I booked a commercial gig that shot last past weekend at O’Hare. I swear, most of acting is waiting, and that’s what I did, waited for over an hour in the international terminal for the film crew to get there from another part of the airport. When they arrived, the frenzy began. Two huge dolly carts laden with equipment and a dozen crew members moving lights, power cords, c-stands, a camera.
Jeffrey, the quintessential LA director, a small guy with articulate features, moisturized skin, and a slightly graying beard, congratulated me a hundred times and told me how excited he was and that he thought I was great. Tom, the producer from the agency with a forty-year-old smirk, asked me if I had a different white shirt and gave me an oh-well face when I didn’t.
Make-up and wardrobe, two very pretty young ladies, descended on me like quick, neat sharks, poking and prodding my face and hair and taping my not-quite-the-right-white shirt to my jacket, my collar down to my tie. Giving me a travel bag to wear over my shoulder and then taping something to that and then giving me another bag because that one wasn’t as good as this one.
Swirling around like a tornado, all the elements of the production made their way across the open terminal, coming to a rest in front of a row of deserted ticket counters, near a foot-long piece of yellow gaff tape on the floor which marked the starting line.
And then, we shot the shot. I delivered one line, “Asserting itself, with ever-growing insistency,” while walking about twenty steps (it’s part of a larger quote by Daniel Burnham, the architect from a hundred years ago – other actors do other lines). The DP, operating a steadi-cam, backed away from me as I walked. A steadi-cam is a harness-mounted system that allows the operator to move as freely and precisely as you possibly can with a bulky, 30-pound camera.
We did it about twenty times in all, and in between shots, one of the other producers or Tom would whisper in Jeffery’s ear and he’d bark orders, politely, if slightly dispassionately, to whomever needed the adjustment. “You’re happier, Jake.” or “Turn the light a little more toward talent and try to keep up.” or “Not that happy, Jake, and put a pause after ‘itself’ for emphasis.” or “Everyone slow it down, just a little.”
Every five minutes we had to “Hold for sound” as the security announcement played over the PA. Every eight minutes we had to hold for a train you could hear, ever so slightly, from the underground. And the whole while we’re doing it, passengers going home to or coming back from Mexico or the Philippines or China or Europe stopped and watched the hulla-balloo and then went about their business. It’s funny what a spectacle this work can be.
“That was perfect, Jake, now, do it with a more positive demeanor.” I did. And then, just like that, it was done in less than an hour. The crew and equipment evaporated in minutes, packing up and out to the next location. Another producer gave me $15 for parking and off I went. In a month or so, I’ll get a nice check that’ll almost cover my rent.
I’ll be sure to let you know where the spot shows up. Should be on a City of Chicago website or something.
Best,
Jake
PS – To illuminate the other side of my double life: One morning last week, my ex-girlfriend caught me rolling to Starbucks half asleep, dressed for a grubby remodel gig and looking like a dirty, dilapidated old rug from out of the basement, and there she was, in her car, clean as a bar of soap, her hair perfect, sipping a tea behind a warm tan and a cool pair of earth-tone aviators, smug, thrilled I’m sure. Humble pie, though it may be well-deserved, tastes a lot like rotten fruit on burnt toast with a side of kiss my ass.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
#9.1 Fat City Revisited - Joker's Appendix
The Dark Knight will win Oscars. It’s the most well-written superhero story ever, I think, with murky themes intensely relevant to today’s social and cultural climate. Heath Ledger delivered the most truthful lines in the movie with an intensity and depth unseen to date in the type of character he played. He, through the Joker’s lines, commented in many ways on the voracious system that had been chewing him up for years and, ultimately, spat him out.
Favorite line: “Funny thing about chaos… it’s fear.”
Also, I just went and saw Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the new documentary, and was sufficiently impressed to mention something about it. Both the content and the presentation of the Alex Gibney documentary were fantastic as a memoriam and as an imperative to those who would carry the torch of Gonzo into the murky corners of greed and repugnancy that thrive today. Isn’t “repugnant” a great word?!
Hunter S. Thompson served the purpose of deconstruction by peeling back the illusion and mendacity that swirled around the late sixties and beyond (he foresaw the travesties of American foreign and corporate policy of the Aughts on the morning of 911). Before something of value can be built, the tragic monolith of modern society must be cracked, Thompson’s work might suggest, and then broken and razed to get at the foundation which allows grubby, wealthy, white swine to better their kind and execute the vicious burn to keep others in their place. Interesting theory, huh? What a joker.
Favorite line: “Funny thing about chaos… it’s fear.”
