Giving Up The Ghost

So as not to bury the lead: I give up. I quit. I'm done.

I moved to Los Angeles Aug 2007 with one goal: To earn my living as an actor in mainstream film & television.

That was over three and a half years ago. Here's a progress report:

# of paid speaking parts in SAG or AFTRA productions: 0
# of broadcast TV auditions: 0
# of non-ultra-low-budget SAG film auditions: 0
# of union commercial auditions: 0
# of voice over auditions: 0
# of paid theater auditions: 0
# of theatrical agents: 0
# of commercial agents: 0
# of print agents: 0
# of voice over auditions: 0
# of managers: 1
# of current managers: 0

Also, as I just did my taxes, here are some more numbers for you:

Amount I earned as an actor last year: $0
Amount I spent on acting-related expenses last year: $5,075

They say that 30:1 is a pretty good audition to booking ratio. Well, at this rate I should book my first mainstream gig sometime after never.

I came to LA saying to my friends "You don't have to worry about me selling out, I'm pre-sold, I'll act in anything so long as it pays." It's one thing to be a girl who doesn't have a boyfriend because her standards are too high, it's another thing entirely to be a bargain basement hooker who in three years of trying has never found a single John. What little pride I have is, not just wounded but, eviscerated and laying in a bloody heap in the dirt.

I have come to the following conclusions:
I am probably not a good actor; I am definitely not an exceptionally good actor. I don't have the internal drive or strength of belief-in-self necessary to successfully market myself as an actor. I don't have "it".

Worst of all: whatever enjoyment I once took from acting, left me months ago. I've become pessimistic, embittered, and a toxic influence on my acting peers. It breaks my heart.

So it is for my sake, and the sakes of those around me that I admit defeat and relinquish my goal of being a professional actor. It's been a great ride. I've made some incredible friends and had some unforgettable experiences (I traveled the world!), but I'm just not strong enough to continue. God bless those of you who are. Thank you for your support and for following me on this journey.
With love and admiration,

Donovan Keith
February 2011

Note: I reserve the right to act for fun and friends, and even money if it comes, but I'm no longer pursuing it as a career.

How To Set and Keep To a Weekly Budget

If there is a stereotype about actors that is unfortunately true more often than not, it is that they're terrible with money. The good news is: it doesn't have to be that way. You can take control of your finances and its easier than you think. Here's a little primer on setting a weekly budget, and some tricks you can do with cardboard, cash, and a wallet to keep you on point throughout the month.

Determining Your Budget

1. On the first of the month look in your bank account, find out how much money you have.
2. Pay all of your monthly bills in full.
3. Take out as much money as you can stand to for savings (if you're new to this, or living close to the margin start with 10% of your monthly income). Your savings priorities should be:
1. 401k up to your employer's match limit (Free money!).
2. Paying down high interest credit cards.
3. Your emergency fund (enough $ to cover your expenses for 3months)
4. Roth IRA up to the maximum deposit amount (this is especially important for actors)
5. Personal savings goals (home, car, camera fund, etc)
4. Figure out how much money you have left, and subtract an overdraft buffer ($100 - $200 should be okay).
5. The amount you have left is your monthly discretionary income.

Determining Your Daily Allowance

1. Take your monthly allowance and divide by the number of days in the month. If you've got a monthly budget of $495 in January, this becomes: $495/31 = $15.97
2. Round down to the nearest dollar. $15.97 becomes $15

The Weekly Budget Wallet System

This one is easy enough, but you may need to modify this system slightly to fit your personality and spending habits.

1. Take your wallet and insert 3 cardboard tabs: Savings, Week, & Expense
2. At the start of every week, withdraw 7 times your daily allowance. $15 x 7 = $105 and put it into the "Week" section of your wallet.
3. At the start of every day, take your daily allowance from "Week" and put it at the front of your wallet for general use.
4. At the end of the day, take any remaining cash and put it in the "Savings" area.
5. If you run into an expense that you know you'll have to pay later in the week (like a friend buying a ticket to a show for you), take it out of your daily allowance and put it in the "Expense" area.

