Summary posts are always the hardest to write. Invariably, I miss something, so it's not even a complete summary. It also reminds me of how long it's been since I have posted, which brings me down a little. Ideally, I'd be posting twice or thrice a week.

According to my lovely other half, however, reading event driven commentary is far more enjoyable than sifting through my more existential, meaning driven stuff.

So the calling service has been getting me a little work, but not much. However, talking to everybody, there seems to be not terribly much work to go around. This means what work there is goes to people with good history, good reputation, or good connections. This applies background-universe wide, not just to my particular corner of the earth. I can't hold it against the service, or the casting companies. Many people do. To me, it's just a natural function of any business. You work with who you know. Getting known and trusted is always the uphill battle.

The most critical element of this little drought is the financial tension it has created. I know it's been a running theme of my blog thus far, but money (or, more accurately, lack thereof) is a constant attention grabber for me. It's a bit of a weakness. For the purposes of this post though, it just served to get me reflecting on my career path and choices.

I really examined all of the energy I'm expending trying to be an actor. I work as an extra to provide me the kind of flexibility I've discovered is critical to being available to audition. I'm not blessed with an agent, so any audition that I land is gotten by the arduous process of sifting through dozens of breakdowns every day. (Breakdowns are basically abstracts of a role, a plot, a pay rate (usually paltry or zero), and a working date range). Most of those breakdowns are either unfit for me, physically, or completely uninteresting to me, artistically.

Now, it may seem snobbish of me to say that I'm disinterested in some projects because of their content or their characters—beggars can't be choosers, right? But I urge you to remember the number of crap movie trailers you've seen in the last six months. Now, take that number, which represents well-funded films that have gotten distribution, and multiply it by all of the students, aspiring film-makers, and talentless green-grabbers you care to imagine. That is the world I inhabit: The Bottom Rung. It's not a complaint, it's a reality.

So I only have access to a handful of really worthwhile projects that I must 1) Submit to, 2) Be invited to audition for, 3) Audition for, 4) Maybe be called back for, and 5) Be cast in before I can actually work on them.

This is a tremendous expenditure of energy for very little product, and most of said product is uncompensated, in the paper-with-pictures-of-presidents sense.

So, after reviewing all of this factual information, I sat back and wondered about what I really care for in a professional and passionate sense.

I know that I love acting, and I know that I love good, interesting projects and characters. I know that I don't love poor writing, commercial cash-cows with little-to-no artistic value, or artistically viable work with messages I can't get behind.

It seemed that I had reached a point where I would have to expand my standards of acceptable work (read: lower the bar) in order to keep acting and only acting. I don't want to do that. I'm already tired enough, just chasing the projects I can get behind. To add to the existing fatigue moral and artistic stress over projects that, even in the moment, I understand are bad would be the equivalent of emotional suicide by tectonic plate. The pressure would build until something gave way, and I would be smashed in the ensuing tremor.

How to love the projects and pay the bills, then?

Writing was the obvious answer. I have screenplays bouncing around in my head, and a book that's been loitering, unfinished, for a year. I've also roosted enough in my faith and in my person to have finally shed some of the wrenching impatience that has haunted this Hollywood dream from day one. It was the kind of impatience that came from insecurity, and a need to have control where control was impossible. In short, I felt I'd reached the place where I knew what I wanted and was willing to wait until I could get it, no matter how long it took. I would get a "regular" job for the bills, learn the discipline to write in the down-time, learn more about myself, my wife, and my son, and sell a screenplay of my own with the condition that I play one of the roles. This kind of conditional sale is pretty common in the business. At that point, if the film was a success, I would have people asking me to be in their movies, instead of the other way around, and I could have complete freedom to take and reject roles based on my preferences and interests in story and character.

By deciding this, I was really taking the long view for the first time in my life. I wasn't just fixing a "now" problem by taking drastic, long-lasting action. I was going for the ultimate goal and finding the best way to have it, eventually. Pretty adult, right?

