A journalism think tank studying "The Daily Show" doesn't believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart - because otherwise they wouldn't get the jokes.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles "The O'Reilly Factor,""Hardball" and other cable news shows in content.
Yes, but The Daily Show is INTENDED to be a parody.
Back in January, after a frustrating run of Avails* to no avail, I gave myself an absolutely ridiculous goal. I even told my agent, whether he remembers it or not. "I want to book 5 commercials before my birthday." When I told him that was April 23, he kind of laughed it off, as he should have. Never booked more than 3 in a year before, and five in a year would be a very, very good year for just about anyone.
So how did I spend my birthday?
Shooting my fifth commercial of 2008.
I love this game!
(* = Avail is an industry term, referring to the production checking on the actor's availability. The production will put their top choices "on avail" so that at least one of them may experience the ol' "Haha! PSYYYYCH! You lose, jackass," moment later on. See also: "released")
Well, if you watched the Final Four, you know that my VW commercial with Bobby Knight debuted. Without me. Thanks, Coach.
If we did 25 takes, 23 of them were the far superior version with me. But Coach Knight just HAD to improv. Geez, Bob, you're not gonna see me marching out onto a court or into the ESPN studio and doing YOUR job. Taking ten, fifteen grand outta your pocket?
Well, these things happen all the time. I was actually prepared for this possibility, and had already accepted that I would walk off that set with not a single souvenir, not a photo and certainly not a finished commercial. Good thing I found a book for him to sign, otherwise it may have all been a figment of my imagination. Truth is, I would never have been cut out if Bob wasn't any good at what he was doing. The ad's final product was the last take of the day, and he gave himself only one chance to get it right. Never has watching a scene be completely nailed been so heartbreaking.
What I WASN'T prepared for was that Kansas-UNC game, and the Heels saving their worst basketball of the season for the Final Four.
Bob, I do appreciate your analysis on the ESPN, it's nice to be brought more in depth than the other talking heads can do. It's also great to see your reactions (mirroring mine) when Dick Vitale goes off screaming out empty platitudes and retarded acronyms in place of actual game analysis. Please Bob, smack him around for me, will ya? You owe me one.
But hands off my residuals, dang it! I gotta rebudget...
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to call a friend of mine and recall one of his fondest baseball memories. He was at Fenway Park and saw a record that will likely never be broken. "Weren't you there at a game in which two triple plays were pulled off?" I asked.
"Yup."
"Cool. ...I just booked two national commercials in one day."
That was how the week ended. Let me back up and dish the details of how it began. With that other booking.
It happened as fast as any commercial I've been a part of: about three days from audition to wrap, and one of them was a Sunday. Auditioned on Friday for a VW ad with All-Time NCAA Men's Basketball wins leader, Bobby Knight, and casting asked that we familiarize ourselves with this clip:
As if I hadn't seen it a hundred times already. But really, not every actor cares about college basketball, so I did have a leg up on some of the competition. I probably knew who he was when I was 12. I feel no guilt for perfectly fine afternoons spent watching ACC games, or for buying a mini-TV to put in the car while messengering during the early rounds of March Madness last year. It's not the first time my sports geekdom has gotten me work. (See the ESPN clip in the sidebar, if you're killing time.) It is, however, the first time my deeply-hidden secret short fuse got me a job. (But not the last, I'm totally gonna play John McCain one day!)
So for a guy who grew up in college basketball's Mecca, Chapel Hill, I couldn't have been more stoked booking it the next day. Without a callback. It was shooting Monday, I clearly knew how to throw chair with anyone and be a dork without trying, so who needs the hassle of a Sunday callback? Head-spinning had begun.
Monday morning, I'm on set at 8am. I met Coach Knight and his wife in their trailer, and he talked with the agency folks about the spot. A few minutes later, we walked on set wearing in matching blue V-neck sweaters and brown slacks. 'Holy crap, I'm Bob Knight's doppleganger.' I could see the crew chuckling already.
