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

Apropos of nothing, here is a list of published plays that I have read recently (in addition to those in which I have performed):

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
November by David Mamet
Hurlyburly by David Rabe
The Water’s Edge by Theresa Rebeck
‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
Travels with My Aunt by Giles Havergal / Graham Greene
On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov

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.

This is part of a series of entries on Making Ideas Happen.

In LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY, the part of the book on the third and last element of the formula (see Blog I), Belsky first addresses “the rewards overhaul.” We need to overcome systems of short-term rewards built in to school, traditional employment, etc. Not that they’re bad, but that they get in the way when pursuing long-term goals or extraordinary things. What to do first?

Unplug from the traditional rewards system. As you shift your focus away from short-term rewards, you must be willing to go without “success” in the eyes of others….

While it can be psychologically and financially difficult to depart from the race toward conventional rewards after a lifetime working with one mind-set, doing so is imperative to succeeding in the long term. Otherwise, you will struggle to sustain your long-term projects amidst the desire to be validated in the near term.

Going without “success”? Psychologically and financially difficult? Can I get an amen?! Totally just described my life over the last several years. We are not alone.

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.”

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