Acting Reel

Here is some footage from film and TV work I did back in New York.  Clips from my tenure in L.A. will be added as soon as I get my hands on it!  

Another Day at Work

In L.A., cars are king.  Obvious.  Okay.  So the normal outgrowth of that truism is that businesses are located off the highway.  So is mine:  “Pho Citi”, a Vietnamese noodle and soup place.  Trash is constantly swirling around in little tornadoes of cigarette wrappers, ancient plastic bags, and pigeon feathers.  Each passing car blows the detritus away and back, around and around, right in front of our door. 

Yesterday, a deliveryman left the door open to wheel in his handtruck of rice stick noodles and suddenly a fat, greasy road-pigeon was wreaking havoc inside the restaurant, launching itself into the low-hanging Ikea ceiling lamps and shitting on the tables.

Customers were screaming with surprise, fear, and disgust.  Every time the bewildered pigeon tried to escape it would fly head-first into the plate-glass windows that face the highway.  A sickening smack could be heard each time, feathers drifting down lazily behind it.

Some customers were yelling.  Some were trying to scare it in the direction of the open door.  Some used their hands to protect their bowls of steaming Vietnamese soup.  Nearly everyone had left their seats and stood in postures of readiness.

The pigeon was now seriously out of it.  Walking in circles, then hovering in the air, hitting the window, flapping its wings, molting all over.  A customer from a table in the corner began trying to chase it out from behind while someone from another table tried to chase it out from the front, resulting in the bird shooting straight up in the air and hitting a ceiling lamp.  Our ceiling lamps resemble the kind you might imagine would be in a police interrogation room and they were almost all swinging back and forth on their long cords in a sinister way. 

This had been going on for five minutes of pure adrenaline.  An ad-hoc peanut gallery began to form and shout orders at the intrepid pigeon-catchers.  The cook, Daniel, an 80-pound Chinese man from Vietnam, watched from behind his kitchen window with a bemused smile on his face.

It’s hard to describe how complicated my emotions were as this was going on.  On the one hand, this was the most exciting thing to happen in three months.  There was a truly pathetic comedy of errors unfolding and I was just as mesmerized by the goings on as everyone else.  On the other hand, I was the only staff on site besides Daniel. It was obvious he was not going to join the fray. He works seven days a week and has not had a day off in months.  Since I was the face of the restaurant for the time being, a part of me felt duty-bound to save the dignity of the Pho Citi brand and resolve the matter swiftly and without further embarrassment. 

But then I began to think of all the mistreatment I and the other staff had suffered under the mismanagement of the owner, Sandra. I would get a certain measure of revenge on her when reading about this encounter on customer review websites like Yelp and MenuPages.com.   This job had nearly crushed my soul, why should I do more than the minimum to save face for someone who clearly had no regard for me?  I wrestled with this silently for a time as the commotion continued.

At first I tried to contain the situation by grabbing an empty cardboard box from the stockroom and throwing it on top of the creature.  This was a disaster, and anyway the box was too small.  It had previously contained to-go soy sauce packets.  Scaring it out was clearly not working, covering it with a box was unsuccessful…I reasoned then that it would only leave if it wanted to.  I looked around for something like bird food that I could use to coax it out with.

The best I could do was a bright green slice of lime.

Hoping against hope with my back to the door, I crouched to the ground and made clicking noises in the back of my mouth with my tongue the way you would get a horse to eat a carrot or an apple: kick-kick-kick-kick. Kick-kick-kick-kick.  Kick-kick-kick-kick.

A purple eye turned towards me.  Then the whole head.  Suddenly, a hopping bird was advancing on me.  Maybe to see what horse I was talking to. I backed further and further away until I could feel the breeze from the road.  And then the pigeon was gone.  It spread its wings and flapped into the daylight, around the corner and out of sight.  I turned back into the restaurant, lime in hand.

People had already begun to sit down.  I looked around to see if any of the customers had been a reporter and if we would make the news.  No one was taking any damning notes and no one looked horrified anymore.  No one asked for my name or the name of the owner.  The deliveryman continued to bring in boxes of noodles.  One table had just finished eating when the pigeon had come in and now were ready to pay. Daniel rang his cook’s bell: another bowl of soup was ready to go out.

Things almost instantly returned to normal and my attention was returned to the work of running the place on my own. 

I never saw that pigeon again.

Access and Inspiration

It is becoming more and more clear to me that on-camera work centers on the idea of access.  The camera's proximity provides unprecedented access to the inner workings of your mind, and the most minute thoughts play out on your face (without you having to put them there as a bit of "business" the way you would in theater).  A teacher once told me, "Emotion is the sweat produced by the work of pursuing your objective."  If you put attention on creating an emotion, you're not trying to get something from your scene partner, you're trying to get something from yourself and it takes you out of the game.

Take your breathing.  It happens naturally as part of the autonomic system of your body.  As soon as you put attention onto breathing it becomes a chore, and all you can think about is making yourself take a breath at the right time.  Putting attention on breathing disrupts the ease with which it comes out.  Emotions are autonomic, too.  Without working at all, the gears can be seen to be turning when someone looks into your eyes.  The face can be read with more clarity because the eyes are blown up to four feet across on a screen, and the eyes are what tell us everything.

