70
the concept. “We got a lot of
response from actors amaz-
ingly quickly,” he marvels.
“I don’t even know how
Fran found out about the
script. I didn’t personally
know her or anything. But
we found out she was inter-
ested in being in this movie.
We were like, ‘Wait, what?’
It was incredible. Once she
was interested, it really kind
of changed the concept
because we were really
going to make this as a pret-
ty small, independent movie.
It still is, but having Fran
in it raised the profile of it.
And then really quickly after
that, Peter Bogdanovich was
like, ‘These are great words.
I want to say these words.’
That’s actually how he put
it to me, which was incred-
ibly flattering. He’s also a
legend in his own right and
an incredible filmmaker.
He’s a really funny actor.
And so we had to raise a lit-
tle bit more money to make
it because it was just going
to be a bigger thing. We shot
it in 15 days, 29 locations.”
Cook says his experi-
ence in daytime helped
the production run more
smoothly. “I’ll tell you,
having the soap background
was the only way I was able
to pull it off,” he shares.
“A couple of actors were
like, ‘Oh, my gosh. How
are we gonna do 10 pages
today? That’s insane!’
And I was probably in that
framework of a bad boss
because I was like, ‘Sorry,
I don’t sympathize. You
have no idea.’ As all of the
readers of Digest know, we
do 100 pages a day in day-
time, no problem. I think it
was day two or something
when I was working on
DAYS. I had two shows to
do that day. At that point,
I was only working with
Peter [Reckell, ex-Bo]. I
hadn’t started working with
Kristian [Alfonso, Hope]
yet. One of the PA’s came
to me and they were like,
‘We’re really sorry. We
know you have two shows
today but we forgot to get
you this script and we’re
shooting part of this show
today, too.’ So there were
three scripts that I had to
do. This was like my sec-A high point for Cook in the
making of The Creatress was
including author Thomas Pynchon in it. “He won the
National Book Award in 1974 for Gravity’s Rainbow,”
explains Cook. “He’s known to be extremely reclusive.
He’s sort of the modern-day J.D. Salinger. He’s still
alive and lives in New York City. He’s an amazing author
who’s had a huge influence on me, huge influence on
The Creatress and the style. So, I wrote The Creatress
and I put a scene in there where somebody barges into
Carrie’s office, played by Fran Drescher, and he’s like,
‘Can you cover this? We’re thinking about reissuing
it.’ And it’s Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. It’sJE
SSE^
GRANT/JPIond or third day. I’m already
freaking out as it is. And then
Peter is like, ‘Nothing like
indoctrination by fire, huh?’
Like, literally laughing. And
he just walks off. I was like,
‘Thanks a lot, dude.’ He prob-
ably played it off perfectly
because if he had made a big
deal out of it, it would’ve only
made me more nervous. We
got through it. So when I hadOn Tour: The film
has made the
rounds on the
FACEBOOK/THECREATRESS festival circuit.Early DAYS:Write On!