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Tuesday, April 23, 1996

She’s cool. She’s funny. She’s a star. Three more reasons why
Janeane Garofalo knows she must keep herself …By Michael
Horowitz

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

When she was in the middle of her high school experience in New
Jersey, comedienne Janeane Garofalo’s parents moved to Houston and
she moved with them. She spent the next year commuting on an
achingly long bus ride with no friends and no happiness.

Then she went off to Providence College in Rhode Island.

"I went to college and had no friends for the first year," she
recalls. "I was just Joe Loser, could not have bought a friend, and
then I gained 60 pounds on top of everything else."

At 5 feet 1 inch, Garofalo weighed 160 pounds, and she took to
wearing "goth-ware." "Remember the way Boy George used to dress in
Culture Club?" she asks. "Picture that in all dark colors and
billowy and horrible. I did look like somewhat of a freak."

"So, I had four friends and lived in fear of drunk frat guys. I
would spend the weekends dodging guy-groups who were drunk late at
night, because they would verbally assault me."

Ah. This experience must have given her the self-deprecating
dead-pan sense of humor that made her cool enough and ultimately
too cool for Saturday Night Live, the comedic touch that powered
the Ben Stiller show and adds to the Larry Sanders show.

"A sense of humor?" she laughs. "No, if anything, that bred the
glass-is-half-empty credo I carry with me in my heart today."

Meet Janeane Garofalo, star of the upcoming "The Truth About
Cats and Dogs." Costar Ben Chaplin says she’s "not like an actress
­ she’s very real, down to earth." Garofalo is honest to the
point of destructive, and a fair portion of her humor is aimed at
herself. If she does, by accident, make herself sound important
during a humorous rant, she’s sure to throw in a disclaimer like "I
hope you don’t think I’m trying to be the cool guy at all ­
because I’m so uncool."

Predictably, she’s hesitant to declare her successful Hollywood
career a triumph over the verbal abusers that ruined her college
experience.

"First of all, I’m sure they have no idea of what my name was,"
she says. "The people who were making fun of me, they just knew I
was a fat girl."

"Secondly, they don’t watch Larry Sanders," Garofalo continues.
"If you’re like a big, dumb frat guy, if you accidentally stumble
across Sanders, you are not going to tune in again. It’s not like
that is going to hit your funny bone, you can go watch The Jerky
Boys’ movie or something. The type of frat guy that would have made
fun of me would find me terribly unfunny now.

"If he stumbled across me doing my HBO comedy special or
something, he wouldn’t know it was me," she adds. "He’d still say
‘who’s that fat girl doing stand-up and I don’t think it’s funny
and I don’t get it!’ And I’m not saying I’m smarty-pants, I’m just
saying that you can kind of predict the ebbs and flows of the
fraternal mind."

Garofalo goes on to illustrate why she’d still be unknown, even
as she appears on billboards and commercials nationwide. "To be
famous, you have to saturate our culture," she stresses. "There are
people who you would assume everybody knows who they are, but you
ask John Q. Public and they have no idea what you’re talking about
or who you’re talking about. You know that great actor James LeGros
who’s in every great indie film? You would have to explain for the
next hour who James LeGros is. It would take the most popular thing
he’s ever done for someone to say ‘oh, that guy.’

"These guys who made fun of me will never know who I am ­
because I’ll never saturate culture enough for their thick heads to
absorb that," Garofalo concludes.

Perhaps her saturation hasn’t reached those levels, but "Cats
and Dogs" represents a large step for Garofalo. A veteran of
smaller parts from last year’s "Bye Bye, Love" to "Reality Bites,"
she’s never been called on to "carry" a film before. While she’s
quick to minimize the pressure ("I don’t feel like I’m carrying it.
It’s a three-way carry."), she’s also overjoyed at the size of her
role.

"It’s the biggest part I’ve ever had, and probably the only time
that will ever happen," she says. "I was shocked, shocked to be
offered a leading role in a film and have since gone back to
supporting roles. It caused me a great amount of anxiety and
teeth-grinding to imagine the critics saying ‘less is more’ and ‘we
enjoy her when she just comes in and makes a statement and exits
quietly’ as character actors are wont to do. I’m not looking
forward to reading bad reviews, if that happens."

In "Cats and Dogs," Garofalo plays a radio talk show host who
solves people’s pet problems. When her friendly voice guides a
photographer (Ben Chaplin) through a canine crisis, he’s eager to
see what the rest of her is like. Her next door neighbor happens to
be a model (Uma Thurman), and Cyrano hijinks are afoot.

Cyrano changes from derivation to derivation, but the characters
remain pretty much the same. There’s a handsome or gorgeous but
vacuous suitor and an intelligent, wonderful romantic,
correspondingly less handsome or gorgeous. Uma Thurman did not play
the latter role.

"I have never been one to turn a head," says Garofalo, "and I’m
not saying that in a ‘poor me’ way, or self-deprecating way."