I don't want to give too much of it away, because however it turns out, it's going to be a damn funny spot. It's exactly the joke you'd want to hear after Coach Knight's retirement if you're familiar with his career. But the "Are you dadgum kiddin' me, is this really happening" moment came after the first rehearsal. My task? Throw chair. And Bob Knight turns and looks down to me and starts coaching me on proper chair-throwing mechanics. A handful of crew guys get this goofy look on their faces that must have mirrored the one I was wearing. He started talking about some golf coach who uses the chair-throwing clip as an example of a good golf stroke. "Get both of your hands back, and as you're following through, you transfer your weight from the back foot to the front," he said as he demonstrated with the chair.
He offered up a lot of suggestions, clearly concerned with his image in reality remaining consistent in the script, sometimes offering his own improvisations. He was pretty good, honestly. You gave him a mark, he hit it. In the scene, he's being interviewed on a talk show. The host makes a comment that earns him the death stare from Coach Knight. When he asked if he could react in a way that was more natural for him, the director (some Coppola fella) asked what'd he normally say.
"Well, fuck you!" After the laughter subsided, it was suggested that while that was certainly his most earnest and effective response, it probably wouldn't fly with the client. Woulda been a fun take, though!
We did about 25 takes with me, and two without, the latter being nowhere nearly as funny as the first 25. :) It was all over in a couple of hours, and afterwards Coach Knight signed his biography for me, "Thanks for letting me work with you!" he wrote. I finally found a copy of the call sheet which was a surreal extension of the day. In the talent section, the list went "**** (the top secret voice of the VW), Bobby Knight, me, Heidi Klum, Rick Searfoss." (Searfoss is an astronaut. And no, I didn't meet Heidi. Somehow, she will deal with that missed opportunity.) Bob Knight's ESPN gig starts tonight, and I will wait in eager anticipation for our ad during March Madness.
And at least three more! Sprint and Capital One, which both booked Friday, will shoot in the next week. Advil sponsors NCAA bball, too! Yes, it has been a career month. Despite a strike, January and February were both my busiest months ever. If that's not enough to be thankful for, the jobs I'm getting are as rewarding and funny as any I could have imagined when I got into this business.
And now, I'll actually write about acting in this so-called acting blog!
There are some hard-core flu germs floating across LA these days. No six degrees of Kevin Bacon with this one, everyone knows someone or half a crew who's currently sitting on the bench. I was spared to a certain degree...101.1 degrees, to be precise, if I am to trust the Spongebob Squarepants thermometer my mom bought for me as a joke. Worse than that, it starts beeping the Spongebob theme song when it's done, so in my delirious state of mind that's the last thing I heard before going to bed. I had dreams that inspired me to to take SCUBA lessons and buy a pineapple.
But that was about it for me, I was fortunate. Also very thankful that it waited until after I'd shot an Advil commercial last week! Great set, great experience, and a holding room with a view from the 33rd floor of the US Bank building downtown. And hey, now I'll be able to buy a digital camera so next time, I can take a picture of it!
It occurred to me, speed-walking down a narrow office hallway and timing a near-collision with another actor who was not visible to me, that I trained for this role in no-budget USC film school productions shortly after I moved here. (Not the one below.) Sure, you can do fifty takes to get the timing and blocking down, but in the student films, they're limited in the number of feet of film they can shoot on a given project. In the Advil spot, they're shooting 120 frames per second, so we rarely did more than ten or twelve takes on any angle. Them feets adds up! Precision helps.
Some great physical comedy in this thing, and a cast full of great facial expressions. Once again, those USC productions were lessons in visual storytelling, as there was almost no dialogue. In the Advil spot, there's just one thing to know: "Doughnuts!"
And now, I could really use some Advil. Anyways, here's a shout-out to the USC boys who I owe a drink (and yeah, another shameless plug):
I've had this idea to post the signs around LA that stand out for one reason or another. I'm not sure exactly where this will be seen, but I'm on the side of a bus (in a good way) for the first time.
If you've never watched Bus Pirates, five of the six episodes are available for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
There is a vast right-wing conspiracy at work against anyone a few miles of out town limits who wants the high-speed intertubes connected to their house. Geez, you'd think the companies that control the information might want more people to have access to that information.
I need my Christmas in NC just to fill my annual biscuit quota. Good biscuits is hard to find in LA. Once again, I forgot to ask Santa for some country ham to fill that particular need, but that's okay. There's a water shortage anyway.