The Most Important Part

The single most important rule for a stable financial life is: don't spend any money that you don't have. If you only have $3 left in your day's allowance - sorry, but you're not going out to dinner you're having packet noodles today. If you spend less than your daily allowance on a given day, you'll have extra cash in your savings section which you can spend whenever you like on whatever you like.

Some Things You Might Notice

• You'll make fewer impulse buys. Having to pull cash out of your wallet, and realizing you have a limited amount on a given day makes it harder to spend money on crap you don't really want or need.
• You'll actually start preparing meals at home instead of thinking you should.
• You'll recognize just how much money you're spending on cigarettes, an astounding cessation aide.

Traps

• Gas & Groceries: If you know you buy a tank a week, and spend $50 on groceries, reduce your daily allowance and put enough money for gas and groceries in your "Expenses" section. Also, the earlier in the week you buy your groceries the more money you'll save on eating out.

 Get a wallet as bitchin' as your new budget will be. Note: Bitchin' is in the eye of the beholder.

Put a sticker on your ATM card to remind yourself that it is to be used to withdraw cash only. This is to keep you from accidentally busting your budget.

Your day's spending cash should be in the front-most compartment of your wallet.

At the start of every week withdraw your daily budget * 7 from the bank. This is all the dough you're allowed to spend in a week. Try to get this cash in small denominations so that you can easily split it evenly into 7 days. Don't withdraw more than a week's worth, because if you do and your wallet is lost or stolen you'll be super screwed.

If you don't spend all of your daily allowance on a given day, it should go into the savings tab. If you're a spend-thrift M-Th you can have a fun Fri and Sat night. If you've still got this money at the end of the week, put it in a savings account towards a fun goal like an HD Camera or a plane ticket to Thailand.

This is where you keep cash that you know is owed to somebody else. Be that the City of LA for a parking ticket you just discovered, or your friend who bought tickets to the concert on Friday.

Something Scary #2: Saying Hello to Strangers

What I'm Afraid Of:

When I was a teenager I was horribly embarrassed to be around my mother when she would start talking to strangers in line at the super market, or on the street, or at the coffee shop, in short: everywhere. These days I really admire my mom's ability to strike up a conversation, and wish that I could do it too. There's something about talking to strangers that I find absolutely terrifying. Possible reasons:

1. I was told never to talk to strangers as a child.
2. The stranger might ignore me.
3. The stranger might reject me.
4. The stranger might think I'm stupid.
5. The stranger and I may having nothing to talk about.
6. The stranger may never shut up once they get started.
7. The stranger will think I'm rude.
8. The stranger may feel physically threatened by me trying to initiate conversation and scream at the top of their lungs.
9. I might remind the stranger of a buddy from 'Nam, they'll enter into a PTSD episode and stab me to death while screaming "Why Johnny, why?!"

Clearly, some of my fears are more rational than others. But some variation on at least one of them is what prevents me from saying hello.

What I Did That Scared Me:

On my walk home from work today, I committed to saying hello to everyone that I passed. It went pretty well. "Hello" became "Howdy" which became "How's it going" which led to "Did you just say 'Friday Night Blues'? No? Oh, sorry, that's the name of a dance event I go to."

However, there were some people I didn't say hello to, namely anyone who wasn't looking in my direction when I was passing (Reasons: #7, #8). So, not a smashing success, but more often than not I felt the fear but acted anyway.

Something Scary #1 was: Asking a Girl Out to Coffee

Taking Risks in Life

I read a great profile on Jeremy Renner in "Men's Health" of all places. Here's an excerpt:

"If you don't know who you are, how the hell are you going to be able to...?" Renner leaves the thought unfinished, but it would be easy to fill in the blank with a million possibilities, most of them more profound than becoming a movie star. "So I made a very conscious decision to be fearless, to live a life of fear-freeness. I decided to do something every day I was afraid of." Like?

"I swam with sharks," he says, recounting a scuba trip off California's southern coast. "I was terrified of sharks and I'm still terrified of sharks, but at least I was taking action--and not being squelched by something I don't know about."

