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Welcome to the O.C Snippets

A random assortment of Mischa-related screencaptures from the new Welcome to The O.C book. Highlights include:

• The casting process for Mischa. • The driveway scene in the pilot. • What are Marissa's interests outside of Ryan? Discussions on a storyline relating to her being a Mean Girl, and/or helping the girl Luke cheats on her with and gets pregnant. • TJ was originally supposed to have her drunk driving off a cliff and involved a cliffhanger with her to allow for Fox to re-cast Mischa if they wanted. • Filming the Luke / Marissa sex scene. Mindy acknowledging the Ben/Mischa chemistry at the start and how by the end they were not on good terms. • References to Mischa reading on set (gasp!). • References to her being isolated on set (I wonder does anyone ask her about this). • Mischa's concerns around the material and expressing her frustrations. • Mischa refusing to speak about the Trey attempted rape scene and implying it was very uncomfortable for her (and directly contradicting Stephanie in the paragraph above). • The original S1 ending involving Eddie, domestic violence and Ryan getting revenge and getting into trouble. • Potential idea of Marissa being imprisoned at the start of S3. • Josh suggesting Marissa could have survived the crash and sailed away on Seth's boat.

Sebastian Stan auditioned for the role of Johnny and they chose Ryan Donowho over him, they didn't even see him in person and didn't realise how much smaller he would look next to Mischa. How could they hire him without even seeing him in person. What in the world.

New Sepinwall interview in the Hollywood Reporter

New Sepinwall interview in the Hollywood Reporter:

Mischa's story was not what he thought would it be. Bleh. (at 28:00)

Josh and Stephanie didn't want to talk about Johnny at all and rescheduled multiple interviews in order to avoid it (this is not directly Mischa related but I lol’d).

In terms of things he was not expecting, Mischa's exit was the biggest in the book. Mischa was really reluctant to talk about her exit at all 😦

He describes his conversation with Mischa as "delicate" and the one he spoke to the least and required the most negotiating to get. "If she doesn't want to unpack her trauma with a journalist, I completely get that and that's her right" because of that she was very weary and simply did not answer many of his questions (at 30:00).

He had to get a lot more from others about her than she was willing to give him.

They ask him how much did the show's exit impact her career - and he says well the gossip at the time could not have helped but Mischa's mom was annoyed that Ben and Adam were getting movie offers when she wasn't.

Maybe showbusiness had decided they didn't want her before she was even fired he seems to suggest. Why would he speculate like this after also calling his conversation with her delicate?

Remember that in a vault somewhere there is a recording of the full OC cast singing this song. Someone release it already!

Season 1 promo shoots of Mischa Barton as Marissa Cooper.

Random assortment of Season 1 stills (Part 2).

Random assortment of stills from Season 1 (Part 1).

Stills from Season 1 Episode 15 - The Third Wheel.

Stills from Season 1 Episode 16 - The Links.

Stills of our Golfing Girl from Season 1 Episode 16 - The Links.

Stills from Season 1 Episode 13 - The Best Chrismukkah Ever.

Mischa Barton: ‘The trauma doesn’t just go away overnight’

The OC made her one of the most famous stars of the Noughties. Now 37, and with a new role in Neighbours, she’s back — and this time it’s on her own terms.

There was a time, not so long ago — the Noughties — when we hunted young women until they went mad. A pack of men with cameras followed them, stalked them, waited outside their homes to take their photograph, so that people could devour their lives and their changing teenage bodies, and watch their rising panic as they cracked under the pressure we were putting them under.

“It was all very Hunger Games,” says Mischa Barton, 37, sitting in a hotel room in central London, hair blow-dried, coffee poured, legs crossed. The British-American actress was 17 when she was cast in the teenage TV drama The OC, catapulting her to worldwide fame and making her Karl Lagerfeld’s “face of a generation” — an It girl in an era of size-zero bodies, up-skirt shots and gossip blogs.

