The Audition Process.

I'm just going to ramble on here about auditions; it's the process that every actor knows and a lot of us hate.

Let's face it there can't be many other jobs on earth where you have to audition all the way through your career; there's only one other job where it can be worse and that's a comedian playing to nobody at all just a producer sitting there demanding that you make him laugh.

I saw something similar once when I went to my very first audition – well it wasn't my very first as I had to audition for drama school: one piece of Shakespeare, one modern piece and a poem.

Every actor will recognize those three requirements and I think I explain quite well how I started as an actor in this 90 second clip from a talk show - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrGBnPB8IN0 - have a look and I'll wait for you.

Getting back to my first audition; I had been at drama school for three months and I saw in The Stage newspaper an advertisement for a pantomime at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester and I decided to give it a go; why not?

By the way I know people on the American continent will hardly know what a pantomime is and will confuse it with 'mime' so have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantomime which should fill you in.

I was living in Shropshire at the time so Leicester wasn't that many hours travel away and when you are at that stage of your career you will try anything; so off to Leicester I went and I can't tell you how I got there but it took a long time on many trains.

The De Montfort Hall has a capacity of two thousand and is a venue for the Leicester Philharmonic Choir and the Leicester Symphony Orchestra; acts like the Beatles played there and Buddy Holly when he came to the UK played there too and walking in that day I noticed how big the place was; an indoor stadium no less.

Most of the others there for the auditions were variety acts; I came as an actor even though I was only a drama student; trying to run before I could walk.

There was a really good double act auditioning made up of two brothers in suits who did a song and dance and many young girls with beautiful singing voices; one fella came on stage with a newspaper and started to sing 'Old Man River' then he said to the producers out front 'I also do lines.'

'Do you?' they said 'well let's hear some.'

That was where the newspaper came in; he unfolded it and started to read it out loud in a mock Shakespearian voice – 'The Prime Minister today met the cabinet at number 10 . . '

There was no hook to drag him off stage or loud 'thank you' - they just let him finish and thanked him.

Then came the comedian I mentioned earlier; he was obviously a bit like me – no experience.

He came on the stage and started telling a few jokes and of course because there was no audience – only us waiting to audition – there was nobody laughing and this threw him totally.

The more jokes he told and the more silent responses he heard the more confidence he lost till he was a quivering wreck.

I remember the last thing he did was to take a chair from the back of the stage and say 'For my next trick I am going to do a back flip from this chair and land on my head on the floor' and he stood on the chair; then he looked out front, got down off the chair and said 'no I'm not' and walked off.

It was very embarrassing and I was next; 'tell us your name' somebody said and I told them.

'What do you do?'

'I'm an actor.'

“What do you do – lines?'

'Yes I'm going to do a piece from Present Laughter by Noel Coward.'

So I did my piece, speaking to the chair, and when I walked off everybody gave me a round of applause; I suppose I was different from everybody else there but I didn't hear another word from them.

Now that has always made me laugh when an actor talks to a chair during an audition but maybe that's just my sense of humour.

Most of the other auditions I've been to over the years have been with just actors and there is a difference between auditions in London and those in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles you really do audition no matter who you are – I don't mean people like Brad Pitt or Jack Nicholson but you would be surprised at the well known faces that audition.

In London actors don't admit they have to audition at all even if they're a nobody – like me; they call them meetings and a lot of the time that's all they are.

You chat with the director for twenty minutes and they assess who you are and base their decision on that.

Lots of times you have to read the lines from one of the scenes; one actor I followed in London had writing next to his name which read 'will not read under any circumstances.' Big headed bastard!!

When you arrive at an audition – on both sides of the Atlantic - you are welcomed with the sight of nervous looking actors who look exactly the same as you; so you can see what type you are as soon as you arrive.

In Los Angeles the actors go dressed for the role; especially for commercials.

I went for the role of Santa Claus once and there in the waiting room when I arrived were three fully dressed Santas and they knew each other.

A bit like the singing Hitlers and the dancing Hitlers from 'The Producers.'

Actors in Los Angeles have their 'sides' with them which are the scenes the casting director wants you to read from the script.

Most actors learn those lines and have worked on it for maybe the last 24 hours.

Actors here are entitled to see the sides 24 hours before any audition – union (SAG) rules.

In London, when I was there, you don't get the sides till you arrive and one time, when I went to meet Ned Sherrin for a play he was directing, they didn't let me see the script till I met Ned Sherrin himself – this kind of process gives you the best sight readers and not necessarily the best actors.

It's a pity about that particular play as Ian Dury was in it and I would have loved to have worked with him.

In Los Angeles they want the best actor for each role and go out of their way to help you which is why you get the sides.

The draw back here is you very rarely meet the director on the first audition and sometimes you don't meet him at all.

