Acting Is a Job: Real Life Lessons about the Acting Business

INTRODUCTION

ACTING IS A JOB

"... No matter how much (or how little) acting

experience you may have, you can start pursuing an acting

career right now ... and this book shows you how."

—Breaking Into Acting for Dummies

If you believe that quote, stop reading now. Close the cover, put this book back on the shelf, and have a wonderful career. Write me when you’ve made it.

If you think that acting, like other professional careers, may take at least a modicum of craft, talent, looks, luck, skill, emotional stability, guidance, patience, and endurance, then read on.

First, there are the stereotypes. Take your pick. Actors are:

A. Lazy

B. Dumb

C. Overpaid for their work

D. Waiters

Well, you can’t win ’em all.

Certainly some actors have no training, some have no talent, some are stupid, and some of them make a lot of money. You could probably cross out my laundry list of prerequisites, with the exception of luck and endurance, and have an accurate accounting of the necessary skills an actor must have. Luck and endurance are the two most important factors in an acting career.

There’s another buzzword. Career. Not a day on a soap opera, not three days of extra work that got you your SAG card. A career. The daily event to which people devote their working lives. A career is a very difficult thing for an actor to have.

For an actor, it’s also difficult to judge whether you actually have a career. You’re a lawyer when you’re arguing in court: You have a career. You’re a doctor when you’re looking in someone’s ear with a scope: You have a career. You’re a teacher when you’re explaining Euclidian geometry: You have a career. You’re an actor when you’re performing on stage, in television, or in a film.

But you do not have a career.

Acting is a perpetually freelance business that fools people into thinking better of it. It entices with celebrity culture, awards shows, and superstar salaries. But it is, at its core, a job-to-job industry.

The winter after I turned twenty-six, I did not have a career. Success was fleeting, and though I had done some bit parts on television and a commercial, career longevity was a long way off. I wondered if an MFA in acting from a recognized graduate program was a good idea, so I sought counsel from a former college professor. Expecting a conversation on the value of education, the art of acting, and the great skills I could inherit through study, I broached the subject of going back to school.

My teacher’s response was pointed and simple.

Unless you’re a model, he said, there’s no work for you until you’re thirty.

I am not a model.

I went to school. In the first month of training, we were forced to perform and outperform each other constantly. Acting schools are a weird blend of summer camp and the military. You’re with the same incestuous group of people all the time. You’re laughing, crying, emoting, moving, breathing, dancing, and drinking together. Between class, rehearsal, and performance, you’re in the theater sixteen hours a day. You’re exhausted and constantly competing for roles, stage time, and validation.

One day, after an especially gruesome display of acting, our Russian professor wore a particularly grim expression. He rubbed his chin with his hand, looked disapprovingly at the actors on stage, and spoke to the translator.

We anxiously awaited the interpretation. What deep secret was about to span the generational divide? What performance nut would be cracked today? What did our master decree?

Acting, he sighed, is hard.

Fast-forward two years. MFA in hand, New York showcase complete, I’m fortunate enough to be taking agent meetings in New York. At one, I sit down with a woman whom I had met prior to school. I remembered this; she did not. Her pitch to me—and she did not stop talking our entire time together—was that she could take someone off the street, any good-looking young someone, and make him a star. That’s what the business is about, she said. Looks.

Two years of training, some fifty-odd thousand dollars of debt, and I was right back where I started.

Acting is hard. Unless you’re a model.

Do ugly actors who are good make it in this business? Yes. Do beautiful actors without a modicum of talent make it? Yes. Is there a hard and fast rule, rhyme, or reason to any of this? No.

Here’s what there is. There is belief in yourself. There is a support network. There is the fact that endurance and patience are perhaps the most important skills an actor can have. And, most importantly, there is a need for you to be well informed.

Misperceptions prevail. Actors, with visions of Hollywood stardom, Broadway careers, or even a simple life of consistent employment, have been misled by an industry that sustains itself by leeching off the dreams of the uninformed. Each new generation of actors, and the general public they entertain, has no idea of the actual happenings in an actor’s daily life. Sure, everyone knows that acting is hard, but do they know about twenty-hour days filled with temping, ramen soup lunches, and late-night rehearsals in unheated East Village studios? Have they heard what an audition is really like? How come my son didn’t get that commercial, they wonder. Why did my daughter move from Houston to New York only to get a job back in Houston? How hard can it really be to find employment? What do you mean, I’m not good looking?