Barton was — reluctantly — a paparazzi favourite. She was beautiful, cool and sceney, with a trail of rock star boyfriends and wild child friends. She suffered as a consequence of rather than in spite of the fame. She was arrested for drink driving, spent time in rehab and was detained in a psychiatric hospital. In 2017 a video of her, incoherent, rambling and distressed, was sold to the gossip site TMZ, peddled as proof of her going off the rails. Her drink had actually been spiked with a date rape drug. That same year an ex-boyfriend tried to sell a video — filmed without her knowledge — of her having sex and being naked in her own home.

“You can go to therapy every day for the rest of your life,” she says, “but there’s just a certain amount of trauma [from] all that I went through, particularly in my early twenties, that just doesn’t go away overnight.”

Today her life is a little quieter — the paparazzi don’t yet know where her new home is in Los Angeles (though the sound of cameras can trigger a panic attack, part of her enduring post-traumatic stress disorder). The OC is coming up to its 20th anniversary, with a new generation of Gen Z fans going wild for the Y2K vibe. She has had a stint on Dancing with the Stars and the reality TV show The Hills: New Beginnings, as well as parts in horror films, indie films and now the resurrected teatime soap Neighbours.

Barton was, and still is, a valuable commodity. “They first wanted me to do an arc on Neighbours when I was in my twenties,” she says, dressed smartly in a blazer, A-line dress and preppy jacquard pumps. I’ve just finished watching the new season, I tell her. “Oh wow,” she says in her mid-Atlantic drawl, “have you actually been watching it?” Sure, I continue, it was nostalgic. “Oh wow,” she says again, flatly. “Yeah. I haven’t seen any of it.” Barton still has the cool-girl energy that drew so many people in: arch, a little judgmental, but fun. She is the popular girl at the party.

The “final” episode of Neighbours was broadcast on Channel 5 last July, after 37 years and 8,903 episodes featuring alumni including Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Margot Robbie. A group of heartbroken fans campaigned for its return and four months later Amazon Prime signed a deal with the production company. The reboot features old favourites Susan, Carl and Harold, as well Barton’s new character, Reece Sinclair, the expensively dressed American hotel proprietor who is having an affair with the bellboy.

Barton spent two months filming in Melbourne, cramming lines for 5am call times. “They work crazy hard [on soaps],” she says. “Really, it was gruelling. You’re lucky to get a second take.” She did, however, rewrite some of her script. “They don’t let everybody change their lines” — she lowers her voice — “trust me. The other kids were like, oh, can I do that? And [the writers] were like, no.” She cackles. “Say your lines as scripted!”

The actress will always be known for The OC, in which she played Marissa Cooper, a rich, blonde Californian who was troubled and glamorous — and who every teenage girl was desperate to be. The first series, which aired in 2003, pulled in an average of 9.7 million viewers per episode in America and was a hit on Channel 4, and she won two Teen Choice awards.

“I don’t think I was fully prepared for that level of fame,” she says. “Because it has never been something that I have sought out. I really would much rather be anonymous.”

Still a teenager, Barton was lauded for her looks and treated, she says, as much older than her years. “You do look back and you were 18 dating 34-year-olds,” she continues. “With hindsight you’re like, yeah, that was weird.” An interview with Harpers & Queen has recently resurfaced in which Barton, 19 at the time, says she was told by her publicist to sleep with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was 30, “for the sake of your career”.

She left The OC after three series — she says she was bullied on set and exhausted by 18-hour days for each 24-episode series — asking the writers to kill off Marissa as brutally as they could. She died lying in the road, dripping in fake blood, her crashed car up in flames.

In the following years Barton became a familiar face on the LA nightlife scene, all smoky eyeliner and faded band T-shirts, photographed with Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse, while dating the Kooks’ frontman Luke Pritchard, the American rocker Cisco Adler and the Roughs’ guitarist Taylor Locke. “I definitely got to tour with some cool bands,” she says, still a little thrilled by the whole thing. “I mean, I was obsessed. But I don’t know if I could date a guy in a band any more. It just sounds exhausting and dirty.” The paparazzi attention was certainly not “healthy” for romantic relationships. “Everything is just so heightened,” she says. “You depend on the person so much more, you think you’re that much more in love because they’re your grip on some sort of normalcy.”

In the gossip blogs she was considered fair game. She was criticised for losing a stone in a year, then criticised for being “bloated Barton”, with the celebrity blogger Perez Hilton often the leader of the pack. “Nothing I did was good enough,” she says today. “It was the peak of cruelty about young women’s bodies. It was wild.”