The casting director 'reads' you and you will get a call back to meet the director at the second meeting.

If you go for a big movie they just put you on tape so you are at the mercy of the casting director who usually don't know how to direct you properly.

I've been to quite a few seminars, organised by SAG, where there have been agents (they get 10% and no more here unlike in London), managers (15%) and casting directors and you do pick up a lot of hints and tips.

Number one: at an audition when you are reading don't fix your eyes on the other person you are reading with; people don't normally look each other in the eye all the time when they speak to each other. Have a look around, if you don't believe me; so there is no need to do it with the casting director.

Also look at the American TV and movie productions and you will see the actors looking around being natural.

That doesn't mean to say you never look people in the eyes but it's unnerving if you do it all the time.

I also know actors who are quite well known and they don't see why they should go in and meet the director as they have worked with them before or they are friends.

Some directors here still want actors they know to come in for casting as they might want them to do something different from what they normally do; maybe you're well known as playing a killer or a heavy and the director wants to see if you could play something light or comedic.

Or the other way around – you do a lot of comedy and they want to see if you could play that nasty streak or even a bit of violence.

Directors have said, at these seminars, that the actors who don't or won't come in sometimes miss out.

What has been fairly consistent over the years at auditions is the seriousness of the Americans, who mean business, and the nonchalance of some of the English; sometimes the English arrive with the attitude that they have something else more important to do; now what could be more important than your next job?

Of course I haven't been to any auditions in London for over fifteen years as I've been here so things might have changed.

At the last couple of auditions I went to there were some young girls waiting, and I couldn't believe that they spent their whole waiting time sending texts on their smart phones – I refuse to use the word texting – but maybe that's natural too.

We are the world.

There they all were down on La Brea the other day at the ex-Charlie Chaplin studios-ex-AM Studios doing their bit of getting out of their chauffeur driven cars and limos, being filmed as they walked the few steps towards the front gate for it to be shown on the video for their new recording of the famous song.Quincey Jones was inside waiting for them in the same studio as last time; Snoop Dog came in his limo and the rest in theirs; all too well known on their world and unknown in mine; one black man with a beard had the audacity to arrive at the back entrance in his jeep and was told by the guys in the suits and the bald heads and sun glasses that he had to go to the front; just another day in Hollywood as I went to the post office.Plenty of cops around as a young thug tried his luck on the corner with a street crime; he was cuffed and standing by the wall at the back as the world was watching the front.
Just a short post today - let's see if you click on to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glny4jSciVI&feature=channel

My brother.

It seems my last post about abortion and advertising was a bit of a rant; this is according to my brother; he said I lost him at the beginning.

This is my younger brother so I don't suppose it was the first time I lost him in our lives, I mean figuratively of course.

I remember when we were two little boys in an outer area of Dublin called Finglas climbing trees; in fact I think it was closer to Cabra, and my brother fell as we were climbing. We were wearing short trousers in those days, not big enough or old enough to go into longers yet, and as we climbed he slipped and came falling down.

I remember seeing the bits of twigs or sharp bits scratching his legs but he didn't have to worry as he had quite a soft landing; he landed on me!

He nearly knocked me off my branch and we would have both fallen to the ground if I'd have let go.

One day we climbed to the top of Nelson's Pillar in Dublin; it was wearing our poor mother out as it was a long climb up those spiral stairs and my brother didn't like the fact that we were going higher and higher; he had a problem with the height, so he said, but if you shoot forward about twenty years he would climb to the top of a thirty foot A-Frame ladder.

The A-Frame ladder is really supposed to be for a two man operation; one man holding the ladder the other man at the top, unless you are against a wall as in the picture, above, but in the theatre we were in the middle of the stage.

I went to the top of it a few times as we were working at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham setting the lights thirty feet above the stage; the height didn't worry me but the seemingly rickety ladder did.

I wasn't sure whether someone would come walking across the stage, as they worked on their part of assembling the set, and kick the ladder out from under me as we were up there by ourselves sometimes; not always a two man job when we were under pressure to get the set ready.

I would stand there when my brother was at the top, and think of the day he fell down the tree and, as he leaned forward to change the angle of a light that the lighting guy would tell him to move, I half expected him to land on me again; only this time it wouldn't be much of a soft landing from that height.

I also remember around about that time playing football (soccer) with him for some made up team or other; he played in defence and I played somewhere out of the way; as long as I didn't do too much damage I was okay. In fact I remember scoring a few goals just farting about.

About ten minutes into the match, or the game as they say here, my brother went in for a tackle and a few people landed on top of him - so what happened? They had to carry him off; he was the soft landing on that particular day.

He was okay as he came back on to a round of applause after a few minutes of touching his toes and a wipe with the magic sponge.

