As a general principle, Lena Dunham does not believe in removing anything that she has posted to the Internet; but, after she received a million and a half hits on YouTube for a video that showed her stripping down to a bikini, climbing into a fountain on the campus of Oberlin College, and performing her ablutions, she reconsidered the value of having personal boundaries. The six-minute video shows her in violation of college rules: having rinsed her hair and brushed her teeth under the fountain’s anemic cascade, she is approached by a security guard, who asks her to desist. (Dunham amiably complies, wrapping herself in a towel.) But it also shows her in violation of the visual conventions that typically pertain to bikini-clad coeds on film. Dunham, who made “The Fountain” three years ago, when she was twenty-one, does not have the body of a Girl Gone Wild. In the video, she has pale, ample thighs and a generous belly; greenish tattoos spiderweb her arms and back. Her blithe willingness to disrobe without shame caused an outburst of censure from viewers.
“There were just pages of YouTube comments about how fat I was, or how not fat I was, or saying, ‘That’s not a fat girl—go to Detroit and see a real fat girl,’ ” Dunham told me recently. She reluctantly removed the video from the site two years ago. She said, “I didn’t want you to Google me and the first thing you see is a debate about whether my breasts are misshapen.” Instead, if you Google “Lena Dunham” one of the first things you are likely to see is that her feature film, “Tiny Furniture”—of which she is the writer, director, and star—won the narrative-feature prize at the South by Southwest film festival last March. You might also learn that HBO has commissioned her to write, direct, co-executive-produce, and star in a pilot for a comedy series. You would certainly find her Twitter, which she updates several times a day. (“Every time I start feeling sexy I trip.”) You would not find her on Facebook, since she suspended her account not long ago. “I told people I wanted less connectivity, but really it’s that I keep getting messages from actors saying, ‘Here’s my headshot,’ ” she says.
In “Tiny Furniture,” which is being released in New York on November 12th, she plays a recent graduate named Aura. Having been dumped by her boyfriend, she returns to Tribeca to live with her mother, a preoccupied artist who photographs scenes staged with doll-house furniture, and her younger sister, a precocious student at an artsy private school who has just won a national poetry competition. Dunham made the movie a year and a half after graduating from Oberlin and moving back to Tribeca to live with her parents, both of whom are successful artists: Laurie Simmons makes photographs in which dolls and doll-house furniture are arranged to unsettling effect; Carroll Dunham makes exuberant, antic paintings that often feature a masculine figure with a penis where his nose should be. In the movie, Aura’s mother, Siri, is played by Simmons, and Aura’s sister, Nadine, is played by Grace Dunham, Lena’s younger sister, who at the time of filming was a student at St. Ann’s School, in Brooklyn Heights, and a recent recipient of a prestigious national poetry prize.
The movie begins with Aura attending an abject party in a friend’s East Village walk-up. (“You look so pretty!” “Oh, are you serious? I feel like this outfit just screams, ‘I’ve been living in Ohio for four years, take me back to your gross apartment and have sex with me.’ ”) It ends with her retreating to sleep beside her mother, in her mother’s bed, after having brief, dispiriting sex in an abandoned lot with a caddish chef from a restaurant where she’s worked as a hostess. A late-night conversation between mother and daughter ensues, in which Siri attempts to determine the place of the assignation: “A hotel?” “No, I wish.” “In the street?” “No, worse than that.” “What’s worse than the street?” “A pipe. In the street.”
In between, Aura reunites with Charlotte, a wayward party-girl friend from high school, played by Jemima Kirke, Dunham’s friend from high school. (“Sometimes, I think of myself as Tribeca’s solution to Marianne Faithfull” is the kind of thing that Charlotte says.) For a week, Aura shares her bed—but not, to her chagrin, her body—with Jed, a mooching comedian who makes modestly popular YouTube videos with titles like “Nietzschean Cowboy.” In the hope of gleaning life lessons, she reads her mother’s post-collegiate journal from the seventies—“I think of myself a lot as this weird mutation from the 50’s. Doris Day in SoHo. What a disgusting thought.” (It is Laurie Simmons’s real diary.) The movie also includes a clip of “The Fountain,” which Aura shows Charlotte to demonstrate her aspirations as a filmmaker. “You should be on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” Charlotte says. “Or maybe something more early Yoko Ono, where you’re just moving through a gallery and everyone’s watching you.”
