This is one of my favorites and of course I wrote this... This is important to me, so...
"How To Do Comedy (According To Diane Monroe)"
Starring: Diane Monroe, Adam Conover, Grant O'Brien, Ally Beardsley, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Katie Marovitch
INT. COLLEGEHUMOR STUDIO - DAY
A chalkboard behind them reads: "COMEDY SEMINAR - WITH SPECIAL GUEST: DIANE MONROE (EMMY WINNER, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE)".
Diane is standing at a podium. She is wearing a perfectly tailored, incredibly severe black blazer. She looks like she is about to audit a tax return. The CH cast (Adam, Grant, Ally, Brennan, Katie) are sitting in folding chairs, taking frantic notes.
DIANE: Thank you for inviting me. I was told I needed to teach a masterclass on my "comedic technique." I don't really have a technique. I just look at the world with a profound sense of dread and articulate it. But for the sake of this segment, I have broken my process down into four simple steps.
GRANT: Oh boy. Okay. I’m ready.
DIANE: Step one. Don’t.
KATIE: Don’t... do what?
DIANE: Don't do comedy. Be anti-humor. If your audience expects a laugh out of you, your job is to torture them on stage. Comedy is a hostage situation, and you are the hostage-taker. You do not give them what they want. You give them silence. You give them a blank stare. You make them sit in the discomfort of their own existence until they laugh just to break the tension. That is power.
ADAM: That sounds less like comedy and more like a war crime.
DIANE: It’s profound art, Adam. Step two. Take a historical event. Norm Macdonald did the O.J. Simpson trial. It was brilliant, it was subversive. We’re gonna do 9/11.
BRENNAN: I’m sorry—what?
DIANE: Nine-eleven. We're going to do a tight five on September 11th.
ALLY: Diane, you can't, you absolutely cannot do a 9/11 bit.
DIANE: We are going to do it so that they will never forget it. We are going to mine the darkest day in modern American history for a solid chuckle. Because if you can make them laugh at the fall of the towers, you can make them laugh at anything.
GRANT: Diane, the FBI is going to show up.
DIANE: The FBI doesn't have a sense of humor. That's their problem. Tell that to Lenny Bruce. Moving on. Step three. Act dumb.
KATIE: Oh, okay, playing dumb. That’s a classi—
DIANE: No. Not playing. Be dumb. But also be smart. I am smarter than everyone in this room, and that is a statistical objective fact. But you need to underestimate the audience with your dumb-smartness. You need to make them think you are a simple, naive woman who just stumbled onto the stage, and then you hit them with a flawless deconstruction of late-stage capitalism. It’s like wearing a wolf’s clothing in a sheep suit.
ADAM: I think it’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing—
DIANE: Don't correct me, Adam, I have an Emmy. Step four. Be literal. Take things literally. If someone uses a metaphor, you manifest it into reality. For example. Someone says, "The classroom was a zoo." You don't just nod. You make the camera pan to a literal zoo inside a classroom.
The camera abruptly cuts to a GREEN SCREEN FOOTAGE of a lion sitting at a school desk, a monkey swinging from a chalkboard, and a penguin wearing a backpack.
DIANE (V.O.): There. Animals in a classroom. The audience is confused. They are terrified. They are thinking, "How did they get a hippo in a freshmen homeroom?" And that, my friends, is the setup.
Diane steps out from behind the podium. The camera pushes in slowly on her face. The studio lights dim slightly. The tone completely shifts from sketch-comedy to deadpan, cinematic thriller.
DIANE: I have a friend. Let's call him... Gary. Gary works at a dive bar. But it’s not a normal dive bar. It’s an aquarium dive bar. It’s underwater. The patrons are fish, marine life, the occasional mollusk.
The cast is completely still. Grant is leaning forward. Brennan has his hand over his mouth.
DIANE: So, Gary is tending the bar, wiping down the counter with a rag. And he notices a group of hammerhead sharks at a corner booth. They’re drinking. They’re loud. But something is off. They seem uneasy.
A beat.
DIANE: They are flopping on the land. Because they are sharks. And they are out of water. And they are dying. It is a horrific scene. Gary looks down, and one of the hammerhead sharks is gasping on the sticky linoleum floor of this underwater dive bar.
Diane pauses. Her face is completely blank. She stares directly into the camera lens.
