Crossroads

Tomorrow, I will have been a resident of the greater LA area for exactly five months. It has been somewhat of a whirlwind of activity, a blur in some cases and agonizingly slow in others. Overall, I would say it has gone fairly well. I have two good acting coaches (more about them later), a quality commercial agent, and I have even managed to find a bit of work in these five months.

I should feel on top of the world about what has happened since I have been here. Truth is, I don't. My downtown LA acting coach says I am too impatient. Maybe he's right (he usually is), but inside I have this gnawing feeling of wanting more....more signs of progress, more auditions, more bookings, more everything that an actor needs as milestones to judge how things are going with their career.

I don't feel my impatience is necessarily a bad thing, if kept in control. A good football coach will tell you that he wants his number two quarterback chomping at the bit to play, yearning to show the coach that he is the man for the job. That impatience is one of the key ingredients which fuels that quarterback's drive. I believe it's the same with me, or any other actor who wants to excel in a major market.

I have two quality acting coaches that anyone would be happy to have, and that's exactly the way I feel about both of them. However, I may have been rushing it too much, in that I am taking a private lesson from one coach one week and the other, the next week. While they come at you with different personalities, they say pretty much the same things. I think however, that I may be (by taking a private lesson each week) overloading my senses, in that I am pushing and trying too hard. As all actors know, trying too hard is not the way to deliver a smooth and natural performance. I thought about taking a month off from acting lessons entirely to regroup my thoughts about the techniques of acting. I decided against that because I didn't want to go a full month without acting lessons.

Before adding my second (Hollywood Hills) acting coach (at the urging of my commercial agency) I was taking a lesson every two weeks from my original acting coach in downtown Hollywood. I believe the two weeks between lessons were beneficial in digesting, utilizing, and incorporating into my acting, what I had learned in each lesson. With that in mind I am strongly considering alternating acting coaches in the following manner. I will take a lesson every two weeks one month from one coach. The follow month I will do the same with the other coach. I believe this will give me more time to more fully understand, and to practice what I had learned in the most recent lesson. This will have the effect of alternating each coach on a monthly basis. This may be a workable scenario or not, but it should only take two months to find out. I haven't made up my mind fully on this, but I am strongly leaning that way.

In with these private lessons, I need to schedule a weekly improve course, and various acting seminars, as they arise. I am taking a one evening seminar from a well known casting director on August 13th.

In the world of Academia, the bylaw for professors is "Publish or perish," For actors it's "Study or perish." I am fully aware that I need to study. It's just that my study schedule may need a bit of tweaking, as I feel I am at a crossroad as to how I continue my studies. Not with whom, just how. I need to continue them in what I deem to be the best way to further my acting skills, and more importantly, my acting career. Perhaps, as my downtown Hollywood acting coach said, I do need a bit more patience. I need to understand that taking a private acting lesson every week may not speed me towards my goal any faster that taking one every other week. The progress of an actor is far more important than the number of acting lessons they have taken.

There is also one other thing which, while I have been doing it frequently, I need to do even more. It is probably best illustrated by an old joke that was in vogue back in my days as a professional musician. A man is walking down the streets of New Your City when he spots a musician coming towards him, carrying a horn case. He stops the musician and says, "Excuse me, but can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?" The musician looked at him for a moment and then replied, "Practice, man, practice." That's good advice for an actor as well. I have exercises and copy to practice in front of a full length mirror, plus filming certain segments with my video camera, so I can study and review my look, actions, etc later. As I said, I need to spend even more time doing that. As a professional musician I spent hours upon hours practicing techniques until they became second nature. As an actor, I need do no less.

Finally, actors all over Hollywood (Using the name Hollywood to mean all of the LA acting community) are complaining that there is lees work than before. That can be attributed to two factors. (1) there is always a noticeable slowdown in work in July and August, and (2) the economy has affected the number of film and TV projects, as well as the budgets of some of the projects that have been given the green light. I have discussed before the fact that there are some things which are directly under the actor's control (being on time, being professional, being prepared for the audition, Being prepared for the role once you are cast, etc.), and there are a number of things over which the actor has no control. The economy is one of those things, and is not something I choose to worry about.

We will talk again, soon...............