Given Dunham’s parentage, she might easily have turned to performance art rather than entertainment, but her sensibility is considerably more mainstream: her exchanges with her mother on film often have the inflection of Borscht Belt comedy. Dunham’s generation has, thanks to the Internet, surrendered its privacy to an unprecedented degree, and she is less private than most: she kept an old-fashioned journal once, but abandoned it. “I was, like, ‘What’s the point, if no one’s reading it?’ ” she says. “I would leave it out on the counter, on purpose, for my parents.” “Tiny Furniture” is, in some sense, a diary left open on the counter: Dunham really did break up with her college boyfriend just after graduating, really did work a day shift in a restaurant, and really does live in her parents’ loft. But the movie is also a clever distortion of reality, in which Dunham, for comic effect, rehearses only the most pathetic aspects of her life. Her typical character, she says, is “like me, minus a certain kind of self-awareness. She is one step behind where I’m at, at any given moment.” Dunham’s willingness to show herself at her most vulnerable is a source of creative strength. “I am always so shocked when anyone thinks of an insult about me that I haven’t already considered,” she says. “I am, like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re good.’ ”
As Aura, Dunham spends much of “Tiny Furniture” moving through Siri’s gleaming white loft in a T-shirt and underwear, lacking pants and motivation in equal measure. Dunham’s willingness to expose her body in her work serves a preëmptive strike against disparagement. “Of course, as a girl you take these things to heart,” she told me when recalling the comments that “The Fountain” elicited. “I live in this constant state of ‘This is what I look like—fuck you!’ and being, like, ‘I am so sorry, I want to cover myself up.’ ” She was once told by a male friend never to show her work to anyone she might have a romantic interest in: “I was, like, ‘Any guy I want to sleep with would be interested in what I am doing.’ Or we would be in a dark corner and he wouldn’t know what my job was.”
In its merciless investigation of its creator’s character flaws, “Tiny Furniture” resembles Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” mashed up with Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan,” or “Manhattan” if it had been directed by Mariel Hemingway rather than by Woody Allen. Like Allen’s early movies, “Tiny Furniture” conjures a uniquely New York milieu: in her case, privileged Tribecan youth, with their gatherings spilling onto fire escapes, tiny windowless bedrooms carved out of lofts, and casual navigation between the Odeon and “some Dalton party.” The depiction of its heroine’s dysfunction is similarly convincing, and is also disconcertingly at odds with the evidently high-functioning capacities of its creator.
For years, Dunham was a vegan, but a few months ago she started eating meat again. “Let’s call a spade a spade—a lot of times when you are a vegetarian it is a just not very effective eating disorder,” she said. “So now I am allowed to eat anything I want, or wear anything I want, or do anything I want. I lost almost fifteen pounds because suddenly the world wasn’t closed to me.” We were on a plane flying to Ohio: Dunham had been invited back to Oberlin to screen her movie. She was wearing a newly purchased black leather jacket over a lacy black shift dress, and new black boots, by Alexander Wang. She was also carrying an iPad, which she’d bought the day before. (“Let’s test the absorbency of my new iPad,” she’d posted on Twitter.) Dunham has attentive blue eyes and a softly rounded face that has yet to resolve into the contours of adulthood; she wore lipstick the color of a cherry Popsicle but little other makeup, giving her the aspect of a schoolgirl who has raided her mother’s dressing table. “I’m so excited—I haven’t been back since I graduated!” she told me, as if the two years since she received her diploma were an unimaginable expanse.
At the airport, she was met by Dan Chaon, her former creative-writing professor, and as he drove into town Dunham looked out on the leafy streets appreciatively, recalling with affection the university’s notorious leftism. “We had to take a vote on whether bathrooms should be gender-neutral,” she said. “I was shocked that I wasn’t granted the right and privilege of a girls-only bathroom. I had to be the loser asking for it.” Chaon told her that a few days earlier Karl Rove had been on campus to give a speech; a student had confronted him and attempted to make a citizen’s arrest. By the time that Dunham retold the story to a friend, later that night, she had embellished it such that another student had attempted to arrest Rove’s would-be arrester.
