bloggie blog

Another limerick, this one composed for the folks at Desperate Housewives. At the start of this its final season, Felicity Huffman said, “All bets are off.” I tweeted this to Jeff Greenstein, and he hit me back with a “Well done!”

Enjoy:

Pilot season has started. Some actors behave differently during this time of year. Some businesses that make money off of actors push their wares more heavily this time of year. I say the thing to do for most of us non-famous folk is keep your head down and work hard 365 days. Thus, I have composed a limerick for the season.

There once was a season called pilot
That raised actors’ hopes way up high a lot.
I calmly proclaim
That unless you’re a “name,”
A different approach should apply not.

Stay tuned for more gems. I’m composing limericks these days.

SAG Award nominees (announced today) will not receive my vote if they pertain to one of these shows:

Damages
The Good Wife
Harry’s Law
Hot in Cleveland
Modern Family
Nurse Jackie
Spartacus: Gods of the Arena
Suits

It’s not because of the quality of these shows, which is generally quite high, but because they are not SAG projects! SAG Awards go to SAG projects, in my opinion. But considering how the new shows are overwhelmingly AFTRA these last few seasons, it’s interesting to note that the nominations are not overwhelmingly AFTRA. (Not yet.)

See that information on the right side of my IMDb page? Watch me in CSI: Miami episode #10.11 on 12/11 @ 10 pm.

Though I hope you’ll watch me, you’ll probably hear me more than see me in the opening sequence of this cuh-razy episode all about pageants for little girls. See a preview on the YouTube.

I’ve been asked to create a list of acting resources. So I’m looking for beloved web sites or applications that you find useful in your acting career!

Do you have a favorite acting resource or three? Care to share?

A few things to consider before you email me your top few favorites:

• Priority will go to cheap resources. The freer the better!
• Not the very most obvious things. We all know about Actors Access and Twitter, for example.
• Stuff you’ll use again and again more than time-sensitive info that served you awesomely this last week and now it’s done.
• And if you can, tag it: is it commercial or theatrical; is this resource more for the actor new to town, or the actor who’s been here a few years; any other label you can think of.

Please share! Add a comment on this page. Or tweet it. Or via email. I’ll compile your suggestions and share the results.

Thanks a zillion!

Examples, to prime the pump:

Stage Agent is a handy way to research the basics on roles in a play you might be auditioning for. I’ve used it a lot over the years. THEATER, REFERENCE

We Make Movies is a great org that gets actors and writers together for readings and good times. And they sometimes make movies! The site has lots of articles for filmmakers and producers, and occasionally for actors. INDIE FILM, ORGANIZATIONS

Map of commercial CDs. Some genius made a Google Map for people new to commercials. Not comprehensive, just the key places. COMMERCIAL, NEW TO TOWN

I recently saw a weekend workshop being advertised. An established casting director says you’ll spend 4 hours exploring, unlocking, discovering, learning; your auditions will improve markedly; etc., etc. Also, because this CD is well established, you know you’ll be on the coveted short list if you impress him. Learning plus access! The flyer explicitly says the opposite: the usual disclaimers, this is no promise of anything. But 25 actors will see the name of the CD and sense that the disclaimer doesn’t apply to them and/or that this block of time will unlock that one last lock. So they attend.

Let’s do the math. CD Bob brings in 25 actors at $200 a pop, for $5,000–not bad for half a Saturday’s work. And you get to spend 4 hours with CD Bob. 4 hours. That’s a deep connection there. Except.

Except there are 24 other actors there, of varying caliber. The teaching is likely to cater to those of lesser talent. And even if not, they’re all there networking away, too. So you paid $200 for 1/25 of Bob’s attention for 4 hour, so you hired an expert at the equivalent rate of $1,250/hour.

That’s pricey.

One alternative: take some material to CD Bob (on your own or with an appropriate acting partner of your choosing). If his coaching rate is $100/hour, for the same two bills you could get 100% of his attention for 2 whole hours, and both the learning and the networking sides of things are likely to be higher.