If you are the parent, friend, or relative of an actor, or you’re anyone else outside the industry, you are more than likely lost in a haze of generalizations about the acting trade. Never fear—most actors are too. The impetus for writing this book came from my own parents and relatives, who would, at every Thanksgiving dinner, brag about my recent appearance on this soap opera or that television show. (The conversations about this always lasted far longer than my appearance on whatever show they were discussing.) Seeing a face on TV is exciting, and it pays well for a day’s work. Yet I never managed to convince people that a day as a crime scene investigator on Law & Order did not a career make. I wasn’t going to suddenly be discovered. I was not moving to a life of perpetual employment as a crime scene investigator on all the Law & Order spinoffs, or Cold Case, CSI, CSI: Miami, or CSI: NY. It just doesn’t work that way.

Meanwhile, I was taking pride in the work I was doing in the downtown New York theater scene, working long into the night in chilly, converted schoolhouses on the Lower East Side. While I found this both romantic and artistically fulfilling, those who had to sit through performances, still wearing their winter coats, had another way of thinking about it.

Soon, they said, you’ll get your break.

This gap in understanding about what it means to be an actor will have shrunk by the time you finish this book. Think of it as a handbook—a reference tool for the future months and years of auditions, callbacks, unions, shoots, per diems, scale rates, day player jobs, and, with any luck, residuals you will pocket. You will hear from working actors who have climbed and fallen and climbed again. They have been gracious enough to share their stories with me, and with you, in the greater hope of diffusing the fog that hovers over this business. There will be an equal amount of optimism and pessimism, because that’s what life in this industry is like. Admittedly, this is a New York–centric guide. However, the rules of this maddening game can be applied to both coasts.

You will not find a formula for success within these pages. This book is not, like so many of the actors’ guides out there, trying to sell the dream. It is not a dissection of the acting business that, when you’ve finished reading, will provide magical answers, a key to stardom or success, or a way to cash in quickly. It is a dose of realism in a hyperfantastic world—information for the admittedly uninformed. It’s the book I wish someone had handed me when I started out in New York.

Because when you know what to expect in the acting world; when you are prepared for audition rooms and callbacks and working on a set and the agent interview; when you know which regional theaters are prestigious, which acting schools are valid; and when you have a community around you that also understands these things, then you’ll have a head start on the game.

Then you’ll have a fighting chance.

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ACTOR

(or How to Respond to the Statement, I’m Doing a Restoration Comedy, Mom)

"I deny that I ever said actors are cattle. What I said was,

‘Actors should be treated like cattle.’"

—Alfred Hitchcock

It’s been an uphill battle for the actor for some time. Two thousand, five hundred and forty years, to be precise.

The general frustrations of the profession are nothing new. Financial strife, poor societal standing, endless travel to other regions, and the celebrity factor were not invented by griping unions, background players, and People magazine. The sordid history of the actor is one large pile of precedent, a warning for all who will follow: You want to live in the fringes society, be our guest—just don’t expect us to care when the curtain goes down.

Ours is a lengthy history. We predate doctors and lawyers and science and Jesus. We have been banned, restored, outlawed, and revered. To appreciate this history, one must unveil the historical plight of the actor. As the saying goes, If you don’t know where you’re coming from, can you know where you’re headed?

The development of the actor through history, and the consequent, complementary movements within the theater; from the theater into film; film into television; and, dare I say, television into reality television, is pertinent to understanding the place of the working actor in the world today. Where once the theatrical event was an act of worship performed for the gods, it has become an industry—a full-fledged business dedicated, in the commercial sector, to entertainment with a capital E!

