Last week, I was feeling pretty good about my career in Hollywood. I had just gotten a lead in the first audition I had done for the Underground Theater Company, of which I had just become a member. I had taken a stand against a bullying acting teacher and dropped his course. And I had just had a wonderful first day with my new acting coach, Joseph Pearlman, who had called me a “very special” actress in our first session together.
What a difference a week makes.
Our first rehearsals for the play were to begin on Friday, February 19, at 6 p.m. I had spent the previous week in San Francisco, where I had worked as an extra on “Trauma,” auditioned for a student film, and auditioned for another commercial to run overseas – this one was for Australia. The casting director who called me in wrote, “Wow. Great eyes, great smile, great look.” I thought, how can I not get cast in this? The answer? By being late.
I have had a problem getting to places on time all my life. I don’t know why. My theory is that I have never gotten quite enough sleep. I’ve spent my life being tired, and I remember even as a little girl in elementary school lying in bed with aching arms and legs, experiencing the pains that were later diagnosed as fibromyalgia (or perhaps lupus-related). Because we didn’t know better at the time, Mom would give me a Coke with my bedtime snack, and then the caffeine would keep me awake for hours. I was late for home room almost every day in high school, but my teachers indulged me because I made straight As and was a good kid. I guess that gave me a sense of entitlement, in a way.
I did better in college, and on my first job, but once I got into sales at AT&T, being on time at work was not that big of a deal as long as you were a top performer, and I always was. It didn’t get to be a big deal again until I was working for a man in Nashville who was always waiting for me to screw up. Lateness was a top priority in his book, and I got in big trouble for not being at work at the crack of dawn – 8:00 a.m. to everybody else. I was going to Vanderbilt full-time by this time, and my health had gotten very bad, to the point that I could barely function every day. All I wanted to do was graduate and get away from the boss from hell who was fixated on my being on-time for work.
So I did get away, by moving to New Jersey six months after graduation. This move saved my life, maybe literally. My new boss was very understanding about my health problems (I was completely up-front about them), and he and I worked out an early form of “telecommuting” that was seen as pioneering (this was in 1993) and made me very popular with our customer, as our main office was 60 miles away and I was just nine miles down the road, living on the ocean. My health improved dramatically, and whenever I was late my boss would counsel me that I just tried to do too much in too little time. Wise words that I try to heed whenever I can, because everything really does take longer than you think it is going to.
When Keith and I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1996, I no longer was able to telecommute, and I had a 26-mile drive to get to my office. Plus, I was managing a global team which meant we had video conferences at least once a month that began at 7:00 a.m. and lasted for three hours, with me as the chair. Plus, the traffic in the Bay Area was nightmarish. It was a constant struggle to get to work on time for the next four years that I was able to work. And since I have been acting in LA, I never seem to estimate the travel times correctly. Every hour here is rush hour, every day of the week.
All of that is a very long-winded way of saying that I have a problem with being on-time. It’s not usually anything personal; it’s just that I don’t feel well enough to get out of bed, or something traffic-related – an accident for example. Several times I was involved in the accident! I used to get lost a lot, but since I got my GPS (global positioning system) in my Toyota Prius, that doesn’t happen nearly as often - which brings me to my commercial audition. I have come to depend on the GPS probably more than I should. I wrote down the address for the audition, and left my house only giving myself 45 minutes to go 25 miles – not nearly enough for San Francisco, but I was running late that morning because, well, I was tired. I made it to the city with 10 minutes to park, which I did, and then walked to the address, which was right smack in the middle of – Chinatown?
Now, Chinatown in San Francisco is a very densely populated area, with a rat’s maze of streets and a rabbit warren of small shops and apartment buildings filling the small area. Tourists love it, but casting agencies do not. They may film movies in Chinatown, but they don’t cast them there. I knew immediately I had made a mistake. Sure enough, when I took out the note from my purse, I realized I had left out a digit on the address, and the agency was ten blocks away!
I was already ten minutes late, and I had to walk (uphill) back to the parking garage, get my car, pay $2 for parking for only ten minutes, and then try to race ten blocks to the agency. I would have called them, but they hadn’t given the auditioners a number, which happens frequently (maybe it's a test). And being late is just the kiss of death for an audition. I don’t know that I have ever been cast in anything that I have arrived late for, even if I did call from the road. Anyway, I figured I might as well go, so I drove the rest of the way, nearly running over a group of Chinese residents in the process (I waved "sorry," but they yelled at me anyway). I got there nearly 30 minutes late. Fortunately, both the cameraman and the director were very nice, and no one else was there. They said it was fine, and told me to tell them what happened on-camera, which I did. They said I looked great and had a beautiful smile. I thanked them very much and apologized about 20 times, and although I did get a very nice e-mail saying they liked my work, they did not cast me. Of course. Because I was late.
