The Biz--Agents

Sorry about not posting for a while, my friends.

Everybody's got a movie blog, but how many are about the struggles of trying to act in those movies? Really, I'm asking. I don't know; I don't read blogs.

This is the first installment of a series in which I explain, in laymen's terms, the life of being an actor in L.A. You've heard about the gummie-worm parties and the lipstick wearing women with pierced ears--and, yes, my friends, it's true; all that and more--but I will endeavor here to convey the less glamorous parts of the life. If there are specific aspects of this endeavor you'd like me to cover, please ask. Otherwise, I'll do as I damn well please.

Part 1: Agents

Agents are awful people. This is the truest mortal fact I know, which is to say, there are very few exceptions, among which I gleefully and assertively count my current agent.

What is an agent? Ideally, an agent is someone who receives breakdowns (descriptions of characters to be cast in a TV show or movie. Ex: "JEFF: (24) This incredibly good-looking and athletic evil genius steals Tammy's underwear during a frat-sponsored pie eating contest. 2 lines. Co-star) from the casting directors and submits you for those you are right for by sending your headshot and resume, either via the internet (electronic) or by messenger (hardcopy). Then, If need be, the agent pitches you, which means they call the casters and tell them why you need to be seen for this part. The pitch is most often needed when you're being submitted for a part larger than your current credits merit (in my case, anything) or for which your headshot doesn't communicate you're right.

Let's assume your agent secures an audition for you, let's assume you go to producers (kind of like making it past 1st cut in basketball tryouts; and yes, like basketball tryouts, there can be many more than 2 cuts), and you get the part. Then, it is your agent's job to negotiate your contract. For all of these services, your agent gets 10% of the gross obtained as pay for any project that came while you were under contract to or verbal agreement with that agent, including any residuals that come at a later date for work obtained while with that agent and any work obtained after leaving an agent that came as a result of an audition received while with that agent. If an agent does their job well, they're more than worth it.

What is an agent, really? On the most basic level, it's a phone number on your resume. This is hilarious: even if your agent does nothing for you, even if every audition you get you get for yourself, you need to have somebody else's number on your resume. It's just the way business is run, and there is no legitimate way around this middleman.

How do you select an agent? There are two main criteria, as far as I can tell: the weight of the agency's name (A-list [submissions get opened by all casters], B-list [by some], C-list [when the interns are bored and want bad headshots to draw boogers on], etc) and how hard that agent will work for you individually (the main indicator of which is how often and how well they pitch you).

There's almost always a trade-off between these two. For example, not too far into my Hollywood Odyssey, I pulled a coup and got signed to a major A-list agency, with no credits and no SAG card (Screen Actors Guild, needed to work on pretty much anything of quality; TBD in futre post). I thought I'd made it. But making pitch calls, which I desperately needed at that point in my carreer, was below them, so even though my headshot/res got looked at by everybody, I wasn't getting called in. For their star and name talent, just submitting was more than enough.

I have learned this: Starting out, how hard your agent will work for you is infinitely more important than their name. As you progress in your carreer, the calculus changes, as the things that are associated with a big name (a helluva team of lawyers and such for negotiating fantastic contracts) become more important.

Next issue of The Biz: The Truth About Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

Good Halloween Movies

Halloween is nearly here. And I understand many will be having their festivities this weekend, so here's some movies I like for the occasion:

UPDATE!
I have seen Texas Chainsaw! It was fantastic. And beautifully shot. More than worth it's rep in gold. See it, and plug that hole in your knowledge of the cannon.

ASIAN

Ringu (not the American The Ring): One of the all-time greats. Some of the freakiest imagery ever. Scare you silly! Rental Tip: I hear it's available as a bonus on the deluxe version of the American.

Ju-On (not the American The Grudge): Holy Shit! Saw this one in the threatre, alone, and I almost left; I almost said, screw this, I can't take it anymore, and left. So scary, it verges on unwatchable. Girls around me weren't just grabbing their boyfriends' arms, they were climbing into their laps and curling up like koalas. See it! IF YOU DARE. Warning: Thin on plot.

AND CHECK THE COMMENTS SECTION. JENNI PROMISES TO POST COMMENTS ON MOVIES I HAVEN'T SEEN.