The journey from the first Greek chorus to A Chorus Line is revealing as a roadmap for the profession. The permutations of the actor, from one part of an ensemble collective to individual star, are a trip worth taking. What follows in this chapter is the barest of bones, a Cliffs Notes of theatrical history. It is knowledge that most actors have culled throughout their schooling, and that most lay audience members suffer without. Certainly, there are scholars who devote themselves to this kind of thing, so if you’re truly interested in being able to carry out a four-course dinner party–length conversation, you’re going to want to consult a better guide than what I’ve laid out here. But if you want to get a handle on why they’re all talking at the same time in a Greek tragedy, but not in Ibsen; what trials actors have endured throughout history; and, as the title of this chapter suggests, why your child is unforgiving in expecting you to know about, and laugh during, a restoration comedy, then this chapter will give you a head start.

The Greeks: Fathers of It All

The Greeks set precedent for a tradition of art and commerce within the acting profession. They fathered the professional guidelines when it comes to matters of pay, practice, managing, and performing.

Greek performance served as both a form of worship to the gods and a way of addressing principal societal issues. The earliest Greek plays were characterless tragedies narrated by the chorus, a body of actors that spoke, sang, and moved as a whole unit. The chorus was nothing to shake a stick at: They underwent a nearly year-long training program and were held to exacting standards of diet and exercise as they practiced choreography, dancing, and singing. For years, the chorus was responsible for delivering the entire play, until one day, an actor named Thespis took on the role of a deity, and in doing so, became the first solo actor. This is why, when trying to be pretentious, we in the profession refer to an actor as a thespian.

The three major Greek playwrights are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They often retold the same stories their predecessors had tackled years earlier. As character development increased, the chorus adapted, often taking the role of a recognizable group that helped the audience place themselves within the play. In Medea, for example, the choral body is representative of the women of the town. Postmodern performance likes to play around with the chorus far more than any Grecian would have. Where contemporary theater might place three or four punk-rock chicks near Medea’s home, the Greeks were far more likely to rely on a group of people all speaking in unison.

The evolution of character in Greek drama continued when Aeschylus introduced the second character, and thus, the concept of dialogue. Individuals were soon carrying on conversations with each other, rather than leaving the bulk of the work to the chorus. Later, Sophocles would introduce a third character, further rocking dramatic structure in the process. With this new influx of individual voices, plots began to take shape. Characters became more human, capable of individual emotional response in reaction to the gods.

Actors were paid decent wages during this period, and the state saw to it that they were not exploited by managers, a role handled today by the Screen Actors Guild. But we can thank the Greeks for another tenet of today’s acting history: They are the original founders of type. Tragic actors and comic actors were sequestered from each other. They honed their performance skills for the material they performed, and judgments of their personal character landed steadfastly alongside such determinations. Tragic actors, i.e., those who performed in tragedies, attained positions at court and were often used as ambassadors for the state. A decree granted them safe passage:

Actors are to be given the security of person and property and exemption from arrest at the time of war. . . . They are allowed to travel in the line of duty between countries at war, and are exempt from military service. *

In this light, Sean Penn’s prewar trip to Iraq actually has some precedence.

Comic actors, on the other hand, with their bawdy style and wild costumes, weren’t even allowed to perform in the same festivals as tragedians until 486 BC, nearly fifty years after the festival of Dionysus began. Mimes . . . well, pity the poor mimes. They were relegated to performing on the street, the same way that today, well . . . mimes perform on the street. They were the kind of actors that other actors spat on, talked down to, and used to boost their own feelings about themselves as performers, the same way actors today, well . . . use mimes as the brunt of jokes. Today’s equivalent to the mime would be something like, well . . . a mime. This begs the question, If a mime shoots another mime in an empty forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does anybody care?

Right now, Marcel Marceau is poking an imaginary pin into an invisible voodoo doll that looks just like me.

Leaving the mime to his own silent fate, then (that was the last one, I swear), it should be noted that the division between comic and tragic actors has not faded into the sunset over the past three thousand years. An actor recently told me of a casting director who wouldn’t see him for a sitcom because he didn’t have enough comedy on his resume. He did, however, just finish playing Romeo at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, one of the largest and most renowned regional theaters in the country. So, as you can see, much about the acting industry has changed since 486 BC.

