What's The Point

"Acting is the perfect idiot's profession"

                              ~Katharine Hepburn

It's a hard world out there for an actor. The leap from amateur to aspiring professional is a small one, typically from high school into college. However, even then, the world seems small and bright. It's just leaving one small community of actors to go play with another. Seems familiar enough. Gain a little more experience, beef up your resume...

But then the real world. There was nothing that could have prepared you for this. The rejection. The humiliation. The integrity. The bloodsuckers running the industry built on dreams...

This isn't high school anymore.

Not every actor's story begins this way, but they all certainly feel like that in the end. When I was looking into colleges, my dad gave me the priceless advice that regardless of where (or if) I went to school for acting, I was always going to be an actor. It is the only profession you can go into that has a major at most schools, but doesn't require you to have one in order to excel in that field. Because if a role comes down to two different people, one with a degree and one without, and the one without a degree is better in even the tiniest way... It will always go to the one without the degree.

My experience with actors that have gone to school and have been trained on a college level is that none of them have been warned about what the professional acting world is really like. It isn't laid out for them that this is a large pool they are jumping into, and any job is a good job. I would sit in lobbies with recent graduates that refused to audition for television pilots or commercials because they believed it would be selling out their integrity (an opinion I knew I might have grown for myself if I went to one of those schools). What I knew at that point that they didn't was that you can't exclusively be a stage actor, a comedic actor, or a serious actor... You need to be anything they ask you to be, or you will disappear. In the age of Justin Timberlake, Jamie Foxx and Natalie Portman, you have to be a triple, quadruple, or a centuple threat.

But even talent doesn't get you everything. Sometimes, the most talented are overlooked. It can take years before you book a paying job. Seriously. Years. That isn't an exaggeration. Imagine having spent 40,000 dollars on tuition a year at a prestigious theater school, and then not getting a single paying gig out of that degree for years. It happens more often than anyone wants to believe. When all is said and done... What's the point?

But there is good news. It isn't always that bad. And it doesn't have to be that bad anymore. The industry is changing. Walls are coming down. Location is superfluous. The big pond is getting very, very small. We, the little actors, can take this industry back. It will take a little time, but we can do this our way.

What I hope to accomplish with this blog is how to help you avoid the pitfalls I have run across in my career, and document my experiences in becoming more of an individual artist rather than a puppet doing other people's wishes. I will write about preparations I will undergo for specific auditions and what I do in order to get those auditions.

I will also write monologues. Those are a big thing in the industry I guess... and it is hard to find good ones. So I'll do my best to get you some to use for free. I mean, you could pay me if you want, but actors using my writing is reward enough.

I'm here to help. I have experienced success and humiliation in this industry. I've had years where I have booked a large job every month, and I have had years that I didn't book anything. I've been given harsh advice, and I have been paid extremely high compliments. All of the above where helpful and worth more than any college experience I could have received. If you have questions, let me know. I will gladly write long, never ending responses that might help answer those questions in some way.

Let's play by the rules. Let's make our own rules. This is our industry. We can do whatever we want.