Molly Shannon ran a con to get her role on Twin Peaks
The then-unknown actor used a fake name and pretended to work for playwright David Mamet in order to break out in Hollywood
Aux News Molly Shannon
2022 seems to be the year of scammer stories. We’ve got the girl boss scam in The Dropout, Anna Delvey’s high-society conning in Inventing Anna, and a dating app scheme on The Tinder Swindler. Yet, there’s another story we’d like to pitch to the streamers: Molly Shannon’s early career hustle that landed her a small role on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
Before she became a part of Saturday Night Live, Shannon joined forces with her friend Eugene Pack to run the “Mamet Scam,” according to IndieWire. Using the fake name Liz Stockwell, Shannon would pretend to be playwright David Mamet’s “right-hand girl” and call casting agents for available jobs.
“We were trying to figure out how we were going to get in the door as actors,” said Shannon in her upcoming memoir, Hello Molly. “How were we gonna bust in? It was too hard to just slip your picture under an agent’s door. A random headshot? No one was ever gonna call. Then we hit on an idea. Eugene had studied with David Mamet. He was (and is) this giant, hugely successful guy, very respected—a big-time playwright and screenwriter—but Eugene knew that he wasn’t a guy who was in Hollywood much. He just liked staying in Vermont and New York.”
With the idea of the scam forming in their heads, Shannon and Pack made like Danny Ocean and carefully plotted out the details of their plan—including the name.
“We went to the American Film Institute library and looked up managers and agents that we thought would be good for us in this big, thick agency book,” Shannon continued. “We also looked up actors who we thought were like us, found out who managed them, and decided to go after these people and try to get them to sign us by pretending to be representing Mamet. I called it the Mamet Scam.”
After meeting with a plethora of agents, Shannon mentioned to her co-conspirator that she wanted to be on one of her favorite series, Twin Peaks. Enacting the “Mamet Scam” with precision, Pack got her through to the show’s casting director, Johanna Ray.
Nabbing her first tv role, Shannon appeared on the second season of Twin Peaks as the minor role of Judy Swain, a social worker. A few years later, Shannon would become known as one of best players on SNL, known for her chaotic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher and high-kicking Sally O’Malley.
She and Pack kept up the “Mamet Scam” for a few more months after getting Twin Peaks. But not everyone was easily duped by the scam they were running: 1980s Brat Pack member Molly Ringwald comes up in the book as one of those who saw through Shannon and Pack’s con.
“We ran the Mamet Scam on her and set up a meeting,” Shannon recalled. “When I sat down for my appointment, she glared at me and said, ‘I just wanted to see what a liar looked like in person.’”
Yikes. At least that doesn’t seem to have affected her future roles, as Shannon went on to have a full career in television and film, with her currently playing the hilarious momager on The Other Two and co-starring on the upcoming Showtime comedy I Love That For You. If you want to read more of Shannon’s stories, Hello Molly will be available April 12 from HarperCollins.
27 Comments
The perceived ethics of doing stuff like this is interesting; rather than the motive of a traditional scammer, which is to try to get something of value out of someone without providing anything of value in return, in this case the deception is predicated on the idea that the film industry (acting in particular) is so competitive (possibly the most competitive industry in the world) that manipulating the gatekeeper infrastructure is often seen as an entirely legitimate tool for getting a foot in the door. At the time Shannon did this, there was a pool of actors in Shannon’s position, with roughly equivalent levels of talent and drive, and roughly equivalent lack of exposure. She certainly wasn’t the only one who would have been trying something like this, and she wasn’t the first or last, either.
I think this falls quite comfortably under the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” classification.
And we know who invented the games.
Yes, ancient astronauts.
Nah. it’s a shitty thing to do to one of the best casting agents in the business who would’ve been a great ally for her entire career. Ray is incredibly loyal.
