. But I was just thinking that about myself this morning. I’m really good, lucky, and fortunate with the big things, I have a great family, things seem to go really, really well, knock on wood, but it’s the little things that trip me up.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not sure whether I should hate you for that or not.
LAUREN BITTNER: Like getting caught… no, no, no, I’m not going to sit here and say I get screwed, because I don’t, but the little things, my friends always say, "Lauren, only you."
CHRIS NEUMER: All right, give me an example.
LAUREN BITTNER: Like right now.
CHRIS NEUMER: Give me something else that I wasn’t witnessing.
LAUREN BITTNER: All right, like for example, I’ll lose something, not specifically, but I can lose something and say, "Oh crap, I forgot my wallet at the store and I have to go back and get it." That’s annoying in itself, but the good thing is I know where the wallet is, I know it didn’t get stolen. But I’ll get in the car and I’ll go, and I’ll get a ticket, or run out of gas, or I’ll get a flat, and I’ll go to fix the flat and the gas station will be closed. It’s like one thing leads to another and the smallest thing will turn out to be the biggest, most awful catastrophe. You know what I’m saying?
CHRIS NEUMER: All right, I won’t hate you for that. I do know what you’re saying, and that’s why I decided I won’t hate you for that.
LAUREN BITTNER: So anyhow.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, that’s good times.
LAUREN BITTNER: Wait, I know you’re supposed to be interviewing me, but tell me a little bit about Paul.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t care.
LAUREN BITTNER: Tell me a little bit more about Paul. You didn’t know you were interviewing me yet, at that point, right?
CHRIS NEUMER: Sort of, sort of not. You remember my first, really, really, confusing, babbling voicemail?
LAUREN BITTNER: The voicemail where you said, "I think you’re that girl?" Yeah, I even remember where I was, I was in the West Village having lunch with my boyfriend, and we were walking back.
CHRIS NEUMER: And you thought, "Who the hell is this guy calling me, leaving the strangest message ever?"
LAUREN BITTNER: He made fun of me, because I was checking my messages. He seemed so bothered about me having messages and then I got yours, and I went, "Uh… huh?" I wasn’t expecting any sort of recognition from this movie, or anything like that.
CHRIS NEUMER: I hated the movie. I hated, hated, hated the movie from, I figured it out, the third frame of the film onward. It opened with either white or clouds, I can’t remember which, the white of clouds.
LAUREN BITTNER: (Gasp) Oh my god, no comment, I’m in the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, Tara’s given me all the information about when you guys saw it and what you thought of it and all of that previously, so. But yeah, I had seen the movie and I was like, "Oh my god that was so bad." It would have been bad in 1996, and I kept wondering, why aren’t they using cell phones? Why do they keep going to pay phones? And my brother had a huge problem with the fact, when you and your mom went to eat with them, because who paid the bill? He was so angry, he was like, "They just left? They left the two women to pay the bill?" I was like, "That, that was your problem? What about the huge, gaping sinkhole of a plot they’ve got going?" He was like, no.
LAUREN BITTNER: One of my friends called me a couple weeks ago and said, "Read IMDB, go to IMDB and there’s The Thing about my Folks." And they were like, whatever happened to the baseball hottie girl?
CHRIS NEUMER: Did they say hottie?
LAUREN BITTNER: Hottie, cutie, something like that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did your characters have names?
LAUREN BITTNER: They did, they were supposed to. Then when I finally saw the final billing it was like, "small town cutie," which was fine. But Paul and I talked about it on set and he decided my name would be Trish.
CHRIS NEUMER: Trish?
LAUREN BITTNER: Well, I picked Trish because my mom’s name is Patricia. We were thinking and I was just like, "Trish." And he was like, "Trish? I like Trish." I said, "Yeah, I like that, because my mom’s name is Patricia, kind of an ode to my mom for this movie, make my name Trish."
CHRIS NEUMER: Ok.
LAUREN BITTNER: But that didn’t happen, apparently.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is your mom a big baseball hottie, or small town cutie?
LAUREN BITTNER: Yes, she is actually, and I’m sticking to that.
CHRIS NEUMER: All right, well good for her.
LAUREN BITTNER: What if I said no? What kind of daughter would I be?
CHRIS NEUMER: Honest?
LAUREN BITTNER: No, no, she is, she’s adorable. She’s cute, and she’s a big baseball fan.
CHRIS NEUMER: Okay, good.
LAUREN BITTNER: She is a baseball hottie. She’s a crazy Met fan, which I used to be, but I’m not anymore.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t know what you asked me originally about Paul, but I hated the movie.
LAUREN BITTNER: How did you get through an interview hating a movie that he wrote?
CHRIS NEUMER: You don’t talk about it.
LAUREN BITTNER: Right.
CHRIS NEUMER: And he asks me what I think about it and I say, "I wasn’t the biggest fan, but —
LAUREN BITTNER: You said that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. I like Paul though, I like him.
LAUREN BITTNER: And you support him.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. The article was more about him and the idea. It’s like, forget about focusing on the crap that is the movie, focus on stuff that he did before the movie. So we talked about writing the script, we talked about that. Actually he liked the interview so much that he called the PR guy that had set it up for me and specifically said, "PR guy, tell Chris out of the whole tour, he’s the only guy I remember doing the interview for."