So I started trolling around for jobs...with the necessary emotional upheaval of still having the extra work to find to try to pay the bills until the regular job could be found. I woke up every morning for a week, up until Thursday, praying over my coffee mug that a job offer (or, failing that, a really well paying principle job) would be in my inbox...something that would relieve the tightening noose on our checkbook.

Wednesday night, for some reason, I just stopped freaking out. I figured God would give me the regular job He wanted me to have at the time He meant me to have it. I was, of course, working under the assumption that the conclusion to which I had come was in line with His will.

So Thursday, I just got up and went to the computer, no fervent praying done en route. In the inbox was an email from a Management company (a manager is a bit different than an agent) to which I had not submitted myself, and that appeared to have specifically looked at me...not just gone to LA casting and gotten a contact list of every member of the website. They looked legit.

So I went down there today. And guess what? I'm going back in on Monday, because they're interested in me for one of their departments. This is exactly the kind of opportunity I need to get access to "better" (higher level) auditions and projects.

Now, I don't know how this will play out, but it certainly has all of the typical markers of something that God throws into my life in order to clarify my direction and close a few doors.

Landing a manager or an agent was off my radar screen. To get an offer from somebody I hadn't submitted to is even more of a blind side than getting an offer from somebody I had contacted. Frankly, the more I digest it, getting this offer is second only to learning my wife was pregnant in terms of drawing my focus from one path to another. Just as then, I had reasoned out a good, solid, morally sound path to walk, and God said, "No, not that. This first."

So who knows? It's entirely possible that they'll want me to do a bunch of stuff to improve my marketability, stuff that'll cost money...money I don't have...but it's entirely possible they won't, too. They could be just the right team for me, right now. For whatever reason, this is happening to me now. I'll take it.

God's been completely reliable about keeping us supplied with the income we need so far, anyway...like, to the point where money just shows up in the mail.

I think maybe, just maybe, I'm finally at the point where I really trust Him. It's fun in a way that I never imagined possible. The minute I let go, good things start happening.

I'm excited, so I'm starting to bounce around, mentally. I'm done with the story...you're up to date.

If you want to see me on camera with a principle character, and sporting a really awful hairdo, watch this last Friday's Prison Break. That's finally up.

See y'all around the next random corner.

I realize in retrospect that using the word "placeholder" in my previous post was misleading. It indicated that I intended to return and edit a body of text into that post. That was not my intention. It should have gone like this:

"This is where a post would go if I felt like posting. I don't want to post."

Sorry.

That said, after I put the wee one to bed, I'll be coming back and posting another post to follow this post which updates you on the recent and twisty eventure of my life.

I believe I've just invented the word eventure, but I can't be sure.

This post is the placeholder for the more in-depth, interesting, and informational post about the recent events in my life.

I do not want to post.

This is later.

Crisis past.

In fact, #s 414, 415, and 417 have passed also. #416 never arrived, for some inexplicable reason.

Most of these things come on because I'm just very, very, very, very tired of, month after month, having the checking account look like it won't be as big as the bills.

Without a reason beyond a potentially non-starting career to keep us installed in this obscenely expensive place (which I'm beginning to like), I have a tendency to try to find more lucrative avenues of employment that generate more reliable income, and to look for homey type places with lower rents.

Basically it's the trade-off between passion and predictability.

At the very least, a trip to church on Sunday night confirmed that there's a community of people we're here to get to know. That was a huge relief. Yes, it's expensive down here. No, I don't know if we'll have the cash to move into the new apartment. No, I don't know whether I can keep acting. But yes, there is a reason to stay in Southern California regardless of the vicissitudes of career.

I do have two auditions coming up. There's some other stuff coming up that could be good, too. I'm going back to Knott's Berry Farm tomorrow for a thing. I was there on Tuesday, and I have to say one thing: Riding the same roller coaster twelve times in six hours damages the shoulders.

I'm bringing shoulder pads tomorrow.

Exsistential Crisis #413

Blarg.


More later.

I'm going to borrow from my latest Facebook status update to kick this off:

We're into the rabbit hole.

