Glass Half Full, page 2
And yet, with liquid courage surging through my veins, I decided this third rule was less a commandment and more of a polite suggestion. As Clooney’s friend made a beeline for the bar, leaving George momentarily unguarded, my intoxicated brain decided that he was in need of a quick conversation with a sycophant.
A fresh cocktail in hand, I moved in.
“Hi, Mr. Clooney. I love your work,” I said, instinctively regurgitating a statement I’d heard others say, but that still sounds weird to me. I quickly followed up with a question.
“How are things?” Things? Really, Zane? You’re an idiot. Just walk away.
He smiled. “Things are good. I’m George.” Oh, he’s done this before.
“Hi…George,” I responded, smiling stupidly and shaking his hand.
“What’s your name?” he asked, doing his best to save us both from a conversational abyss.
“Zane.”
“Nice to meet you, Zane. What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m an actor.” Is an actor who’s only spoken one word on camera an actor?
“Great. How’s it going for you?”
“I’ve done a few things.” And by “things,” I was referring to a Subway commercial that I was just in, where my only line was “Really?”
“Good. Well, I’m sure it’ll work out for you.” Why is he being so nice?
“Why are you so nice?” Oh, come on, dummy! Did you just say that out loud? “What I mean is, I’ve heard you were nice, but why are you this nice?” Eloquently put, Zane. You have a gift with words. You should write a book.
He chuckled. “Well, I’ve thought about that. I didn’t make it in this business until I was thirty-three. I had a bunch of TV shows come and go. I even considered quitting a few times. But when I was thirty-three, I got ER and my career took off. If I’d found success in my twenties, I probably would have thought I deserved it. But now I know no one deserves this level of success. So, it’s easy to stay grounded and grateful for every opportunity I get—and for anyone I get to meet.”
“Wow. That’s amazing,” I said, waiting for him to pull a mic from his jacket and drop it.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Me? I’m thirty-three. It’s my thirty-third birthday tonight.”
George’s friend Waldo returned with their beverages. George introduced us, raised his drink, and raised his glass to mine. “Happy birthday, Zane.”
I took that as my cue to retreat. But as I turned to walk away, George grabbed my arm. “This is your year,” he said, with all the certainty of a man who’d seen it happen before. “It’s up to you to take charge of your career. Remember, the only person standing between you and your success is you.”
I smiled, lifted my glass in thanks, and headed back to my friends, feeling as if I’d just been knighted.
“What was that about?” my friend JB asked.
“Oh, nothing. He said he’s starting a tequila company with his friend Randy and asked if I wanted in. I passed. It’ll never work.”
The advice from that brief conversation stayed with me. Everything he said resonated with me and solidified my belief that I really could manifest success for myself. This really could be, I mean would be, my year. That chance meeting, that I’m sure George forgot before he even left the bar that night, changed my trajectory forever.
Almost Doing Porn
I jerked into a vacant spot beside a parking meter before someone else could grab it. I had made the seventeen-mile drive from North Hollywood to LAX in impressive time, an hour. I turned off the car and reached for the Ziploc bag of quarters that I kept in my glove box to feed LA’s voracious meters. I then riffled through a pile of printed-out MapQuest directions and scratched-up CDs sitting on the passenger seat to find the instructions to where I was going. I’d been at the acting game for nine years, still working for my big break. It was 2005, a few months after my encounter with George, and I was still embracing my newfound confidence. Giving up never occurred to me, but I knew that if I were to slink back to Syracuse, New York, where I moved from nearly a decade earlier, there’d be little evidence that I’d ever ventured west of Buffalo.
A hotel room was a weird place for an audition, I thought, as I walked through the lobby of the airport Westin. I rode the elevator to the fifth floor, and I walked down the hall locating the door number that matched the one written on the piece of paper in my hand.
As I reached up to knock, the door swung open to reveal a friendly-looking woman gesturing for me to come in and take a seat on the bed. Across the room, a stocky Asian man in a Hawaiian shirt loitered behind a small video camera on a tripod, idly flipping through the room-service menu.
She asked me to state my name for the camera, which I did, all the while wondering if this would be one of those stories I’d tell friends if they were to somehow ask, “Did you ever accidentally do porn?”
I was there to audition as the host for a new TV show called You Should Open a Restaurant. The premise of the show was interesting enough: An aspiring cook has their house transformed into a working restaurant, which, after a week of preparation, would open for business. In the end, one of the patrons would reveal themselves to be a restaurant critic and give them a review.
Aiming to enchant these people with a cocktail of charm, humor, and just enough professionalism to seem credible, I engaged them in a volley of witty banter. It appeared to be working. The Asian man had abandoned his menu and was now fully invested in the conversation. When I got everyone in the room laughing I knew the part was mine.
Will they offer me the part now? I thought. Or is this one of those things where they have to go through my manager?
“You’re not right for this,” the woman said, snapping me from my daydream.
“Oh…OK…Well, I appreciate your time,” I said, forcing a smile to feign that I was unfazed and gracious in defeat.