Romans and Christians: A Very Brief History

There’s a reason you haven’t heard about the Roman theater: They didn’t have much. Nor did they produce any truly memorable playwrights. A good death match with a lion was spectacle enough—tragedy and comedy all wrapped into one. Cicero was the Mark Burnett (renowned reality TV producer) of his time, using gladiators as protagonists, lumping real actors in with the sporting events. Suffice it to say, this conflation of all forms of entertainment didn’t benefit the actor, and things began to go horribly wrong.

The actor’s swift decline in status was soon put into law. Justinian code stated that He who appears on the stage in order to act is marked with infamy. Infamia, in this case, being a legal term that stripped a person of particular civic and personal rights. Little rights, like living. While a Roman farmhand might be given twenty lashes for adultery, any man catching an actor in the act with his wife was allowed to kill him on the spot.

Religion and theater have always had a turbulent courtship. With the rise of Christianity, theater was parked under the religious tent. But Christian doctrine frowned upon spectacle, and further condemnation followed. Emperor Justinian II issued another ban on theater in 692 AD. There was nothing left for excommunicated performers but to pick up their wares and travel.

And so it is the Romans we have to thank for the advent of the regional theater. With animosity toward performers mounting, actors took to the provinces, packing up and forming touring troupes. Though outcasts in religious and legal doctrine, minstrels, jugglers, mimes, and acrobats enjoyed continued popularity with the nobility. They were the Paris Hiltons of their time: outlandish, verboten, and eminently entertaining.

And then . . . well, as far as the actor’s development goes, not much. Until the Italians.

The Italians, the French: Commedia dell’Arte and the Comédie-Frangaise (Women Start Reading Here)

The proud tradition of male-only performance was dealt a stunning blow in 1545 when women began performing in the theater. These Italians, Harold Pinter wrote in Betrayal, so free and easy. In the mid-sixteenth century, traveling troupes of improvisational comic storytellers roamed the highways and street fairs of Italy. Called the Commedia dell’Arte, this form of improvisational comedy plotted around loose storylines was revolutionary. Comedy had never seen such unpracticed success.

The shows included a cast of stock characters: archetypes upon which many of today’s comic characters are built. Pantalone, the bitter, rich miser, Zanni, the clown, and the Innamorati, or lovers, wrestled along plot lines consisting of such elements as lovers separated by a mean, slightly lecherous father; clowns who screwed things up and then came to the rescue; and doctors who knew little of medical practice other than the enema, and who practiced in full disregard of the Hippocratic oath. In the Commedia dell’Arte, broad farce was encouraged.

The Commedia would greatly influence comedic styles in both England and France in the coming centuries. Molière and his troupe, which would eventually work under the nom de plume of the Comédie-Française, mined much of their material from the Commedia players. In plays drawn from the same characterizations, mishaps and base immorality were, this time, fully scripted by the playwright. These two pylons of theater history are joined by another commonality: their commitment and reliance on an ensemble company of actors. In a little-known one-act play called The Versailles Impromptu, Molière casts his actors as themselves, and for forty-some minutes they argue over what type of show they are going to put together for the king in order to win a contract for continued performance. It is evident that in the time since, and most likely the time before, nothing has changed: The leading ladies are still cheating on their husbands, the leading man is still complaining about not having enough lines, and the playwright is still doing rewrites up until curtain.

The theater revolved around troupes and companies well into the middle of the twentieth century. These collectives of actors worked together time after time, learning each other’s rhythms and styles, strengths and weaknesses. Certainly, they were on to something that the American theater neglects today, as few professional acting companies remain, even in the regional repertory.

The Brits: Renaissance, Shakespeare, and Restoration

During the English Renaissance, actors were brought out of the gutter to a position of vague repute. Public theaters, however, were still classed alongside such popular amusements as bear baiting. Theaters attracted audiences from all walks of life, among them soldiers and sailors on leave and in search of entertainment. Higher-priced balcony seats were filled by students and intellectuals, while the plebes occupied the standing-room area on the floor. They soon became known as groundlings, and actors had to fight, literally at times, to keep their attention. Industry cropped up around the theater—namely prostitution and larceny. Theaters were not allowed inside city limits. Most companies traveled, leading to the coining of one of the more apt phrases on the acting profession: Take down the wash, the actors are coming.