On Facebook, it was a reference to how I'm finding myself beginning to love Southern California. We'll see if the infatuation can survive location shoots in July.

In general, we're at a strange crossroads. We got the apartment that we applied for, and we don't have any obvious answers about where the moving money is coming from.

I signed up for a calling service (for the background work) which means I don't have to sit on the phone all afternoon dialing Central Casting anymore. The jury's still out on how much work I'll get with the service, but I've heard good things. I'm already booked on Entourage for next week.

It's not unusual stuff in terms of the little (and big) crises that we're generally surfing through in any given month...but the strangeness of now comes from an odd peace I have about everything. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm clearly and obviously out of control of most of the variables in my life, I'm chasing my dreams and desires in spite of the massive unpredictability involved, nothing is guaranteed even through next week...and somehow, I'm not nursing an ulcer.

When did this happen? Will it last? I hope so. I've done years' worth of wear and tear on my body worrying lesser things than what faces us today.

Is this just what it feels like to be where one is supposed to be?

I can't quite believe it.


Not yet.

Gotta break the seal on April, right? Right??

One Verizon commercial turned into four.

The first one was a longish day down in Whittier on a golf course. We extras (that massive network you see roaming around behind the guy in the glasses) got stacked up on the green, giving the putter aiming advice. Then we ate lunch. Then we got stacked up on another green, waiting for just the right moment to leap in [almost] unison to bump the poor man's ball from the lip of the cup to the bottom of the cup. Pretty clever application of a classic golf joke, if you ask me.

Tuesday was a day off.

Wednesday I got on a pilot called The Eastmans which, apparently, Donald Sutherland is in. He was not on location. The location, as it turned out, was a massive cemetery in Pasadena. It was just a little strange to be dressed as earthmoving/greens crew for a fictitious funeral...standing around in the midst of real graves. It's not that I'm particularly creeped out by cemeteries, I think shooting in a cemetery is just one of those things that draws a specifically sharp distinction between the make-believe and the real.
The distinction was drawn even more crisply when, toward the end of the brief shoot, a real funeral procession came in for an interment on the other end of the grounds. It was all peppered in surreal.

While at the cemetery on Wednesday, I got a call about more Verizon. A lot more. Three days of shooting, Thursday, Friday, and Monday. Well how's your father? That was a nice way to seal up the week with work.

On top of that, Thursday and Friday were both really short days. Like, 1330 call, 1830 done days. Monday promises to be similar.

I had a surprise audition waiting in my inbox on Thursday evening, which I was able to squeeze in before Friday's Verizon call. The writing was great, the premise is interesting, the writer/director was fun, and I got to go to USC for the first time. They have a ridiculous cinema arts building.

Saturday was a little more on the interesting side. We wound up applying for a new apartment at a different complex...a really nice 2 bedroom place. There's a slight hitch, though...it's a teensy bit out of our current price range. Like, we should probably be aiming for something about $200/month cheaper than this...but everything seemed to make sense. It had all the things we were looking for in a bigger place, it kept us in the city we want to stay in, there was a unit coming available in the middle of next month, etc., etc. All this on the day I happened to stop by. That has all the markings of the proverbial "God Thing". However, moving into a place that we can't guarantee the ability to pay for also has all the markings of the traditional "Brings Out all of the Latent Stress, Insecurity, and Doubt about the Career Thing" too. Oh the fun that that engenders. Made me feel like an idiot, anyway. It's a classic human story. It seems like the right thing to do, until you do it, realize you've done it, and begin to digest the practical implications of what you have to believe God will do for you.

Granted, the complex hasn't let us in yet. That's the final litmus. If they approve us, I'll take it as and indication that God intends to provide the necessary means to pay the rent. It's not impossible to expect, especially in the entertainment industry...it just can't be guaranteed...and if that's not a fight starter in this house (because of yours truly, of course) nothing is.

PS - Upon further reflection (read: proofing by the wife) it's not so much the higher rent that's the issue at the May rent here, 2/3 May rent there, and then June rent there...So, like triple rent in the space of a month. My bad.