Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (20 page)

Resurrection

I
had blown through LA and back a few times before moving my tool kit permanently to the City of Dreams, so in my Chicago circle of fools, I was the expert on Hollywood. A sad state of affairs, considering how incredibly ignorant I was about the place. Leaving the Defiant Theatre behind seemed impossible at the time, but it didn’t look like I would have to: One of our next productions was to be
Action Movie: The Play
, conceived, of course, by Joe Foust and Ragsdale, and it was one of the funniest high-octane romps you could ever hope to see on a stage that didn’t also include Bugs Bunny and GWAR. The plan was for the show to be produced in Chicago, then travel to Los Angeles, where it would be such a smash hit (who better to flock to a theatrical send-up of action films than the people who make action films?!) that we would certainly be moved to the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, and then probably to Broadway, on our way to the West End, which is a part of London where the best theater in the world occurs, according to some white folks. It was an amazing plan, and flawless, really, except for the fucking goddamn flaws in it.

When my theater-company mates told me they would be traveling our show to California, they didn’t take into account the simple truth that they did not, in fact, want to go to California. Oops. It was an honest mistake on their parts, by which I mean I don’t think they knew their true hearts in the matter until push came to shove. Some of them wanted to bow out of the business altogether, some thought the idea of a tour imprudent (which it most certainly was, but then, wasn’t the whole megillah?), and a couple were just chicken. I’m certain it was smart of them to “walk on by” the LA tour, but doing things the smart way was not what had made us an exciting young Chicago company. We were not going to get to the West End by being smart! What I loved about these men and women, these gorgeous rascals, was precisely that we did
not
do things the smart way. Idiots. Whatever the case, the damage was done. Defiant Theatre was staying home in Chicago. I was alone in Los Angeles.

At least I had some friends in town, some of whom had small jobs for me to do, like acting on a minor Nickelodeon show, or carpentry projects, or art department or PA (production assistant) work. But I was without a stage upon which to ply my troth. Many people recommended shows for me to see, claiming that this theater company or that was really a lot like Defiant, and so I would go running all over town to see production after production, some mediocre, some god-awful, but nothing remotely like the Defiant flavor I craved. I began to drink to (even greater) excess. I would go to a bar and think, “Aha! Who’s smart now, motherfuckers?!” before vomiting into an empty pint glass.

“But enough about theater, you crybaby! How about ‘THE BIZ’? Huh, bro? You didn’t come here to do some Kabuki bullshit, you came here to get on
Baywatch
and shit! Kowabunga, dude!!!”

My subconscious, which had been very into
The Simpsons
, was speaking to me in such a derisive tone, but my subconscious was flat wrong. Like an absolute dullard, I
had
come to LA to do theater, at least among other things. One way or another, theater was just about all I could do. What I had failed to learn through my zero piles of research was that LA effectively had no theater community. Sure, there are theaters in LA, but compared to Chicago’s big-shouldered strength, they are pretty weak tea. Foolishly I had assumed that the largest concentration of acting and writing talent in the country would have a healthy theater scene, but that is sadly not the case. It’s a vicious circle, in which there is not a large theatergoing audience, so nobody does theater, so nobody goes, etc. I am being slightly unfair. Of course there are talented people putting up plays in LA. I can’t fairly make such sweeping generalizations, because I have never seen all of it. Nobody has. LA is so spread out that you would need to make viewing theater a full-time job in order to canvass the entire area from Venice and Santa Monica to Pasadena, and from the deep Valley or even Ventura down to Orange County. The point is, it was as bleak to me when I landed here as it could possibly have been. I saw more plays that were written by a person trying to get a job writing for
Friends
, “plays” that seemed just like a seventy-minute episode of a sitcom onstage, than I care to say. It turned out that moving to LA to work in theater was the logical equivalent of moving to Chicago to work in television.