This is something I need to hammer into my new consciousness because a great deal of who I am as a person is going to play out onscreen autonomically, without my permission, and who I am needs to be something more vulnerable and less guarded if I'm to have success in this field.

My natural inclination is towards humility, self-deprecation, and "letting the work speak for itself", but these things are all keeping me from engaging the camera (and thus, the viewer) with intimacy.  If you're up close but can't get inside, the whole enterprise is frustrated and the work becomes good, but not great.

Something else I've been thinking about is how to take ownership of myself and my career without being obnoxious or entitled; how to go after what I want and believe I deserve it; how to create an atmosphere around me that says, "I am in control, you can relax," rather than, "Do you like me?"

This is particularly hard in an industry town where everyone you meet seems to be in the same market as you and the prevailing attitude is that actors are a dime a dozen.  How can you hold your head up high and feel pride?

I think you need to hold on to the things that inspire you personally.  To believe in love and family and artistic passion and strive to make yourself better, to improve in such a way that you can say to yourself, "I am better than I was before; things are moving forward even if other areas of my life have stalled or are not on fire yet."  If your passion is acting, keep acting and taking classes and digging into what mystery is right outside your grasp.  If it's writing, keep churning out those drafts.  Keep taking inspiration from the outside world to find the characters that speak through you.

I am having a wonderful week because I just got more involved with the artistic side of my time here as opposed to the staying afloat side which took precedence for two months.  It's like a breath of fresh air to keep striving at what I want to be doing.  I'm fortunate that I have this time, and I'm going to spend it very wisely.

Secret Video

 This is the view from backstage of the game show I was on as an actor (playing a contestant).  The creators did a mock-up of the game for investors to try and sell it to networks.  I had been in two previous run-throughs as the main contestant, but suddenly when the money comes in, they wanted me as an alternate.  I got so mad I filmed this video just to break my non-disclosure agreement.  Then, of course, a guy didn't show up (classic LA flakiness) and I went on after all.  It's all in the past, but for those in the know, this was what it was like from the wings.  You may not be able to tell, but that figure at the bottom of the screen is eighty-thousand dollars.  The jackpot was 3.2 million.

Atmosphere

Here are some photos of the neighborhood and environs that I have just been able to put up.

Paco Taco

David and I went to this little treasure downtown last week. Mexicali Taco Co. It's some of the best mexican food I've had since I've been here.

This is the cachetada, which I had with chicken (their specialty), and I also had the famous vampiro which is like a garlic cheese quesadilla.  Both were superlative, although I thought the cachetada was better and I had two.  I can't believe I never had one of these before!


These guys are the best, highly honorable and great energy.  Very friendly and charismatic.

Discipline

I am finding it very hard to stay disciplined out here.  For the moment, no car and no job, so everything is a little easy-breezy and then you look at the clock and the whole day is gone.  It's difficult to believe it's not perpetual summer break.  I have to make lists every morning of what I need to do, and somehow those lists stay long no matter how many items I knock out.

Here's some big items I did knock out:

1.* Go to the Actor's Work Program and get help finding a job.  This is one of the best resources I have found and I wish I had known about it sooner.  The Actor's Fund (amazing in itself) has an offshoot that specializes in career development.  The operation in NYC is absolutely top notch, I can't say enough things about how professional and smart everyone was when I went a few months ago during the run of Agent G.  In LA, the rigor of the program remains to be seen, but I went to orientation and my first workshop, and I am underway.  In NYC, the AWP felt like a sanctuary in Times Square where you could go and it was open and friendly, people are buzzing around and there's a computer lab.  In LA, the offices are in the SAG building and the layout makes you feel really uncomfortable.  You have to wait in an anteroom and then you get shuttled into a conference room where you can't see anything but a secret, anonymous hallway.  Everything seems to be behind a closed door.  As if you don't spend enough time alone out here, brawp.

2.  Get Health Insurance.  There is a great blog I mentioned a while ago (that has been priceless) called New Yorker in LA which directed me to the ehealthinsurance.com website.  After a week of back and forth and researching, I am now on a Kaiser Permanente HMO plan that should work.  Big ups to Mom and Dad for helping with that.

3.  Get a Library Card.  This one I've wanted to do but was intimidated by the application requirements I saw online, when in fact they're super chill about giving you one.   I should have known.  There's two really nice library branches within walking distance, Cahuenga and Los Feliz.  Very excited to try them out.  Kate and I got our cards together and took out materials the same day.  She said, "I think I found my new favorite plaaaaaace," because there are so many crazy characters walking the stacks.  Absolutely fascinating, unusual people.  One was a guy who seemed to be talking to himself about the "order you had to go in", which was apparently Dog, Rabbit, Snake, Bear.  You could not go Snake, Bear, Rabbit, Dog.  Hmm.

*So get a job and get a car where the actual numbers one and two, but those are going to take a touch longer than I thought.  I remain optimistic.  I have a number of great people who came out here before I did who are in my corner and it's making a big difference.

There's a great line in Malick's The Thin Red Line (one of my all time favorite movies) where Nick Nolte says to John Cusack, "From now on you don't have to tell me that you agree with me or that you think I'm right.  Ever.  We'll just accept it as given."  Find acting work is kind of an uber-number one, or super-objective, so we'll take that goal as given.  It's running underneath everything else I do.