Try as it might, the theater’s association with moral turpitude continued. Actors whose companies might be performing before the court one day would be back dodging tomatoes the next. It’s nothing like performing in an episode of Law & Order one day and returning to an Off-Off-Broadway show or temp job the next. So much has changed since the mid-sixteenth century.

By 1572, an act of Parliament required licensing of companies and plays. In 1576, the great Shakespearean actor James Burbage, perhaps the first true celebrity actor, built the first permanent theater in London. Producers, actors, and playwrights became shareholders in this and other companies. Actors in the Elizabethan period made about sixty pounds a year, twice as much as a schoolmaster. Shareholders could be expected to bring in about 150 pounds a year. Shakespeare, as an actor, playwright, and shareholder, cleared two to six hundred pounds a year.

All was trooping along well until 1642. Parliament, succumbing to pressure from the Puritans, enacted a law banning theater. Calling performances spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity, it declared its participants rogues, and punishable.

First the Romans, now the English. Actors can’t catch a break.

It took eighteen years, but upon Charles II’s ascension to the throne, the ban on theater was lifted, restoring it to a rightful place as entertainment in a somewhat civilized society. And so the bawdy, lewd, comic-oriented period of theater known as the Restoration began. It was a welcome return. For the first time, women graced the English stage in great numbers. The sexually and otherwise repressed society, now free from Puritan rule, took a cue from the French and began having some fun. The period produced some notable comedies, including Congreve’s The Way of the World and Wycherley’s The Country Wife. With material paving the way for great comic performances, focus in the theater began to shift from the play to the actor. The first female star of the stage, Nell Gwynn, was, somewhat ironically, born in a brothel. She began as an orange girl in a theater and was eventually spotted by producers and given a small role in a production. A crowd favorite, she worked her way up to lead roles, eventually performing in her greatest real-life triumph as Charles II’s mistress. What Nell apparently knew then, as the world of public relations teaches us today, is that a little relationship status never hurt anyone’s career.

The Nineteenth Century: From Melodrama to Modern Drama

The nineteenth century fully cemented the actor’s status as reigning celebrity of the day. For the first fifty years, no memorable plays were produced and no great writers emerged in the theater. Great actors, however, did. Edmund Kean, described by the critic George Henry Lewes as possessing lionlike power and lionlike grace, was known as the greatest Shakespearean actor of his time.

America, that jealous stepsister, fostered no exception to the celebrity status afforded to actors. A theatrical community that had begun with the simple pleasures of vaudeville was soon importing English actors to star in plays. Theatergoers certainly took their stars seriously, as became evident in New York City one April afternoon. American actor Edmund Forrest and English actor William Macready were both scheduled to play Macbeth that night, Forrest at the Bowery Theatre and Macready at the Astor Place Opera House. A lingering dispute between the two only fueled the fire—Forrest had, in observing Macready’s interpretation of Hamlet in London, hissed at him mid-performance from his seat in the balcony. Anti-English sentiment only incited matters further (this is now monitored by Actors’ Equity, which negotiates with British Equity for transatlantic actor crossings). Crowds began to gather in protest outside the Astor Place Opera House and fighting ensued to a point where the army was summoned. When the smoke cleared, thirty-one were dead.

It was a striking event, considering Americans’ dispassion for the theater on the whole today, and perhaps the only time Americans took their theater seriously.

Plays were, as the Astor Place riots illustrate, star-driven vehicles. Lead actors were paid far more than anyone else in the cast and were also, in essence, the directors of the shows in which they performed. At this time in theater history, no position of director existed. The autonomy given leading men is evident in one of Macready’s diary entries, where he writes, sans irony, The actors were very attentive and behaved very well.

There were only eight or nine rehearsals per production, and shows ran in a rotating repertory, much the way the Russian theater continues to operate today. The reason for this was primarily financial. A leading actor was prepared to perform in ten shows at a time, in order to accommodate lesser numbers of audience members. The crowds might have