But football wasn't his game; he went on to play rugby for Birmingham and played representative rugby too and one day he ended up in hospital; I don't know whether he broke his ribs or bent them or what but one of them pierced one of his lungs.

I went to see him in hospital and he lay there in bed with a painful look on his face; what could I say to him?

I had come to cheer him up and, as he looked quite stressed, I tried to make him laugh; when he laughed a terrible look came on his face as it was hurting him to laugh - Sorry Pat.

Freedom of Speech and Abortion.

I haven't posted for a week!!! I was busy doing some proper writing and also entering my novel,
The Storyteller, into a writing competition which meant writing an outline of 300 words, then the first 5000 words of the novel and finally the novel itself.

Now:
I am of the opinion that sports and politics shouldn't mix and living in the UK for so many years we have obviously had a lot of experience; South Africa was banned from international cricket and rugby and then, eventually, the Olympic Games; I wouldn't appear in a TV production which would be sold to South Africa and it cost us Equity members a lot of money.

When apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela said the fact that South Africa was banned from sports helped a lot with apartheid's demise – so which way is right? Who knows?

But back to politics and sport; I really believe they should not be mixed because most of the time sports figures are the biggest arseholes under the sun and they know nothing about anything; case in point is Tim Tebow, famous for being a college footballer, who is doing an anti abortion commercial to be shown during the super bowl on Sunday and should be seen by the many millions watching the event.

Tebow was born in the Philippines the son of Christian Missionaries and he was 'home schooled' by them.

I don't know whether he was a good or bad footballer as I don't have the slightest interest in the game and think it a bit of an oxymoron that the game is called football in the first place when they hardly ever kick the ball but I wonder why they think he is qualified to do such a commercial; I have done a few commercials in my time including one for Brylcreem; I wouldn't have got that commercial if I was bald so what does a home schooled son of missionaries American footballer know about abortions?

Now what do I think of abortion? I am not for it as Mr Tebow's backers would have everybody believe - I am not for abortion and I don't know anybody who is.

However I am pro-choice and I strongly believe in the law as it is in Britain; abortion is freely available on the national health service and it is free.

If you are a married woman you have to have a signature from your husband, in case he would use it as a reason for divorce, and the abortion has to be carried out during the first few months of pregnancy.

There are no maniacs with guns roaming in search of so called abortion doctors and it appears to be an accepted way of life; however that doesn't mean to say that there are no people in Britain who are not pro-choice.

I think I have made my opinion clear on this but let me ask another question; by stopping this commercial, or banning it, what happens to freedom of speech?

Let me switch slightly; over the next few months Gordon Brown, when he thinks the time is right, will call for a general election in Britain; then there will be a three week election campaign.

On the day he calls the election television programmes will be monitored; they will be monitored to show fair play to all the political parties who have a certain amount of candidates standing.

Representatives of the parties will literally have stop watches to see how long each candidate is exposed for and if a news item is about a particular constituency and the news anchor mentions one of the candidates he has to make a mention of the others too.

Political commercials are against the law; they can use billboards but no commercials.

Commercials are replaced by Party Political Broadcasts which are free – when I lived there they appeared on all the main channels at the same time and they would last about 10 minutes or so; which always appeared like a lifetime!!

Another thing that happens there is a ban on political jokes on television; there would be no such thing as impersonators taking off leading politicians of the day – you might say this is against free speech; but what is free speech?

There's no such thing.

We're not allowed to speak when we go to the theatre or the cinema; if you went up the street shouting and cussing you would probably be arrested – so where's free speech?

Somebody was ejected from one of the halls when Tony Blair was making a speech for heckling; isn't that an infringement of freedom of speech?

On television in Britain anything goes; after 9.00 pm (the so called watershed) anything goes as regards so called bad language; words that you are not allowed to say on American television no matter what time it is unless it's on cable.

In Britain, last year, a right wing politician won a seat in the European Parliament and the BBC allowed him to be on Question Time; it cause a controversy but what could they do? They could have banned him, I suppose, but he was very careful on the show not to say anything racial.

The BBC allowed him on in the interests of freedom of speech but you have to ask yourself the question; is he dangerous? Would his appearance on the show and his charisma influence the young?

Fortunately he had no charisma and wasn't very pleasant to look at – but neither was Hitler.

You can look up Tim Tebow to see if he is attractive or not; he just looks like a load of well scrubbed muscle to me and I think his commercial will back fire.

However I think the decision by the supreme court in the Citizens United v. FEC case here a few weeks ago which will allow corporations to spend as much money as they want at the time of an election on hate films is wrong.

It's complicated so here is a smattering from the NYT: Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

Freedom of Speech – yes if you can match the corporations funds.