* * *

A
s usual, I had more than my share of dumb luck to buoy me. While I’d been in Chicago, a great casting director named Tracy Kaplan had gone to bat for me aplenty, and then she sent me to LA with a list of contacts with whom I could get in touch. She was vouching for me. From her list, I landed at a small but very nice agency, Progressive Artists. Bernie and Belle. I also scored a manager named Eve Brandstein, who taught me a lot about the business before going back to her first calling as a casting director. I’m very grateful to all these folks for getting me off to a running start. They hooked me up with meetings at networks and studios, and I promptly repaid them by falling flat on my fat face. The executives in these meetings generally had no interest in nor ability to comprehend a theater résumé. They’d look at my very nice theater résumé like it was written in Greek. “Oh, Steppenwolf!” they’d say. Or, “Oh, wow. Shakespeare.” Those were the two words they knew. It was really frustrating. We’d just look at each other, mutually puzzled by my presence in their offices.

I learned later that in these moments I was expected to be cute, or winning, or electric. I was supposed to turn up my X-factor and come across all “fuckable,” which I am afraid I did not do. I had always done just fine by working on plays in which people would see me, and then on occasion some of those people would put me in their next play. “We need a big dumb guy who falls down good. What about this guy? We’ll put him in our play.” Like that, pretty much. That system wasn’t going to work in LA, apparently, so I quickly found myself beating my head against the wall.

As is well known, the business can be really shitty, especially when a person is just starting out. This did not take me completely by surprise, and I was not so naïve that I thought I would cakewalk into a successful career without eating some shit. More surprising was the ugliness that arose in my social life. All my friends and acquaintances from Chicago would get together for drinks at watering holes specifically peopled by ex-Chicago actors who wanted to commiserate about how hard the business was. The status of our auditioning lives and our “callbacks” became our conversational commodity. When we would see our friends, that’s what they would ask about, rather than health or family or anything else. It would be, “Hey, man, what’s up? Are you going out?” Which means, “Are you getting any auditions?” They couldn’t wait to come to the bar if they had any such information to share, and then they’d play it really cool. “Yeah, I’m going in to read for
ER
, no big,” and if they got a callback for a second reading, maybe for the producers, that was exponentially more valuable. One’s true friends would be thrilled about any such achievement, whilst the majority of the Chicago “pals” would seethe with envy. Schadenfreude was easily the most popular cocktail served in those establishments.

This circumstance quickly became really unpalatable to me. I began to eschew the scene, opting for smaller gatherings with friends, at which we’d cook inexpensive meals and bemoan our collective lots to more sympathetic ears. In my desperation, I actually designed the set and puppets for a Defiant show in Chicago, built most of them in Hollywood with a couple of pals, then hauled them all with my tool kit to Chicago in, you guessed it! A “drive-away” pickup truck!

Some of my LA gang generously tried to hook me up with a couple of dates with cute ladies, dates that could only be described as laughably terrible. I remember one specifically with this cute actress named Elizabeth. I took her to dinner at Lola’s, and I’m sure I looked like I was fresh off the construction site to begin with. She said, “What do you do?” which is LA-speak for “What can you do for me and how can you help me get a leg up on everybody else?”

I said to her, “Well, I don’t do much—I just moved from Chicago, where I’ve got a theater company, and we’re actually doing this Caryl Churchill play called
The Skriker
that I’m designing the set for, and heading up a team that’s building twenty-five puppets and a bunch of masks . . . ,” by which point she was out the door.

Things weren’t going great.

* * *

F
ortunately, my main squeeze Pat Roberts was in a similar boat as an artist feeling underappreciated and underutilized. He too had no interest in playing the commercial-art game and chasing the girls. I mean, don’t mistake me, we were definitely interested in the chasing of the girls. It’s just that the girls we were meeting were not of the most appetizing variety. Once in a while we’d meet an amazing woman, and, as if by a rule, she would be married or gay. So, wisely, we began to stay home and drink a lot of bourbon.

At a certain point I realized that I was not cut out for the self-promotional part of this industry. An unbelievable amount of money changes hands every day in Hollywood, forked over by hopeful performers with a dream, desperate for any slight inch of advantage they can beg, borrow, or steal to put themselves nearer the top of somebody’s list. These monies are greedily received by countless photographers, “acting coaches,” and shyster agents and managers, who promise the secret to gaining such inches. It was immediately clear to me that I didn’t want to succeed at anything by “buying an inch,” or by convincing an executive in his/her office that I was cool, so I made up my mind to ignore the business.