The futon must go. And with it, the color scheme in my room that I chose when I was four years old. I must have ingested some small toy from China the day my parents asked what colors I wanted.
We are all so thankful for the day that the cats and their litter boxes are forever banished from the dining room. I was introduced to those great igloo-shaped litter boxes which, in a normal household, would revolutionize the air quality. In our house, the cats would sniff around it, peek into the little tunnel and say, "Hell naw, somebody else can go in there. I'm pissin' on the hardwood floors right next to it. And then I'll go fight somebody."
I guess that's my interpretation of Winston Churchill's brilliant-and-simple quote, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
The schizophrenic nature of The Bidness occasionally makes for emotional volatility that would make the Dow Jones Industrial Avg blush. Volatility seems to pick up when testing new highs and lows, and I found myself riding the coaster, presumably, at a 52-week low.
Booking droughts are common among actors, and certainly no stranger to me. I had very high expectations of myself going into 2007, with 7 jobs in the last three months of '06. Kind of a difficult pace to keep up. Sometimes, you know you're close. I've been kicking at the door since October, an entire month I spent on Avail for four different jobs.
I finished October like Alex Rodriguez does. O-fer. So what you do is you give thanks for the knowledge that you're on the right track, you're not a Yankee, and you've jumped through that many hoops and done almost everything possible to get the job. (Either that or you can be pissed off about 2nd place and keep attracting more of it. Filthy habit I picked back up.) That last hoop is where chance comes into play. Wait--actually, it's more like Community Chest, given that not only do you have to nail the audition and however many callbacks, but you have to please a committee of ad agency, client, and production people.
This week, volatility was sharply up once again for Me (ticker symbol: SMRT). The price was up in anticipation of the Pirates 3 DVD release, which was to include the Tales of the Code short film I shot last year at this time. It happened to be the one and only reported special feature not included in the final packaging. So I'm left to assume it may appear on whatever monster Trilogy Box Set they come up with. (The sooner the better!) I was really looking forward to posting a recollection of that 16-hour night shoot and expressing my endless gratitude for finally having an incredible character and scene for my reel. Instead, my stock plummeted on the news, and investors reportedly spent an hour crying into and/or beating the crap out of pillows. An hour later, I'm putting the mental train back on the tracks with a same-day commercial audition...and then another. Nice, I'm back, stock price recovering after early weakness, time to go.
Here's where the poetry of life kicks in. Off I go for an afternoon of opportunity. If only my car would start.
Battery's dead, so I have an opportunity to be grateful to Mom, who still has me on her AAA account. Driver comes out just in time for me to be just in time. $109 for a new battery, but at least I don't have to worry about that for a while, right? Now, if only I could pay my rent this month. Off to my audition...for the role of a tow truck driver.
I gotta hit the fast-forward button before this gets too dull--good audition here, good callback there (yay), a check doesn't arrive on time, will my rent check bounce? (boo), Mom calls to inform that the new well we had to dig (back in NC) because of the drought is not, after all, contaminated (huge yay), two straight-to-callbacks the next day, one with a director who knows me and digs my work (more huge yay), perfect time for the car to overheat for the third time in two weeks (boooo), so I miss the second audition and take it straight to my dude at Midas, where I sit for an hour and he can't for the life of him find any leaks. (Yay? Boo? WTF.)
I do believe, at this point, I deserve that Super Bowl commercial that ends up playing incessantly for the next 12 months. Way back when I experienced this bottom-scraping before the 7-booking streak, the well ran completely dry and I was literally down to less than $20 in the bank. Now I'm back, and after rent is paid I will be at $21. The difference this time is a full year of dues-paying, well-digging, and seed planting. While the residuals of last year's tidal wave are long gone, I reinvested a lot of them in myself--headshots, reels, MacBook, a wardrobe that doesn't look like I picked it out in junior high school--they're all part of the reason I've gotten to this point. I'm going out more often, and all the time through the mountains of poop raining down from the sky on actors by the nature of the industry, the wilting dollar, and a debilitating strike. But I've seen much, much worse and with far fewer resources.
So I plant seeds and let the bullshit fertilize. And now that it's finally raining water on Los Angeles, some of them are gonna grow.