They laughed at my reaction. “No, listen, you’re great,” she said. “It’s just that we’re not looking for the host of this show. We’re looking for the host of the restaurant, to bring people to their tables. It’s too small of a part for you.”
I considered saying, “That’s fine, I’ll take a small part!” but I instinctively laughed along with them and exited the room with my dignity intact. Anyone who saw my walk of shame down the hall would have pegged me as a guy dazed with rejection—or possibly someone who had accidentally just done porn.
I stepped into the elevator and pressed the lobby button, exhaling as the doors slid shut, mercifully sealing me off from the scene of my latest professional heartbreak. Just as they were about to close completely, a hand shot through the narrowing gap. The doors jolted open with a reluctant shudder, like they, too, were annoyed by the interruption. It was the camera guy, breathing heavily.
“We just talked.” He was trying to catch his breath after sprinting down the hall. “Sorry…We had seen your demo reel and actually called you in for something else, but we wanted to meet you in person, and then talk about it.” A bit more gasping for air. “We’re developing a new show called Three Sheets, which focuses on traveling around the world and drinking. Is that something you’d be interested in?”
Is this a trick question? “Uh…Yes?”
“Great. We’ll call you next week,” he said as he backed away while the doors slid shut.
There are telltale phrases in Hollywood that let you know you’re being brushed off: “We’ll call you next week,” “Let’s do lunch,” or “It’s so weird running into you!”
But he seemed sincere. If this was just a polite brush-off, why sprint down a hallway to tell me that? I tried to keep my expectations in check, to remind myself that hope was the enemy of sanity in this business. But despite my best efforts, my optimism was already taking root.
The following week, my manager called with the news: They’d made an offer, $2,500 per episode for the first season of Three Sheets, an eight-episode run. He attempted to negotiate for more, but everyone involved knew I would have done the show for free.
That day, my life changed. Nearly a decade in Los Angeles, hustling, struggling to believe in myself, and, at one juncture, actually doing porn (which I’ll get to later), had finally amounted to something tangible. Every bizarre gig, every near miss, every questionable career choice had, in some indirect way, led me to this moment.
They say you learn more from your failures than your successes, which, if true, meant I should be wise beyond my years. In reality, I still had plenty of dummy left in me, but at least now, I was a dummy with a TV show.
Hills, That Is
A decade earlier, in 1995, I graduated from the State University of New York at Cortland, which we called Cortland College, and which, eight years prior, had been named the eleventh best party school in the nation by Playboy magazine. It was a fact that every student was aware of, and a reason that many students, like me, took a more scenic route to graduation. I majored in fine arts, with a concentration in oil painting, a path I embarked upon because it’s where I believed my future was, not because I wanted the easiest course load. The summer following graduation, after five years in college, I drove out to California with my girlfriend, Debbie.
With New York state in the rearview mirror, I barreled toward my future on the other side of the country. Everything I owned, which wasn’t much, was packed into a Chevy Astro van pulling a U-Haul trailer. With a pile of empty coffee cups on the floor behind the passenger seat, we finally rolled into California two and a half days later.
I had my heart set on living in the ocean-side city of Santa Monica where I could run along the beach every morning like a Baywatch extra, in slow motion, of course. California, as it was presented to me through television and movies, was a land of perpetual summer, a place where everyone surfed before work and then congregated at bonfires before calling it a night.
The harsh reality, however, was that Santa Monica apartments were nearly impossible to land. Thanks to rent control and proximity to the beach, long-term tenants clung to their leases with the tenacity of a doomsday prepper guarding his bunker. With my Point Break dreams suddenly dashed, I was forced to set my sights miles inland.
I ended up in Beverly Hills, though not the version people imagine when they hear the name. Beverly Hills is essentially two different cities. North of Santa Monica Boulevard is the hallowed 90210, home to obscene wealth, palatial estates, and a collective sense of self-importance so thick you could spread it on artisanal toast. Where the air smells of new cars, expensive soaps, and entitlement.
Then there’s where I found my first apartment, south of Wilshire, in an area of Beverly Hills known as The Flats, which is as devoid of hills as it is of glamour. It was in this neighborhood that I found my little slice of the southland in one of the units at 221 South Arnaz Drive in Beverly Hills 90211, for the princely sum of $850 a month. The one-bedroom apartment was nothing special, but the location was just one digit away from that magical zip code where we’ve been conditioned to call the zero by the letter O. Like me, most of my new neighbors were all grinding their way through the entertainment business, including a few aspiring actors who waited tables, a struggling screenwriter who was a Starbucks barista, and a Jewish rapper who sold us all weed.
Living in The Flats, just down the street from such wealth, was both inspiring and discouraging. On a daily basis I’d see people I recognized from TV or movies, people who had already climbed the ladder of success as I was still struggling to find the bottom rung. One morning, I ran into Sharon Stone while browsing magazines at a newsstand near my apartment. She approached me flashing a dazzling smile. She was so beautiful that I forgot how to speak. “Hi!” she said as she walked up to me, a greeting to which my response was “Erp.” I thought we were flirting, until she tried to hand me money, and I realized that she just thought I worked there.
