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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.

Today, a tip that can help when using Craigslist. Because CL posts expire after a week, they can disappear on you at the most inconvenient times.

The problem: You responded to a job offer a couple of days ago, you want to remind yourself of some detail that was posted on CL, and now it’s gone.

The solution: Get in the habit of using toread on every CL post that you respond to.

Sign up, install the toread bookmarklet in your browser, and click on the bookmarklet before responding to CL. Now you know that if you need it, you can re-read that important CL post later by finding it in your email long after it’s not available on Craigslist itself.

To make things smoother, you send the CL posts to an email account that allows for automatic filtering. For instance, you set up a Gmail filter to apply label ‘toread’ to all messages with [toread] in the subject line and to archive them, so they don’t bother you. Ta-da! They’re only there if you need them.

Hope this helps. Happy surfing!

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.

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

A few things on Reference Items.

Years ago, when I started anew to dig into acting and music and writing and other non-corporate America stuff, I got some nice notebooks. This was a good idea, finding a notebook I liked instead of just buying whatever could be found on the shelves of Duane Reade. One brand I’m fond of is Miquelrius, and they often come in colored sections (example) and I suppose the colors are for a filing or organizing of some sort. After a while, I ignored the colored sections and just started taking notes page by page with a date at the top and putting a start date and end date on the title page when it got full.

Fast forward to 2011 and me reading MIH and coming upon this:

References Are Worth Storing, Not Revering

The tendency to take notes … and compulsively save various types of handouts … is ingrained from our early days in elementary school.

For many of us, this habit of recording and organizing everything has become a time- and space-consuming behavior with no real payoff.

While we might cherish the opportunity to refer back to the thoughts or main points gathered in meetings and brainstorms of the past, we rarely have the luxury to do so. Truth be told, we can barely complete our Action Steps amidst the chaos of the everyday, let alone refer back to References.

What to do instead?

1. Reduce your scribe-like tendencies, especially if you know that when the notebook closes, Action Steps and References and all that you wrote of value disappears from your mind.

2. Use a chronological pile (or file). Yes! Validation of what I’ve been doing for a while now. In this day of scheduling software, it is easier than ever to match meetings in the past with exact dates, and then in turn to use that date — and nothing more — as the way to label it to later find any notes you might need. Just put everything in one big pile! Efficient. Simple. Keeps your space clear.

3. When you get a handout or URL or whatever, question it. “What is the relevance? For what purpose would I refer back to this at some point?” If you can’t answer the question, throw the Reference out.

I look around at my workspace, and see only partial progress in this regard. But progress, nonetheless. One manila folder for 2011 is better than the previous, ever-increasing number of manila folders I went through for this subject and that, and then new sub-subject and blah blah blah.

Does this help? Heidi?

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.

Saw this dude protesting outside the brand-new Chick-fil-A in Hollywood, at the corner of Sunset and Highland, where the new normal is probably going to be lines of cars around the corner, interfering with traffic. Boo.

The guy is protesting the close affiliations and donations between this restaurant chain and Focus on the Family (evil), which I’d heard before, but he also says that Chick-fil-A has a retreat center where they have meetings only for married straight employees (creepy).

Well, we know one thing for sure. It’s a trend we see all the time, with Focus on the Family’s James Dobson being a shining example. Remember when he took a gay prostitute to a hotel room? Yeah, that. So the thing we know for sure is this: somebody who runs Chick-fil-A is a closeted homosexual.

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.

The last of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet evokes a pleasant feeling in me. True, the entire volume is cherished because of the good feelings it brings to the modern reader, but this letter ends on an unexplained and inexplicable up note. It is the day after Christmas and Rilke is responding to something good the young poet had written. Further, Rilke is glad he hasn’t ended up in a profession that denies or attacks the existence of all art. Isolation in a lonely soldier’s outpost is better than a job in journalism, criticism and three quarters of what if called literature. I’m not at all sure I technically agree with this, but I can’t argue with the sentiment. The letter warmed me, that is all.

In this my final post on the topic, I link to an online version of them that I have found. Enjoy. It’s a resource to be read again and again.

Find more brief posts on Rilke here.