Like Brothers Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Freebie LLC and Jippet Inc.

  Foreword copyright © 2018 by Mindy Kaling

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Duplass, Mark author. | Duplass, Jay author.

  Title: Like brothers / Mark Duplass and Jay Duplass.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057278 | ISBN 9781101967713 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101967720 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Duplass, Mark | Duplass, Jay. | Actors—United States—Biography. | Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. | Screenwriters—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | HUMOR / Form / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PN1998.2 .D75 2018 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017057278

  Ebook ISBN 9781101967720

  Author photographs on this page: © Carissa Dorson.

  Duplass Brothers logo on this page by Mark Duplass and Jay Duplass.

  Images on this page and this page are from the personal collection of Mark Duplass and Jay Duplass.

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: meat and potatoes

  Cover photographs: © Carissa Dorson

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Definitely Start Here

  Foreword by Mindy Kaling

  Prologue

  Chapter I.

  The Woog

  Chapter II.

  Movies Not Meetings

  Airport #1

  Chapter III.

  Some Thoughts on Compromise

  Chapter IV.

  In Defense of The Karate Kid Part II

  Unsolicited Advice Part 1: Housing

  Chapter V.

  Girlfriends

  Eighty Is Enough

  Airport #2

  Chapter VI.

  Some Thoughts on Arguing

  An Apology, Very Late

  You (An Exercise in Empathy): Part 1

  Chapter VII.

  The Ball

  Psycho

  Chapter VIII.

  Chapter IX.

  Lemons

  Hikes

  Unsolicited Advice Part 2: Cars

  The Cavalry Isn’t Coming

  Chapter X.

  You (An Exercise in Empathy): Part 2

  Chapter XI.

  Some Thoughts on Lying

  The Blowjob Chronicles

  Chapter XII.

  Wives

  In Defense of Air Supply

  Airport #3

  Chapter XIII.

  True Believer

  Unsolicited Advice Part 3: Investing

  Chapter XIV.

  The Box

  Children of the Mountains

  One Out of Five

  Chapter XV.

  I Am Jealous

  I Am Also Jealous

  Chapter XVI.

  Airport #4

  The Waterslide

  Dedication

  Friends of This Book

  About the Authors

  WHETHER YOU’VE BEEN waiting months for this book to come out, or you are at an airport wondering who these two extremely regular-looking guys are on the cover and why some idiot let them write a book…either way…Hi. Nice to meet you, kind of. We are genuinely excited for you to read our book.

  We’ve tried to offer a collection that is entertaining, funny, and (ideally) a bit useful. Something that you’ll remember once you’re done with us. This book is filled with essays on all kinds of things. Some are specific to our film and television careers, some to our twentieth-century childhood and our twenty-first-century parenting experiences, and some relate to random pop culture that made an impression on us along the way. Most, however, are our attempts to make you laugh, cry, or emit that quiet “mmmm” sound under your breath when you’ve been gently enlightened. Essentially, we hope that when you finish this thing you will turn to us with glee (like our mom did) and exclaim, “There’s something here for everyone!”

  Needless to say, we’d like you to read the essays in Like Brothers from front to back, in the order we chose. But it’s also cool if you want to pick and choose stuff. Let’s say you’re an aspiring filmmaker or artist trying to figure out how two brothers from nowhere special with no special connections managed to build something from nothing. If that’s you, you could read the Roman-numeral chapters and skip the rest. You’d miss a lot, but you’d get the history of our journey and a bunch of our secret widgets as to how we carved a career inside this insane Hollywood system without anyone else’s help. Or, if that’s not you, you could skip the Roman numerals and read the rest of the book: essays on the wonderful/terrible nature of collaboration as well as a bunch of other random things that fell out of our brains.

  Either way is fine. We just humbly ask that you read it. It will teach you some things. Because that’s what books do.

