12:36 pm - Fri 6.13.2008
Certain Technical Considerations

I'm embarrassed by my last entry, and am tempted to delete it.

Not going to, though. Cause that's kind of the point - risking being embarrassed by what you say/write, feeling like it's stupid or trite or boring or too revealing or whatever, in order to get through it/past it, and to "the good stuff" at some point.

I'm procrastinating all over the place right now - I have to go to the water machine down the street and grab a couple gallons (Don't trust LA tap-water in general, or my apartment building's old pipes in particular), I have to shop (I ate peanut butter sandwiches all day yesterday, cause there was nothing else in the house. And I'm guessing thrice daily injections of PBJs are not the way to weight-loss success), and I have to get to the gym (I went twice last week, and once so far this week, which, under the circumstances - the "losing weight" thing - falls under "better than nothing, but not good enough").

There's any number of other things I'm not doing that I should be doing these days, but those are today's biggies.

(The fact that I need to do those things, and I'm doing this instead, is pushing my plan to go the the museum today to Monday. But anyway...)

I was very happy to break my month-and-a-half long audition drought yesterday, with an audition at Isenberg Casting (For a five-line part in a horror movie called Dark House).

Too bad I fucked it up.

Well, that may be over-stating things, maybe, but I definitely didn't do as well as I'd wanted (I'm pretty positive I'm not going to be booking it).

Seven years down the road, and I still go into these things and do poorly, mostly because of "technical considerations".

All I'd been told going in was that I had to do a "death scene". Nobody said whether that meant there were lines, or I just had to pretend to die, or what (With the kind of things I tend to go in for, I assumed the latter).

Anyway, there were lines, I found out when I got there, so I spent my time in the waiting room going over the script (At one point, being annoyed by a young actor who wanted to talk to me, about nothing in particular, when I was very clearly "working").

When Ivy came out to get me, she complimented me - again - and in front of the other actors in the waiting room, on how good I'd been when she called me in for "Minor Accomplishments" (I thought that was pretty cool).

We chit chatted a little on the way into the room (I congratulated her on going into business on her own), and then we did the thing.

So what went wrong, in my estimation?

I had the lines memorized by the time I went in, I thought, so I put the sides on the ground beside me, thinking that would look better than having them in my hands. Which was a mistake - I got my first two lines out, reading with Ivy, then the next part involved me talking to myself in front of a computer, and I couldn't think of what the next line was.

I didn't want to stop(Maybe I should have), so I had to - on camera - reach down, get the sides, and thumb to that page.

That threw my focus off. And I hadn't determined "sight lines" before I started; when I read the first part with Ivy, she was the sight line, but I needed a new sight line doing the bit where I was talking to myself (So I think I was looking above the camera at one point, then below it, and maybe even right at it).

When we finished, Ivy said my eyes looked really cool when I died (Carrie, I guess you're right - I do good "dead guy"). She showed me my final "pose" on the monitor - slumped back in my chair, eyes rolled up in my head, and it did look pretty creepy.

But coulda/shoulda/woulda done better.

And speaking of doing better, I've gotta go make a little more out of this day than this.

See ya!

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