Time now for another installment in this series wherein I write about writing. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here and Part 8 can be read here. Which brings us to Part 9…
When I was in my twenties, I went out with a lot of actresses, including some who were, to my astonishment, capable of talking about topics unrelated to their careers. With a few, the conversation ranged all the way from bad agents to evil casting directors, with sidebars about parts they should have been submitted for, auditions they should have won, producers or directors who coyly hinted at sex as a prerequisite for a role, producers or directors who went way past hinting, other actresses who beat them out for jobs by allegedly complying, where to get good photos shot or printed, good acting coaches, bad acting coaches, how to pay for groceries when acting jobs were scarce, etc. A question that some put to me was, "Will you come speak at my support group?"
I guess these support groups are still around but I personally haven't heard of one in years. In the seventies and eighties though, the way a lot of young actors coped with the challenges of mounting a career without mounting a producer was to band together. All over Hollywood, there were these little clubs that met in community rooms and church buildings and theaters.
They'd meet every Tuesday night or every second Thursday or on some other schedule and they'd all chip in a buck or three per meeting for the room and/or refreshments. A dozen or more aspiring thespians would sit around in folding chairs and discuss what was up or not up with their careers and they'd share advice. Whenever possible, one of them would bring along someone working in the industry to answer questions and give them another viewpoint on the curious institution that is Casting.
Casting is a very strange process, based as it is on so many subjective factors and hunches and inexplicable decisions. If you are an actor, you spend much of your life trying to get auditions, performing your heart out at the ones you get, and then (usually) being bewildered as to why you didn't get this part or that part. You're usually even bewildered as to why you get the parts you do get.
One time on a show I worked on, we auditioned about twenty ladies for a bit part…and I would guess that at least twelve of them would have been fine for it. Sometimes, you read folks for a role and one is just so outstanding that it's No Contest but often, especially with small roles, you can eliminate some who are clearly wrong and then go eenie-meenie-minie-mo to select one from the rest. In this case, the mo turned out to be a red-haired young lady who was as good as we could have hoped for.
We got to talking on the set and she asked me, as someone who'd been on the "inside" of the casting session, why her? I told her the God's honest truth…
"The producer adamantly wanted a certain blonde lady who'd auditioned…I think because she reminded him of a girl he had the hots for in high school. The director fiercely wanted a certain brunette for some reason of his own. They argued about it and it turned into one of those arguments which wasn't about what it was about. It became about which one of them was running the show. Finally, to settle it with neither of them having a 'win' over the other, they decided to hire neither of their picks and to bring in someone they both liked. You were the second choice of both."
In other words, she got hired for a reason that was somewhat out of her control and there was no way she would have guessed why. A lot of casting decisions are in that category. (The blonde actress, had she been picked, probably would never have imagined that while her acting certainly mattered, what got her the part was reminding the producer of an old crush.)
A few weeks later, there was another small part for the same kind of actress. The Casting Director brought in twenty ladies, some of whom had been in the earlier sessions. Wanna guess which one got picked this time?
Answer: None of them. The producers agreed on one but before anyone called to say she had the part, someone at the network phoned. They had an actress they were looking at for some other show and rather than spend the money on a screen test for her, they wondered if we could give her a small role on our show. She seemed fine, our producers agreed and none of the twenty ladies who came in to read were hired. I wonder how many of them wasted a lot of time wondering what they did wrong.
As you may have realized, the casting process for actors has a lot in common with the hiring process for writers. Often, you have no idea why you succeeded in one situation and didn't in another. And often, the reasons are in no way visible to you.
I was a guest at about, I would guess, eight or nine of these Actor Support Groups. This meant I showed up and sat through the discussion that preceded my part of it. Some of it was "Hey, I found a great place to get photos duplicated cheap" or "There's this play casting and here are the details." But a lot of it was wanna-bes sharing their frustrations with The System.
The System is maddening. You want to act for whatever reason you want to act — love of the art, love of the fame, love of the pay, love of all three and more — but for the most part, someone has to pick you. Someone has to let you act, at least in the jobs that pay. You have to please them and you never really know what the hell they want, often because they don't know what the hell they want. Once in a casting session for a situation comedy, an actress read the scene, left the room and then simultaneously, one of the producers said, "She's exactly right for the part" while another producer said, "Who asked her to come in? She's all wrong for this!"
Imagine if your life depended on winning over that room.
So in these Actor Support Groups, I heard one aspiring Brando or Bernhardt after another vent their frustration with The System and there'd be a lot of asking why it had to be that way and why did so much of it not make sense and couldn't it be changed? One gent, frantic and agonized over his inability to land anything with more than three lines, ranted on about how casting directors keep bringing in the same people because they're too lazy to do the work to find and learn about new talent.
"We have to get a law passed," he said, "that for every part that's open, they have to see at least five people they've never seen before!"
Everyone nodded in agreement though no one knew who was going to pass this law or enforce this law. When it came time for my part of the festivities, much of what I did was to tell them that, no, The System can't be changed. Or if it can be, you ain't gonna be the one to change it.
The System may not make sense to you but it wasn't designed to make sense to you or to anyone in your position. It was designed by and for the folks with the power, the folks who do the hiring. And even they aren't in a position to change much about it since that's the way the whole industry operates.
So forget about trying to change it and stop bitching all the time about how it's not fair. Instead, channel that energy into learning to live with it and to the extent possible, learning to circumvent its more malleable aspects. Also — and I'm a lot more serious about this than you'll probably think — learn to be amused by it. This is not easy, especially when not getting a job in the next few weeks may mean you won't be able to pay your rent, but see if you can't accept some of the insanity as just a colorful, unavoidable aspect of the profession you've chosen.
A guy who sells cars, if he has any perspective on his job, learns not to expect to sell everyone who comes into the showroom or even a majority of them. A certain percentage are just plain going to go down the block and buy some other make and model. A certain percentage won't buy at all, at least in this decade. Still, the salesguy learns to go through the ritual with each one, greeting them with a smile and delivering the sales pitch. He knows it's a waste of time with 80% or more of all those who wander in but still he does it. It's part of the job and, besides, it's good practice. If he can sell 10% or 20%, he's content…or he should be.
This is not just good advice, I think, for actors. It's good advice for writers and good advice for everyone. As we go through life, we frequently find ourselves trapped in Systems that don't work for us and we can see all sorts of things that are wrong or wasteful or unfair about them. I thought about this a lot last year during the two times I was hospitalized. At first, I complained to myself and everyone who wandered into my room about how impractical so much of it was from my point o' view.
Eventually though, I realized what a waste of time that was. I was in no position to change anything about it. My first few days after surgery, I couldn't change my own gown.
What I had to do was to, first of all, understand that System. Once I more or less did, I then had to figure out how to operate within it…to get good at it, rather than expect it would change to suit me. The same thing was true of the writing profession when I got into it. I am not saying there isn't a lot wrong with how editors decide what to buy or how producers decide which writers to engage. I just decided that it was a waste of time to bitch about it and pretend like I could do anything to modify it.
What I could do however was modify how I viewed it and how I operated within it. I could stop trying to figure out why I got one job and not another. I could stop expecting a fairy tale "fairness" in the selection process. I could stop fantasizing over where every possible project might lead. Most of all, I could stop wishing the business worked the way I wanted it to. That's never going to happen. I was a lot happier as a writer once I accepted that. And not that this is a separate group but I was also happier as a human being.
