Fun Times on the Set and in the ’Sades with Charlie Grandy

By JACQUELINE PRIMO | Assistant Managing Editor

On a warm winter day, Palisadian Charlie Grandy is a long way from his home in the Alphabet Streets, bouncing along a bumpy road past quaint village shops, then big-city skyscrapers, then European castles soaring into the skyline.

Trams packed with people drive past and wave, and Grandy good-naturedly gives them an easy smile and a wave back.

But the laid-back Grandy isn’t driving through a fairytale countryside or New York City. Instead, he’s piloting a golf cart, bopping around the Universal Studios lot to and from various sets for “The Mindy Project.”

As a writer and executive producer on the hit show, Grandy is on his second day back from hiatus to begin shooting the final 13 episodes of season four. (The season’s first 13 episodes were shot and aired on Hulu before the winter break.)

With high-fives and hugs, Grandy and the show’s cast and crew greet each other as eagerly as school kids back from summer vacation.

Among the sitcom’s stars who greet Grandy are Ed Weeks, who is just as dashing and charming in real life as his character Jeremy Reed is on the show, and Mindy Kaling herself, the show’s creator, who proved just as quirky, cool and fun-loving in person as her TV persona.

For Grandy, moving from the writers’ room to various sets to working with the actors—it’s just another day at work. And cruising around on a golf cart while driving down James Stewart Avenue on the NBC/Universal lot is just part of his daily commute.

It’s all the culmination of a prolific career that’s earned him two Primetime Emmys plus two Writers Guild of America nominations.

Despite the success, “I always felt like my life was a long road back to the Palisades,” Grandy tells the Palisadian-Post during an exclusive set visit on Wednesday, Jan. 20.

A JOKE MACHINE

Grandy was born in New York and moved with his parents (including dad Fred Grandy, best remembered as Gopher on “The Love Boat”) to the Via Bluffs neighborhood of Pacific Palisades when he was just a baby.

From there, Grandy lived in various Los Angeles neighborhoods on the Westside until he reached the sixth grade, when his father moved to Iowa and his mother headed east to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Grandy went on to attend Harvard University where he majored in East Asian Studies—a choice he refers to as a bit of “rebellion” on his part, having come from a family in the entertainment industry.

But he was around 9 or 10 when his dad introduced him to “Monty Python”—unknowingly planting the seed.

As a kid, Grandy would listen to stand-up comedy albums a la Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Steve Martin and Bill Hicks, whom he called “a real comic’s comic.” Grandy started doing his own stand-up comedy after graduating from college in 1997.

His foray into stand-up lasted about a year before he landed a gig at “The Daily Show” with then-writing partner Dan Goor. He migrated to “Saturday Night Live” in 2001 to write for the show’s weekly political/current events mock newscast sketch “Weekend Update,” which at the time featured Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon.

In 2002, over SNL’s four-month production hiatus, Grandy tried his hand at stand-up comedy again, this time in Brooklyn.

“It was a fun time to be doing stand-up. I had a lot of access to stage-time,” Grandy says, noting a five-minute set he did for Comedy Central’s long-running show “Premium Blend.”

“I quit immediately after because I realized I preferred writing comedy to performing it. And I preferred spending time with my wife-to-be Sage, who heckled me less than stand-up audiences,” Grandy notes. “I was much more excited about the inception of the joke than the delivery of the joke.”

Grandy would go on to be a writer and producer for SNL until 2008, working with the cast members who have become household names—Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Maya Rudolph and Seth Meyers, among others.

“That whole crew has gone on to dominate late-night television,” Grandy says.

Along with the on-screen comedians, the writers’ room was filled with equal amounts of talent over the years Grandy was on staff.

“You stay close with that class you come in with,” Grandy says.

In 2008 Grandy joined the writing staff of hit sitcom “The Office,” a series for which he would become co-producer and eventually supervising producer.

“When I left late-night TV, I figured I had written between 25,000 and 30,000 jokes over eight years, five pages of jokes a day,” Grandy says.

And then, ever the humble gentleman, he adds, “About 3 percent of them were any good. Though through hard work my percentage is now about 4 percent.”

ON THE “MINDY” SET

It doesn’t take spending a lot of time with Charlie Grandy to see how down-to-earth and genuinely funny he is.

