you are viewing archives from 2005

the slackmistress' hollywood screen kiss

Younger SlackBrother j. came over on Friday. We had one of those career talks that starts out as a civil discussion, and well, ends as a civil discussion but a hell of a lot louder and with a lot of stifled tears.

Younger slackbrother j. wants to be an actor. My acting experience entails playing the Queen of Hearts in my third grade rendition of Alice in Wonderland, a few bit parts in high school theater, and portraying Hottie #1 in the Lizzie McGuire episode “Aaron Carter’s Coming to Town.” Typecast, indeed!

However, writing and acting have more than just a few things in common when it comes to Hollywood. Specifically, breaking in. Thousands of people come here every year (Every month? Every day?) with dreams of being an actor, a writer, a director, and animator. When they arrive, their visions are pure and simple and focused.

But as the days go by, Reality rears its ugly head. There’s rent and car payments, and the ever-elusive-insurance. There’s rejection and self-doubt. There’s the worst guy in your acting class, or the chick in your writing seminar who everyone agrees is terrible, and somehow those are the people who make the leap from wannabe to gonna be. Everyone else is booking auditions and jobs and freelance scripts.

One of my friends describes Hollywood as a slippery rock in the middle of stormy sea. The key is to get out of the sea and grab hold of the rock, then climb, climb, climb. But it’s slippery, and for as many people that are going up, the same amount of people are sliding down. But it doesn’t matter; you’ve just got to get out of the sea before you drown.

j. was drowning. I knew, because I had been there before. You’re out here a year or two, you haven’t become and overnight success and the Business of Getting By starts growing larger than the Business of Your Intended Business. If you dedicated as much thought and action to your acting career as you do to the Next Big Plan, I told him, you’d have booked something by now. Them’s fightin’ words, I’m aware. But that’s a part of being an Older Sister. You have to take your younger siblings under your wing and beat them about a bit.

Hollywood, as I’m fond of saying, is a weird place. If you want to be a doctor, chances are you’ll be a doctor. Sure, you have to study hard and take out enormous loans and dedicate yourself to long, grueling hours of a residency, but if you really want to be a doctor, you’ll most likely get a chance to practice medicine somewhere.

If you want to be an actor, or a writer, or a director or an animator, you might be supremely talented and work your ass off and still never get paid to do what you set out to do. It’s a fact of life out here. If you’re not prepared to work and hustle your ass off, find something else to do, ‘cause there’s thousands of people in front of you who are.

You’re not a failure if you never achieve it. At some point in life you have to take stock. You have to sit down and think do I want to be fetching lattes three years from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now? At some point, it might be time to walk away. And that’s okay. If you gutted it out and just couldn’t find a way in, then it just wasn’t in the cards. You can always draw, always write, always find a place to act, it just may not be for a living.

But if you didn’t bust your hump and make the effort to go after your dream while you were here, if you half-assed it because you were scared and you were depressed by the odds or you just couldn’t deal with the rejection, then you failed. You failed yourself.

I made it out of the stormy sea with just moments to spare. I had been out in Los Angeles for about seven years and although I loved my friend, mentor, and boss S., I didn’t want to be her assistant when I was 30. She asked me to hang in there one more TV season and I did. She got a job running Lizzie McGuire, which meant I got a job writing Lizzie McGuire.

And after seven years, I was an overnight success. I was writing. I was earning good money. I paid off all my credit cards and my car and socked away enough money to be comfortable for the next two years. Which was fortuitous, ‘cause the next two years were awfully slow. Because that’s the way things work out here. You work, and then you don’t. The rock is slippery, and sometimes you have to just cling to it for dear life.

And throw a life preserver for the ones out there in the stormy sea.