Picking up from yesterday –
Then, as far as how we chose who I’d play – as most people would think of me probably as more for Janet than Elenor – basically, we loved the girl who played Janet. And we loved having her perform with us.
And she IS Janet through and through. So, since she’s MORE of a Janet than me, and I would never have wanted to put in ALL that work and ALL those years to not perform at all in my own presentation… Eleanor it was!
And I was so happy to play Eleanor. A great part, and something I was excited to do!
And I just realized we never talked about HOW we landed on The Good Place to begin with!
There’s no huge wild story to it.
Basically, Ben and I had a reeeeeally tough time landing on source material. Originally I was thinking, “oh we have the whole entire summer. We’ll have more than enough time. We’ll figure this out pretty quickly, and maybe we’ll even get a lot of writing done.”
But we took basically all the months we had.
I was adamant that I wasn’t going to musicalize a show that had the main hero’s journey be for a white, straight, able-bodied man.
I don’t write shows on spec where the main character isn’t a woman, and the cast isn’t at least half or more women. If somebody wants me to write about some boy, if they’ve got money, I’ll probably do it!
But when I spend my own time dreaming? I don’t want to write stories for the demo we’ve seen SO much of, and the demo who is so much of the writers in the industry. Let them take care of that.
But. Ben is a straight white guy. So, he wasn’t thrilled about that.
To not completely shut down his ideas, I spent some time watching things he liked that had straight white male protagonists.
And then we also had trouble matching on tones. He suggested a number of sort of spooky things, kind of horror film-type things. But I really thought a comedy would be best. (He did have me watch Stepford Wives, which was supposed to be a mix of spooky with a funny twist.)
And this is where we’ll finish out tomorrow!