DIANE: Gary leans down. He looks the shark right in its dead, rolling eyes. And Gary says, "Are you okay?"
Long, agonizing silence. The tension in the room is palpable. Katie looks like she's about to cry.
DIANE: And the shark on the floor looks up at Gary. And the shark responds...
Diane leans in an inch closer to the mic.
DIANE: "No... he's just hammered... And that happened on September 11, 2001... Where a second tragedy struck."
BRENNAN (Whispering): He's just hammered. Because he's a hammerhead.
KATIE (Whispering): Did she really add 9/11 into this?
ALLY: They were flopping on the land, Diane! They were dying!
DIANE: And that is how you do comedy. Class dismissed.
Help why am I now having my fame dr take place within Blue Lock 💀 (Now I have to make sure everything I scripted fits in within the time line and maybe add in more stuff too...)
The Man Who Sold Me Hollywood By The Grimm Brothers
by Dianne Jeane Monström
I am going to tell you a story that I have only ever told three people: my therapist, my lawyer, and against my better judgment, and my children. Tonight, I am telling you.
This is a story about a con man. A very, very good con man. And the nineteen-year-old idiot who fell for it.
That idiot was me.
Part One: The Setup
It was 1999. I was eighteen years old. I had just done a stage play at NYU out of pure boredom. I wasn't a drama major, I was a journalism major and somehow, someone in the audience had taken notice. Not an agent. Not a manager. A man named Gerald who said he was a "talent liaison" for something called Pinnacle Artists Management.
Pinnacle Artists Management did not exist, I did not know of it. Gerald had an office. A real office. On the sixth floor of a building near Times Square that smelled like carpet cleaner and ambition. He had a desk with papers on it. He had a phone that rang. He had a framed poster of Good Will Hunting on the wall, which, in retrospect, should have been my first red flag. No legitimate talent agency decorates with a Good Will Hunting poster. It's too on the nose. It's like a doctor hanging a poster of Grey's Anatomy in their waiting room.
But I was nineteen. I was from the Upper West Side. I had never been to Los Angeles. I had never been on a film set. The most famous person I had ever met was my father's friend, a Swedish cinematographer who once told me I had "good bone structure." I thought that was a compliment. It is not a compliment. It is a description of a skull. Gerald told me he had been "tracking my career" since my stage performance. He said I had "an unmistakable screen presence." He said he had "projects in mind."
I asked what projects. He said he couldn't tell me yet. "Confidentiality." I asked who else he represented. He said he couldn't tell me that either. "Privacy." I asked how much his commission was. He said we'd "figure that out later." I signed with him that day. I signed a contract that I did not read. I did not read it because I was nineteen and because Gerald had a way of speaking that made everything sound both urgent and casual, like he was doing you a favor just by existing in your vicinity.
Part Two: The Headshots
Gerald's first order of business was headshots. He gave me the name of a photographer—another "Pinnacle affiliate" and sent me to a studio in Midtown. The photographer was a woman named Doreen who took approximately four hundred photographs of me in front of a grey backdrop and charged Gerald a fee that Gerald then told me I owed him for. The headshots, in hindsight, were fine. Generic. The kind of headshot that says "I am a young woman who owns exactly one blazer." But Gerald treated them like they were the Mona Lisa. He pinned them to a corkboard in his office and stood back, hands on hips, like an art director surveying a campaign. "These are going to get you in the room," he said. "What room?" I asked. "The room." I did not ask again.
Part Three: The Roles
Over the next six months, Gerald called me with updates. Exciting updates. Updates that, had I been even marginally less naive, would have set off every alarm bell in a five-mile radius.
First, he told me I was "in consideration" for a lead in a new DreamWorks project. He couldn't tell me the title. He couldn't tell me the director. He could tell me that the script was "being rewritten" and that I was "on the shortlist." I was not on any shortlist. There was no shortlist. There was no project.
Second, he told me I had "caught the eye" of a producer at Miramax who was looking for a "fresh face" for an ensemble piece. He said the producer had seen my headshot and said, "Who is she?" No one said this. No one saw my headshot. My headshot was pinned to a corkboard in a fake office in Times Square. Third and this is the one that still makes me want to crawl into a hole—he told me I had been cast in an independent film called Yellow Light. It was a small role, he said, but it was a "foot in the door." The director was a man named David. The shoot was in two weeks, in Los Angeles.