LAUREN BITTNER: Awe, that’s sweet.
CHRIS NEUMER: Actually we were smoking cigars — and now this is going to make me look good — he was smoking cigars and he was like, "If you print this, I’ll kill you," and I was like, "Ok." And then he asked me if I wanted a cigar and I said, "No, I’m like a cop on the job, I can’t smoke." And he said, "Well, if you do a good job I’ll give you a cigar." So he gave me a cigar and I felt like, "Nice kick ass interview." I went home, started smoking it, got so sick and started puking, it was the ugliest —
LAUREN BITTNER: So what if I print that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, when you get your magazine going. I’ll be the first to talk about all my many, many weird shortcomings, and not being able to smoke is, I guess, one of them. I didn’t just throw up; I threw up like three times! It made me realize that I am never going to do meth.
LAUREN BITTNER: You’re never going to do meth?
CHRIS NEUMER: So I had to cross that off my to-do list.
LAUREN BITTNER: Well you know some things you just might not be able to handle.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, and this is one of them. I am a lightweight extraordinaire.
LAUREN BITTNER: Do you smoke cigarettes?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, that’s something I’ve actually never tried.
LAUREN BITTNER: Well that’s good.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s something that I’m worried about if I tried I would be like an eight-pack a day smoker.
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, well I think that’s good, I’ve never been a smoker ever.
CHRIS NEUMER: I just used to do heroin for a while. It was the track marks; they’re just starting to go away a little bit.
LAUREN BITTNER: Where can you go from there?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, it’s not so much where you go from there, as where you go to get the heroin. Yeah, so that was Paul. He was good, he was fun, he was nice, and his movie was terrible. But at the time, I had shifted over, probably to frame 12, to think about other things and how I could make something out of the experience. So I started thinking about the upcoming actresses, rising actresses thing, and I thought, well who do I know that’s had a small part in a motion picture? How about that girl with the pants? Then I called. Seriously, trying to get a hold of you, trying to figure out who you were, I called casting agents. They were like, I think it might be this one, but it also might be that one. That’s why the message was so confused, because I talked to the people who cast the film—
LAUREN BITTNER: Georgian Walken, Christopher Walken’s wife.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah? Huh. But I spoke to them, I can’t even remember which one, and they didn’t know! They were like, can you describe her? I said, she was wearing pants with holes in them!
LAUREN BITTNER: That’s funny, because I feel like I know everyone in New York really well now. But the movie, it was very strange, some of the casting directors were like, "I saw your movie," like it was my movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, and I didn’t even realize you were in another scene, other than that one.
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, it was pretty substantial.
CHRIS NEUMER: So your hair was up in the baseball cap?
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, totally. It was not only up but also pulled back; small town bad hairstyle and big earrings. Then in the second one, I had big, long blonde hair.
CHRIS NEUMER: You had big, long blonde hair? Wait, you had blonde hair in the movie?
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, caramely blonde.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wow, you’re blowing me away here.
LAUREN BITTNER: Why?
CHRIS NEUMER: Because I can’t remember.
LAUREN BITTNER: Really? We could go online and look at the trailer.
CHRIS NEUMER: You’re in that a lot?
LAUREN BITTNER: Yes, not a lot, but I’m in it.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’ll have to check that out.
LAUREN BITTNER: I’ve been on all the talk shows; I just haven’t had to show up for any of them. I’m in all the clips, I was on Letterman. My boyfriend and I were watching Letterman one night and Paul Reiser was on, my boyfriend was like, "Lauren! Paul is on!" So I said, leave it on, we’ll see what he says about the film. He started to talk, and then Letterman said, "Let’s show clips." And I looked at my boyfriend and I said, "Wouldn’t it be great if out of all the clips they show the ones with me in them?" Then all of a sudden, I see myself bounce onto the screen, and bend over. And I was thinking, "Please don’t let Letterman say anything about my ass, please!"
CHRIS NEUMER: Did he say anything about your ass?
LAUREN BITTNER: No, thank god!
CHRIS NEUMER: You know, I was at a café, and I don’t know why your ass would make me think of this - well, actually I do know — I was at the corner of Beverly and Robertson. There were five quintessential Beverly Hills girls sitting next to me talking about a friend of theirs who had recently broken her foot.
LAUREN BITTNER: Were you at a Starbucks?
CHRIS NEUMER: Coffee Bean, just across the street.
LAUREN BITTNER: Ok.
CHRIS NEUMER: And a friend of theirs had just broken her foot prior to getting married, because she was standing on a toilet and had slipped off while looking at her ass in the mirror.
LAUREN BITTNER: (Laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: I heard this, and they just kept talking about it, and apparently she’s getting married this weekend, and I was thinking, wow that’s amazing. So Letterman didn’t make any comments about you or your ass?
LAUREN BITTNER: No. That’s an amazing story.
CHRIS NEUMER: I had my laptop and I was writing and it got to the point where I just started typing these quotes that they were saying. It turned out they were making up a song that rhymed with —
LAUREN BITTNER: Were they in high school?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, good lord, we’re talking 30, 33-year olds.