"I’m being very pragmatic and realistic about that. I’m not the
kind of person that people are going to turn around and look at in
a restaurant unless you say ‘Look, she has a tattoo.’"

Hence, her second fiddle roles to Winona Ryder and Uma
Thurman.

"Hollywood has very stringent rules for the ladies," she says.
"It’s not that way for the guys. Romantic leads can be anywhere
from Danny DeVito to John Goodman for a male. They will not allow
us the same thing. ‘Frankie and Johnny’ ­ Michelle Pfeiffer is
Frankie? Or Johnny? Or whoever? It’s galling to me what they expect
you to accept as the imagery of the plain person."

"Now, I’m being realistic," she explains. "You put me next to
Uma, yes, I am the plain one, that’s true. If your average
red-blooded American or British man is going to come into a room
and immediately be asked to make an aesthetic decision, they’re
going to pick Uma. There’s no way you can get around that. But it
is annoying that Hollywood likes to make those divisions and
perpetuate those stereotypes, and I am as guilty as everyone for
having done that."

Garofalo’s mea culpa comes in part due to her recent successful
diet. She explains that her now trim figure is a source of great
disappointment.

"I went on a diet in September," she says. "But I have been
jousting with windmills to no avail at 140 pounds since I started,
when I was 20, doing stand-up. I made the commitment not to do
anything cosmetic or change. I was like 160 when I was in college.
I’m 5′ 1," so that’s a formidable density."

"I moved here at 140, kept auditioning," she says. "Did not give
in, did not. And you know what? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.
You can only go so far."

"You can fight the good fight as long as you want," she
explains, "but at the end of the day, when you purchase your co-op,
you’re broke."

Her dwindling bank account was one factor. "Flirting With
Disaster" was another. Garofalo yearned for the part that Patricia
Arquette eventually got, but heard indirectly that she was a little
too "dowdy" even to play a woman who’s just been pregnant. "I was
supposed to be playing a somewhat overweight woman that had just
had a baby," she explains. "They still thought I was too much of
that."

Despite her feeling that Patricia deserved the role, the reasons
for her exclusion crushed her crusade. "I would like to work as
much as the next guy and gal," she says. "And it just wasn’t
happening. I wasn’t making a difference. There might be five
14-year-olds who were glad that I weighed 140."

"But I feel I did my part, I really do," she maintains. "I did
‘Bye Bye, Love’ at 140, I did ‘Reality Bites,’ they forced me to
lose weight for that, but I cheated … but I accidentally lost
weight because they made me have a trainer. I accidentally got down
to, by the end of ‘Reality Bites,’ 115. Then I shot up
immediately."

Garofalo was at around 130 pounds when she filmed "Cats and
Dogs." "I didn’t want to be thin and pretending to be dowdy," she
says. "So being dowdy was the right thing. If ‘dowdy’ is a
word."

She was happy to be dowdy, but she hated the clothes the studio
insisted upon. Yes, her character was supposed to be plain, but her
character’s fashion ranged from conservatively banal to downright
appalling. "Here’s how I justify that," she starts, laughing. "She
was so enlightened, she transcended even thinking about fashion.
She’d wear everything on the floor. She was that cool."

As for the studio’s whims? "I think they were just so afraid I
would dress the way I normally dress," Garofalo offers. "They’re
just so afraid of grunge or alternative or any other lame label you
want, that they wanted to make sure none of Janeane Garofalo was
going to come through ­ because it frightens them. And I don’t
mean that to make me sound cool or edgy."

Predictably, she had a gripe about the sizes as well as the
styles. "For whatever reason, if you’re not anorexic, wardrobe
doesn’t have stuff to fit you," she says. "They do not accommodate
anyone who’s not a size 5. I don’t know what it is, but if you go
in for fittings, they’ve got sample sizes for people with skeletal
frames with skin on them. That’s it."

While Garofalo insists she doesn’t throw "diva fits," she’s got
two sore subjects on set. She needs her Starbucks coffee hot, and
she hates it when wardrobe refers to "the big problem" of finding
clothes in her size. Any attacks she wages are immediately
apologized for.

"There’s nothing to be ashamed of about pursuing show business,"
she says, "but there are many aspects that are shameful or that are
embarrassing to me. It is embarrassing when you see somebody
throwing a diva fit, or getting their ass kissed, or when I’m in a
bad mood and people let me. I’m embarrassed for myself and them for
letting me."

"It’s a business that encourages and caters to bad behavior,"
she explains. "The squeaky wheel definitely gets the grease, as
opposed to being replaced. And that’s a problem."

So she’s resolved to keeping herself "under her thumb" and as
self-deprecating as possible. She calls it being "pragmatic."

One wonders if she’ll lighten up on herself after a few more
leading roles and winning character spots?

"Lighten up on me?" she asks incredulously. "I hope not, because
then I’d be a dick!"

Janeane Garofalo stars as a radio talk show host who tackles
callers’ pet problems in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs." In the
film, Garofalo’s character enlists the help of her neighbor (Uma
Thurman) when a grateful caller (Ben Chaplin) wants to meet
her.