While fielding calls from her agent about the casting of her HBO pilot, Dunham revisited sites of her youth. There was the dorm where she had stood outside, in a miniskirt and ripped tights, propositioning other undergraduates—the main gag of “Hooker on Campus,” a short film that she made in 2007. (“She was like Ali G on campus,” says Dunham’s best friend, Audrey Gelman, who is now the press secretary for Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.) There was the apartment in which Dunham had filmed her first feature, “Creative Nonfiction,” in which she plays a hapless undergraduate named Ella. Dunham told me, “In some ways, the character in ‘Creative Nonfiction’ has more confidence than the character in ‘Tiny Furniture’ because she’s a virgin, so there’s a lot of humiliation she hasn’t been able to go through yet.” Much of the action—or inaction—takes place in Ella’s bed, where she has invited a boy she likes, Chris; he is more interested in escaping the mold growing under his own bed than he is in coupling with Ella. “I’m your friend. I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not anyone’s boyfriend. I don’t intend to be anyone’s boyfriend,” Chris tells Ella immediately before becoming her girlfriend’s boyfriend.
Bed-sharing with sexually unresponsive men is a recurring theme. “That was a big thing for me in college,” Dunham says. “At the time, it made perfect sense—‘Yeah, we don’t know how we feel about each other, but we are sharing a bed.’ It was crazy.” On her computer, Dunham keeps spreadsheets with categories such as “Boys I have slept in the same bed with but not kissed,” “Boys I have kissed,” and “People I didn’t kiss but I had a weird emotional moment with.” She explained, “It’s not an issue of volume. I just need a way to keep them straight. It’s just information I want to hold on to—where it happened, if it was fun or not, if there are any notable embarrassing details.”
Before the screening, an interview was scheduled with an undergraduate reporter from the Oberlin Review, who was slightly awestruck but ineffably cool, in cigarette pants and a shirt knotted at the waist. Dunham established an instant intimacy, swapping New York private-school details. (Dunham went to St. Ann’s; the reporter went to Riverdale Country.) She fielded questions about women in comedy—“There’s always an article coming out, saying, ‘The new thing is funny women!’ ”—and dispensed modest advice on how an aspiring filmmaker might support herself while she goes about building a career. “Babysitting is a sweet gig,” she said. “You could probably make a sweet racket on the Upper East Side. I got a call last week about babysitting—someone said, ‘I know you are working on a show, but do you have any time?’ People are so desperate. I was not even offended. I was kind of tempted. I just couldn’t do it.”
“That’s got to be cool, though,” the reporter said.
“To be able to babysit, or not to be able to?” Dunham asked.
“Both,” the reporter replied.
“I like knowing that I could fall back on it,” Dunham said. “I like knowing that I didn’t tarnish my reputation as a babysitter and I am still employable.”
When Dunham was growing up, one of her own babysitters was Zac Posen, who, before achieving youthful fashion stardom, was also a student at St. Ann’s. Often, Dunham’s parents brought her along for the evening, taking her to gallery openings and parties. “She always had a sort of weird ability to be perceptive about adults that was sort of disturbing,” her mother told me. “Kids would be in the room over at one end, and Lena would be over with the adults, saying, ‘How is your divorce going?’ ” Jerry Saltz, the art critic, who is a friend of Lena’s parents, says of her, “She was happier with adults partly because her parents treated Lena as an adult. In that family, it’s almost as if everybody is exactly the same size.”
The family first lived in a loft on lower Broadway that Simmons had inhabited since the nineteen-seventies. Later, they moved to Brooklyn Heights, then to Tribeca. Dunham spent several unhappy years attending elementary school at Friends Seminary, in Manhattan. “I had no friends,” she says. “I worried a lot. I was really close with my third- and fourth-grade teacher, and three-quarters of our relationship was me asking, ‘Are you sure I don’t have Ebola?’ ” For seventh grade, she transferred to St. Ann’s, which was favored by artistic types. (Vito Schnabel was a classmate.) Alex Darrow, who taught Dunham English in her senior year, recalls her self-assurance: “In about seventh grade, she came up to me and said, ‘I have heard good things about your class. I look forward to the Mr. Darrow experience.’ ” Jemima Kirke, who was a schoolmate, says, “She knew everyone, but she was always sort of a loner—she had her own agenda. It was really annoying, when you are that age and you want to go around the corner and smoke pot, and she was just, ‘I have to go home and work.’ ”
St. Ann’s is the kind of place where kids make installation art instead of playing sports, and Dunham threw herself into the school’s playwriting program: in her first year, she wrote “The Goldman Girls,” about three Jewish sisters going home for Thanksgiving, based upon her mother’s experience growing up on Long Island. In ninth grade, Dunham wrote a play that was set in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. “It was, like, women wrestling with big choices, which I was really unqualified to write,” she says. “I definitely had not even kissed anybody.” At fourteen, she requested as a Christmas present standup-comedy lessons. “She did a couple of gigs,” Simmons told me. “I had to be with her, because she was under drinking age and she wasn’t allowed in a bar. Her opening line was ‘Hi, I’m Lena, and I’m an alcoholic. Just kidding—my dad is.’ ”
Dunham did not get good S.A.T. scores, and spent a year at the New School before transferring to Oberlin. “At the New School, there were a lot of kids who were really excited to have just gotten to New York, and they wanted to go to clubs or go to Broadway,” she says. “They had all been the biggest weirdo in their high school and they were, like, ‘I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it,’ and I was, like, Oh, no.” She recalls encountering kids who came from less cosmopolitan backgrounds: “There was this boy who was really smart and really intellectual, and he came from, like, a steel town in Pennsylvania, and his family called him ‘the freak.’ I had never met a person who was different from their parents before.”
