continued from GQ March Article pt. 1....

AsThe Larry Sanders Show lampoons Friends fever at the networks (Larry and Chris Elliot pitching a series about five tall jockeys chillin' out in the barn), even established winners circle their wagons. For the second time, Seinfeld distances itself from the newcomers by opting out of the yearly sweeps gimmick that has all the NBC Thursday-night singles visiting one anothers shows. (Schwimmer, who happily consorts with his real-life high school pal Jonathan Silverman on The Single Guy, pronounces this lack of team spirit "a real bummer.")

Amid the pink slips and handicapping of this mad date-and-dump derby, the Friends set still has the air of a winning locker room" close, clubby and adrenaline-rich. Pairs of giggling cast members wrestle on couches as the others run their lines. On the sofa in Central Perk, Chandler is complaining about Monica (Courteney Cox), who's been trying to help him lose weight with ceaseless punishing workouts. "She's got me doing butt clenches at my desk," he moans. "They wont bring me my mail anymore."
Schwimmer and Aniston are still blocking out the Kiss. It's four seconds the network will want to promote the bejesus out of, but no one is worried, least of all the canny architects of the "Ross-Rachel romantic arc." Rattling the kids' comfy cocoon with some intra-Friends sex seems natural, even necessary to them.

"Much as I admire some shows," says Marta Kauffman, "there came a point in Cheers when you said, 'Oh fuck her already. Please!' Maddie and David [in Moonlighting]? 'Kiss the woman!'"

Friends are sexually responsible, but Friends do hit the sack with Others - even the women. Because of that, the pilot show didn't test too well, according to NBC's Jamie McDermott, the 31-year-old exec-on-the-move who shepherded the series through development. "Monica, the most grounded character, sleeps with a guy," McDermott explains. "Those social biases against it came out with test audiences."

The young production/development team that McDermott heads decided it was a case of research be damned. "You've got to go with your gut," she says. "One of the differences between TV now and Leave It To Beaver days is that adults then were much more infallible. Human beings make mistakes, and it's OK to put that on the air."

Hence the birth of Ross's son - with all the warring factions in the labor room - was last seasons penultimate show, and rather sweet. Part of the show's appeal is it's refreshing retreat from all sorts of correctness. Scripts reek of unregenerate guy behavior and plenty of erection jokes. There is the youthful overindulgence. After watching Aniston weave deftly - and hilariously - through a drunk scene with a suffering blind date, Matt Perry wonders in concerned-announcer tones about how a more well, thoughtful show might treat two extra glasses of Chardonnay:

"This week, in a very special episode of Friends..."

Wow, there's Mel Gibson!"
Schwimmer nearly points, then catches himself. "Still kinda starstruck." he mutters. We are lunching in the Warner Bros. commissary. So is Mel. So is the rest of the Friends cast, at a separate table. They really do hang out together, profess to love one another and hew to an all-for-one media musketeerism, voting on interviews, reporters' set visits and the like. There is a lot of laughter from their table. A Warner's executive is working the room, squeezing shoulders, urging attendance at a mid-season victory party. All this is great - amazing! - says Schwimmer who is busily plucking onions off his pre-Kiss cheeseburger. Of course, there are moments of weirdness now. Hard Copy lenses instantly zoom in on Schwimmer's new home. Which is why a construction crew is feverishly slapping up a cinder block-and-stucco wall this morning.

As the child of attorneys, Schwimmer says he understands about compromise and has no problem with it. Putting his big, bankable TV face in the center of one Miramax feature will allow him to write for and direct his theater company in another. And if his part in The Pallbearer seems a tad Friends-ish, so be it. In that film, Schwimmer plays Tom, a struggling architect still living at home with mom. The comic tumblers start clicking when the mother of a high school classmate he can't remember asks him to be a Pallbearer after her son's suicide. Soon the mom (Barabara Hershey) has given him the son's death car (an AMC Pacer) - and herself.

Billed as a black comedy, the film was cowritten by its first-time director, Matt Reeves. the characters are 25-plus singles and just-marrieds in Brooklyn (and Manhattan), with Gwyneth Paltrow as the unattainable girl Schwimmer's character has had a crush on since - yes, their Clearasil days. Visiting the scene last summer, I watched Reeves direct a very tight shot of Schwimmer, Paltrow and two others in - yes, a Manhattan espresso house. "Take it down," Reeves would urge his star, gently. "It's that sitcom guy," teased Paltrow. "He's stressed out."

Coming from a medium heavy on mugging and light on modulation, Schwimmer says he was a bit anxious "trying to learn to act for film" until Barabara Hershey quoted a helpful line she attributed to Brando: "In a play, you have to show what you are thinking, and when you are in a film, you just think it."
Artfully tousled in baleful close-up, his Tom seems meant to coax a '90s echo of Dustin Hoffman's graduate, Benjamin Braddock. Tom is kinder, fuzzier. He lacks that edgy 60's irony, but he is somewhat wiser than Ben. Tom knows that the real world sucks, and one of his final scenes - also at a wedding - is more capitulating than triumphal. Schwimmer would end up shooting this second ending months later, once he'd resumed his day job. "Going back to the sitcom," he says, "was a whole 'nother animal."

