Still Just a Geek, page 50
Shout-out to everyone else who includes The Twilight Zone marathon in their New Year’s tradition.
* There was a time when it was important to have a dedicated fax phone line. I am exceedingly pleased I have neither a fax machine, or a landline, now.
And this makes at least three fax references, which is almost as many as masturbation jokes.
You can see what’s important in my life with these annotations.
* I don’t remember who wrote it—I’m sorry; I wish I did. To be honest, I had forgotten all of this.
I should have annotated this years ago.
* Hey look. I know all of this. I am aware of all of this. I seemingly understand all of this.
* Another, less douchey way to put this is that I end up in my own head. Instead of being present and in the moment, trusting my instincts and reacting naturally, I get between myself and the performance. When this happens, I can see myself acting, and I hate it.
* Years after I wrote this, I worked on a show called NUMB3RS that filmed at this location. The set decorators turned the lobby of the building into a comic book convention that was so real, I tried to buy a Shogun Warrior toy from a vendor.
* Okay, I’m starting to see it now.
* My editor takes a break from the “cool” battle and free speech violations to remind me that I probably meant “dystopian” here, and he’s right. (Fuck!) This place feels like if the mall from Logan’s Run were overrun by zombies who were then nuked. So maybe “post-apocalyptic dystopia” is more precise.
* “It’s a cookbook!”
If I’m going to spoil famous art about eating people, let’s get a Twilight Zone reference in here, too.
Also, if either of these were genuine spoilers for you, I applaud your ability to avoid two of the most overused pop culture references from the twentieth century.
* This is what we all want, no matter what walk of life.
I love this about him, so much. I love how Frakes makes it okay to be enthusiastic, to have fun, to embrace joy. I really, really wish he was my dad.
* Cool.
* This seems like a good time to address something that you either have not noticed at all, or is driving you nuts:
I overuse phrases and words in this manuscript.
A.
Lot.
As you’ve seen in my battles with my editor, “really good,” “confident,” and “cool” are all repeat offenders. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words since I wrote these. I think I’m a little more polished and erudite now than I was then, but I don’t want to be too harsh on myself. A conversational, immediate, unpolished tone was the way we all wrote in our blogs back then. I don’t know what it was like for other bloggers, but I did very little editing, and never once thought I’d be looking back on these words, twenty years in the future.
As I’ve noted, I want to rewrite and cut so much from Just a Geek, but I feel like that’s unfair to myself, and to you.
Anyway, if my rhetorical laziness has been distracting to you, or if you’ve been happily unaware and cannot unsee it now, I appreciate your patience and understanding.
To my editor now: Deal with it.
* Sammy Hagar, of course.
* This is called “subverting expectations” because you expected Sammy Sosa. And the word “drive” is pulling double duty. I am a good writer now. Very clever. A+. Next stop, New Yorker cartoon captions.
* And I was so happy to actually feel validated and appreciated by a father figure.
* No, my friend wasn’t Frank Herbert. But wouldn’t that have been great?
* I have no idea why I made a choice here to use “weblog” instead of “blog.” The only people who called them “weblogs” were journalists who had trouble logging on to American Online.
* You see, back in the day, you used to have to get porn on what were called “video cassettes,” and these were full movies and not just random clips, and . . .
Again, I don’t know why I explain all this to you. Google is your friend.
Just maybe don’t use your work or school computer to look up this.
* Nearly everyone who still writes a blog uses WordPress to run their site. But in 2002, there were two primary blogging platforms: Blogger, which was on its own server long before Google bought the company, and Movable Type, which was installed, configured, and hosted on the blogger’s own server. It’s one of the reasons so many of us who were early bloggers were also software nerds (think of classic car owners who were also skilled mechanics, out of necessity).
Movable Type was fantastic software, and it powered my blog for years, in spite of my clumsy maintenance, which caused it to crash several times.
And, as long as I’m down in the weeds here, a huge shout-out to Noah Grey, who created and maintained Greymatter, the original, primordial, blogging platform. Blogs look like they do, with the main content in the center and blocks on either side, because Noah Grey did it first.
* This absolutely does not work the way it did in 1966.
Today, it would be a change.org petition, or something on Twitter.
But way back then, this was a legitimately possible occurrence that was just hard enough to confirm to support the fiction.
* Still pretty proud of how I invented and dropped in these specifics. It really ties the room together.
* I know this is a myopic observation, but I’ve marked and skipped this so many times, I clearly want to talk about it.
