In the pilot episode of her new HBO series Girls, Lena Dunham's character Hannah gets herself fired from her internship at an indie publisher in New York City after requesting that she be upgraded to a paid position.
Although the funny, if excruciating, scene was filmed in the Brooklyn offices of Melville House Publishing, Jacket Copy reported that Dunham (who also directed and starred in the film Tiny Furniture) actually interned at publisher Soft Skull Press during the summer of 2006--though she was never fired.
"She was making the story work in a fictional context," said Richard Nash, who was Soft Skull's publisher at the time. "It was autobiographical in the vaguest way."
Nash added that as an intern, Dunham "was great as expected. The stuff she was doing on the side was all film." He also praised the show's publishing house scene: "It got the atmosphere, the broad strokes of things perfectly right.... You always want to feel like your interns are going to go on and do great things. I don't think Soft Skull can take the slightest credit for Lena's success, but it's always fun when interns become writers and publishers and things like that."