Part Four: The Impersonators
Here is where the story enters the realm of the absurd. I did not go to Los Angeles for Yellow Light. Gerald called me the day before I was supposed to fly out and said the shoot had been "pushed" due to "scheduling conflicts." He said not to worry. He said he had something else for me, that's something "even better." He asked me to come to his office to meet a director.
I went. Sitting in Gerald's office, in a chair across from the corkboard with my blazer headshot, was a man who looked exactly like James Franco. Exactly like James Franco. The jaw. The eyes. The slight look of perpetual confusion, as if he had just been asked a question in a language he didn't speak. "This is Brian," Gerald said. "Hi," I said. "Hey," replied Not James Franco. Gerald left the room. Not James Franco and I sat in silence for approximately thirty seconds. Then he said: "So. Gerald tells me you're talented." "I don't know if that's true." "He tells me a lot of things." Another silence. "Are you... James Franco?" I asked. Not James Franco smiled. "No." "Okay," I said. "Okay," he said.
What I did not know then—what I would not know for years is that "Brian" was a professional James Franco impersonator. Gerald had hired him. Gerald had hired multiple impersonators over the course of his scam. There was a Not Matt Damon. A Not Ben Affleck. A Not Gwyneth Paltrow, who I never met but whose existence I discovered later during the investigation. Gerald's operation was, in essence, a rotating cast of lookalikes who would sit in his office and pretend to be Hollywood figures, creating a veneer of legitimacy so thin you could see through it if you just... looked between the broken shards but I didn't look. I sat in that room with Not James Franco, and I talked about my "craft," and I nodded when he said I had "real potential," and I left feeling like I had taken a step forward. I had taken a step into a hole.
Part Five: The Actual James Franco
Here is the part of the story that makes it truly deranged: one year later, in 2000, I was actually cast in a real movie, a real movie with real contracts and real directors and real everything with the actual James Franco. Whatever It Takes. A teen comedy. A very silly teen comedy. I played Maggie Carter. James Franco played Chris Campbell. He was lovely. He was professional. He was not the man I had met in Gerald's office. But here's the thing: when I met the actual James Franco on set, I didn't immediately realize he wasn't the same person.
Let me repeat that. I did not immediately realize that the actual James Franco was not the same person as the fake James Franco I had met in a fake office in Times Square. Why? Because they looked identical. Because my brain had already filed "James Franco" under "people I have met in a professional context" and when I encountered him again, it simply... didn't question it. It assumed: oh, this is that guy. From that thing.
It wasn't until halfway through the shoot―HALFWAY that I turned to James Franco on set and said, "Hey, did you used to go by Brian?"
And he looked at me like I had asked him if the moon was made of cheese.
"What?"
"Brian. From New York. The Pinnacle thing."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
And then it clicked. And I felt a wave of humiliation so intense that I genuinely considered walking into traffic. I laughed it off. I said, "Never mind. Weird joke." And I went back to my trailer and sat on the bed and stared at the wall for twenty minutes.
Part Six: The Hack
Oh, and the money thing. I almost forgot the money thing. During the six months I was with Gerald, he periodically sent me messages, "updates" about "payments processing" and "upcoming deposits" from "projects." These messages were vague but reassuring. "The Miramax check is being held up in accounting." "The DreamWorks wire is pending." "You should see the funds clear by next week."
What was actually happening: Gerald had somehow obtained access to my bank account information, probably through the "paperwork" I had filled out when I signed his fake contract and was using it as part of a larger financial scheme. I didn't lose my life savings, because at nineteen I didn't have life savings. But my checking account, a modest account my parents had set up for me with a few thousand dollars in it was drained. Zeroed out. Every dime.
When I noticed, I called Gerald. His number was disconnected. I went to his office. The office was empty. The corkboard was gone. The Good Will Hunting poster was gone. It was as if Gerald had never existed. Because he hadn't. Not really. "Gerald" was a name. A desk. A poster. A con.
Part Seven: The Rabbit Hole
I reported the theft to the police. They took a report. Nothing happened. I told my parents. My father, the Marxist film critic, was surprisingly calm about it. My mother, the archaeologist, said, "Sediment." I did not understand what she meant. I still don't, but it felt profound at the time. I moved on. I got a real agent. I did Loser. I did Legally Blonde. Life continued.