When Dunham returned to New York from Oberlin, she worked a succession of part-time jobs and developed projects with some of her old friends. One, Isabel Halley, says, “Post-college, we were all, like, ‘What the hell do we do? I guess we will go out a little bit too much,’ and Lena really focussed us. She was, like, ‘We are best friends, we have known each other forever, let’s do something awesome.’ ” Dunham wrote and directed a Web sitcom called “Delusional Downtown Divas,” which featured herself, Halley, and another friend, Joana Avillez, as spoiled art-world brats trying to get famous. Dunham enlisted the help of such downtown stalwarts as Joan Jonas, the performance artist, whom, in an episode called “The Jonas Mother,” Dunham’s character takes to be the mother of the Jonas Brothers. Another episode shows Halley at Ground Zero hawking “Ambien tours” of the site—“You need to get the exact right dose to feel the absence of the towers,” she explains. Dunham’s character asks dismissively, “What even happened here?” (“We shot it on September 11th of last year, which is such a dicky thing to do,” Dunham says. “I am not a particularly political person, but, as a Tribeca resident, the commodification of September 11th is offensive to me.”) “Delusional Downtown Divas” was initially made for the art magazine Index, which was founded by Isabel Halley’s father, the artist Peter Halley.
In the fall of 2009, Dunham began writing “Tiny Furniture”—a more emotionally nuanced and technically advanced work than “Delusional Downtown Divas,” which owed an unrepayable debt to the British sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” She completed the script and filmed it in two months, using a Sony camcorder that her parents had given her for her twenty-first birthday; the budget, which was twenty-five thousand dollars, was supplied by three art-world investors who had seen her earlier work. (They have since been paid back.) The movie has found important admirers. One is the director Judd Apatow, who told me, “About twenty minutes in, I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Am I crazy, or is this kind of unbelievably great?’ ” Apatow e-mailed Dunham, who thought that it was a prank message from Halley. “I wrote back, ‘If this is Isabel, fuck you. And if this is actually Judd Apatow, here are all my thoughts, thank you so much.’ ” Apatow is an executive producer on Dunham’s HBO project. (The movie has had its skeptics, too: Glenn Kenny, the film critic, posted a thoughtful review of it on his blog, in which he suggested that Dunham had insufficient critical distance on Aura. “I think ‘Tiny Furniture’ is good,” he later tweeted. “But it does represent the Cinema of Unexamined Privilege, let’s face it.”)
After Scott Rudin, the producer, saw the film, he invited Dunham to a meeting one morning. She was so nervous the night before that, in order to avoid a last-minute wardrobe crisis, she slept in her interview outfit: black pants, a white blouse, her sister’s Comme des Garçons jacket, high-heeled boots. “I got up, washed my face and brushed my teeth, and got into a taxi,” she says. Rudin has since contracted her to write and direct a movie based on a young-adult novel, “Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares.” “I literally have shown ‘Tiny Furniture’ to probably fifty people,” he told me. “I can’t wait to see her next ten movies.”
The comedian Sarah Silverman, who met Dunham when Dunham was assigned to interview her for Paper, not long ago, told me, “I loved how her movie was funny with no jokes.” Now, when Dunham goes to Los Angeles, Silverman is a lunch date. “There is something kind of hilariously not wide-eyed about her,” Silverman says. “There’s a savviness. She doesn’t have that ‘I want to pick your brain’ thing. Her brain is already pickable.”