Finally settled in my Beverly digs, I did what every aspiring actor is told to do: get headshots, cobble together a résumé, enroll in acting classes, and make a Wednesday morning pilgrimage to the newsstand to pick up the newest edition of Backstage West. This industry rag was the budding actor’s bible, filled with articles I never read, ads I ignored, and casting notices that I pored over like a burglar examining blueprints for the best route to the safe. Most of the gigs listed were for student films or indie projects shot on film, 16 mm film stock, “Super 16,” or, if they were really fancy, 35 mm. Back then, many aspiring industry folks believed that the more expensive the camera and equipment, the more important their project was. Little has changed.
I got myself some black-and-white headshots, cheap lithograph reproductions, because actual photos were too pricey, and fabricated a résumé full of projects that existed only in my imagination but sounded plausible enough to survive an interrogation. I bought five hundred 8x10 headshots; five hundred 9x12 manila envelopes; a thousand thirty-seven-cent stamps, each envelope requiring a pair; and I photocopied five hundred completely made-up résumés. I mailed them to every casting director and agent I could find addresses for—and any production in Backstage West that had a part that I was even remotely suitable for. In the first year I was called by zero agents, zero casting directors, and a smattering of indies and student films.
Acting in student films produced by kids attending USC, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, and CalArts was an education in itself. I got a feel for the audition process and was able to spend time on “set” (which often meant in someone’s apartment), observing to understand people’s roles and the interworkings of a production. I also learned how much time it took to set up a scene (hours), how long it took to shoot it (minutes), and how long you’ll wait to see the final product (I’m still waiting). Of all the student films I worked on, not a single one materialized into anything I could add to my acting reel. The indie projects I gradually got called in for fared no better, running out of money before they could be finished or never getting off the ground in the first place.
After three years in Los Angeles, I was no further along than the day I arrived. Debbie was very supportive, but her patience was fading. Observing my frustration after being rejected for a role, she asked, “How long are you going to give this?”—a question that Mel, my wife of fourteen years, still asks me.
“As long as it takes” is my response to both of them.
This is my life, not a hobby. As cliché as it sounds, it’s not something I’m trying; it’s something that I’m doing. Try, and you make yourself open to failing. Do, and you will persevere until you succeed. #yoda
I left Central New York because it didn’t offer me the creative outlets or opportunities that I craved. A career in entertainment was more than a dream. It was a calling. As far back as I can remember, I felt like I was destined to be in front of an audience, but figuring out how to actually turn it into a career was eluding me.
Talent, I was beginning to realize, could be a curse. Everyone who moves to LA has some talent, and oodles of them had far more than me. But talent, as it turned out, was just one piece of a much larger puzzle, one that didn’t come with a picture on the box to guide you.
The real currency in this town is a mix of hard work, perseverance, relationships, and luck. How much are you willing to sacrifice? How much rejection can you stomach before you start considering a life back where you came from—or become a realtor? Who do you know, and more importantly, who knows you? And, when the right opportunity finally presents itself, will you be ready?
Even luck, I’ve learned, isn’t entirely random. You have to put yourself in the right places, around the right people, doing the work long before anyone is paying attention. The more I stuck it out, the more I understood that success wasn’t about being the most talented person that you knew. It was about being the one who refused to walk away empty-handed.
Playing Hollywood
Five years into my time in LA, a casting director called me in to audition for a Godzilla-themed commercial that would be filmed in Japan. They were specifically looking for someone who resembled Hank Azaria, the actor who played the cameraman in the 1998 Godzilla movie. The casting director had seen my photo and told me I was a dead ringer for him.
“You have a passport, right?”
“Of course I do!” Of course I did not.
“Great! Get here before five.”
I burst out of my apartment in Beverly Hills and raced across town to the Federal Building in Westwood for a rushed passport. After zipping around, fighting traffic and the clock, I flung the door open to the casting office, passport in hand, just before the 5 pm deadline. I stepped into the waiting room to find that it was packed with more than twenty guys, all of whom looked more like Hank Azaria than I did, and three of them who I think actually were Hank Azaria. I turned around and walked out.
That casting director couldn’t have cared less about me. To him, I wasn’t a person, I was a number, just another warm body filling a quota. His only goal was to impress the producers with how many options he could round up for the part, even if he knew only a handful had a shot. He didn’t care that we had to rearrange our lives, leave work, change plans, fight traffic, or obtain a passport that we lied about having. In Hollywood, before you’re someone, you’re a bug that comes swarming when the light turns on.
If I were to have given up and retreated back east with my tail between my legs, no one would have cared. The tally of aspiring performers who quit would have ticked up by one, only to be replaced by another starry-eyed dreamer rolling into town. My life since moving to LA had consisted of futilely jumping through an endless series of hoops. I came to the realization that if I were going to succeed, I needed to take control over my fate.