Could she leave the house without being followed by photographers? “No,” she says immediately. “I couldn’t. [The paparazzi] were doing all kinds of crazy stuff to me.” She says they tracked her car, tried to climb over the walls of her house, paid off restaurants and bought mobile phones for homeless people so they could tip them off. “I was stalked,” she says. “I did go a little bit nuts at [one] point. I just felt really helpless.”

Then there was an arrest (2007, driving under the influence, without a valid licence and possessing cannabis), rehab (court ordered) and psychiatric hospital. She said she was “depressed and overworked”, and then, she claims, pumped full of prescription drugs by her “team” to keep her working. People have got kinder about mental health, though, she says. “That’s one of the better things about society these days — people are more willing to talk about having had depression or anxiety, or it’s not so taboo.”

But it was her legal battle against her ex-boyfriend that was “one of the worst and most gruelling experiences of my life”, she says. In 2017 Jon Zacharias tried to auction off illicit videos of her to the internet’s highest bidder.

After a years-long legal battle she won the case to prevent him from doing so. “It’s shocking to realise that there is that type of darkness in the world,” she says. “And you wonder what you’ve done to attract it.”

Mischa Anne Barton was born in Hammersmith in west London, the middle of three girls, her mother a producer and photographer, her father a foreign exchange broker. She went to St Paul’s Girls’ Preparatory School before the family moved to New York when Barton was six.

She was a bookish, shy child who found respite in acting. She had her first modelling job at eight and her first professional stage role the same year. By 11 she was in Italian Vogue. By 13 she was the lead in the movie Lawn Dogs, which had dark undertones of child molestation, followed by Pups, a crime drama. “Even from a young age I was sexualised,” she wrote in Harper’s Bazaar in 2021.

After her big break in The OC she starred as the “hot girl” in various music videos (Noel Gallagher, James Blunt, Enrique Iglesias) and became the face of Chanel, Calvin Klein, Monsoon Accessorise, Neutrogena, Herbal Essences and Keds.

“I was definitely told ‘sign here’ many, many times over,” she says. “I’ve gotten a lot better with legalese. Now I will read a contract front to back.”

Do people think she made more money than she has? “Oh, I know they do.” Today you can watch The OC on Amazon Prime, Hulu and ITV. “But I say to my friends, ‘Oh cool, I just got a direct deposit for $1.50.’ And they’re like, ‘What’s that?’ And I’m like, ‘Residuals.’ ”

She pushed herself into indie films and cerebral plays, which she loved, and then appeared on the rebooted reality show The Hills, which “wasn’t for me”, she says. “It’s the fame-chasing and the posing stuff that I don’t like. I found them to be very alieny.” She says the producers tried to make out that the original cast of The Hills had hung out with the cast of The OC in the Noughties, “but that was not the case. I never saw them around. I mean, it was a completely different world, a different type of celebrity.” She looks up from pouring herself another coffee. “You know what I mean.”

Today Barton lives between New York and LA. She is steady and grown-up, but still with a streak of flightiness. Her spontaneity “is a problem”, she says. She travelled around Indonesia alone over the summer, then France, then the UK, where she has been staying with her older sister, a barrister, in Kensington.

“I’m happy being single at the moment,” she says. “Because it comes up, the whole thing of ‘Do you wanna settle down and have kids?’ I am a weirdly traditional, conventional person when it comes to stuff like that, more so than people think. But it really depends on the person you’re with.”

In the past few years there has certainly been a collective reckoning regarding our behaviour towards young, famous women of that era. But does that regret mean anything to the women who suffered through it?

Recently the FBI knocked on Barton’s door, saying they were “working on a case” and wanted to play her a series of tapes. She listened to her conversations with people from years ago, which were recorded covertly. “Who knows who was doing it?” she says. “But I was almost grateful to know that they [the FBI] were going to such lengths, otherwise you feel crazy and paranoid.”

She has also had direct apologies. In 2019 Perez Hilton told her, on The Hills: “If I could go back in time and do things differently, I would.” Barton was largely unmoved. “This bullying you did for so long to so many young girls, I find it hard to let go,” she replied. “I can’t really accept the apology entirely.”

