Enjoy:

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.”

[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.

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

There are six leadership positions that always write letters for Screen Actor. Consider the six letters in this edition. What do they talk about besides merger?

Ken Howard: zip.
Amy Aquino: processing small residuals checks.
David White: the new Production Center and digital theft.
Ned Vaughn: zip.
Mike Hodge: zip.
David Hartley-Margolin: vote.

I think the non-merger topics above are important, so I’m glad to hear about them. But there are a ton of other important problems that we need to be working on, too. So a plea to all: don’t spend all your energy on merger. It might fail, and even if it goes through it cannot be a panacea to solve everything, and we do have other problems here and now.

I once wrote a one-act play with David Isaacs about a Malibu condo that was leaking during a rainstorm. The play was a farce — characters frantically running in and out with buckets, that sort of thing. At one point a character goes off stage to mop up a leak. The actor wanted to know where the leak was. I said, “Off stage. Wherever.” That wasn’t good enough. He needed to know exactly where. So I shrugged, walked backstage with him, pointed to a spot on the floor and said, “Right there…no, wait. There!” He thanked me and throughout the run of the show he went to that spot, got on his hands and knees, and went to work mopping up. Meanwhile, other actors are tripping all over him coming on and off the stage. The real farce was unseen by the audience.

Funny stuff! If I were that guy’s castmate, I’d want to kill him. Read the whole entry — and the comments! — for juicier stories. (The comments also contain very serious discussions and support of The Method. Yawn.)

There’s plenty of stars I want to work with but to me it’s just more exciting to have that discovery. Like, “Who are they?!” Let an audience have that discovery that we have. There’s nothing more exciting than in an audition, somebody comes in who you don’t know and they blow you away in the room. Then you’re like, “Wow, okay, this is great, I’m having the discovery that now an audience will have when this person comes on the screen and surprises them.” I struggled for so long as an actor, there is something exciting about giving somebody their shot. That sounds far more charity-based, because it’s not. We’re not going to put anybody in something that doesn’t just kill, you know, that isn’t great. But when you find that person that’s great, and if it somehow came down to you can have this star who’s really good, or you can have this unknown who’s just going to kill, it’s like, “Give me the unknown who’s just going to kill it.”

Let me get right to it: Please include all dates in notification emails that go out from you to actors. Currently, dates for callback auditions and shoot dates are not included in emails that actors get via their commercial agencies, yet this information is known to you and can be viewed manually by the agencies.

If you do not include callback and shoot dates in notification emails because of some business decision, that is, if you are doing this by choice, reconsider that choice! You are doing an immense disservice to the acting community, to the thousands of actors that you rely on to make a profit. That alone should be reason to change.

If it’s for technical reasons, please hire me to fix it. Are you currently understaffed? Is it some other reason? I don’t know, but I do know this: I could fix it easily and quickly, so easily and so quickly that I would be willing to do it for free. You do not have to pay me to fall off a log, is what I’m saying.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to a change very soon, or at least an explanation. The acting community deserves one or the other right away.

Respectfully,

Kevin Ashworth
http://www.lacasting.com/kevinashworth

P.S. In case you’re wondering, yes, I took a very big hit last week because of this issue.

P.P.S. If you don’t receive these notices and are curious to see what they look like, I’ve uploaded a few sample screenshots of emails I’ve received over the last year in this addendum.

Upper left. A year ago, callback and shoot dates were included.

Upper right. They briefly switched to a notification system where the subject line gave you all the info you were going to get except by going to their site. On their site currently, “alerts” are prominently featured in red and they are archived … and they have no callback dates or shoot dates listed.

Lower right and lower left. There are 2 iterations of the current version where you get no future dates, just audition dates.

The oldest email (upper left) looks a little clunky and doesn’t have the Casting Networks logo, but it’s clearly got the most complete information. Bring back the information!

I look forward to the ceremony Sunday night! (More accurate: I look forward to reading about it on Monday morning!)

UPDATE: My vote went to the award recipient only 3 of 12 times. There were lots of good choices!

I can say, however, that as a literalist, I will not vote for any work on an AFTRA show. Why? Because these are the friggin’ SAG Awards! With the exception of the Female-Comedy category, the majority of the nominees are working on SAG shows (shown in bold). AFTRA shows (shown in italics) will not get my vote, even if that has very little to do with the quality of the work.

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series
Steve Buscemi — Boardwalk Empire (HBO)
Bryan Cranston — Breaking Bad (AMC)
Michael C. Hall — Dexter (Showtime)
Jon Hamm — Mad Men (AMC)
Hugh Laurie — House (FOX)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series
Glenn Close — Damages (FX)
Mariska Hargitay — Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC)
Julianna Margulies — The Good Wife (CBS)
Elisabeth Moss — Mad Men (AMC)
Kyra Sedgwick — The Closer (TNT)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series
Alec Baldwin – 30 Rock (NBC)
Ty Burrell — Modern Family (ABC)
Steve Carell – The Office (NBC)
Chris Colfer — Glee (FOX)
Ed O’Neill — Modern Family (ABC)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series
Edie Falco – Nurse Jackie (Showtime)
Tina Fey – 30 Rock (NBC)
Jane Lynch — Glee (FOX)
Sofia Vergara — Modern Family (ABC)
Betty White — Hot In Cleveland (TV Land)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
Boardwalk Empire (HBO)
The Closer (TNT)
Dexter (Showtime)
The Good Wife (CBS)
Mad Men (AMC)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series
30 Rock (NBC)
Glee (FOX)
Hot In Cleveland (TV Land)
Modern Family (ABC)
The Office (NBC)

In Job Seekers Find Bias Against The Unemployed, a recent NPR article, find mention of the “numbers game,” which certainly applies to acting, and general discussion of how the working find it easier to find work than the unemployed. Ponder how this is another thing that is not unique to The Biz.

Article Five in my occasional series on things that many people in Hollywood talk about as if they weren’t true of other businesses or other cities. (For more, see Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.)

There are 18 of these helpful clips, but only about 20% of the viewers of clip 1 have made it through all the clips. This is probably because the title of each video is long, and identical except for the number, and that number gets cut off as the titles are shortened by YouTube, it’s pretty hard to watch them in any sort of order without a lot of clicking around.

Until now.

Visit this YouTube playlist I made, and you’re good to go.