  Your friends,

  Mark and Jay

  DO NOT PUT Mark and Jay Duplass on your sitcom. Ever. I made that mistake. Six years ago, they guest-starred on my show, The Mindy Project. They were just supposed to come in, play funny midwife brothers, and leave. But within a day and and a half, the entire cast and crew liked them better than me. There was something about Mark and Jay’s Southern affability, their genuine interest in the people around them, their low-key stylish clothes, and their fascinating Hollywood stories that drew everyone to them. They even sang and played the guitar really well. How eyeroll-emoji-inducing is that? Suddenly everyone on my show had abandoned me to be around Mark and Jay and hear stories of how they’d made their wonderful films The Puffy Chair, Safety Not Guaranteed, Cyrus, Tangerine, and many more. Then everyone wanted to know what it was like to star in their own television shows, Transparent and Togetherness. It was all too much for a leading actress to hear, so now they are banned from set.

  But somehow I still like to hang out with them. Just privately. Because they’re funny, they’re woke as hell, and they have a way of making you feel like the best version of yourself. They’re artists, with that kind of tireless entrepreneurial spirit that inspires. When you hear them talking about their projects, suddenly you’re excited about making a movie too! Maybe you’ll direct a film that you wrote! Maybe you’ll go to Sundance and have Ted Sarandos from Netflix throw obscene money at you for all your artistic endeavors! These two act, they write, they foster talent, they take chances on young artists, and they do it all while being married and raising kids. I guess white men can have it all. And I’m glad this book exists to explain how. And to make you feel like I feel when I’m hanging out with them.

  In closing, I’d just like to say this:

  Wright. Ringling
. Jonas. I’m sure you could name a bunch of famous brother teams. They’re all garbage compared to Mark and Jay. I can’t wait for you to read this book. But please don’t mention them if you ever run into me.

  Love,

  Mindy

  Los Angeles, California

  THE ROYAL WE is a tricky thing. It’s certainly helpful at times. It allows us to share that collective first-person-plural voice that makes us The Boys (a label that’s stuck since childhood). The royal we perfectly sets up those inspiring twenty-to-thirty-word quotes in articles written about the beauty of our long-term film and TV collaboration. How we share the same brain. How one pronoun can encompass us both. Basically, we use it to talk about ourselves because it brings our voices together. Making us stronger.

  But it also sucks sometimes. Because there’s a distinct lack of I in that we. And the bizarre, undefinable edges that make us uniquely ourselves get rubbed out so that the we can come across more clearly. Is it reductive? Sometimes a little bit. Sometimes a lot. But it’s for the greater good, right? Because no one wants to listen to Lindsey Buckingham’s solo record (sorry, Mr. Buckingham, as much as we love your technically proficient acoustic finger-picking, this is just a reality). People want to listen to Fleetwood Mac. That magical blend of disparate talents that creates the special soup you can eat all week, not just on Tuesday afternoon when you’re hungover and feeling weird.

  So we use the royal we. And in the past ten years or so, The Boys have become a brand of sorts. The ideal creative duo. And we feel many people’s hopes and dreams pinned upon us. That we will stay together and live in collaborative bliss forever. That others might build a similar bond with one of their siblings or, even better, have kids who get along like we do. So, people pleasers that we are, we play into this fantasy with idyllic sound bites about our collaborative process:

  “Two heads are better than one.”

  “It’s hard making good art, and we’d rather put aside our differences and get each other’s help.”

  “Whatever personal issues we have are quickly dwarfed by our love for each other and our understanding that we need each other to navigate this world.”

  And all of this is true, but not entirely so. What’s also true is how oddly difficult it is to do what we do and keep this thing moving forward. How we struggled for years trying to make a decent piece of art together. How we finally broke through, with each other’s help, and created a new model of making films and TV in the process. How this success has brought its own set of challenges. How our intense closeness through the years has caused trouble for our girlfriends and now our wives. How we stand next to each other in this life, trying desperately to hold on to each other and keep The Boys together, while at the same time lovingly pummeling each other in the face so we can get a breath of air that doesn’t already smell like the other one’s breath.

  And how on a daily basis we cry more than grown men should. But laugh a shit-ton as well.

  IT IS DARK.

  It is late.

  It is 1984.

  We are lying next to each other in one of our twin beds. But, predictably, we are not asleep. We are talking about life. And our dreams. And the great mystery of cable television.

  “Jay?”

  “Yes, Mark?”

  (Silence. Mark has always loved the dramatic silence. I am older by four years and should find this annoying, but I love this about him.)

  “When is it coming?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  (I take a moment to mitigate expectations and not get my seven-year-old baby brother too excited.)

  “Dad said by next week it’ll be here.”

  “What does it look like?”