I bring up Hilton today and she rolls her eyes. “I don’t listen to anything he says because he’s so crazy,” she says. “You can see how sorry people feel for what they did to people like Britney [Spears] then. Everyone now is like, ‘I can’t believe we did that to those poor women.’” She pauses. “People feel so entitled to you and your body and your image. It’s a strange feeling. It’s strange.”

Video included in the article:

Mischa Sunday Telegraph Interview

Why Mischa Barton said yes to surprise role on Neighbours

She was the star of the hottest teen drama of the noughties, but The O.C’s Mischa Barton shocked everyone when she signed on to the revival of Aussie soap Neighbours. Now she exclusively reveals to Stellar why she gave up work in the US for a show she’d never seen in suburban Melbourne.

After starring in the hottest teen drama of the noughties and being idolised for her every fashionable move, Mischa Barton surprised everyone when she signed up for some suburban drama on Australia’s most famous cul-de-sac in a revival of Neighbours. But then the British-born, US-based actor – who started her career on the stage and in soap operas – has never relished the role Hollywood chose for her. In an exclusive interview with Stellar, the 37-year-old recalls being cast in The O.C. because she “wasn’t anything like the other young blonde girls going in and trying out” and reveals how she’s taken charge of her own narrative.

Craning her neck forward, Mischa Barton lets out a squeal of excitement as she hears the first bars of Neighbours actor Stefan Dennis’ 1989 single ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good’ emanate from a mobile phone. “I’m adding that to my playlist!” she exclaims with a throaty laugh, before plotting how she will tease Dennis on the Neighbours set the next day, her first suggestion being that she might just broadcast the tune loudly in her dressing room.

While Barton was a fan of Kylie Minogue before joining the Neighbours cast, she was far less familiar with the era-typifying swerve into pop music made by Dennis (who has been playing the show’s “villain” Paul Robinson since 1985), let alone its reputation for turning out future Australian music superstars. As such, she can confidently say it’s “very, very unlikely” that her 10-week stint on Ramsay Street was motivated by a secret desire to follow in the footsteps of Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Delta Goodrem or even Dennis.

So if not music, then what did prompt the former star of the early 2000s teen drama The O.C. to say yes to a stint in suburban Melbourne working on a show that she has never seen, and that has no cultural footprint in the US, where she lives?

Certainly for Network 10, adding Barton to the cast was a shrewd move to create buzz when the series returns later this month, resurrected just over a year after its 37-year run came to an end and also airing for the first time in the US and Canada via Amazon’s streaming service Freevee (as well as streaming in Australia and New Zealand on Amazon Prime). For Barton, who wasn’t yet born when Neighbours debuted in 1985, it was a serendipitous chance to try something new, as well as reconnect with some old friends in Australia.

When Stellar spoke to Barton in June, a week before she returned to the US, she explained the role had “come at a really good time, because while I was loving living in New York, there’s a writers’ strike on. And it’s [Northern Hemisphere] summertime. So there’s really not that much work going around for a lot of my actor friends.”

Of course, the Hollywood actors’ strike – which was called in mid-July – has also compounded the issue for Barton’s fellow actors. However, practicality and picket lines aside, the real lure for Barton was the role of Reece Sinclair, a wealthy American who arrives in Erinsborough under the guise of doing business – but in reality, has a much more personal agenda to fulfil. “And then she falls for a guy,” Barton says with a smile. “It actually just felt like a very good fit for me in terms of a role I could really play. And I don’t always feel that way with television.”

Her sentiment is understandable given the 37-year-old’s most high-profile project since leaving The O.C. in 2006 was her surprising gear-shift into reality TV on The Hills: New Beginnings. A sequel to the popular MTV series that followed the daily lives of TV personalities Brody Jenner, Audrina Patridge, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, it was sold to her as an opportunity to let people see “the real Mischa Barton”. Ultimately, she felt let down by the process.