Now, you would think that after an incident or twenty like this that I would learn my lesson, right? Well, maybe. I AM doing much better. You can never be late for background work – if you are, more than 15 minutes or so, the assistant director checking people in will call Central Casting, and if it happens more than once, you will “never work in this town again.” Literally. If you can’t get work with Central, you pretty much won’t get work with any of the other agencies either. So obviously, I CAN be on time when I know I have to be. But sometimes, for auditions and rehearsals and classes, I just don't seem to allow enough time for the problems that always come up, like no parking spaces, traffic jams, accidents, and etc. And that’s really the story for today.
On the night of the first play rehearsal, I made it to Hollywood from the Bay Area right at 6 p.m., but I was still ten miles from the director’s home where we were to meet. I called him and said I’d be there in about 20 minutes. And I swear, it took me an hour to go ten miles, get parked, and get to his house, because of the Friday night traffic! I was fit to be tied but there was nothing I could do. I apologized profusely but he said no worries, and we had a great read-through. The next rehearsal was the following day, at 1:00 p.m. I had an 11 a.m. rehearsal for my Sunday class with my scene partner, who lives about 12 miles from the director. We rehearsed until 12:30, and then it took me 45 minutes to get there and parked! This time, the problem was due to the fact that there is NO street parking allowed in West Hollywood on Saturdays, something the director had neglected to tell me. This time, I could tell he was pissed off, although I was not the last person to arrive, but we proceeded and again, the rehearsal went fine.
Then, on Monday, all five cast members were to get together in the theater to do the first “blocking” rehearsal. Blocking is when the director places the actors on stage and tells us where he wants us to be at certain times during the play. It is the beginning of stage directions, and it’s a very important part of the theatrical directing process. I wanted to make sure I was there on time. The director had sent us an e-mail stating we only had the theater for an hour and a half, and I thought he said 5:45 to 7:15, when in fact it was 5:15 to 6:45. I know I sound really stupid, but my lupus has caused some memory problems and I do make mistakes like people much older than me do. It’s very embarrassing because I used to have a razor-sharp brain. I should have double-checked but I didn’t, and I thought I was right on time as I was driving to the theater at 5:30 when my cell phone rang. It was the director, livid. I said, “I’m on my way,” wondering why he was so upset. When I arrived five minutes later, I realized the other four cast members had been just sitting there, waiting for me, since 5:15. We started immediately, but I knew he was mad.
Then, the real bombshell dropped. I received a text message (from my extras’ calling service that books me for my background jobs) that I had been booked for four days of work on “The Office!” I was thrilled, for several reasons: I needed the money, because Keith expects me to make a certain amount every month and I was way short so far in February; I had never worked before on “The Office,” my favorite show and a great sitcom with terrific writing and acting; and getting that many days in a row might, just might, give me a chance to get a SAG voucher (you need three to be able to join the Screen Actors Guild, and I don’t have any) or get a Taft-Hartley upgrade (one speaking line in the show which would have immediately given me SAG-eligible status). I’m in AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors), but not SAG, and in order to even start getting considered for work on the types of shows I want to work on, I need to get into that union. But that is a discussion for another day. So I was thrilled, and I went to tell the director that I might have a problem with some of the earlier rehearsals that week (one started at 5 p.m.).
He looked at me like he wanted to strangle me, and said, “You have to be at every rehearsal. You can’t take that job.” I looked at him incredulously and told him very nicely that background work is the way I pay the bills, and that I couldn’t turn it down. I mean, I was surprised I got booked for ONE day, much less four – I’d submitted my availability to my service three times earlier in the month, and only gotten one day of work, and the most days in a row I’d ever gotten before, in eight years of doing background work, was two. I reminded him that background rarely goes longer than ten hours, and we were starting at 8 a.m. so that meant we should be out by 6 p.m., fine for 7 p.m. rehearsals, but he wasn’t buying it. I pointed out that he could use the early rehearsal to do the scenes I’m not in (there were two of them), and that seemed to really set him off. As I left, he was headed over to talk to the bullying acting teacher, who also happens to be the Artistic Director of the Underground Theater Company, the one who has a zero-tolerance policy on lateness. Uh-oh, I thought, I’m in deep doo-doo.