Grandy is approached by cast and crew (who have clearly become good friends with him) everywhere he goes on the NBC/Universal lot that day—from the set of an extremely realistic New York City subway car, to an apartment set, to the writers’ room where “The Mindy Project” scribes were working on a script for an upcoming episode.

Stepping into the writers’ room, Grandy greets the team and takes his place behind his computer at the head of the table. With his hand on his chin, he scans the pages of a script the writers prepared that day.

“This is good,” he says with a laugh as his eyes move along the screen.

The writers smile in his direction. It’s clear that making Grandy laugh is a good thing.

The sitcom stars Mindy Kaling as the bubbly and quirky Mindy Lahiri, an Ob/Gyn doctor at the center of the romantic-comedy series.

“Mindy has tremendous focus,” Grandy says of his friend and co-worker. “She’s the most talented writer I’ve ever worked with…She’s hilarious and thoughtful and smart.”

Grandy and Kaling have a history dating back to his SNL days when Kaling breezed in as a guest writer for a week around 2006. The two also worked on “The Office” together for years.

Now, Grandy says “The Mindy Project” is unlike any show he has written on.

“Mindy has such a clear voice. That makes it so much easier to write jokes. It’s very clear now to say this is something she would or wouldn’t do,” he says of her character on the show.

On a typical day, Grandy and the writers are either getting a script ready for a table read, prepping a script to shoot or “breaking stories” (developing the story and jokes for an episode).

“The nice thing about being on a show for a few years is you round the characters out, give them more of a backstory, put them through greater challenges. It keeps it interesting,” Grandy says.

Even better, he adds, “I love being in the writers’ room. The highlight of my day is being in that room, just with funny people figuring out stories.”

But the writing process isn’t always glamorous, he admits. And in order to churn out a script in two or three days, which he often does, it takes more than just being creative and funny.

“You can’t have writer’s block. It’s a discipline. It’s not very sexy,” Grandy says.

FAMILY TIME IN THE ’SADES

Cut to a scene that’s far more familiar to most Palisadians—the Palisades Recreation Center. Away from the craziness of the Universal lot, Grandy is in the midst of another kind of chaos a few days later on Jan. 23. Instead of being in the driver’s seat of a golf cart this time, however, he’s sitting on the sidelines cheering on his son Teddy, 8, who is playing in a nail-biting overtime basketball game in the gym.

Earlier that morning, Grandy was encouraging his other son Rhys, 6, at his PPBA baseball tryout.

Mom Sage, with her sunny personality, is on hand too as is daughter Annabelle, 10, who nods her head enthusiastically when asked if her dad is funny.

“He always puts a funny twist on things,” Annabelle says.

As the family poses for a photo for the Post, son Rhys hams it up on the slide, clowning for the camera.

“He’s way funnier than I am,” Grandy says with a laugh.

It was just this sort of family-friendly, small town community scene at the Rec Center that brought Grandy back to the Palisades in 2008 when he transitioned from “SNL” to “The Office.”

“Actually it was Sage who told me if we were going to move to California, the Palisades was the only place we could live,” Grandy says.

Sage, a former news producer for CNN, knew about the Palisades because she had a brother and her best friend living here.

Like many Palisadians, the Grandy family likes to keep it local when eating out—Roast, Casa Nostra, Kay ’n’ Dave’s, Beech Street and Juicecrafters are on their regular rotation. They’re looking forward to even more options once developer Rick Caruso opens his Palisades Village project.

“We’re really excited about Caruso,” Grandy says.

Sage adds, “It seems like if anyone could do this project, he’s really the right guy for the job.”

After the morning’s sports activities, the family heads off to one of their favorite eating spots: Palisades Garden Café.

Plans for the rest of the day include working on the kids’ projects for the upcoming Palisades Elementary Charter School Science Fair on Feb. 1.

“We’re making home-made lightning,” says Grandy, who had just received news that his latest TV comedy project—“Dumb Prince” with co-executive producer and longtime friend Amy Poehler—got picked up for a pilot.

Will the science fair project and his new show be winners? That remains to be seen, but you can bet Grandy will have a whole lot of fun in the process.

Additional reporting by Frances Sharpe