Laurie Simmons recently figured out that “Tiny Furniture” is a love letter to her. Who else, Simmons told Dunham, would want to spend so much time looking at her mother’s enormous face? Dunham started enlisting her family in her work while she was still at college: for one video, she asked her mom to reënact the role of Jane Curtin in a “Saturday Night Live” skit, “Credit Card Counselling,” while she played the part of Gilda Radner. The relationship of mother and daughter permits a certain shorthand on set. “I have literally given her the direction of ‘Do it again, but less stupid this time,’ ” Dunham told an audience of undergraduates at her Oberlin screening. “She is, like, ‘You are being mean to me.’ I am, like, ‘You gave birth to me. This is what happens.’ ”
Carroll Dunham appeared in some of his daughter’s early work—in one short, “Open the Door,” he is shown, having been locked out of the apartment, futilely buzzing at the intercom while Lena attempts to force him to deliver lines of a movie she is supposedly shooting. (“Will you just say this one line, Pop—‘I didn’t mean to hurt you guys, I just needed to make some money’?”) He has since declined to take an acting role, citing his preference for privacy. “Lena’s relationship to these boundaries is very different from anyone else in this family, and she’s turning it into something she’s making her work about,” Carroll Dunham told me, when I visited the family home one Sunday afternoon. “I can’t in any way question her interest in these kinds of subjects. As the father of the artist, I kind of check out. I don’t love watching the sex scene in Lena’s movie, but I don’t have to.”
The apartment, just south of Canal Street, looks like a movie director’s idea of a famous artist’s loft, its white walls hung with the work of its occupants and family friends. Simmons’s studio is downstairs—lately, she has been photographing a high-end Japanese sex doll. (Carroll Dunham works, and for much of the time lives, at the family’s home in Connecticut.) Dunham’s bedroom, which adjoins her sister’s, at the rear of the apartment, looks like that of a precocious preteen. It is painted pink, and pinned to one wall is the sleeve of Bette Midler’s album “Thighs and Whispers” and the cover of an Eloise picture book. Dunham’s first tattoo, which she got at the age of seventeen, is of Eloise. “As a child, I just liked the story of this kid who was able to entertain herself,” Dunham told me. “She had the best sense of humor, and I also think I sort of look like her because she has got this really messy hair and a pot belly.” On her bedroom door is a poster from “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay” and—in an unusual bid for privacy, left over from her teen-age years—a sign that reads “Please Knock.”
Dunham has no desire to move out of her parents’ apartment, and they do not want her to go. She doesn’t have a curfew, though she is required to text her father if she plans to stay out all night. Her parents have a more active social life than she does; she tweeted recently, “Parents: in black going to party on Bond St. Me: PJs, trying to master Final Draft 8 revision mode, literally said ‘don’t be home too late.’ ” Dunham’s closeness to her parents is remarkable even to those who know her well. “In high school, she was almost never able to hang out,” Jemima Kirke says. “She would say, ‘I need to go and hang with my parents because we are all watching “The L Word” tonight.’ ”
Dunham recalled, “When I was a sophomore in college, I had a friend who I stopped being friends with because she said, ‘I feel like you care about your parents more than you do about me.’ She was a crazy friend.” Dunham was perched on a chair at the family’s dining-room table, upon which she had placed an array of pastries from Locanda Verde cut into small pieces, quietly smiling and occasionally reddening as her family talked about her. “Remember the Cheeto incident?” her sister said, referring to an occasion at St. Ann’s when Dunham—cast as an obnoxious five-year-old in a play by a classmate—had spontaneously crushed Cheetos all over her body. (She was reprimanded by the principal for upstaging the playwright.)
Dunham’s closeness to her parents does have its limits. “I was going up to the country to stay with my dad for, like, two weeks, and my mom was going to be up there, too, and my friends and I were talking about watching some scary movie,” she said. “And I said, ‘Oh, my God, I am going to be so scared, I am going to be afraid to sleep alone, but, actually, I don’t sleep alone, I sleep in my parents’ bed when I am up there.’ It was a hundred per cent a joke. And then the next week another friend was, like, ‘Is it true that when you are in the country you sleep in bed with both your parents?’ The fact that the rumor spread, and it sounded realistic, was sort of a wake-up call.”
“There might be the germ of a cautionary tale there for you,” her father said, looking at Dunham with quizzical fondness. “We’ve encountered this in the past, where your idea of the funny merges a little too convincingly with the real. It’s funny to say, ‘I sleep with my parents,’ but it’s also too close to being massively weird. And you will have to navigate this for the rest of your life.”