LAUREN BITTNER: Awe, see now that story just went from funny to sad.
CHRIS NEUMER: But I’ll keep going, and it’s going to get really funny again. But it was her rehearsal dinner, I guess, yesterday, maybe.
LAUREN BITTNER: So the girl getting married was there?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, they were talking about her.
LAUREN BITTNER: Oh, I see.
CHRIS NEUMER: Because she was in the hospital because she’d broken her foot while looking —
LAUREN BITTNER: (Laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: See? It’s funny again! They were making up a song.
LAUREN BITTNER: Just checking out the cellulite, maybe. See how it was doing. She was applying that cream for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the eight weeks were up and she wanted to know.
CHRIS NEUMER: She wanted to know. Apparently she put it on her feet as well. So they were making up words to the Grease song, "Tell Me More."
LAUREN BITTNER: Oh, "Summer Nights," yeah. "Tell me more, tell me more…"
CHRIS NEUMER: Like does he have a car, yeah, that one. So they were making up all the words to go with the girl. It was awesome, it was great live theater. I would’ve paid money to sit there. I actually ended up being 15 minutes late over at New Line because I just wanted to hear more. So they were trying to figure out themes to the different verses, and one of them was like, "What about that time she thought she had health insurance for two Years and didn’t?" And another one said, "What about that summer she decided to wear only going to wear white?" And they kept on going, and they were like, "What about that time —
LAUREN BITTNER: It sounds like they were going to perform it.
CHRIS NEUMER: They were, they were going to perform it at the rehearsal dinner.
LAUREN BITTNER: Oh, I get it. That’s funny.
CHRIS NEUMER: It was hysterical. If you are really interested, I was typing it all up and I was going to send it to all of my friends, I’ll just put you on the list and you can see more. It was just so fantastic. So, yes, that was Paul Reiser, your ass got me all flustered and I started thinking about other things, and that can segue nicely into this, which is: as a young, attractive actress, is there a balance between sex appeal and talent?
LAUREN BITTNER: Well, I don’t know, it’s weird. First, it’s so weird that you’re saying that about me, because my personality is very self-deprecating.
CHRIS NEUMER: Even though your character was "baseball hottie?"
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, but it’s funny, because actually the first name was "babe #1." So "baseball hottie" is better than "babe #1", but the thing is, it’s weird, because I honestly don’t get it. I don’t, I don’t see myself as that at all. And I think a lot of people don’t know what to do with me. It’s difficult because I am sort of quirky. Like, you see me and you’re like, "Oh," and then I start talking and it becomes, "Oh, she’s that."
CHRIS NEUMER: What is people’s first impression of you?
LAUREN BITTNER: I think a lot of times people think that I can pull of the hot thing. Then I start talking. Sometimes it’s the reverse, "She’s this young, sweet, teenager type of thing," and then I start talking and they’re like, "No, she’s twenty-something and mature." No, but I think it’s hard, too, because I kind of have this funny thing about me. I think that’s sometimes why I play sexy, because sexy and attractive is funny, and I think that people that are attractive and aren’t afraid to look ugly sometimes…
CHRIS NEUMER: And get Oscars?
LAUREN BITTNER: I just think they’re more attractive to a lot of people, because pretty girls are scared to look ugly and that’s why they’re never funny. I think it’s hard with me, I think we’re still trying to figure out a way. I’m not anxious.
CHRIS NEUMER: When you say we, you mean?
LAUREN BITTNER: I mean me and the people who help me.
CHRIS NEUMER: Your handlers?
LAUREN BITTNER: Myself and those who I go to for career advice and stuff like that. My agent who is wonderful, my friends, people who I ask. I certainly haven’t done enough that I have to depart from sexy things. But I would like to, that’s what I’m getting at.
CHRIS NEUMER: True, but — get away from sexy or baseball hottie?
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, I don’t think I’m too anxious to bend over anymore, and have my ass be the focal point. (Laughs) plus I don’t like my ass! That was really hard for me, you have to understand, I worried for a really long time about how my butt was going to look, and I don’t want to worry about things like that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Were you looking at dailies?
LAUREN BITTNER: No. I didn’t see any. What’s really funny is that I had a really big pimple the day it was shot. I swear, my skin’s clear for months and months and months, and then the day we shot it I had this really annoying zit.
CHRIS NEUMER: On your butt?
LAUREN BITTNER: No, on my face, not my butt!
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, I didn’t know! You’re talking about your ass, and then you’re talking about having a huge zit.
LAUREN BITTNER: That’s disgusting! Ewe! But you’re right, we were talking about that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Your filters, or rather your lack thereof have been shocking; we’ve had at least seven pull quotes so far. But I just wanted to make sure.
LAUREN BITTNER: Yeah, it was on my face. I found myself worrying, because this was my first job really, first movie. So I was worried about that, and I don’t want to worry about stuff like that. I want to get to a place where the role is meaty enough, and I care more about if I did the work well. But then when I saw it I was pleasantly surprised, because I felt like I actually got a chance to sort of create a little bit of a character, even though it was baseball hottie, or whatever.
