I’m standing close enough to study the hair on his cheek. I guess most teenage boys would be more excited about working with Lindsay Lohan, Jaime Pressly, or even Drake Bell, but it’s Ethan Suplee that does it for me. And I’m sure there are a small legion of teenage boys out there who would scratch out my eyes to get this close to the man.

The studio is an anonymous warehouse in a nondescript quadrant of the San Fernando Valley called Van Nuys. This might be the same place where they flimed 90210. Inside the studio, Ethan Suplee and I are standing on the second-floor walkway of a fake motel, in front of a printed backdrop that’s two times the size of an ordinary billboard. It’s a ginormous photograph of the motel parking lot. There are a couple dozen extras and crew members crowding the platform with us, rushing back and forth, constantly re-lighting the scene from different angles. One enormous light is set in front of the backdrop. It floods the motel room, emulating sunlight. The rest of the studio is shrouded in stale darkness.

In this episode of the show, Earl is teaching some rebellious high school kids (including me) the value of education. There are six extras and four day players (i.e. real actors) in the posse of young hooligans. One of them is a cute chubby kid with blonde hair, who quickly establishes himself as a douchebag. He’s playing a game with the other day players, in which he bestows upon them points for saying anything “gay”, in an effort to determine the gayest of them all. He is dealt several points, himself, for relating an anecdote about the time he intentionally peed his pants so he could go home from school early. It was really sweet, he says– he got to spend the rest of the afternoon practicing field hockey. “I think you all deserve a few points just for having this conversation,” says Jason Lee.

Meanwhile, I privately collect about a hundred points as Ethan Suplee walks by, sending a flurry of displaced oxygen molecules my way. He could be one of the most beautiful men on T.V. That’s not saying much. There are more beautiful men on the street. There’s a much more beautiful man in my bed. Still, the novelty of his pseudo-celebrity makes my stomach fill up with butterflies. Shallow, unfounded butterflies. He’s married. He’s a scientologist. Aren’t scientologists supposed to be humourless? Jason Lee’s one, too. I hope I don’t get blacklisted from Hollywood, for saying that just now.

After three days as a hooligan in a dark studio across town, I’m granted the reprieve of a calm, warm morning on a quiet street not far from home. It’s for Cold Case, and I’m a young teenager in Pennsylvania, circa 1999. It’s just one shot: me and a buddy walking down this tree-lined street, peering into the window of a stalled car. In this Buick station wagon, there’s a runaway girl on the cusp of puberty and her awkward feelings about boys at That Age. Then the car drives off and I go home before rush hour.

The prop manager handed us fake Sidekicks that were actually calculators. One of the wardrobe people dressed me in some absurd plaid pants and a clashing plaid patterned-hat, literally working out of a copy of Fruits, while the other “cyber bloggers” were all dressed like more-or-less ordinary teenagers. Eventually, due to the confusion, the cyber-blogging clique was dissipated, with half of us joining the “hipster” group– another extremely incongruous grouping of varying archaic and non-existent fashions– and the other half becoming nerds or goths. Other “cliques” included mimes, body contortionists, “greenies” (hippies), skaters, and “headgear kids” (seriously, when is the last time anyone wore orthodontic headgear?).

So you’re wondering what the Bratz dolls would look like in a live-action movie. So was I. When I got to set, I was keeping an eye out for girls with grotesquely oversized heads caked in copious amounts of makeup. There were a few extras who fit the bill, but the Bratz girls themselves turned out to be pretty normal-looking, surprisingly conservatively dressed teen actors. Except the black girl. She was in booty shorts and a halter top. Anyway, the plot of the movie is that the Bratz girls have to unite the cliques. They have to spread hegemony by putting lipstick on headgear girls and teaching everyone to embrace “acceptance of individuality“. See Also: the vapid, devastatingly popular High School Musical. P.S. Jon Voight plays the principal.

They have a new album coming out next Tuesday, called We All Belong. I did some street team work for them, flyering around Silver Lake and Echo Park. Here are some pictures: