What I Have Learned

Since I lost weight over the course of 2010, I have desperately been trying to get footage together for a new demo reel. My look had changed significantly, and frankly I personally didn’t want any of my old self on my new reel. So, I have been performing a lot of student film, short film, and other small-budget independent productions just to get stuff I could use.

It took a few months, but I had enough precious seconds of myself on film that I could assemble into a two-and-a-half-minute reel. But I waited. Why? Good question.

In February-March I had done a film for a university student’s senior project. It was a touching story about a son who finds out after his father died that he had been having a secret relationship with a man. They’d even adopted a young child together. I was playing the part of the other man. The director told me that she wanted to show that the son wasn’t the only one who was feeling loss, that what my character was going through would bookend it. So in a particularly touching scene when I was looking at home movies I end up crying on camera. It felt really good at the time, and I thought it would make a great addition to the reel I was making. So I waited.

Well, the months went by, and although I was pretty sure the film had been completed because it was needed for a class, I never heard anything from the director. Finally, just last month, I got a disk through the mail, and got to see the film for the first time. I was disappointed to find that half of my footage had been edited away, even to the point of cutting one of my lines in half. As you might have guessed, the scene where I cried was one of the cut-out parts. I went from expecting really cool footage to having virtually nothing I could use.

So, what have we learned? Don’t wait. Don’t wait for that one project to get finished no matter how cool it is. Make your reel now with what you have. If you do get cool film eventually and it is as good as you thought, then you can always add it in later. But every day you wait not putting your reel together is a day you can’t show people what kind of actor you are.

Don’t wait. Trust me.

After the workshop I left the city and stopped ofr gas in NJ. As I was going inside to get a soda, a guy pulls his Caravan into the lot going the wrong direction and finally manages to work his way into the space on the end. As I pass him he gets out of his car and says, “Hey buddy, you need to see this! Hang on.” He goes to the tail gate to open it up, discovers that it’s locked and fiddles with his keys.

Now, I could have walked away at this point, since I was pretty sure he was about to show either bait-and-switch speakers in a box or something stolen, none of which I really was in the market for.  But I stayed simply because I had thought of what I was going to say ahead of time, and since those opportunities were rare, I waited as he opened the hatch to reveal a snazzy blue bicycle.

So I said, “Where’d that come from?” He then replies with some spiel, probably about it’s legitimacy, but I wasn’t paying attention. When he was done, I said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t trust anyone who would park in a handicapped parking space.” I pointed down at the blue stick-figure-in-a-wheelchair and walked off to him stammering about not seeing it. By the time I left the store again he had pulled out of the space, but I could see him circling around the gas pumps for some sucker with a less awesome line at the ready.

Usually I don’t think of those kinds of responses until it’s far too late.

Lately I have been taking some commercial workshops – you know, getting in front of commercial casting directors and the agents they bring in, and hopefully someone will like you enough to through you work. And you stand there with your big smile and catcher’s mitt (in order to catch the work) and give them your best stuff and pray to God that they like you.

Until recently I hadn’t considered acting for commercials. I never had an opinion about them one way or another, but just never thought about them until recently. For some reason there has been a sudden flood of friends, fellow actors, and even some legit casting directors telling me I should be doing them. So, okay, I’m now trying to be a commercial actor.

I imagine some idealistic actors who probably consider commercial work to be somehow beneath them, or look upon it as some form of sell-out. Well, here’s some news – 99% percent of acting is a sell-out of some form or another. Whether you get paid or not, chances are someone else is. Our job is to simultaneously tell the God’s honest truth and lie our butts off so that someone will fork over some cash to somebody (maybe us, maybe not). Probably the only non-sell-out acting would be some crazy street performer whose performance includes yelling at people who give them money and throwing it back at them. So far I have never seen more than a distant approach to this Platonic ideal.

Our job is to tell a story. And commercials have a story to be told. It may not be Wuthering Heights (that’s a book, right?), but they do have a story in there.  And I aim to tell it.

As I prepare and send off my audition sound file for the AFLAC Duck search (why not?), I can’t help but think of the events that made the search necessary for the insurance company. Namely the blog posts by Gilbert Gottfried about the recent events in Japan, and AFLAC’s subsequent decision for fire him.  And that got me thinking about the nature of comedy, so excuse me if I get too philosophical here.

I get it, Mr. Gottfried, I really do. For comedy in its purest form to work, everything must be on the table. If anything is deemed “politically incorrect” or “too soon,” then the comedy we are left with after such censorship invariably falls short of this ideal. And if that happens too often then we become trapped in mediocrity and nothing is funny anymore. As you are a champion of this ideal, and  a very brave one at that, I do have respect for you.

However, I also understand that comedy is not in a vacuum. All humor is born of tragedy, but unfortunately all tragedy affects real, actual people. Often we have to weigh striving toward the ideal of comedy against sympathy for the tragedies’ victims and the victims’ loved ones. It’s not always easy to decide where to draw the line – what should be off the table and for how long. It is of course different for each individual.

And I understand AFLAC’s decision to fire Mr. Gottfried. I mean, they are an insurance company – their entire purpose is to minimize risk. While another type of company might have had to luxury to consider keeping him on, an insurance company can’t afford to look risk-taking or unsafe.

Where do I stand? I wish I knew. If I were a braver person, I might be out there with Gilbert, crusading for comedy in its purest ideal. But as it is, I will gladly throw my voice in for consideration, and try not to think too much about the amount of death and suffering that indirectly led to this opportunity.

Wish me luck.