“Would I do it again? Probably not something like The Hills,” Barton tells Stellar. “I think they’re even continuing to try to do it, but it just wasn’t really all the things that were promised around it, like clearing up any misconceptions or getting people to know you. There are just people putting

on too many fronts and they’re not being themselves. So if people aren’t being themselves, it’s impossible because I’m used to having a script. That middle ground is just too trying for me. It’s partially scripted but it’s not, but they can’t really say that. So it wasn’t my favourite experience.

“But I’ve never been attracted to that kind of fame, either,” she adds. “It’s not something that I chase. I actually veer away from it.”

Fame has long been an uncomfortable by-product of Barton’s chosen career. Asked whether she’s grateful to have become a celebrity in an era when smartphones couldn’t capture her every move, Barton sighs wearily. “You can always play the grass is greener thing, and I just don’t feel that way,” she says. “I mean, in a sense, it would have been much easier for me if there had been social media to combat all the ludicrous stories in the press. Now, kids can really show their own narrative. You can use your own social media to be whoever you want to be.”

She qualifies her reply after a brief pause: “At the same time, I don’t really love social media. So I’m fine with having come up in a time when it wasn’t around and things were, in one sense, a lot simpler.”

That’s why, rather than opting for a luxury hotel suite, Barton relished staying in a relatively humble cottage nestled behind Melbourne’s bustling Chapel Street for the duration of her time filming Neighbours. There, she could cook meals for friends, do her own laundry and, when her schedule allowed, walk to the Prahran Market to pick up fresh fruit and veg. She also found time to indulge in a bit of shopping, and admits that she would be going home with far heavier suitcases than when she arrived. “I really liked a vintage store I found there,” she says of Chapel Street, which is known for its eclectic mix of high-end boutiques and second-hand clothing markets. “I did a lot of damage in there.”

Filming in Australia meant such excursions could be enjoyed without being recognised or photographed, and added a layer of protection for Barton, who has learnt the tricks to staying incognito – the easiest being to steer clear of bars and clubs where people inevitably want selfies.

Avoiding unwanted attention wasn’t always so easy. When The O.C. first aired in 2003, it catapulted Barton and the rest of her young co-stars into a searing spotlight of adulation and attention. For someone who had been acting steadily since she was eight – making her screen debut in the US soap opera All My Children in 1994, and going on to appear in two of the biggest films of 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller The Sixth Sense and Richard Curtis’ hit romance Notting Hill – the sudden and frenzied interest in both The O.C. and her personal life was a shock to the system.

“I was 17 or 18 and it was a very specific kind of fame,” Barton recalls. “Most actors, they can work their whole lives and have a very normal level of notoriety or fame. But, for some reason, The O.C. was just one of those things. It was a time and a place, and it just took off in a very different direction. It was kind of an uncontrollable beast. But I’ve been in this industry for a long time and managed, for a large portion of it, to get away with just living a very normal life.”

Both Barton and her character, rich girl Marissa Cooper, became fashion icons of the time, with the actor regularly centre stage on red carpets and front row at fashion weeks, while young girls everywhere mimicked her onscreen style of low-slung jeans and spaghetti-strap tops.

Recalling her time in the fashion spotlight and the pressures to look a certain way in Hollywood, she says she’s “learnt how to get away from it. I don’t really live in LA anymore, so I don’t put myself under that constant scrutiny and pressure. I’ll only dip into [the Hollywood scene] when I feel like it’s healthy and something I want to do.”

Even so, Barton recalls how a “bizarre amount” of people found it hard to separate the British-born and New York-raised Barton from the quintessential Californian teenager she portrayed. “People were obsessed with Marissa Cooper,” she says. “I’d get sent a lot of [scripts] that are rehashes of her. And I was always like, ‘Do you not realise that’s actually not something I like to play?’ I didn’t really enjoy having to play that character. I had to find my own version of Marissa and I think the real reason I was cast is because I wasn’t really anything like the other young blonde girls going in and trying out for it.”

Barton left the show in its third season in 2006, when Marissa died in a shocking car crash. The series’ creator Josh Schwartz recently told Vanity Fair that he regretted killing off her character, saying he wished he’d found a way to give Barton “the break she needed and wanted that still would’ve allowed for that character to return”.

Fans say The O.C. never recovered from Barton’s departure, but the death scene – in which Marissa’s body is carried from the flames by her longtime love Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) – is etched into TV history.