Also, I just went and saw Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the new documentary, and was sufficiently impressed to mention something about it. Both the content and the presentation of the Alex Gibney documentary were fantastic as a memoriam and as an imperative to those who would carry the torch of Gonzo into the murky corners of greed and repugnancy that thrive today. Isn’t “repugnant” a great word?!
Hunter S. Thompson served the purpose of deconstruction by peeling back the illusion and mendacity that swirled around the late sixties and beyond (he foresaw the travesties of American foreign and corporate policy of the Aughts on the morning of 911). Before something of value can be built, the tragic monolith of modern society must be cracked, Thompson’s work might suggest, and then broken and razed to get at the foundation which allows grubby, wealthy, white swine to better their kind and execute the vicious burn to keep others in their place. Interesting theory, huh? What a joker.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
#8 - Dude B and the A-Hole Patrol
I told you all about Flashpoint, the new film school downtown. Apparently they got handed a last minute project, so I received two five-page scripts to consider. For those of you non-industry types, film time correlates to a minute a page generally.
One script was from Matt Arauz, the young director for whom I recently did a two-minute hit man picture (copy on the way). The other from a guy I won’t mention, because I’m about to destroy him. I’ll call him Dude B
Both scripts were great. Matt’s was about a crossing guard who fancies himself a noire detective – a single, straight Walter Mitty meets a Jules Dassin Dirty Harry – and fantastic. The other was about a mob guy who gets tired of getting his ass kicked by the mid-level bosses he works for and decides to do something about it, also fantastic.
Dude B contacts me first, Thursday night at 7 p.m. I mention a couple of schedule things, a Sunday evening and a Tuesday evening, and I tell him that, if necessary, I could move and rearrange almost anything in order to do his film. He told me we could make it happen and that he’d work with me on scheduling because they really want me for the part.
At noon on Friday, I speak with Matt, tell him, Sorry, Dude B spoke with me first, we’re going to make it happen. Matt was bummed, but had a casting session set up for the afternoon. I change a couple Monday auditions with my agency, the one who hates me right now, in order to facilitate shooting Dude B’s movie next week and await his call for final scheduling.
Seven o’clock rolls around and Dude B calls me to say that they decided to go with someone else because of my scheduling things, precisely the things I told him I could re-arrange. It’s clear to me he had someone else in mind, because he didn’t call during the day to ask me about changing anything. So, now I’m out this picture and I can’t call Matt and say Oh, just kidding, I’m doing yours.
If I weren’t so enlightened now, I would have told Dude B about a special place I have reserved for him… Down the back of my boxer briefs on four-alarm chili day. Dude B is an A-hole. I just missed out on both films because this guy didn’t want to work it out and didn’t want to tell me about it until too late. These are student directors, but this happens all the time in the real acting world as well.
Where in hell does such unabashed douchebaggery finds its due? Justice, like Santa Clause, is a fairy tale designed to bribe idiots and children into behaving. So much for informed ignorance, or whatever the hell I blathered on about last week. Yeah, yeah, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get cast this week, for whatever reason - Marty’s going to call or something. I’m working on it, but, hey, I had a lot of inertia before I decided to change direction. It’s a good thing I’ve got this outlet now, otherwise I’d probably go Harvey on someone’s ass.
Happy Fourth. Don’t blow anything up.
Ciao,
Jake
PS - My latest print ad, one for Solo cups, appears in the Everyday with Rachel Ray magazine, June/July issue, on the page opposite the table of contents. It's also in Good Housekeeping and Redbook this month. I’m the bleached out guy wearing the tight cords on the right. Thanks to brilliant photo editing, you can’t tell that the pants I’m wearing are practically painted on. The sizes I wrote on the stylist’s size card before the shoot didn’t reflect the start of my Fat Elvis phase back in February. It just looks like I have fabulous junk, right?
PPS - This past Friday, I auditioned for the part of a bad cop in an independent feature in Lansing, Michigan. It went really well. If I get it, I’ll have to spend some time in Michigan so hopefully I’d get some money for the role. If the role is right, I will do a B-movie. Somebody’s zombie lab partner who dies before the end of act one… not a good role. Priest who rapes a nun and makes her get an abortion… not a good role; I turned that one down this morning.
One script was from Matt Arauz, the young director for whom I recently did a two-minute hit man picture (copy on the way). The other from a guy I won’t mention, because I’m about to destroy him. I’ll call him Dude B
Both scripts were great. Matt’s was about a crossing guard who fancies himself a noire detective – a single, straight Walter Mitty meets a Jules Dassin Dirty Harry – and fantastic. The other was about a mob guy who gets tired of getting his ass kicked by the mid-level bosses he works for and decides to do something about it, also fantastic.