In the early aughts, the Internet felt smaller to me than it does today. What I mean is, there were a few sites, like Fark and Slashdot, that carried a TON of credibility with me and my peers. It was my generation’s version of getting in the paper or being on the six o’clock news. They only featured a small number of stories a day, so being part of one of them, at just one site, was a big deal. Having your story picked up by both was EPIC.
The modern comparison would probably be trending on Twitter or Facebook, simultaneously.
* Because I kinda was.
* This is a Unix joke. I thought about explaining it, but I concluded that if you don’t already get it, I’m just going to annoy you with a man page you don’t want to read.
* Of course he made it about himself.
* These folks were online friends who I trusted and felt good around. We had a private forum (phpBB, configured, compiled, installed, and maintained by me *nerdflex*) called Frodo.
* Even with the rise of streaming platforms, this is still a thing. All the pilots are cast at the beginning of the year, regardless of the broadcast medium.
* I trust I am not the only one among us who is incredulous when someone insists we fax them something today.
“Sorry, I don’t have your fax number in my Rolodex. Send it to my pager.”
(Another fax reference!)
* The fact that I could write this, that I could admit it and say it out loud, was a significant revelation.
It would still take years to understand where it came from in this moment.
* The Voice of Self-Doubt sounds an awful lot like my father.
* Before smartphones and tablets, we had to entertain ourselves on road trips by interacting with the other people in the car. Usually, this interaction took the form of a game, and Auto Bingo was a family favorite.
For those of you who grew up in the smartphone era, Auto Bingo was sold in every truck stop and roadside attraction on every interstate in America. Imagine a square of cardboard, about eight inches on a side, with twenty-five different pictures of things we’d encounter on a road trip, like cows, tractors, railroad crossing signs, et cetera. You’d close a little plastic window over a square when you saw whatever it featured on the road.
This was considered fun.
* This is so hard to revisit and reread now. I recall the sickness I felt in my stomach, I recall how I knew I was letting my wife and kids down. I can feel everything, all over again.
So there’s this compulsion and obligation to write hundreds of words revisiting this chapter. But there really isn’t much to add or recontextualize. I hated that I made this choice then, but I also felt like it was the only choice I had. I didn’t want to be an actor. It wasn’t my dream to be an actor. I hadn’t chosen to live the life of an actor, one where this kind of sacrifice would be welcomed and understood. That life had been imposed on me, and now I was faced with these irresistible colliding forces: my love for my wife and children, my need and will to provide for them, my effort to be the parent I never had, and my desire to be loved, accepted, and uplifted by my own parents.
I guess the one thing I didn’t say then, that I presume is clear now, is that I chose to stay home and make this sacrifice because I knew it’s what my parents—well, my mother—would expect me to do. I knew from experience that if I displeased them, they’d hold it against me and it would be a whole thing. I guess a big part of me knew that Anne and the kids would be disappointed, but I also knew they wouldn’t hold a grudge.
This choice was about so much more than the job, and its resolution would be, as well.
* Not just the title of a song by the Damned, the title of a COVER SONG by The Damned. That’s a twofer, lawyers!
* Arrested Development Voice-Over: It was, in fact, a very bad thing.
* Great work, Wil. Let’s go to Anne real quick and get her side of this:
Anne: This sounds mean. I don’t recall ever saying to you to “keep the fucking house clean.” Maybe you could rethink what actually happened here?
Me: Entirely fair. We don’t have, and have never had, the kind of relationship that includes talking to each other this way. I was trying to be funny or trying to set up some dynamic where I could be the reluctant hero. For further study, I recommend reviewing Scalzi’s maxim about assholes who fail at being clever.
* This is not necessarily accurate. Yes, there are some roles worth fighting HARD for, but if you have to fight hard for literally everything, maybe that’s telling you something.
* I’m sure the entire Kimmel Syndicate could not care less about me, but just in case: I’m sorry for being such a child about this whole thing. It was really hard for me at the time, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jimmy or Sal or the show. It’s embarrassing to read this stuff now, and I regret letting it consume me the way I did.
* On early auditions, this is true. If you’re lucky enough to get to a network or studio screen test, it becomes the single most important thing. We call it “chemistry reads” and you could build a highway to the moon with the smashed dreams of actors who were perfect for the role, but just didn’t “click” with the other actor or actors in the chemistry read.
* As long as I’ve been aware of them, that’s what they’re called. I don’t know where the term comes from. I’m sure one of you do, or could easily look it up.
* For the rides as much as for the auditions. But in this case, I’m talking about the studio.