To me, it’s a no-brainer that the workshop is overpriced. Furthermore, if you’re dying to give Bob $200 for some reason, this alternative is far better. But I fear 25 actors out there will behave differently, every time.

Less than an hour ago, I got email from SAG announcing the results of the most recent election. I took their numbers and prepared a graphical representation of the Hollywood division results. You can see how well Unite For Strength did. That slate ran 34 people and 31 of them were elected. Only Scott Bakula, Valerie Harper and Esai Morales got elected without being part of UFS. Click the thumbnail for a bigger image.

Sometimes you see comments like this in casting notices: These roles require strong ability to express emotion through facial expressions. These comments from casting directors can appear in high-level projects or no-budget backyard shoots.

There’s a trap here. Actors, beware!

The potential problem here is that actors might go for face-oriented results, after all, they’re asking for expressive facial expressions. But I want you to watch a few seconds of the following video. It’s a shot-by-shot homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Just watch the first moment when our young fanboy actor looks out into the forest, from 0:46 to 0:52.

We are watching the back of this guy’s head as he comes into frame, surveys the forest and puts his hands on his hips. In these 6 seconds, we can tell it’s not good acting. (If you watch further, you’ll see many imitations of Harrison Ford that are inauthentic human experiences. Hey, it’s tough to imitate Mr Ford!)

The amount of his body that is in the frame for these few seconds is the same amount that would be in the frame if we could also see his facial expressions. What if from the front his facial expressions were perfect? Beyond his face, we’d still see the same inauthenticity that we see in this shot. It’s never just about the facial expressions! You always want an authentic full-body experience, perhaps even more so when they say they’re looking for a “strong ability to express emotion through facial expressions.”

Dallas Travers has a lot of good ideas for actors. Her latest initiative is a revisiting of last year’s 42-Day Book a Job Challenge. Please take a moment to read that post before continuing here.

[pause while you read]

Okay, you’re back. As you saw, last spring 150 actors under her tutelage found focus for 42 days, took the bull by the horns, and totally beat the odds during those 6 weeks. This is significant, remarkable, worthy of attention. But — and there’s always a “but” — let’s look at the dollars involved. I think I’m going to blow your mind. I think I’m going to blow your mind wide open.

In order to blow your mind wide open, I admit that I’m going to have to make a lot of assumptions about the $$ involved, because I don’t know what these actors did or paid during the 42 days in question. I’m going to try to be open about my numerical assumptions, and open about the precise numbers we know, as well. Feel free to tweak my numbers and redo the math if you know better.

First, assume all 150 actors bought her book at $15. Next, assume 1/3 of them only did the 42-day project, which currently goes for $247. Assume that 1/3 are big fans of hers so they also bought her more-expensive “blueprint” program. I think I heard that it’s about $700. The other 1/3 of these actors probably bought another of her less expensive offerings, let’s say maybe “gold” membership, which goes for $37/month, and let’s say they signed up for 12 months. These are all wild guesses, but I’m guessing that these guesses will yield a fairly accurate total of how much money Dallas made with this program and the additional income for other programs that this program’s success generated.

Now let’s think about other costs to the actors. Assume that the 6-week push included paid casting director workshops. Beyond talking, sharing, manifesting and the like, I really have no idea what these actors did for those 6 weeks, but I’ll assume most of them hit CDWs harder during that time. Now, CDWs can be had for under $30 with careful shopping, but when hitting it hard, you can’t shop around much. So let’s assume these actors paid $50 per CDW, and let’s assume that on average they went to 15 of these paid workshops over the 6 weeks in question. Again, total SWAGs here.