Dude B contacts me first, Thursday night at 7 p.m. I mention a couple of schedule things, a Sunday evening and a Tuesday evening, and I tell him that, if necessary, I could move and rearrange almost anything in order to do his film. He told me we could make it happen and that he’d work with me on scheduling because they really want me for the part.
At noon on Friday, I speak with Matt, tell him, Sorry, Dude B spoke with me first, we’re going to make it happen. Matt was bummed, but had a casting session set up for the afternoon. I change a couple Monday auditions with my agency, the one who hates me right now, in order to facilitate shooting Dude B’s movie next week and await his call for final scheduling.
Seven o’clock rolls around and Dude B calls me to say that they decided to go with someone else because of my scheduling things, precisely the things I told him I could re-arrange. It’s clear to me he had someone else in mind, because he didn’t call during the day to ask me about changing anything. So, now I’m out this picture and I can’t call Matt and say Oh, just kidding, I’m doing yours.
If I weren’t so enlightened now, I would have told Dude B about a special place I have reserved for him… Down the back of my boxer briefs on four-alarm chili day. Dude B is an A-hole. I just missed out on both films because this guy didn’t want to work it out and didn’t want to tell me about it until too late. These are student directors, but this happens all the time in the real acting world as well.
Where in hell does such unabashed douchebaggery finds its due? Justice, like Santa Clause, is a fairy tale designed to bribe idiots and children into behaving. So much for informed ignorance, or whatever the hell I blathered on about last week. Yeah, yeah, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get cast this week, for whatever reason - Marty’s going to call or something. I’m working on it, but, hey, I had a lot of inertia before I decided to change direction. It’s a good thing I’ve got this outlet now, otherwise I’d probably go Harvey on someone’s ass.
Happy Fourth. Don’t blow anything up.
Ciao,
Jake
PS - My latest print ad, one for Solo cups, appears in the Everyday with Rachel Ray magazine, June/July issue, on the page opposite the table of contents. It's also in Good Housekeeping and Redbook this month. I’m the bleached out guy wearing the tight cords on the right. Thanks to brilliant photo editing, you can’t tell that the pants I’m wearing are practically painted on. The sizes I wrote on the stylist’s size card before the shoot didn’t reflect the start of my Fat Elvis phase back in February. It just looks like I have fabulous junk, right?
PPS - This past Friday, I auditioned for the part of a bad cop in an independent feature in Lansing, Michigan. It went really well. If I get it, I’ll have to spend some time in Michigan so hopefully I’d get some money for the role. If the role is right, I will do a B-movie. Somebody’s zombie lab partner who dies before the end of act one… not a good role. Priest who rapes a nun and makes her get an abortion… not a good role; I turned that one down this morning.
#8.1 - Dude B and the A-hole Patrol - Bonus Material
Speaking of A-holes...
In trying to get money for the Covenant Coffee, the TV show I’m helping produce, I visited the card room at the Majestic Casino, a fine boat of questionable repute wherein patrons engage in games of chance. Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, Slots, to name but a few, and also, on the top floor in a huge card room, Texas Hold ‘em. The Majestic is docked amid the flotsam and jetsam that make up the industrial wasteland of Gary or Hammond, Indiana (I’m not sure anyone really knows which is which). Allow me to paint a picture…
The landscape is checkered with gigantic, old-wooden-barn-looking warehouses, most of which find themselves in one state or other of dilapidation, and also bland, squat, fat fuel silos in immaculate condition, protected by bleached-white walls and chain link fences. Cutting between them are a maze of single destination roads which twist around each other there, making it impossible to get where you’re going or home from where you’ve gone, or even down to the corner to get gas.
By the way, it’s damn near impossible to find a corner, any corner, let alone one that could be of some use. It’s all exit ramps and turn-arounds and access roads and drive ways. And, you have to have lived there for twenty years to know where the one gas station is - it’s in refinery land for god’s sake – they should gasoline spigots every twenty feet.
As close as I can figure it, Gary-slash-Hammond is Hell, or maybe just A-hole Nation. If that’s true, the card room at the Majestic is its penthouse suite. It’s kind of like a red velvet sweat shop equipped with blinking lights, cup holders and hair-sprayed, half-pretty dealers who don’t judge. It’s a haven for degenerate gamblers, who all speak sparingly with scratchy voices and hide behind a gray, grimy film, as if they’d stepped out of a shadow but couldn’t quite shake it all off. Half of them wear cheap sunglasses and smirks, most couldn’t make eye contact if their lives depended on it. More than a few resemble giant, flaccid penises, as if to remind humanity that their existence is, at best, the result some glitch, or, at worst, the cosmic sarcasm of natural selection. They all need a shave, a clean set of clothes, and a rap on the knuckles from a nun or personality coach.