I got work fabricating stuff for people, like building an editing bay and some props for this small animation company I was friendly with. Thanks to my minor connections, I started getting sporadic acting jobs here and there. Every few months I’d score a guest-star job on a TV show or a little part in a movie, and these tidbits were just enough artistic food to sustain me. I began to describe my career as a very slowly—ponderously slowly—rolling snowball. Like all aspirants, besides my “theatrical” agent (film and TV), I had a commercial agent, for advertising jobs. I was giving it the old college try while maintaining my uniqueness. I loved driving straight to an audition from a job site, covered in sawdust and sweaty, because I knew that I was guaranteed to stand out from all of the adorably coiffed “cute guys.”

One of the pearls of wisdom the agents would gift a body, if one was trying to break in as an actor in LA, was “Record a videotape of every show that’s on TV. Be sure to watch one episode of every show, so that when you go to audition for that show you’ll know what they want, what style they’re looking for.” My response came quite easily—I said, “Tell you what, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to watch any fucking shows. I’m not taping
Angel
and
Buffy
to formulate how I can better play a demon when I audition for them. That way you’ll have a hundred guys doing what they think the producers want, but you’ll have at least this one guy doing something original.” That was my technique. I stand by it. Did I ever get a job as a demon on
Angel
? I did not, and after some time went by, I learned that many initial rejections should eventually be taken as compliments. A lucky actor learns that the projects one says no to end up being much more important than the jobs one takes.

* * *

O
utside of TV and film auditions, my time was spent traipsing to commercial auditions and working as a carpenter. Invariably I’d be working on the east side of LA and the commercial audition would be far to the west in Santa Monica, which can often mean an hour of travel. One commercial reading could be a three- or four-hour commitment—an ordeal of at least half a day, sometimes more, if one would (hopefully) be asked to “stick around so the director can see you.” It didn’t take me long to begin adding up these hours for which I was not getting paid as a carpenter. Even though I did shoot a couple of minor commercials, the total profits did not eclipse the amount of carpentry income I was missing to attend the auditions. This was just foolish. The only point of chasing commercials was to garner a paycheck, but if the whole process was losing me money in the end, what was the point?

Understandably, I started to find the commercial auditions really depressing. At least at an acting audition you have the possibility of your talent or your training getting you the job. “Hey, this guy’s really good at acting, naturalistically portraying the story. He’s funny.” Or he’s really scary, or really clumsy, or whatever was right. They could look at your résumé and see that you were a trained professional, meaning there was a good chance you’d be more dependable on a fourteen-hour shoot day. But in commercial auditions you’re in a room with a hundred fucking yahoos, and basically whoever could make the right funny face got the job. The only qualification necessary to get into this audition was that one look like he enjoys beer, or tits, or Doritos. It didn’t take me long to ken that any joker could get the job.

I began to comprehend that I was different from all of these guys, simply because I could earn money with my tools. Their ineptitude in finding any other gainful employment filled the waiting rooms with an atmosphere of desperation. They were led there, Pied Piper–like, bewitched by so many stories, like “Loren got a Chevy campaign last year and he ended up making six hundred grand. He bought a condo and a boat and . . .” etc. The foyers of commercial casting offices are festooned with visions of sugarplums dancing. I had been briefly beguiled by these pipe dreams as well, but I was beginning to get wise. I began to limit myself to national (as opposed to regional) commercial auditions that promised a big payday, like the ones for banks, beer, or automobiles.

* * *

I
had been in town for about a year when I found myself auditioning for a Budweiser spot. I hauled my ass out to Santa Monica—the same old waiting room, full of maybe sixty guys. It’s a big square room, and each wall has a bench along it—so it’s a big square of guys, mostly beer-loving, baseball-fan-looking guys (so, fat guys). The shtick was, you’re in the bleachers looking down at the outfield, holding two huge beers, at a baseball game, and you hear the sound of a home run crack off the bat. The crowd noise builds, and you’re watching the home run. It’s coming straight toward you. You look at your two beers, and you don’t want to set either down, because Budweiser is so delicious (or because ballpark beers are so expensive?), so the home run hits you on the forehead and you make a hilarious face and then fall over. So the salient question was, “Who makes the funny face of getting hit on the head with a home-run ball the best?”