So I called the director, who is about 24 and has never directed a play before, about 15 minutes later. I told him I was not happy about what had happened, and that I was sorry about the background job but that I had to take it, for the reasons I stated earlier. I said it appeared obvious to me that he was going to replace me with someone else, and if that was the case, I wanted him to go ahead and do it. He said he would think about it and call me in about an hour. I proceeded to go to my workshop scheduled for that evening with the Casting Director for “The Office,” completely separate from the background job. I did a fun scene playing “Michelle” Scott in the scene where she talks with Oscar about his being gay. The CD said she enjoyed every minute of it and believed every word I said, which is hard to do because, if you watch “The Office,” you know that this character is a total idiot. And then, when I got to my car, I had a voice mail from the director, "releasing me" from the play, when I got out.
I called him back, and I got mad, unfortunately. Because I knew it wasn’t really about the background job. He told me he didn’t consider background work “real acting” (theater snob, I called him) and that he could see that I was “only in it for the money” (no one in their right mind is in acting for the money; I would starve if I were!) and then he basically got down to the real reason: that I had been late to all three rehearsals. Never mind that I had legitimate reasons, except for perhaps the Monday one were I just lost my mind and got the time wrong. In the world of the Underground Theater Company, apparently there are no excuses for being late.
I said some things that I probably shouldn’t have, but basically I told him that this play is free theatre, and background pays the bills; I want to get in SAG and working background gives me the possibility of getting vouchers (I didn’t get any, but again, another story); I want to work in sitcoms and "The Office" lets me work with the best in the business; and if I had known he was going to f-ing fire me for missing one rehearsal (which is all it turned out to have been) I wouldn’t have taken the lead in the first place. And when he said, piously, “I hope you can learn and grow from this experience,” I replied, “Well, in the interest of learning and growing, you could have started without me on Monday, rehearsing the scenes I wasn’t in.” He lost it at that point and said, “I find it highly offensive that you are trying to tell me how to run my rehearsals when YOU were the one who was late.” And at that point I realized that this conversation was over, and said so, but wishing him "all the best."
So, was I wrong to take the background work? Well, from his perspective, yes, although he could have handled it differently. End times on background days are notoriously unpredictable, and on Thursday I had to miss an important audition for Home Depot because we weren't finished, and I had expected to be done before 6:45, the time of the audition. But since the play was free theater anyway, meaning they were not paying any of us, he could have gotten an understudy for the week, in case I was not able to make it. As it turned out, Thursday’s 5-7 p.m. rehearsal was the only one I would have missed, and I couldn’t resist sending him an e-mail telling him so when we were done. But I also sent him a letter of apology, copying the directors of the theater company, as well as my agent, just to cover my butt.
I also did something in hurt and anger that, looking back, was probably a bad idea. Normally I never send e-mails like that until 24 hours have passed – a very good rule that I violated this time. I have never been dropped from any kind of production before, and my ego had really taken a blow. So I sent a letter of resignation late that night to the Company Director, a woman who I don’t know well yet but like so far. Knowing that the bullying acting coach is the Artistic Director of the company, and also knowing that he had told the director unequivocally that he should have fired me after just one time of being late, I was sure that I would be dropped from the company. Given that my priorities are on serious acting study, now (a change from earlier this year!), in auditions, sitcoms, and improv, and hoping to work as much as possible doing comic films, sitcoms, and commercials, rather than theater, I decided to resign from the theater company before they could fire me.
She responded to my e-mail the next day expressing surprise and disappointment that I had resigned. Stating that “the company does not share [the bullying teacher’s] position on lateness; you would not have been dropped from the company,” she informed me that the play would have been treated as a director’s workshop only. Great – now she tells me! I wrote back that perhaps I had been too hasty, and that although paid jobs would always take top priority, I expected that there would be time for me to do workshops and plays, especially in the summer, and asked for re-instatement. But she has not replied, so I guess I screwed that up too. But I may be breaking my old boss' advice again, of trying to do too many things in too little time, so maybe this is all for the best.
So, what went well this week? I did have a great time on the set. I was featured twice in relatively long scenes which, if I am recognizable, will allow me to appeal to SAG for at least one voucher. I made several new contacts and got referrals to a new commercial casting agency and a new talent agency. I made friends with the first and second assistant directors (there are usually four assistants to the actual director, who usually does not interact with anyone but the principal cast), who allowed me to take a long lunch on Wednesday so I could audition for a lead in an independent film (another one about zombies). And the food was fantastic! All of these are part of the reasons why background work is so much fun. Oh, and I made pretty good money too, meeting my commitment to my husband. And I have to ask myself – which is more important? Having fun, and doing what I say I will do for my husband? Or always being on time to auditions? Because I don’t kid myself. He fired me for being late.
Til next time,
Jennie
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