  (I actually do not know, but I have a few theories.)

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is it, like…a big cable?”

  “I think so?”

  “Do they just drag it down the street and plug it into the house?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  (Mark thinks on this. Wide-eyed. Young mind grappling with what it all means.)

  “What is going to happen to us, Jay?”

  “Nothing crazy. I don’t think. Or maybe everything.”

  “I’m so excited.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  (Pause.)

  “Jay?”

  “Yes, Mark.”

  “I have something to confess.”

  “What?”

  (Again, the dramatic pause.)

  “I don’t know what cable is.”

  (I try extremely hard not to laugh. I am careful never to condescend, because he is smart and very sensitive. Still, I am an older brother and can’t help myself….)

  “If you don’t know what it is, then why are you so excited about it?”

  “I don’t know. I just…I heard you talking about it to your friends. And…I can tell how excited you are about it. So…I got excited about it.”

  (Not an extremely eloquent response, but quite prophetic in many ways as to the nature of our unique brotherly bond and complex relationship to come.)

  “It’s going to be bringing a lot of movies, and TV shows, and a bunch of new channels into the neighborhood.”

  “Do you think it’s gonna change everything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  (Pause.)

  “Jay?”

  “Yes, Mark.”

  “When we grow up do you want to get houses next to each other?”

  “Definitely.”

  (Mark considers this.)

  “Do you think…we could share the same cable? Or do we have to get different cables for each house?”

  “I could probably figure out how to share one.”

  (Mark believes me. He believes that I am very good at this kind of thing. Good at everything, actually, if you asked Mark in 1984. This was a huge part of building my confidence.)

  “What happens if we wanna watch different movies but we share the same cable?”

  “I think we’d have to watch the same movie.”

  “So what do we do if we ever want to watch a different movie at the same time?”

  (We both consider this question. It’s a troublesome thought. Might there come a time when our interests, and therefore our lives, diverge? The question hangs over us like a fat black cloud for a moment. But then we smile. Because this is a ridiculous thought. We will always want to watch the same movie. We will always live right next to each other. We will always lie in bed at night and talk about our lives and our dreams.)

  Two weeks later, cable arrives at our home.

  And everything changes.

  DO YOU FEEL weird inside? We do. All the time. Sometimes we call it depression. Sometimes we call it anxiety. Sometimes we just call it “The Woog.” As in “I’m feelin’ Woogie today.” At the core of this weird feeling is a sense that there are, at minimum, two people inside of us at war. And we don’t know how to make them get along.

  “I’m gonna stay up all night and write and put on my weird hat and two different socks and smoke weed and eat cereal and maybe pizza too and try to crack a new kind of story and make something fascinating and different and I don’t care if I never make any money because I’m an artist who is trying to represent the underrepresented and create empathy for all….”

  And.

  “I probably should go back to business school. And learn how to buy and sell companies and make millions and millions and maybe billions and use that money to start charities. This is the better way to live. For others. Not for myself and for my artistic vision. That’s…that’s kind of a load of selfish horseshit in the end…
.”

  And then some other voices start to pop up. And it’s hard to tell if they are subsets of these two main people or if they are actually secondary characters that also live inside of us.

  “I just want to live a quiet, simple life with my family. I want to stay home and be there at all times with my kids. Read to them. Cook for and with them. Play board games. Just be a good parent and husband and, in the end, just kinda be…

  “TEACHERS! That’s what the world needs now. Leadership for young kids who don’t have positive role models. Give myself and everything I can to them. An innocent child needs a thoughtful role model, and even though I’m not perfect, I am likely willing to give more than what I hear the average burned-out public high school teacher can give, so I should get my teacher’s license and…

  “The world is hard enough. Who am I to think I can help and save anyone? I’m just an average-intelligence person trying to get by. It’s enough just to make my own way in the world. I should just go inside myself. Stop talking and start listening. Get small and find a small sliver of happiness in the world and hang on to it for dear…”

  You get the picture.

  Do you ever feel this way? Hopefully not. And if you don’t, feel free to skip to the next chapter.

  But if you do…we want to say sorry. Sorry you feel conflicted like we do. That you are uncertain as to what the right path is in life. Sorry that you want so badly to be useful but also happy. To be inspired but also at peace. To make change but also just get by.