The One Where Cosmo Visits Friends
[from British Cosmo, 4/01]
It's a tough job but someone's got to do it. Erin Keylly snoops for you on the set of the top US sitcom.
Oh. My. God. I'm so sitting on the sofa in Central Perk. Could I be any more excited? My bottom is gracing the battered couch that's second home to Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Ross and Joey. The coffee table, the cappuccino machine, the huge coffee mugs - my surroundings are as familiar as (if not more than) the Starbucks opposite our office. Every detail is real and authentic, from the recipes chalked up on the board to the ring marks on the tables.
Filming takes place in Studio 24 of the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, Los Angeles. It's a huge, ugly building that looks like an aircraft hangar - a far cry from the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the series is set. I have the whole morning to crawl all over the Friends set, snooping around the areas the cameras can't see before filming takes place this afternoon. Being here on my own is like going through your new boyfriend's cupboards to see if he's got any deep, dark secrets. (Um, everyone does that, right?)
I wander across the set to Monica's apartment and sink into the sofa, flipping through American Cosmo, like you do. On the other side of the "hall," Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc are rehearsing and I manage to sneak a look at them. I lose all cool immediately. If I hadn't been made to turn off my mobile, I'd be texting away like a teenager in a shopping mall. And I would tell my friends that, make-up free and in a white T-shirt and gray slouchy trousers, Jennifer looks about 14 and effortlessly pretty. The stubble on Matt's chin adds years to him, but he still looks mighty fine. (How you doin'?) Both of them look tired and they don't smile as the run mechanically through their lines.
As any busybody will tell you, the first place to snoop is always the bathroom cabinet. Chandler shaves with Zir shaving gel, Monica keeps her skin soft with St. Ives Collagen body lotion and they use Mentadent P toothpaste. What's in the fridge? A surprising amount of variations on the theme of lard. An ice-cream tub as big as my hand and an industrial-sized jar of mayonnaise. Has Monica been stealing from her job in the restaurant? And how can she eat like that and stay so skinny?
The apartment is bigger and smaller than you'd expect. Bigger because there's no fourth wall so the apartment just fades out into miles of cable, lights and equipment. And smaller because there isn't an ince of spare space. Everyone always asks how Monica can afford a Manhattan apartment on her salary and the answer is simple - she lives in a shoebox.
When Matt and Jen take a break from rehearsing, I nip across the corridor into Joey's apartment. In series seven, now showing on US TV and available here on video and DVD, Rachel is Joey's flatmate. The pizza-and-socks bachelor pad smell I'd imagined is missing but everything else is still the same. I try to write "Cosmo woz 'ere" on the Magna Doodle message board on the back of Joey's kitchen door, but the crew won't let me in case it gets left there when filming behins. They are, however, happy to wup my ass at table football.
Rehearsals recommence and I decide to explore the dressing room. It's an Aladdin's cave of products, as if someone has done a supermarket sweep in the Harrod's beauty hall. Hairdresser Jonathan Hanousek reveals the secret of the girls' silky locks - Kerastase shampoos and conditioners. Ever wondered how Courteney, Jennifer, and Lisa get that airbrushed, perfect skin look? Their NARS foundation is actually airbrushed on to their faces. Make-up artist Robin Seigel has been working on Friends since the pilot episode and made up Jennifer Aniston on her wedding day. She shows me the contraption she uses - a spray attached to a huge oxygen tank that looks more like 60's drug paraphernalia than an ultra-modern make-up application technique. The indispensable items in Robin's make-up bag are Creme De La Mer face cream, and lots of Kiehl's, NARS, and Clinique productus. "I don't use a lot of colour, I'm just trying to create that natural, round-the-house look." Robin explains, unconvincingly. Can you remember the last time you slobbed around the house in spray-on foundation and perfectly lined and glossed lips? Thought not.
