Roommate Woes & Scraping By: "For a Good Time, Call..." Screening
Plenty of us have taken on menial and less-than-creatively-satisfying jobs to make it in the city.
No shame in some nannying and plasma donation to barely afford your miniscule studio that you share with some waterbugs and a sputtering AC unit.
But raise your hand if you're ever been a phone sex operator. (No judgment, we swear.)
There's the premise of For a Good Time, Call..., the new film starring Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist's Ari Graynor and co-screenwriter Lauren Anne Miller.
Graynor's Katie and Miller's Lauren are reluctant roommates, college acquaintances thrown together very begrudgingly to save on Manhattan rent, who eventually become tight friends once the phone sex hotline they start takes off.
So of course we had to inquire, no: not if they had ever dialed a phone sex hotline, of the guests at last night's screening about their own roommate and job desperations.
Nylon's Dani Stahl, date to Alice + Olivia's Stacey Bendet for the night, joked about her own Boogie Nights career beginnings but as for the living situation, she doesn't share space well. "I'm not a roommate girl. I had the single my freshman year of college," she said. "I'm an only child…and very particular with my things."
Bendet once had a more colorful living setup. "When I started Alice + Olivia, I lived with two boys," she said. "Alice + Olivia was on the ground floor of that building. They'd [her roommates] throw parties, and I'd have meetings…people would come in, and there'd be beer and joints all over the apartment." But don't worry: the trio is still close.
Miller cowrote the film with her college roommate, Katie Anne Naylon, whose own time with a phone sex hotline inspired the on-screen shenanigans. Miller's Lauren is the initially prudish and straight-laced roommate, not a huge stretch in her own relationship with Naylon.
"I've had such a charmed, lovely life," she admitted.
So no harvesting of the eggs or other clandestine organ donations?
Nope.
"I worked at the Gap. I went to FIT before I went to film school and I worked at the museum there," she continued. "I was an assistant for three years, and i did assistant things that were not my proudest moments, that were nothing I went to college for, but I always worked with lovely people."
Graynor, whose character takes in Lauren to hold onto her grandmother's palatial apartment, couldn't divulge any shameful jobs either. "I wish I had some good gossip! I did some construction work for my dad once, and he gave me a hot pink hardhat. It was probably embarrassing for me that I was working on a construction site," she said.
We've heard worse.