I asked my friend Michael to take my passport photograph. You can see his handy work above. The US government actually requires that you not smile - it's easier to recognize world-weary travelers that way.
"Wait!" you might say, "You wrote an entire article on how to make a collage that looks like it came off a 14 year old girl's bedroom wall?!" To which I reply: Yes, yes I did. Those 14 yr old girls had the right idea, I can almost guarantee you Katie Holmes had pictures of Tom Cruise plastered over her bedroom walls when she was a kid. Note: The artistic merit of a vision board is secondary to its content.
When working on a film set, you might hear the 1st AD call out "Back to ones!" What this means is that actors and crew should return to their first marks for the shot. There is something therapeutic about returning to the starting gate.
It's 10:47pm. I just got back home from a day of shooting, followed by rehearsal, followed by a performance of my sketch about Euthanasia, performed for the benefit of cancer patients everywhere (the sketch, not the mercy-killing). I received an email telling me that the script of my film is changing dramatically (an actor failed to show) and I've got some new scenes tomorrow; oh and an 8:30am call time. Doing some math, I might be able to get 6 hours of sleep - not bad for most, but a nightmare for a hibernating bear like me.
It seems that my buddy Jonny is always blogging about various celebrity sightings. I live in Hollywood proper and my star-sightings are few and far between. I feel like I'm getting short shrift in this situation; heck my morning run takes my by the Scientology Celebrity Center and still - nada.
UPDATE: The list of teachers became inordinately long, I'm now just posting links to other resources.The Alexander Technique is a way of working for the self-prevention of unhelpful or harmful habits that interfere with the mental and physical conditions best-suited for the health and functioning of the "self" as a whole.In other words, people carry a lot of unnecessary tension and often do things in completely inefficient ways that do far more harm than good. By putting a little mental focus on such matters you can drastically improve you posture, ease your breathing, and bring an aliveness to your body and movements that you haven't experienced since you were a small child.
I have started and stopped reading more books on the craft of acting than I care to recount. I made it through one of Stanislavski's, halfway through Uta's, a few pages into The Actor and the Target, but for the most part it is a struggle. Not that I don't want to learn more about my craft, I do, it's just that acting teachers don't all make for great writers, nor are the minutia of their techniques compelling to read about. That's why Richard Brestoff's The Great Acting Teachers: and Their Methods was something of a revelation for me. I finished it in less than 2 days, and given it took me nigh on 8 months to read Middlesex that is no small feat.In this book Brestoff takes the reader on a personal journey through the history of acting from Thespis to Stanislavski to Suzuki. At times the book reads like a history, at others it takes us on a fanciful journey through time and space, and it also includes passages that give you a sense of what it is to learn acting in each of these great teachers' studios.
This evening I shared a meal with a gentleman named Gabriel. We met in an on camera acting workshop taught by Bobby Weinapple, a man who exemplifies the best parts of bay area crunchy liberalism. In a hole-in-the-wall Thai noodle shack in San Francisco Gabe and I shared our visions of coming down to LA to live the dream. We kept in the lightest of touch through Facebook. As things would have it, I made my trek down to La La Land about 10 months before him. So it was me who got to play the role of wizened sage when we met up today at Thai Patio at the intersection of Thai Town and Little Armenia in Hollywood.Our conversation wound through geography, up to work, finding comfort at craft, climbing to relationships, falling to raunch, and oscillating to a delightful hum in the realization that we shared similar ideas about how it was we wanted to find success in this town. We agreed that it was a bad idea to sell our souls, but that there might come a time when we would have to; just not yet. The key, we discovered, is that no matter what you do in this town or what this town does to you – you have to live your life. So it might as well be the life you want to live.
I will share with you, faithful reader, the one piece of advice from our dinner that I feel genuinely qualified to give. It will come to you by way of anecdote.
When I first moved to LA there were only two things that I truly could not stand about the town: traffic, and parking. Every night I'd drive home sighing my frustrations at the cars streaming before me in an endless parade of red brake lights. When I got to my apartment, my supposed sanctuary, I found no place where my Mitsubishi Galant could rest it's weary tires. I would circle, and circle, and circle in search of parking. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 23 minutes and not one fucking space in this block?! Eventually I reached a point of such extreme frustration that I would park five or six blocks away because, well, spaces were available. As this became routine, I stopped searching for parking near my home. What used to be a 20 minute quest became a ten minute walk home and a ten minute walk out to my car. A curious thing happened because of this new strategy, a certain buoyancy entered my step, the stresses of the day rolled off my shoulders and by the time I joined apartment key with apartment lock I was happy, renewed, and refreshed. What once felt like a punishment, exacted upon me by the forgotten Gods of Olympus, was now an expected pleasant part of my day. My time commitment hadn't changed, searching for parking and walking both ways averaged to the same 20 minutes. But I had shifted my mindset.
A Joke:
A man walks down the street and sees another man lying in the street. The standing man asks the supine man "What on earth are you doing lying in the street? You're going to get yourself killed!" The horizontal man replied "I'm saving this parking space! I was so excited to find it I sent my wife out to buy a car."
Don't be the man in the road. Leave early, park where there are spaces, and enjoy the walk to your destination.
Cold reading is for the most part dead. What most actors call cold reading today is actually a prepared read or at least a lukewarm read. For most auditions you've got the sides at least 24hrs in advance and by all rights you should be off-book and at performance level when you enter the room. Granted, I make a gallant effort towards this end, but usually end up half-memorized and half-committed to my choices; not an enviable position. Last night I picked up some wonderful tips on how to approach a cold read – and I can already see applications in the realm of prepared reads. Richard Seyd is the man responsible for this little bit of genius. The following is a paraphrasing of his lecture:When an actor is given a script and only given a little bit of time to prepare all of the blood drains from his brain and floods his major muscle groups. Yep, fight or flight. So when you feel stupid in an audition, it's because you actually are stupid. That being said, if you create and practice a preparation for cold reads and auditions you'll be much more able to effectively wrangle your grey matter (it's had more practice).
When actors are given a script on short notice they often fall into the trap of immediately building a character and back-story without taking the time to fully understand the text. This is stupid. The text will inform your character choices, and will allow you to be more specific and accurate. A couple very good choices will serve you far better than a dozen ungrounded and unclear choices. In order to arrive at a clearer understanding of the text in a short period of time, you should read it in a series of passes, making a conscious effort not to think just about your character but to take in the totality of the scene.
While this post has grown into something of a tome, it's all really good stuff and definitely worth giving a shot the next time you're playing around with a script with some actor buddies. If it works for you, then make a habit of doing it every time you get sides, a habit of preparation is what will allow you to excel in a cold-read situation.
In preparing for my commercial agent interview, I realized there's quite a bit to do.