“I’ve only just rewatched that scene recently,” Barton admits. “I never watched it after I did it because there was really no reason to, but I just did the podcast [Welcome To The OC, Bitches!, hosted by her former co-stars Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke, who played her best friend Summer Roberts and mother Julie Cooper] and we rewatched it together, and it was weirdly emotional. I was like, ‘Oh, I forgot the car is on fire.’ And I forgot there’s no music playing for once in the show. It was done in a really interesting way.”

Despite the enduring affection the public still has for the series, Barton isn’t sure that a reboot of The O.C. would work for audiences today. “It’s not like it hasn’t come up before, but obviously, I’m dead,” she says with a smile. “Honestly, it’s more likely to work as an offshoot of it or something based around those characters that’s not exactly the same, rather than trying to simply resurrect them. You’d have to think outside the box if you want to resurrect The O.C. culture or characters.”

And while The O.C. featured former Neighbours co-star Alan Dale, who played his screen dad and is one of his good mates, Dennis had never seen the US series. He was only aware that Barton – or, as he knew her, “the vomiting girl from The Sixth Sense” – was coming to Ramsay Street.

“[I thought], ‘Oh, here we go, they’ve cast a Hollywood hero to show us how it’s done,’” Dennis admits to Stellar. “There was a cautious shyness initially as she was alone on the other side of the world, thrown into a building full of people she didn’t know and working day-by-day in a show she didn’t know or understand the way it worked. This cautious shyness was misread by me. I now like to think we have cemented a long-term friendship.”

Another castmate, Annie Jones (who rejoined the show in 2020, reprising her 1980s character Jane Harris), was equally impressed by Barton, enthusing that she brought a “beautiful, serene calmness to the set. It’s great for the show to have someone of Mischa’s calibre on it. She was gorgeous. Everyone loved her.”

And while Barton may be back in the US as Neighbours returns to air, she tells Stellar she remains excited that – unlike her very final departure from The O.C. – the door has been left open for a return. And the plot wheels are already turning in her head, as Barton teases, “Reece might pop up on FaceTime from New York.”

Not only was Adam Brody considered for the lead role in Jumper, Mischa was too!

Rachel BIlson, 2006 at 3:25 clarifies to Kimmel that Mischa was fired.

Alan Dale also had thoughts about Marissa's ending in an IGN interview in 2006:

IGN TV: Well a year later, they did kill Marissa… Dale: I don't understand what they're planning on doing with that. I have to say, they must feel really confident with the other characters to carry it, because it's that doe-eyed gentleness that she gives off that I think was very valuable to the show and I don't know what they think they're doing. But I guess they know their own business. I'm just an actor; I don't know.

Insightful article about the making of the show with JJ Philbin. She talks about Marissa's pivot in S3 with the Volchok storyline, as well as the changes to the Marissa/Berkeley episode (which we know from the original sides that are thankfully still out there)

The Making of a Golden Boy (The Guardian, 2005)

Moreover, the show is not quite as he envisioned in certain aspects. "The idea initially was that kids would casually have sex or not have sex, do drugs or not do drugs, and wouldn't draw conclusions about who they were as people," he says. You wouldn't have thought the Fox network would be his natural home. Fox does have some clever programmes with a liberal bent, notably The Simpsons (which has made typical, and telling, in-jokes about its Fox network base), but it is known mainly for pull-'em-in entertainment and trashy reality TV - "I married my midget spouse", as Schwartz describes it - and Fox News, of course, bastion of all kneejerking self-righteous conservatism. So, Josh, what's a nice liberal boy like you doing on a network like this?

"Yeah, yeah, Fox's reputation and Rupert's reputation is bipolar. People associate it with Fox News, which is very conservative, but the network tends to be more outrageous. Not necessarily tawdry, but willing to push the envelope," he insists. But not too far: he has had to "pull back on a lot of the partying that takes place on the show because the network has asked us to work with them on that".