Stuck to the wall of Dunham’s office at Silvercup Studios, in Long Island City, where her HBO pilot is being made, is a Post-it that reads, “Lena Dunham ‘works’ here.” When I visited, one week into her tenure, there was nothing on her desk but a telephone and a long-handled dessert spoon. On the wall was an enormous poster, made by Isabel Halley while she was a student at the School of Visual Arts, that listed “25 Performances I Shouldn’t Make.” They included “I shouldn’t run for office on a platform of vaginal freedom” and “I shouldn’t get the word ‘OBJECTIFIED’ tattooed on my forehead.”
Dunham was wearing more new clothing—a loose, transparent white blouse, cinched at the waist like a pirate’s, which she wore over a red T-shirt, with a black leather skirt, black tights, and black ankle boots. Her look was cable quirky rather than network sleek. Outside her door bustled the various producers, stylists, and assistants who were participating on what was still known as the “Untitled Lena Dunham Project.” (“My friend says it should be called the ‘Entitled Lena Dunham Project,’ ” Dunham jokes.) As the person in the office with the most authority and the least experience, Dunham struck an odd figure: half boss, half intern.
If the pilot meets with HBO’s approval, it will be the first of twelve half-hour episodes concerning the travails of three women in their early twenties who have recently moved to New York City. Dunham’s hope is that it will provide a more accurate reflection of post-collegiate life than is typically represented on television. “It’s not, like, the ‘move to New York and have an unreasonably large apartment on an unreasonably cute street’ version, but, like, hopefully feels real without feeling like a Mike Leigh movie,” she says. Dunham’s character, Hannah, is the offspring of professorial types from Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I have never written about characters that weren’t from New York before,” she says. “I was trying to choose places that felt like they weren’t New York but had weirdly analogous intellectual communities, so that if these girls appeared and they were quipping their heads off and they’d watched certain kinds of films since they were three, it would make sense.”
That morning at Silvercup, Dunham was having her first meeting with her costume designer, Stacey Battat, whom Dunham has known since Battat was a salesgirl in the Marc Jacobs store in SoHo, a decade ago. “My mom used to take me there, and she would say, ‘You can have a key ring when they are on sale,’ ” Dunham said.
Dunham began to speak in very general terms about the show’s look: “I really want it to feel realistic, so the whole ‘Sex in the City’ thing of endless shoes coming out of the closet is not happening.”
“I’m thinking there should be some socks,” Battat said.
“I really see some socks,” Dunham said. “I think one thing about my character is that she hasn’t yet figured out the difference between what’s cool and what looks good on her.”
“I think you should all look as good as possible,” Battat said.
Dunham seemed tempted by the suggestion that she be glamorized, but she was wary about losing the feel of her past work. “I’ve lost a little weight since ‘Tiny Furniture,’ and I had the thought ‘Oh, my God, what if the only reason it’s funny when I act is that I’m lumpy-looking?’ ” she said. “When we were auditioning for the other two girls, I was, like, ‘Make sure she’s tiny enough for it to be funny when she’s next to me.’ ” She reflected for a moment. “The camera adds back on what I’ve lost,” she said. “Anyway, it’s not the jiggling flesh; it’s the attitude. I’ll always have a fat attitude. I’ll always have a chubby attitude.”
Construction of the set had begun on one of the soundstages, and after she’d finished discussing the costumes Dunham and her co-executive producer, Ilene Landress, a veteran of “The Sopranos,” went downstairs to take a look. There wasn’t yet much to see: just a lot of lumber, and several tables filled with household items that Landress had bought for Hannah’s apartment, which is supposed to be in Greenpoint. There was a yoga mat, some blue plastic tumblers, and a couple of model snakes made from wood. Dunham was delighted. “I feel like she hasn’t figured out what her taste is yet,” she said. “She’s just the kind of girl who would be, like, ‘A wooden snake is just what I need for my apartment!’ ”
Dunham and Landress left the soundstage and entered a corridor. A diminutive figure was heading toward them, with her head bent over a BlackBerry: Tina Fey, whose show “30 Rock” is shot on a neighboring stage. As Dunham rounded the corner, she and Landress started whispering excitedly. “I’ve been wondering when I would have my first Tina Fey moment!” Dunham said. She was half star-struck, and half enacting the role of being star-struck; and if Fey, absorbed in her e-mail, had experienced her first Lena Dunham moment without even realizing it, she would not likely remain oblivious for long. ♦