But then, years later. I got a call from a journalist named Rachel who was investigating a string of talent scams in New York who I was classmates with in NYU. She had found Gerald's name in a database of fraudulent businesses. She had connected him to at least a dozen other victims. Young actors. Aspiring models. People who had been lured in by the office, the headshots, the impersonators, the phantom roles. Gerald—or whatever his real name was had been running variations of this scam since the early nineties. He was never caught. He simply moved on. New city. New name. New poster.
Rachel asked me if I wanted to go on the record. I said no. I was too embarrassed. I was building a career. I didn't want to be "the actress who got scammed by a fake James Franco." I regret that. I regret it because silence protects scammers. Silence makes other victims feel like they're the only ones. Silence is the currency of con men. So now I'm talking... To my kids and the readers.
Part Eight: The Cautionary Tale
I am telling this story tonight because I was sitting in the living room with Ben and the kids, and Jean our nine-year-old, our aspiring actress asked me what it was like when I first started acting. And instead of giving her the polished, press-tour answer, I told her the truth. All of it. The office. The headshots. The impersonator. The actual James Franco. The drained bank account. The Good Will Hunting poster. And Ben... My husband, my life partner, my biggest supporter laughed. The laugh he does when something is so absurd that his body cannot physically contain the humor. The laugh where he throws his head back and slaps his knee and makes a sound like a seal that has been startled.
"A fake James Franco?" he said. "Diane. A fake James Franco?"
"Yes, Ben."
"In a fake office?"
"With a Good Will Hunting poster?"
"Yes."
"YES."
He laughed for approximately four minutes. Our children stared at him. I stared at him. The dogs stared at him. Even Grogu, who is not known for his observational skills, seemed concerned. When he finally stopped, he wiped his eyes and said: "Baby, I love you so much. I love you more than anything in this world. But that is the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life."
I want to be clear: I was not amused. I am still not amused. This was a traumatic experience that shaped my relationship with trust, authority, and the entertainment industry for years. It is not funny. It is, however, objectively hilarious. And I know it's objectively hilarious because the first person I told whom is Claire, my best friend also laughed for four minutes. And then she said, "Wait, so you met the fake James Franco BEFORE the real James Franco?" And I said yes, and she laughed for four more minutes.
Ben, to his credit, eventually stopped laughing and said something genuinely wise: "You know why this happened to you and not me? Because I wasn't famous enough to scam." He was right. In the late nineties and early 2000s, Ben was hustling. He was doing UCB shows for free when no one's watching and bartender. He was writing sketches that was rejected. He was sleeping on couches and eating cereal out of the box. No con man looked at Ben Schwartz in 1999 and thought, "There's a mark." They looked at me who was a young woman who had stumbled into a film career through sheer accident and saw opportunity. Male privilege at it's finest, that was sarcasm.
"It's a cautionary tale," Ben said to the kids. "Your mom got scammed because she was young, and naive, and she wanted something too badly. And the thing about Hollywood is that there are a thousand Geralds for every real opportunity. They smell desperation. They smell hope. And they use it against you."
"That's actually good advice," I said.
"I know," he said. "I'm not just a pretty face."
"You're not a pretty face at all."
"Wow."
"Daddy's ugly," Leo said.
"Leo," Jean said. "That's mean."
"It's true," Ben said. "I'm ugly. But I'm not gullible. And that's why I still have my money from 1999."
"You didn't have any money in 1999," I said.
"Exactly. And I still have all of it unlike someone I know."
Part Nine: The Afterlife
One final note. The fake James Franco... His real name is Michael, and I'm using his real name because he has given me permission reached out to me several years ago. He had seen me in an interview and wanted to apologize. He told me he had been a struggling actor in the late nineties and that Gerald had paid him $200 per "meeting" to impersonate James Franco. He said he knew it was wrong but that he needed the money. He said he had since quit impersonation entirely and had become a voice actor a real one, with real credits, on real shows.
We talked for two hours. He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He was, crucially, nothing like the actual James Franco, who, whatever his other issues may be, is not a con man nor a predator. Michael was just a guy who got paid to sit in a chair and be someone else. That's literally the job description of an actor. The problem was Gerald. The problem was the system. Michael and I are friends now. Actual friends. We text occasionally. He sends me voice acting reels. I send him articles about scams. It's a strange, unlikely friendship, but then again, most of my friendships are strange and unlikely.
Get up. Walk out. Check your bank account. And for the love of God, verify the identity of anyone who claims to be James Franco.
