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How did she go from ugly duckling into swan? It’s the Leni Riefenstahl in her. producer, observes, “When she got here she was kind of goofy-looking, but everyone had a crush on her because she was so funny and bitingly mean. “Tina is not clay,” says Lorne Michaels, the impresario of Saturday Night Live, Mean Girls, and 30 Rock, when I ask him how he helped shape her career. Before she even had a chance to take a breath, a freakish twist of fate turned her from red- to white-hot, and enabled her, at long last, to boost the ratings of 30 Rock: Fey was a ringer for another hot-teacher-in-glasses, Sarah Palin, the comely but woefully unprepared Alaska governor, who bounded out of the woods with her own special language to become not only the first Republican woman to run on a national ticket but also God’s gift to comedy and journalism. The comedy struggled in the ratings for two years but was a critical success, winning seven Emmys last fall and catapulting Fey into red-hot territory. Then she lost 30 pounds, fixed her hair, put on a pair of hot-teacher glasses, and made her name throwing lightning-bolt zingers on “Weekend Update.” Speeding through the comedy galaxy, she wrote the hit Mean Girls and created her own show based on an S.N.L.-type show: 30 Rock. Then she retreated backstage at S.N.L., wore a ski hat, and gained weight writing sharp, funny jokes and eating junk food. pal Colin Quinn dubbed Tina Fey “Herman the German.” She’s a sprite with a Rommel battle plan.Įlizabeth Stamatina Fey started as a writer and performer with a bad short haircut in Chicago improv. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.” “I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. “I love to play strippers and to imitate them,” says Fey. I mention that in the pilot of 30 Rock Liz Lemon puts on a Laura Bush–style pink suit from her show-within-a-show’s wardrobe department to go to lunch with Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), to try to sign him, and he takes her to a strip club in the Bronx, where she gets drunk and dances onstage with a stripper named Charisma. “It didn’t go great when you came back, did it? I was very angry.
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We ate chicken, really good pasta.”Īnd Fey still recoils. (He composed the bouncy retro theme music.) Richmond still reassures her, all these years later: “Nothing happened. (“We walked into a model of the human heart,” Fey deadpans.) The writer-comedian and the musician-director dated for seven years, have been married for another seven, and have worked together in improv theater in Chicago, on Saturday Night Live, and on 30 Rock. They fell in love quickly, soon after a Sunday afternoon spent together at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Their conversation is woven with intimacy, the easy banter of a couple who knew each other long before fame hit. “‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.”’ “‘-over to the Doll House,”’ Fey finishes. “When we were first dating,” he says, harking back to Chicago in 1994, “some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over-”’