It’s a stupid, amateurish way to play the game. She got a tiny role instead of a strong booster for decades who would’ve gotten her more roles after SNL.
shes doing very well for herself. i think shes happy with the choices she made
Clive Cussler famously got a bunch of letterhead and envelopes printed up for the “Charles Winthrop Agency” used that to write to his (future) agent:‘’I’d written one book but it kept getting rejections,’’ said the California-born author. ‘’When I finished another, rather then send it unsolicited to publishers, I printed up some stationery with the name of the ‘Charles Winthrop Agency.’ I used my dad’s address in Laguna Hills, Calif., because it sounded like it had a little class. Then I sent a letter to Peter Lampack at the William Morris Agency. I wrote ‘Dear Peter,’ like I knew him all my life. ‘As you know, I primarily handle plays and movies; however, I recently ran across a couple of book-length manuscripts by an author I’d like to handle, but since I am retiring I wonder if you’d be interested in looking at them.’ ‘’When Mr. Lampack replied that he would, one Clive Cussler soon sent along both manuscripts. ‘’Ten days later I almost went into cardiac arrest when Peter said my second manuscript was second-rate but my first one was good,’’ Mr. Cussler recalled.It took several years to sell that first manuscript, a paperback original titled ‘’The Mediterranean Caper.’’ And Mr. Cussler, who typed the manuscript for his novel ‘’Iceberg’’ on leftover Winthrop stationery, did not reveal the deception until he was a best-selling author. Mr. Cussler remembers that when he did break the news to Mr. Lampack, who now has his own literary agency, ‘’Peter looked blank for a while. Then he laughed himself under the table and said, ‘Oh, my God, I always thought that Charlie Winthrop was a guy I met at a cocktail party when I had a little too much to drink.’ ‘’Matthew Reilly self-published his first book, put a fake publisher name on it, and then reverse-shoplifted it on to book shop shelves. People’d grab, take it to the counter, it wouldn’t scan, bookshop owners would get vexed, ring up all the publishers, ask who the fuck is Matthew Reilly…
Speaking of David Mamet, if you still want to like him, uh, don’t look up why he’s in the news again.
Oh my.
Well, there it is; something about him always bothered me. White dudes from Chicago…… so tough.
My family is from Chicagoland and I lived there for years.
Chicago white people are something else; cold as ice but they’ll flip out over the smallest thing, like ketchup on a hot dog. Plus they invented a liqueur to punish people for coming to Chicago.
Right you are. And as you move down the state it gets more and more Floridian. I’m sure you saw this about one of Springfield’s finest: https://www.theroot.com/illinois-police-officer-resigns-after-racist-social-med-1848756282. This is from The Root, but the story in their local news is so much more horrifying. Note: they’re all like that.
lol, man, that’s certainly a “hot take.”
Just stopped by to say that Molly Shannon is a National Treasure.
+1 for your screen name.
What a waste of time for her.
If Molly Ringwald had that level of scorn for me I am not sure I could go on living
I 100% picture Ringwald giving her that disgusted, mouth slightly open Breakfast Club glower. And wearing her Breakfast Club sweater. Basically I picture Molly Shannon wandering into the Breakfast Club for a few minutes.
No, 2022 is the year of the War on Women. My local news channel (online) publishes no fewer than 5-8 stories (plus mug shots) of women being bad mothers (alot of those), women stealing, women doing all of the bad things. Women of ALL colors. Except the bad things simply aren’t as bad as the bad boy stuff. In fact, half of the stories aren’t even local. This city wants to make sure everyone knows that this country’s women are sick and deranged and dangerous.Guess this was your day, Molly.
as opposed to every year before this one in which women were constantly praised and celebrated?
Is it a Sinclair station?
Yes, it is.
In a related note, Mamet is a right wing POS.
so how does that impact your enjoyment of heist, gangster, action flicks he’s written and directed for decades, some of the most enjoyable movies of all time? Can you appreciate them still, or is it all dead wasted celluloid crap now? he’s one that I’m especially intrigued by “cancelling” as I’ve always loved his work- my entire adult life- while ALWAYS disliking him personally, long before I knew any of his crazy delusions or conspiracy nonsense. He was always kind of a dick in general, playing into the tough guy thing, and acting like he was so OG and above it all, while still playing the game. So…now what?
Molly Ringwald has long since not had any time for people’s nonsense!
Gatekeepers aside, what about the ethics of conning your peers just to advance yourself? Hey, how about an all-Molly revival of Glengarry Glenn Ross? I know at least one Molly who’d be down for it.
Now *that’s* a story. I gripe at you a lot these days, AV Club…but this was a good choice.