Damn You, Jason!

My "Roll-up" record improves to 2-3, winning another glorious coffee, which means another rim to roll-up. I'll let you all know ASAP how that goes! I know you all care so much! !!

Nothing gives me more motivation to blog than data-entry, which is what I'm currently faced with at work. So let's you and I have a chat, shall we?

Awesome, I thought as I signed-in at North Shore Studios for my second (third?) "I Love You, Beth Cooper" audition. I'm the only guy here for this part, I realized when I scanned-through all the names and saw I was the only guy with the privilege of reading for Loser Clerk. The only other guys in the room were auditioning for the role of one of the friends of the character for which I was first submitted (me and Brendan kinda thought that if they were going to "give" me any role, it'd be the role of one of the friends.) I'm definitely not going to be "given" this role, as all the guys reading for it were black, which I don’t real “read” as (although I did play a Puerto-Rican before, so you could say that ethnicities are my specialty, along with commenting on the state of a woman’s pants upon arrival in a foreign land.)

So I'm feeling pretty good, no one else in the waiting room, I'm calm, I'm cool, I'm collect. Then one guy walks in, whom the casting assistant recognizes immediately, gives him a mug with his name on it, and pulls-out a chair with the same. She snaps her fingers and a frantic-looking teenager with a headset and clipboard rushes out of nowhere to ask this man if there's anything he can get for him, coffee, tea, Carmel macchiato. This man is Jason, and he's out for the same part I am. I even recognized him from a distance (I wasn't wearing my glasses or contacts, my dang pink-eye made Loser Clerk look like Enraged Clerk) from a number of commercials and TV shows, including that car commercial where he's playing with all the knobblies and whirly-bobs in this awesome automobile when his S/O comes along and puts the kibosh on all that. I enter the audition room, which is much sparser than it was last time, and I do my thing and feel pretty good about it.

It was certainly one of my better ones, because I "found" something in the room, which meant the discoveries I made while working on it continued right up until I did it for the Casting Director. That may not make much sense to the “normies” (non-acting folk), but the actors should get it. The “little people” just wouldn’t understand.

I exit the room, and see Jason putting on a red apron, looking like a real winner of a Loser Clerk, talking to the Casting Assistant about how wearing glasses never comes-across in the audition, how it seems too cartoony. Good thing I didn’t wear mine, although it made it more difficult to "connect" (more acting parlance, I apologize, normies) to that big light blur I was acting with.

So the Jason thing threw me, and this is where it hit me that I really need to practice what I preach. There's no controlling who you go in against, you're really only competing with yourself. So why should I be upset when I go up against the pros? If anything, I should be flattered. I've said a million times, you don't audition to get the part; you audition to get another audition. So what does it matter if the other guy gets it? At least they're seeing me, and these are huge Casting Directors who cast for huge projects.
"You know what this means? It means you're on their list, they like your work, and if you don't get the bigger parts, they'll see you for these smaller parts," explains my agent. Role size doesn’t matter to me at this stage. I'm lucky that I got as far as I did with for the roles for which I was called-back.
"And the nice thing about going-out for these big features is that they pay 130% buy-out, so even if you're just an actor ("actor" means you have at least one line, but less than ... eight? I think) you're making over a grand a day." Oh yeah, I forgot that I’d get paid for this.

I get home and plan to sleep between 1pm-7pm, go to the gym, eat, and go to work. Of course I go to sleep and my phone rings every hour or so, either being work, or my agent. Work can screw itself (they wanted me to start early), but the agent I never tire of hearing from. I missed his call, so I get this voice-mail: "You've never done this before, but I want you to put something on tape for this Casting Director, I'll send you an e-mail with the details." Something on tape? This could only mean one thing: Los Angeles.

I helped my great friend, Sara (she's the best) put something on tape that was being sent to some CDs down in Californ-eye-ay, so I figured this might have been what I was in store for. Did my agent have so much faith in me that he wanted my smiling face seen in the land of the free and the home of the brave? I check my e-mail to see what it is I need to work on for my star-spangled friends, and see tha--Winnipeg? I'm submitting to a CD in WINNIPEG?

Yes, but it's actually a good thing. This is for a lead in a new series for The Comedy Network, written and directed by a bunch of people that have so many credits I don't even know where to begin. It's called "House Party" (no relation to the immortal Kid n' Play series of the same name) and it's about, well ... a house party, telling the story of a different guest each half-hour episode (kinda like “Lost”, only nothing like “Lost”). The characters look really interesting, and the sides I have are pretty damn funny, so I should have fun with this. It’s right down my alley, especially the scene where I'm being awkward with a girl I have a crush on; pretty much my trademark.

To “put it on tape” (that means I have to recor—oh, I guess that one’s pretty obvious, even to the “normies”) I have to go a studio and pay them to film me and send the tape away. I wanted to use my iSight camera on my MacBook, but that just doesn’t yield the same result as a professional studio. So it’s up to me to find someone to read with (like I did for Sara), and book the studio time before Thursday.

As long as Jason doesn’t show-up at the same studio to put himself on tape for the same part, I should be OK.