The wardrobe area is also like another world. All the show's costumes are held in a three-room closet with leopardskin carpeting. A space approximately one-metre square stores the clothes for men. The rest is full of clothes, bags and shoes for Rachel, Phoebe and Monica. the wardrobe mistress, Debra Maguire, won't reveal the sizes the girls wear but confirms the clothes are "tiny." I pick up a pink vest Jennifer Aniston wears. Might make a nice legwarmer for me, but that's about the only way I'll be trying on Rachel's clothes.
After lunch, filming starts. I'm in the front row of an audience of over-excited Americans. The set is swarming with about 100 people. I can't get over how many crew members it takes to make what is, at the end of the day, a fairly simple sitcom. People run around with make-up brushes, cables and cameras and, bizarrely, a small child tuckedf under their arms. Surely not all of them can be making a valuable contribution to the programme.
Rumour has it Warner Brothers makes $12 million for ever episode of Friends, which you'd think would make a stressful working environment. But this lot are hugging and high-fiving each other all over the place. In fact, the only real prima donna on the set is Joey's pet duck, which costs $1000 a day with a minder and and a trainer in tow and is given to violent tantrums. In the words of one crew member, "That duck is a psycho, man!"
Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer aren't on the set today, but Jennifer, Courteney, Lisa and Matt are present, all smiles, blown kisses as they come onstage. It's like seeing a TV screen come to life. Jennifer Aniston is a tiny, tawny, tanned person with immaculate hair. Lisa Kudrow is lean and loud in her mad swirly Phoebe clothes, her hair elaboratly twisted and coiled, and her make-up bolder and thicker than it looks on television. The only surprise is Courteney Cox. I've always thought she was attractive in a hard-edged, cold sort of way. But in the flesh, she's one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, with luminous porcelain skin the camera doesn't do justice to and hair that inspires the women on either side of me to go and get a treatment and blow-dry the next day.
Of course, while I'm going on about hair, skin and make-up, you just want to know one thing - how thin are they? They're skinny all right and, at one point, Courteney turns to one side and nearly disappears. Maybe I'd find their skinniness shocking if they were wearing something that revealed skin and bone, but from where I am, their clothes hang great.
A week before my visit the tabloids print that Courteney Cox broke down three times one day because of difficulties in her marriage. When I see her, she's reserved and quiter than the other two, admittedly, but to be louder, she'd have to tap dance on the counter in Central Perk and sing I Will Survivr. When the cameras aren't rolling, she looks comtemplative and often chats to another member of the cast or one of the producers. There's usually someone touching her, either strokign her hair or holding her hand.
If any actress is similiar to her character, it's Jennifer. Rachel began to show as Daddy's Princess and there is a trace of the stage-school diva in Jennifer, who blows kisses at the audience between takes and examines her nails while the directors are talking to her, rolling her eyes when a scene needs to be reshot. Each scene is filmed once and then, if the audience doesn't laugh loud enough, or the producers don't think it's working, a team of writers huddles together like a rugby scrum and they brainstorm until they come up with a funnier gag. More often than not, the added humour is too much for Jennifer, and her infectious giggle has crew, cast and audience in stitches. It's like watching one of your friends in the school play - hoping her her sake she doesn't crack up again and yet hoping she does, because it's so funny.
My lip reading isn't good enought to pick up what they talk about when their microphones are off, but they communicate with the kind of quasi-telepathy that only really intimate friends can manage, and are obviously sharing intimacies and in-jokes. The three women are a tight-knit group that no one else penetrates. A crew member tells me the standing joke on the set is if you see one of the Friends girls, you see them all - they travel in a pack. It's understandable -they only have each other to share in the phenomenon they have become.
Eight hours later, filming winds up. The crew say they're glad of an early finish. I look at my watch - it's 8 p.m. nad we've all been here for 12 hours. As the cast comes out to take their curtain calls, i feel sad to say goodbye - a much stronger feeling than the mild disappointment you feel when turning the TV off after a half-hour episode. Short of being given a walk-on part, I couldn't have felt more involved with the making of Friends. And I did make my mark. When The One With Joey's Award is screened, listen out for a very loud, Barbara Windsor-esque laugh at the joke about the unusually shaped cake...
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