Part 2 is also the most autobiographical section -- and holds the key to why August was motivated to write about a creator's responsibility to his creations. In the role of "Knowing's" frazzled show-runner, Gavin, Reynolds is the film's most obvious stand-in for August. Davis plays the development executive who literally drives him crazy.
"Especially the middle section of the movie was very much based on my own experience running my first TV show ['D.C.' for the WB] and getting to a place where most of my time was spent living inside an alternate universe and trying to write a show from the inside and really losing touch with the boundaries between where the real world stopped and where my imaginary world began," says August, who would spend long hours as a child alone in his room inventing James Bond stories.
"When you let yourself get lost, it can be exciting and tempting because your normal responsibilities go away, but there's that danger that you're not going to be able to find your way back to normalcy again."
These feelings degenerated into a self-diagnosed nervous breakdown in 2000 and August was eventually fired from the show and beset by guilt at the thought he had stranded his characters.
"It could be my own personal brand of crazy," he admits. "But I suspect that quite a fair number [of screenwriters] do have that sense of responsibility because you spend a year working on the script, and those characters are right at your fingertips for all that time. And there's a bit of a Pinocchio quality in that they're just little wooden dolls sitting on the shelf, but if the movie gets made, then they actually get brought to life."
Mirroring reality
At least one character in "The Nines" doesn't have to rely on August's Blue Fairy wand to become real. In Part 2, McCarthy plays herself. And just as Gavin writes his pilot for McCarthy to star in, August has written the actress into several of his other projects, including "D.C."
"It was really scary because I think you can do anything under the guise of: 'It's not me,' " she says. "And it was supposed to be me playing myself. All the topics were real -- like my husband and I had just bought a house, and all these lines kind of blurred. And as things would happen, John would just slip them in there. So it was a little more nerve-racking to really talk about things that are actually yours. I'm glad I've done years of Groundlings because I can just kind of improvise it."
