Paul Guyot’s Hollywood fantasy comes true—and then he starts dreaming about St. Louis
By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
Paul Guyot grew up in the Arizona desert, where the ground was either fickle shifting sand or hard-baked earth. His parents, reeling from the tragic loss of his older brother, didn’t seem to know what to do with him. So he played alone in the side yard, and it grew lush with possibility.
“I won several World Series rings in that yard and a lot of Masters and U.S. Open titles,” he says. “I also starred in several action movies and won an Oscar or two.”
He remembers sitting with his parents in the back of their pickup truck at the drive-in, a grocery bag of popcorn in front of them, watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and yearning “to be inside that screen.”
What his parents wanted was for him to be a golf pro. His dad ran a two-pump gas station; his mom had cashiered at a racetrack. In their side yard, their son wore white and talked gently with rich folk.
He caddied through his teens, seeing the fairways as “beautiful rivers of green snaking through the desert brown.” But he couldn’t major in golf at the University of Arizona-Tucson, so he chose creative writing. He’d already published his first work—Laws, a parody of Jaws—in the back of Mrs. Parker’s fifth-grade class, followed by High Afternoon, “a violent and bloody, yet at the same time shoot-milk-through-your-nose funny, parody of spaghetti Westerns.”
In college, he met a guy who said he “knew Hollywood,” so they decided to blow off school and move there.
Guyot ended up working the graveyard shift at a Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard. His friend gave up and went home—which turned out to be West Covina, Calif., “no closer to L.A. than Tucson!”
Eventually Guyot’s parents drove down, hitched his smashed-in Honda (you cut the wheel left to drive straight ahead) to their pickup truck and took him home. He figured he’d seen the last of Hollywood. But three years later, Nicholas Cage came to Tucson to film Firebirds. Guyot auditioned to be an extra. They made him Cage’s stand-in.
The Tucson Community Center looked like a military operation, readying for an invasion, with people running around talking into headsets and walkie-talkies. Inside, everything was dark except the glowing set, ringed by giant Panaflex cameras. “Pretty overwhelming, huh?” somebody said, and Guyot answered without turning: “I’m home.”
Next the casting director asked whether he’d be a stand-in for Don Johnson in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. When they left Tucson, Johnson barked, “Bring the kid along.” He wound up back in L.A. as a stand-in for Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, James Spader, Tommy Lee Jones. “I think it was because I left them alone,” he muses. “About 98 percent of all stand-ins are struggling actors. But the cinematographer is the guy who uses the stand-in, so I quickly learned as much as I could about shadows and flares and how to find the light. I paid attention.”
He also started writing again, using the down time on the set to churn out a teen comedy, an action movie, a weird dark comedy. By now he’d met his future wife, Kelly McCarthy, who was working as an assistant to a TV director. She suggested he get an agent, and soon he was writing an episode of Snoops. Then Felicity, followed by three seasons of Judging Amy.
Meanwhile, he and Kelly had two children and started coming back to Kelly’s hometown, St. Louis, on holidays. “It was so green!” Guyot exults. “It had everything a big city had, yet it felt like a small town. Kelly’s family would laugh at me because I’d come back and say, ‘The cashier at Dierbergs talked to me!’”
Kelly was executive producer for the pilot of HBO’s Carnivàle. But she was more than willing to walk away from it when Guyot convinced her that he wanted to move to St. Louis and write books.
“I’m not sure my agent’s mouth has closed since I told him,” he chuckles. But for a mortgage the size of his car payment, they bought a two-story redbrick house in Chesterfield on a street with eight children their kids’ ages. “In L.A., the nannies are all raising the children while the parents are off having plastic surgery,” he says wryly. “Our kids didn’t have any friends!”
His first thrill was buying a lawnmower. (“In L.A., all you need is a Weed Eater.”) He loved that their mailbox was “shaped like a mailbox, with a flag that goes up!” He loved the change of seasons.
“I feel real,” he told Kelly, “for the first time in my life.”
They were sitting contentedly in his in-laws’ kitchen when the phone rang. “I have Stephen Cannell calling for Paul,” a woman’s voice said. Guyot laughed and said, “Oh, OK, put him on,” figuring it was a joke.
Cannell’s voice filled his ear. Stephen J. Cannell, the genius behind The Rockford Files and 21 Jump Street. TNT had gotten him out of retirement because they liked his idea for a show about FBI serial profilers. But Cannell didn’t want to write it.
“You’re the guy,” he said. Guyot gulped and offered to fly out so that they could take a meeting. “No, you’re the guy,” Cannell said. “I read your stuff.”
What he’d read was a pilot Guyot had set in St. Louis called Arch City, about a squad of cops here.
Guyot wrote Cannell’s pilot, logging 25,000 frequent-flyer miles between last June and December. Then the phone rang again. “They’re making the pilot,” Cannell said. “C’mon back.”
Guyot clears his throat. “I ... er ... had not been completely honest with the L.A. people. I’d told them we were just here with family. They said, ‘Oh, family illness?’ I said, ‘No, no, we’re just hanging out.’”
He had set this pilot in St. Louis, too, hoping it would be filmed here. “They find these bodies buried in a football field in St. Louis County,” he explains, “and they’re all from different municipalities, so there are all these police departments, all these complications. The captain of the Chesterfield police helped me do it accurately.”
Guyot also wanted the pilot shot in St. Louis so it wouldn’t “look like every other show.” The producers said they couldn’t afford to film here. Guyot made call after call and proved them wrong. So they said, “We’re gonna get killed by St. Louis weather.”
Muttering under his breath, he rewrote the pilot for San Diego. It rained the entire time.
“We were shooting in an abandoned rodeo arena,” he says, “and it was a quagmire, pure mud. It wouldn’t even dry out enough for them to get the dead bodies in and dress it for the shot.”
On the fourth day of shooting, Guyot was sitting next to the producer under a tarp, rain pounding overhead, talking to Kelly. “I hung up and just stared at him. Finally, he felt my gaze and said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘It’s 50 degrees and sunny in St. Louis right now.’”
The producer swore and walked away.
Guyot flew home and started plotting a murder mystery.