It's pretty brilliant strategy for becoming a better actor if you ask me, although apparently the idea is nothing new:

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

It seems, that if one wants to play a character on the edge of madness, you must expand your threshold for risk. So I have unofficially undertaken the project of consciously doing things that scare me. I'll be cataloging this risk taking under the "Something Scary" tag.

#27 - #??: The Count Ends Not With a Bang, but a Whimper

It seems my goal of creating something every single day and posting the end-result to this blog has sputtered out a bit. It's not that I haven't been creating things; I have been. It's just this whole business of remembering what I've done, numbering them then posting something that's gotten me out of whack.

A Partial List of Creations Since I Last Posted:

• Screenplay w/ my Writing Partner
• Lyrics and Melody for The World's Worst Song
• Super Secret Christmas Gift(s)
• Prepared scene for Class
• Edited short film "Sesame Avenue"
• Attempted to Cover Radiohead's "Creep" on Ukulele
• Wrote monologue
• Revised monologue

I'm tempted to spend the next couple weeks strategizing and restart my count in 2011. Until then, rest assured: I will be acting daily.

Creations

#24 Groundlings Monologue and Screenplay with Partner
#25 Short Film Script
#26 Dance Class with Chryssie Whitehead

Okay, better to post something to try and keep track than lose track altogether.

How To Research a Part

As homework for my class at Margie Haber Studio, I was just given a 4-page scene from the pilot episode of a TV show set in the world of the FBI. My teacher, then asked the class how we planned to prepare. "Boil a lot of water, drink a lot of tea, and eventually get down to work?" I offered. She was not impressed. Instead, she offered up these ideas for learning what is involved in living the life of an FBI agent:

• Read a book on the FBI
• Read a crime blotter ( http://www.crimeblotter.org/map/ )
• Interrogate someone, about anything. "It's my understanding this market stocks papayas. Yet, I don't see any papayas."
• Investigate something. Try and put the pieces of a mystery together.
• Call your local FBI bureau, tell them you're preparing for a role, and ask if they have any PR people or agents who would be willing to answer your questions.

Now this may seem a little preposterous, but I don't think I've ever done preparation for a role in this way before. I tend to just read the script a lot and build up a world imaginatively. Which, now that I think about it, seems like a pretty good way to create a performance that's not grounded in reality.

Whenever I get despondent about acting as a career choice, I'm usually able to re-motivate myself with the promise that acting is a way to experience all that life has to offer. I can be a policeman one day, a fireman the next, a schoolteacher, a doctor, a recluse, a roustabout - basically I'm paid to explore all of my childhood fantasies and I'm never forced to give up one in order to be another (forgot to mention: Astronaut!). But the fact of the matter is, it's been a hollow promise. I really haven't done much in the way of really exploring those other lives.

So my challenge to myself, and to other actors out there, is to: dare to live the life of the character.

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So what is it like to be an FBI agent?
Some preliminary investigation (one made-for-tv documentary and some web searching) on what's involved in being an agent has turned up:

• To be an FBI agent, you need a 4year degree and at least 3 years professional experience.
• Agents are haunted by unsolved cases for basically their entire lives.
• Agents undergo extensive training that simulates emergencies just in case one ever occurs, sometime you'll simulate something for years before you actually encounter it.
• Agents work incredibly long hours, get little vacation time, and are paid government wages.
• Working for the FBI gives most agents an incredible sense of purpose; your work has meaning. (This is the bit I'm most excited about playing)
• There is an acceptance that there will be another terrorist attack, and there is an accute fear that they won't have done all they can to prevent it.
• Agents often have to be hyper-vigilant in situations where nothing bad ever actually happens nor was going to happen (putting together security plans for big sports matches, etc).
• Working as an FBI agent often involves less action than working as a regional police officer, but it offers the promise of working on some of the largest and most important cases in the States.
• You might get the opportunity to work in beautiful foreign locales.

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Oh, and Creation #23 was a cold-reading from an episode of Law & Order. I haven't acted across from someone else in about a month, so once I got through the fear and anxiety of being rusty, it felt really good to be back in the swing of things.