ZOMBIE

Night of the Living Dead--George Romero's 1st, and 2nd best.
Dawn of the Dead--GREATEST ZOMBIE MOVIE OF ALL TIME. Less scary than funny and brilliant.
28 Days Later--See Cillian Murphy's face somehow look more normal while emaciated.
Shawn of the Dead--funny, in the vein of Dawn of the Dead.

CLASSIC

The Omen--Beware all sequels. Especially the final one, where a full-grown Damien works for the U.N. (totally jacked by the Left Behind peeps) and the second coming of Christ occurs at the end of the movie--but only in narration over glowing light!
The Exorcist--Beware the 3rd installment.
The Innocents--The original creepy kids movie.

SLASHER

I go Nightmare On Elm Street 1-3. I prefer Freddy to Jason, though Leatherface is good, and the remake of Texas Chainsaw is pretty good.

Good Bad Halloween Movies

The movies that shaped my childhood. The Cream of the Crap.

Creep Show: Contains the worst 15 minutes of film I know of--the 1st segment--starring Stephen King (who wrote). I won't spoil the ending.

Creep Show 2: actually directed by Romero. The lake episode is actually good-good.

976-EVIL 2: Boobs in the first 30 seconds, no boobs to follow, all down hill from there.

C.H.U.D.S. II: Bud the Chud: My current employer had a part in this movie!

Waxwork: Totally rad idea. Good make-up. Hilarious acting by Gremlins star Zach Galligan.

Puppetmaster: A little Creepy, A lot Crappy.

The Asians are on fire!

Short reviews of movies I've seen recently, many at the wonderful New Beverly Cinema (www.michaelwilliams.com/beverlycinema), an art-house in L.A.

2046--The Asians are on fire! A movie made by a dude (Wong Kar Wei) who knows how to make beautiful, ruminating movies about chicks and dudes, performed by peeps acting their asses off Tony Leung (see also In the Mood for Love, Hero) and Ziyi Zhang (see also House of Flying Daggers--a true epic), shot by a dude who takes pretty pictures (Christopher Doyle, et al). Almost as good as its downright brilliant predecessor, In the Mood for Love.

Eros--A series of 3 short films. They are The Hand (directed by Wong Kar Wei), Equilibrium (directed by Soderbergh) and something with a long Italian title I can't remember and Imdb didn't bother to translate by Michael Anotonioni. They are presented in this order, which by my estimation, is also the order of their quality. The Hand is easily the most romantic film about a handjob EVER, well acted, beautifully shot. Equilibrium's a lot of fun, Soderbergh and his actors (Robert Downey Jr. and Alan Arkin) casually displaying their substantial talents. And the Antonioni one is a a movie out of water; it seems like it was made in 1960, except you keep wondering why all the cars are from 2000. For Antonioni, go for the real deal: L'Avventura, Blow Up, and my personal favorite The Passenger (which at this point is almost impossible to find, but I hear is gonna get a proper DVD release soon).

Oldboy--A totally rad revenge movie, this one from Korea, the plot of which is that some dude gets kidnapped and held in a cell without explanation for 15 years, only to be released by his captor and given 5 days to find out why. Well done, even the twists at the end are well-earned. Tune in, if only to see how a man eats a live squid.

To America!

The Squid and the Whale--a friend asked me, "Did it make you Cry?" "It wouldn't let me," I said. The one scene where I was a gonner for sure, Noah Baumbach cuts away from the impending catharsis. Maybe the most honest and well-done movie about divorce I've ever seen, it's that kind of experience, constantly thwarting your emotional expectations, even of a good cry; it doesn't give you or any of its characters any easy outs. Everyone here is guilty of doing some repellant or downright awful things, but the story's presented so honestly you can't help but sympathize. Brilliantly acted by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney (see also You Can Count on Me, for goodness' sake), and the by the two kids too. One helluva movie.

A History of Violence--maybe the best revenge movie since Unforgiven. Truly intense in its imagery, acting, and (wow) its sex scenes. Vigo's best performance, hands down. Mari Bello's good; Ed Harris is fantastic; William Hurt's accent is ALL OVER THE ROAD, but he's still fun to watch. Boy do I love what Cronenberg's been doing since he stopped doing movies obsessed with throbbing goo effects and sublimated that into this wonderful, and equally unique, tone (see also Spider).