The card room at the Majestic, for me, was like a return to the blissful ignorance of Plato’s cave, where mastery of two dimensions makes you a god. The windows look out on the industry lined harbor, reminding you that nothing but toil and strife happen outside the cave. So you sit, content to while away the hours playing 1-2, $200 limit; that is to say, the blinds are one and two dollars and the maximum buy-in is $200. If you don’t understand that, consider yourself better off for it.
What I’m getting at and hopefully I’ve lost readers like my mother and my landlord by this time in my garbled prose, but, um, ahem, I lost (murmur-murmur-murmur) dollars, which is a fair amount of money for me presently. Um, I blew all the birthday money from my mom as well as a small chunk of my rent on eight hours of Texas Hold ‘em. I was so CLOSE to winning big! Errrrrg. I know, I know, it’s as irritating to me as it is to you. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were lucky in love or something. Oh, well. I’m never going to gamble again. Really. Truly.
So now, I just need somebody loan me money to cover the remaining development costs for the brilliant new TV show, Covenant Coffee! Somebody. Anybody?
Not you again, you damn crickets…
In trying to get money for the Covenant Coffee, the TV show I’m helping produce, I visited the card room at the Majestic Casino, a fine boat of questionable repute wherein patrons engage in games of chance. Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, Slots, to name but a few, and also, on the top floor in a huge card room, Texas Hold ‘em. The Majestic is docked amid the flotsam and jetsam that make up the industrial wasteland of Gary or Hammond, Indiana (I’m not sure anyone really knows which is which). Allow me to paint a picture…
The landscape is checkered with gigantic, old-wooden-barn-looking warehouses, most of which find themselves in one state or other of dilapidation, and also bland, squat, fat fuel silos in immaculate condition, protected by bleached-white walls and chain link fences. Cutting between them are a maze of single destination roads which twist around each other there, making it impossible to get where you’re going or home from where you’ve gone, or even down to the corner to get gas.
By the way, it’s damn near impossible to find a corner, any corner, let alone one that could be of some use. It’s all exit ramps and turn-arounds and access roads and drive ways. And, you have to have lived there for twenty years to know where the one gas station is - it’s in refinery land for god’s sake – they should gasoline spigots every twenty feet.
As close as I can figure it, Gary-slash-Hammond is Hell, or maybe just A-hole Nation. If that’s true, the card room at the Majestic is its penthouse suite. It’s kind of like a red velvet sweat shop equipped with blinking lights, cup holders and hair-sprayed, half-pretty dealers who don’t judge. It’s a haven for degenerate gamblers, who all speak sparingly with scratchy voices and hide behind a gray, grimy film, as if they’d stepped out of a shadow but couldn’t quite shake it all off. Half of them wear cheap sunglasses and smirks, most couldn’t make eye contact if their lives depended on it. More than a few resemble giant, flaccid penises, as if to remind humanity that their existence is, at best, the result some glitch, or, at worst, the cosmic sarcasm of natural selection. They all need a shave, a clean set of clothes, and a rap on the knuckles from a nun or personality coach.
The card room at the Majestic, for me, was like a return to the blissful ignorance of Plato’s cave, where mastery of two dimensions makes you a god. The windows look out on the industry lined harbor, reminding you that nothing but toil and strife happen outside the cave. So you sit, content to while away the hours playing 1-2, $200 limit; that is to say, the blinds are one and two dollars and the maximum buy-in is $200. If you don’t understand that, consider yourself better off for it.
What I’m getting at and hopefully I’ve lost readers like my mother and my landlord by this time in my garbled prose, but, um, ahem, I lost (murmur-murmur-murmur) dollars, which is a fair amount of money for me presently. Um, I blew all the birthday money from my mom as well as a small chunk of my rent on eight hours of Texas Hold ‘em. I was so CLOSE to winning big! Errrrrg. I know, I know, it’s as irritating to me as it is to you. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were lucky in love or something. Oh, well. I’m never going to gamble again. Really. Truly.
So now, I just need somebody loan me money to cover the remaining development costs for the brilliant new TV show, Covenant Coffee! Somebody. Anybody?
Not you again, you damn crickets…
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