SS:  So there’s enough there for an entire sequel if you wanted to do it (laughing)

GT:  (laughing).  Yeah.  And that was another hard part about writing the movie, was that there was so much more to tell.  It’s just the first thirty-four years of her life that you see, and a lot of crazy stuff happened to her.

SS: How did you go through the process of deciding what to put in and what to take out, with so much material to work with?

GT:  Well, again, the thing is that in her later life, she had some real mental health problems.  She was arrested, and you know, a whole bunch of stuff happened to her that would again sort of make it seem like, if you do this, then eventually you’re just going to go nuts and go crazy, and you know, God’s going to punish you for being so “sexually free” with your body.  And it’s just her life, and things happened to her.  So part of the decision to just stop where we did was again to avoid that kind of pitfall.  And also just because there were so many stories, and where people’s lives go doesn’t follow a three-act structure, and to stuff it all in to ninety minutes or even a hundred minutes, it’s just silly.  You’d shoot yourself in the foot.  You have to just sort of choose the story that you’re telling, and the story that we decided we were telling was about Bettie Page.  It was also about how, using her as a springboard for how to talk about sexuality, and the kind of crisis that it was in where the legalities of sending stuff through the mail, even though the images you’re looking at are not in any way pornography by our standards today.  In fact, there’s no men in them at all, and just relationships to fetishism, and kind of that panicky thing that we show in the Senate trials about it contributing to juvenile delinquency, it’s all just kind of about the changing times, and how Bettie just fit perfectly as a way to talk about larger issues.  But, everything that we put in there was absolutely true, what happened to her.

SS:  Were the actual senate transcripts used to form the basis of that dialogue?

GT:  Not even “form the basis of”, we edited it, but word-for-word, there’s not a single thing in those scenes that wasn’t actually said.  The only thing that’s not completely, historically true in that whole scene is that Bettie Page actually couldn’t hear what was happening.

SS:  That seemed to be a turning point in the film, where she hears the statements about the gentleman’s son’s murder or suicide.

GT:  See, because in reality, she did find out about that, but she wasn’t hearing it as it was happening.  That’s one of the things we do in movies, the scene of her reading the newspaper or being told about it, that wouldn’t get you anywhere, you just need to know that she knows.

SS:  Certainly the way it was done added dramatic effect, and worked really well with the rest of the movie.

GT:  Yeah, I like it.

SS:  So sitting through it for the first time and just watching it from start to finish, did it turn out the way you envisioned it as you were writing, even ten years ago?

GT:  Oh, yeah, I mean I absolutely love the movie.  I’m so proud of it, I think Mary did such a beautiful job, I think Mott the DP did such an amazing job, the production line is beautiful, I think everyone really shined.  Gretchen’s performance is just perfect.  It really is, after studying the subject and envisioning the film for so long, you can’t imagine how satisfying it is to be like “Yes!  That’s exactly what we wanted to do, here it is, at last!

SS:  That’s pretty amazing, to get exactly what you wanted...

GT:  Yeah, I know, that’s rare! (laughing)  That happened to me also with American Psycho.  As a writer, I’m lucky enough to collaborate with a director who’s also my good friend, so I get to be a part of the whole process, and you know, really think things through, every step of the process, so that’s a big part of it, that I partner with Mary.

SS:  Are the two of you working on anything new together?

GT:  No, she’s working on...not together.  She’s moved to New York and I’ve moved to Los Angeles since we wrote Bettie Page.  She’s working on something that she needed to collaborate with someone else who was there at the time, about the birth of punk rock in the 70’s.  She’s working on that with someone who was her best friend when she was there working at Punk Magazine, and that whole world which I know nothing about.  I’m working on any number of things, including trying to raise money for a sequel to Go Fish.  It’s going to be called Go Fuck Yourself (laughing), and it’s going to be all of the characters ten years later, breaking up and being horrible to each other.

SS:  That does sound like the L.A. scene sometimes. (laughing)

GT:  (laughing) Well that would be, to me anyway, any set of lesbians you get ten years of their lives , not that they’re all horrible and mean people, but that people would have broken up and reconfigured, and also people will have kids, and to us, to Rose [Troche] and I, it’s a new thinking or rethinking of where we are now in terms of lesbian representation as opposed to where we were when we made Go Fish, and our biggest objective was to make us look like normal, well-adjusted  people who just live dumb, silly, mundane lives just like everyone else.  But you know, good, like happy.  So now it’s ten years later, wait, twelve years later, we can actually kind of look like flawed people, and we can afford to now, so that’s kind of where our thinking comes from, of course being funny about it, and making it all hilarious.

SS:  So is that script already done?