There would be other expenses, too. I’m sure printing, postage, travel and miscellaneous expenses varied a lot per actor, and it may or may not have been significantly higher for these 42 days than the rest of their acting life, but I’ll assume most printed and mailed and traveled more, and I’ll just assume these 150 actors spent — pulling a number out of the air — $100 more per actor during those 6 weeks than they would have otherwise. I could be way off, I have no idea. You’ll see it doesn’t matter much when we do the math.

So much for my assumptions on what actors spent. In terms of income to actors, 47 of them had bookings. Nice. A few might have been lucrative, on-going gigs that paid really well, but I think’s it’s safer to assume that these bookings were one-day jobs at union scale, which is about $800/day. Some paid more, some paid less, but that’s a pretty good assumption. If we don’t take into account a 2nd commission for those with managers and if we don’t take into account taxes for Uncle Sam, we see it’s a pretty generous assumption. Great residuals could boost it further, but that’s never known until way down the line.

Okay, so let’s run the numbers on who made how much money from those 42 days. To repeat, I’m making lots of assumptions here. But I bet I’m not too far off in the aggregate, and even if I am, the principle behind these calculations is still valid.

Actors paid Dallas Travers $15×150 + $247×150 + ($37×12)×(150/3) + $700×(150/3) = $96,500.
Actors paid workshop operators and the casting folk there $50×15×150 = $112,500.
Actors paid Argentum, USPS and Arco $100×150 = $15,000.
Actors received $800×47 = $37,600. Let’s round that to $40,000, just for the hell of it.

So there you have it. Total cost to actors: $224,000. Total earned by actors: $40,000. Is your mind blown?

It’s not surprising that Dallas is excited that she just launched the 42-Day Book a Job Challenge again. The last challenge brought her about $100,000 of income. Of course she’s excited!

I bet the people running workshops around town are excited, too. This challenge is going to bring them about $100,000!

Other people will receive $15,000 in additional business, but they probably won’t be excited about it. It will be more of an every-day nature for them.

Actors are excited about the challenge, too! I know. I talk to actors all the time and if one word describes the feelings they have for Dallas Travers it’s “excitement.” So, an additional 150 excited actors are going to get together for a 6-week push to spend approximately a quarter of a million dollars and in return, they will probably book some awesome jobs and earn $40,000. That is a ROI of so many negative percentage points that I don’t even know how calculate it — but I guess that a negative ROI is what they mean when they tell you to invest in your career.

An additional point I’d like to make is that the jobs booked were jobs that would have been booked with or without the 42-day program. The program did not generate any actor employment, even if it did have some impact on who got the jobs. Even so, I’d guess most of those 47 actors were on the verge of booking already.

Any of the 47 bookers want to weigh in? Better still, any of the 103 that didn’t book? The comments section of my blog is wide open.

Just gotta respond to what Ryan Basham wrote on Facebook:

If I never see another webseries/short/indie film about actors and their pursuits, that’d be totally cool. Seriously, take your experiences and put them in any other setting. I say this with love!

Yo Ryan,
Totes agree! But I’m sure you don’t really mean that about *my* web series. It IS going to be different! It’s going to be called An Actor Pursues (get it?) and we’re in post right now. We just took the plunge, didn’t even worry about what the world wants or any of that haters gonna hate stuff that just slows you down, man! With the brilliant, and I must say, deftly inscrutable acting choices being made by my friends who totally didn’t even have to audition, with its amazing real writing about things that really happened to me and to some other actors I heard about, so you know they’re really real and really amazing, with its in-your-face sound quality that we got in this total bargain from this guy on Craigslist who also knew this director guy who was just awesome, and — this is the real key — with its editing that actually slows … things … down and lets the user spend meaningful time on each and every moment of what it *really* takes to be an actor — I mean, nothing happens in the first 5 episodes, and I really hope you GET that, man — well, I’m sure you’ll eventually see that AAP is really going to totally take off and prove you wrong once we get it set up with our new Tumblr account! So no hard feelings and thanks in advance for the “likes”!! And for watching!!!!!
Kevin