* Again, at Warner’s, that could be tough, especially if you were auditioning to be Wile E. Coyote.
* I don’t do this anymore, because I don’t go on auditions anymore.
In 2019, I realized I never booked auditions. I still work when someone offers me a role, and I still do a good job when the cameras are rolling. But when I auditioned, which I rarely did anyway (maybe—maybe—four in a year from about 2008 to the present), I rarely booked the job. Actually, I think I booked two jobs: Criminal Minds and one of the CSI shows.
Most successful actors, the ones who can make a living exclusively from acting gigs, book about one in thirty auditions. The really, really great ones may get that down to one in twenty, usually because they are on their way to just being offered roles based on their reputation and résumé.
At my pace, I’d book a job about once every seven years.
Yeah. So fuck that. I quit. In 2020, I made a choice to retire from on-camera acting and stop subjecting myself to auditions. If someone wants me to work with them, I’m easy to find, and I believe my record speaks for itself.
It turns out that I do not love any part of acting more than I hate auditioning. I’ve known that my whole life. I’ve been saying it since I was seven, and it makes me so sad that I didn’t actually listen to myself until I was in my forties.
* Technically, Shane Stant, but you get the gist. Or you don’t, which is fine, too.
* 1990. Reform school boys sit around in our underwear and try to save our boarding school from narco-terrorists.
I wear a dangly ankh earring and do a terrible, generic, New York City accent.
I had so much fun making this movie. Everyone in the cast was awesome, and the director, Dan Petrie Jr., treated me with a kindness and respect that kind of took me aback. No director before him had ever treated me like a peer, or an artistic collaborator. Not even Rob Reiner (not that he should have; I was twelve). I could write an entire chapter about what a great experience this movie was. Gosh, if only I had a blog or something where I could do that.
* I love this bit. My friends and I do it way too much.
* I mean, if I’m going to be serious and sincere for a moment, a lot of actors really do love The Process. I’m just not one of them.
But I do love processing checks, so I played The Process game for a long time.
* If you’re one of those nitpickers (like my editor), you’ll note I did have a cell phone around the time of the filming for Nemesis.
Yep. By the time this happened, money had gotten tight and cell phones were a luxury we couldn’t afford.
* I wish I could remember who “David” was. And now I’m wondering what he’s doing at this moment.
* Just to keep the stakes in perspective: It’s uncommon to see more than five people, total, in a room. Twelve people, plus an assistant, plus me, made this room feel suffocating, not just because it was so full, but because each person the studio or network sends to this audition increases the stakes and pressure logarithmically.
* My editor wonders: Maybe she knew about COVID way before everyone else?
I reply: This is not far off the mark. Lots of casting people chose not to shake hands to prevent the spread of germs. I didn’t know this at the time, and like everything else in my existence, I took it VERY personally.
* This is also a shitty thing men in Hollywood (and, I presume, other industries) do all the time. This douchebag knew I was in Stand by Me. He was acting like he didn’t know to purposely make me feel inferior to him.
Why in the world would someone pull a douchey power move in an audition, where he already had all the power (not to mention my résumé)? My theory:
Because there are some really great producers who love the art, and producers like this guy, who love the power.
* At this point in my life, a single casting person swiping right would have been a major victory.
* Editor: That’s funny.
Me: I know!
* I don’t remember the project (I think I tried to block it out). But WOW can I recall the visceral anger I felt.
* Get Up Kids for life.
* You see, in Linux and Unix, the cat command takes the contents of a file and . . . you’re not listening, are you? You’ve moved on and you aren’t even reading this.
That’s fair.
* It’s adorable how I thought anyone in my industry would read anything I said, much less care about it.
I am also relieved I didn’t fall off the VERY precarious limb I put myself on when I suggested Tom Cruise wasn’t a great actor (some people love him but just because I don’t doesn’t mean he “sucks”) or shared the earth-shattering revelation that a couple of directors with enormous egos had well-deserved reputations. I mean . . . these things are about as controversial as declaring that kittens are cute, or that Radiohead never released a proper follow-up to OK Computer.
* Cringe.
* Considering how much I’ve cursed on this site, I’m not really sure about the self-censoring I did in this post.
* I don’t know if this still happens, but it was common when I was auditioning regularly. For someone who is working multiple jobs to make ends meet while they pursue a career in acting, losing an hour’s wages can have an outsized impact on their lives, so SAG negotiated this agreement to mitigate that.
Over the course of my entire career, one casting director, one single time, on one single callback, reminded all of us to fill out the time we were there, so we’d get our tiny checks. Once.