GT:  It’s in the works.  I’m off to Paris to meet her [Rose Troche] in a few weeks to write it, and then we just need to raise the money, so maybe someone will read that on l-word.com and get in touch with me and say “I want to be a backer” of the sequel to Go Fish.

SS:  Is there anything else in the pipeline that you want us to know about?

GT:  I also wrote this action movie that came out in January called BloodRayne that didn’t do very well at all, but not because of my script.  So, I’m getting a lot of offers and having a lot of conversations about doing other big-budget, female-driven action movies, so we shall see.  That may be something that I’ll be able to announce officially soon.

SS:  Now, the obligatory L Word questions.  Do you have a particularly favorite scene or story from the work that you did on The L Word?

GT:  I think that my favorite episode that I wrote is the episode from Season 1 that’s called “Looking Back” that Rose directed and I wrote, where they all go to the Dinah Shore weekend and they all talk about their coming out stories.  I think all the actors were really great in that episode, and it was just a really fun way to frame it, because it was at that point where everyone wanted to know for the characters, “what is the backstory here?” and making up stuff, and conferring with the team of writers to figure out “what do we think?”.  Of course, I had a different story written for Leisha (Alice), and she was like “Please, can my backstory be something that has to do with music?” and so we rewrote it to be what I think got even more hilarious to have Leisha with her boyfriend, being all punk rock, and then, you know, the hot girl comes on the stage, and she’s in love.

SS:  So how did you originally write Alice’s coming out story?

GT:  It was something about her being a cheerleader back in high school, and her and her best friend getting drunk under the bleachers at a football game, and then she kind of gets the girl to make out with her, but then the girl throws up all over her.  And then the friends joke that that’s why she’s bisexual, because the first time she kissed a girl, she was puked on.

SS:  Does Bette have a coming out story that was ever discussed?

GT:  {pause, thinking)  That’s funny,  you know, that’s because in that episode she was off first meeting that woman that she cheated with, so we never actually got to hear Bette’s coming out story.  You know, I don’t know!  I don’t know if it was addressed in season 3, but we never, it’s so funny that that never came up!  I guess she was just born a dyke and we all understand that.  (laughing)

SS:  Now, if you could go back and change something that you wrote or worked on in the first two seasons, is there anything in particular you wish you could do differently?

GT:  Hmm.  (pause, thinking)  Hmm, hmm, hmm.  That’s a hard one.  (pause)  The thing is, the way that the process works with the writing of The L Word is that you write things, and often Ilene [Chaiken] will change little things in a given episode.  Also, she would give me an episode and say “can you change this, this and this?”  So there’s not a lot of ownership per se.  There were times where I’d say “Are we really going to change that?” and then it’s like “well, okay, that’s good”, it’s just this back and forth process and things change so much, and they’re not necessarily what I would do, but I end up liking them, or I even forget that that wasn’t originally my idea, it all gets kind of cloudy.  One time, sitting in a meeting, I was like, “who re-wrote that episode?”  And Ilene was like, “I did!”, and Rose was like “No Guin, you did!”, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I did!”  There’s so much switching around that you kind of forget what exact scene or idea belongs to who. 

SS:  So if you could change one or two things, does anything leap out at you?

GT:  That’s such a hard one.  I would have made the Lisa character, you know the boy named Lisa, that was a character that I actually came up with.  I would have made him not a hippie, I always envisioned him as a sort of Goth, punk rock kid.  Not like the sensitive man, but just like, you know, a weird anarchist kid who was like “Yeah, I’m a lesbian, whatever.”.  I think that would have given him more life, because I saw the way that character ended up, and I watched an episode of I think Friends, and there’s a character where they try to get a babysitter and it turns out it’s exactly that same guy.  I would hate to think that I thought of something original, and then see it on TV.  (laughing).  Oh.  And I’m totally blanking on the character name of the carpenter that Bette has an affair with.

SS:  Candace?

GT:  Candace, right.  That’s funny, because that’s my ex-girlfriend’s name.  I would have made the Candace character a lot more butch. 

SS:  That’s one thing the show seemed to be missing until Season 3, and now we get the butch character, and she wants to be a man.

GT:  Right.  You know, I hesitate to throw the word “butch” out there in the universe because it means a lot of different things to a lot of people, and to a lot of lesbians, they think I’m saying “ugly”.  And I’m not, I’m saying “androgynous.”  And you know, all the gorgeous incarnations of androgyny.  Just because you put a tool belt and a tank top on an actress, you don’t necessarily really have the essence the way that some people do.  Not that I don’t think that Ion, the woman who played Candace, did a great job.  It’s just that once again, I had a different opinion on her character.  That’s why I need to have my own show, so that way you can be the boss of everything.  (laughing)

SS:  So when are you going to do that? (laughing)

GT:  I’m trying, I’m trying!  (laughing)

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