The Kiss, Phase Two: Schwimmer has been pacing. He thinks maybe he should steamroller the scene - grab Aniston, mess her up a little. Seems right after all this time. Bonerz yells for action, and Ross rockets through the door, grabs Rachel, lifts her in the air and starts the Kiss, which ends hard, against the counter. "Hey," says Bonerz, "It's a kiss, not tumbling."

"A lot rides on this," says Aniston during a break. "It's huge. HUGE." For that reason, she's thinking the Kiss should be slow. She likes the fact that Bonerz and writes have just come up with three locks for her to struggle with before she can let Ross back in. Set carpenters are hammering at them now.

"I think slow is always good," she reasons. She and Schwimmer, her good friend, movie date and confidant in real life, have huddled and agree to pull the scene like taffy the next time. Outside work, she notes, they're in very different places. Schwimmer's longtime girlfriend, a Louisiana attorney, has just moved here to take a job with a Century City law firm. "And I'm single," sighs Aniston, now officially one of People's Most Intriguing People. "I actually love it. I was in a relationship for five years. It's like being let out of prison - oh, not that it was prison."

On the series premiere, Rachel showed up in a wedding dress, scared and panting, having just left her nice-but-boring orthodontist at the altar. Brave new vistas opened up when the Friends made her cut up Daddy's charge cards and get a job. Aniston, a former burger joint waitress, had no trouble playing that moment of scary singles lib. Now she gets to live it. "It's just that feeling of sunlight," she says. "what do I do? I feel like I'm back where I started when I was 20. Not knowing anything. I don't want to date. What do people say now? Where do they go?"

All of the actors have felt their lives seeping into their characters. The producers listened closely as Matt Perry's woeful recitation of a weekend date, soon after, his terse assessment - "I'm pretty confident I'll die alone" - became a Chandler story arc. "I'm not dead," Chandler soliloquized after a dismal party experience, "and yet I have no life."

The producers also encourage improv, especially if it's mined from real life in the singles trenches. Says Kauffman, "Why shut them up if they can make it better? We're comedy whores - we'll take it from anywhere."

Occasionally, the slim decade's age difference between the show's boomer creators and their cast has pointed up a sexual conservatism that suprises the producers. "We were in our twenties in the 70's and early 80's, when drugs and sex were OK," says Kauffman. "We did an episode recently about how long Ross would wait to have sex with Julie." The magic number the producers decided should be a sidesplitting six weeks. "David and Kevin and I - those of us hovering around 40 - were going six weeks? What?" recalls Kauffman. "And a lot of the guys in their twenties - guys! - were going, "That's OK. So it took six weeks, nothing freakish about that.' We're going, 'Uh-huh. OK.'"

In fact, beneath the lesbian in-laws and publicity declared lusts, a certain core traditionalism and a baseline decency my be the Friends' darkest secret, on-screen and off. There are no predatory Arnie Beckers among them, no conniving Sammy Jos. Friend's February-sweeps show would feature a plot with some lesbian friends-of-Friends, but, hey - they're getting married. Commitment.

"The Friends spend every episode banging on each other," observes Jamie McDermott. "But if anyone were in trouble, you have no doubt the other five would lined up to help."

At bottom, making light of loneliness is the leitmotif of this Season o' Singles. It's the demon that has George and Jerry warming themselves nightly at the Greeks' greasy hearth, that hounds the flannel shirttails of Silverman's Single Guy.Schwimmer tells me that some of his single friends now talk as though marriage and children just might not be so important anymore, and it gives him the willies.

"It's strange for me to hear," he says. "I've always wanted a family. I think that's why we're here, very simply - to have children and raise them well and try to improve the quality of life for people in general and for the ones to follow."

Ward Cleaver couldn't have said it better./ But you wouldn't have found him dressing the Beav in a T-shirt that says, MY MOMMIES LOVE ME.

The Kiss run-through, final try: Rachel is flailing at the locks. Basset eyes watch her through the glass. Click, turn, she gets the locks, opens both doors wide. Beat. Ross reaches; his arms travel up from her waist, wrap her, nearly lift her. The kiss is...hot! Long...

Marta Kauffman screams. Above wild cast and crew applause, she is moaning, "This is terrible. I'm so sad. Why am I so emotional?"

Schwimmer and Aniston hug. In a quieter voice, Kauffman is asking, "Who knew David could be so sexy?" When things calm down, David Crane faces his actors. "Serieswise," he says, "this moment is extraordinarily satisfying."

Says Jerry the orthodontist, "Amen."

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