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/22/broadcasting.fashion

Ben McKenzie's interview in Elle (Volume 20, issues 1-2, 2004) was not a good look then and is definitely not a good look now. Really interesting to think how little controversy this generated compared to another cast member's Elle interview the same year. ELLE: Comprehensive list. Anything you might actually respond to favorably? BEN: A political point of view is really sexy, especially in L.A. Women here are exotic and beautiful, but it's like you're in a zoo. You look around thinking, Wow, look at all those pretty animals, and then when one opens its mouth and speaks, you're like, Holy [Censored], the monkey's talking to me!

ELLE: Would it bother you to find out that a woman you were dating had had significantly more sexual partners than you had? BEN: I think it has to affect you.

ELLE: So what's an acceptable number? BEN: In the teens is understandable. But get into the twenties and that's not good at all. Over 50 would be like, Who are you?

The OC Strikes Back (IGN, 2004)

Looking through some old media and will post some of the things I find. This old IGN article from 2004 promoting the second season stood out and in particular this quote (images of the article at the end of the post): "The show's creator says he isn't worried about this season's evolution turning fans off, because the relational fabric of the series remains intact.  "I think the sort of core relationships that we have on the show, the Ryan/Marissa dynamic, the Seth/Summer dynamic, are the core, iconic relationships of this show," Schwartz said.  "They're like the magnetic, polarizing force of the show in that you can throw as many new characters and hurdles and obstacles in front of those characters as you want, but you can never break free of those original dynamics. That's the foundation of the show. Even when you see scenes where Ryan and Marissa aren't together, if they're off with other people, and then you see them share a scene together, you just feel like 'God, they should be together.' They have such unbelievable chemistry; there's something pulling them together. So to quote George Bush, we 'can run, but we can't hide,' and that's where our show lives and breathes in those core relationships."

Welcome to the OC, B! AMA Podcast Episode

The Welcome to the OC, Bitches podcast finally released the AMA episode (questions were taken from fans on the subreddit in May 2023) and originally it was released behind a paywall of Mindy's post-WTOCB podcast. They've released it publicly now and some tidbits below:

12:32 A passing reference to Mischa doing something for the troops (Rachel was wondering why they didn't do any events).

13:20 He mentions looking through his mom's scrapbooks for photos for the book and talks about how there's copies of the female cast members FHM covers and the crew seeing Autumn's and realising how attractive she is, that is why they wrote in that sex fantasy montage and had Ryan checking out her butt. Josh actually says the cover made them realise she had a nice butt. So wildly unprofessional.

14:20 Josh would not have killed Marissa if he could do things again.

17:07 My Johnny question (which Josh refuses to answer) and requesting my credit card details to release the show's scripts.

18:10 if Marissa had been alive in the AU would Ryan have stayed. Answer: yes.

23:56 Rachel says Adam "would definitely wanna do something for me right now" (re reboot) AND THEN JOSH SAYS "APPARENTLY HE COULDNT DO SOMETHING FOR YOU EARLIER" This is a comment about Rachel mentioning she didn't orgasm until her late-30s. After laughing about Josh's comment, Rachel says Adam gets it and knows it wasn't about him because he is a sane person. Okay.

24:26 Where would you have liked the story to have gone if Marissa had lived and there were more seasons and if she was alive in the series finale. Answer: Josh focuses on RM's shared sibling making things weird. That did not stop Dan and Serena Josh, you clearly have no problem with that premise.

Special thanks to Josh and Co for not really answering any of the questions. I listened to this to hopefully spare anyone else having to torture themselves through it!

There's a new book out by an entertainment journalist about various early 00 shows. And I have screencaptured the Mischa tidbits (and one Ben tidbit that amused me, lol how did Mischa get all of the blame with being the 'difficult' one in the discourse at the time? jfc).

Some observations:

The ferris wheel kiss was UNSCRIPTED. And they enjoyed it!

Can we please stop with the 'Olivia looks strong, Mischa looks weak' discourse. Please, I am begging you.

Great to get more info about the screen test. Thank you Patrick Rush for containing yourself and not commenting on Mischa as an actress like you so rudely did on the podcast.

Mischa's Eric Cartman request might be the cutest thing I have ever heard. God, she was so young.

The reference to RM being in love by the TJ episode.

Wish they had mentioned how much of a role Mischa played in developing Marissa, "she didn't ad-lib" doesn't do her justice.