Good Night and Good Luck--George Clooney can direct! I wasn't sure. I loved Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but there were rumors about Soderbergh ghost directing that one. The dialogue is very well handled, by the writers and the actors. The ensemble is very good. It's beautifully, starkly shot, and it doesn't try to become an epic. It's a small film about a small period of time. All together, it works very well.

Ryan Reynolds's Abs

In what I hope is only the first installment of a regular feature on this site, I bemoan my lack of success and cast aspersions at my betters.

I recently rented the new Ammityville remake, mainly because, being raised by premium cable in the eighties, the original was a staple of my childhood. (Now if I can only use my boundless industry clout to green-light a remake of C.H.U.D. II) And I thought I could feel okay about it because this is the sort of movie I could theoretically be cast in these days (cue laughter), and so I should familiarize myself with the horror-remake-'sploitation genre, even if there is an I'D RATHER BE WATCHING BERGMAN bumper sticker slapped on my DVD player.

The movie wasn't terrible. There were a couple good scares, and at least one scene where Ryan Reynolds's acting was downright noteworthy. There's plenty to complain about here, especially the increasingly common and annoying recent horror movie technique of innercutting flashes of allegedly horrific imagery with the action, which feels like cheating, like stealing screams, like the horror movie equivalent of telling a joke that doesn't go over and then jabbing me in the ribs "EH? EH?" until I relent and laugh a little.

But I digress. I don't wanna get too deep into dissecting the quality of this movie; as far as that goes, I think you'll get just about what you'd expect from it. It's forgettable in that way. I want to talk about the one thing in this movie that isn't forgettable: Ryan Reynolds's body.

Let's get one thing straight, bub: I'm into chicks. Bigtime. And I can't be gay anyway, I'm a Christian. But when I saw Ryan Reynolds jump out of bed to go see what that noise was, I backed up the thing to see if my eyes didst deceive me. They did not. In this movie Ryan Reynolds is sporting the buffest bod of any beefcake in recent memory. And this is a problem. It's terribly distracting.

This movie takes place in 1974. In 1974, the body Reynold's displays in this movie belongs on a stage, lit from above, greased up, posing down to Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo, not acting. It does more than a little to hurt my suspension of disbelief when I'm told he's not the reigning Mr. Olympia, but in fact a contractor, who doesn't spend six hours a day at the gym, but sits on a couch in the basement all day. In his defense, on the DVD extras (yes, I watched them) Ryno says he wanted to make this character as physically intimidating as possible, but Rye-Rye, couldn't you have stopped when your bench press hit 400?

What I'm trying to say is this: not only need we be concerned by the fact that the studios seem to want to put out nothing but remakes of bad TV shows and death from above; we need to be concerned about the acting, as we should be concerned about any art where the artists are competing on some basis other than their art. For actors in the last ten years or so, it seems like a big part of that extracurricular competition has been about what we can do with our bodies. But what your body looks like has virtually nothing to do with your acting (What you do WITH your body is another matter).

How buff you can get doesn't speak to how good an actor you are, or even to how devoted to acting you are, but to your level of self-discipline (and your genetics). Don't get me wrong. Tyler Durden (Fight Club) and Derek Vinyard (American Histroy X) have to be buff dudes and Jake La Motta has to be a fat ass by the end of Raging Bull. But when so much of the discussion of acting talent and quality (see various Oscar campaigns over the last decade) has to do with how much weight somebody gained or lost for a part, there's a problem. I also question whether it's a shortcut. Instead of creating a truly intimidating character (Jack Nicholson in The Shining--all 5'9'' 160 pounds of him) let's just hit the gym and pack on some weight. Not that bodybuilding's easy, or ignoble; but it ain't acting.

And I'm not saying that there was a golden age where acting was all that mattered. Even though Brando was a genius and he changed everything, he probably couldn't have done so if he weren't gorgeous and buff. But I do believe that since Brando, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall et al focused themselves, and us all, so myopically on the craft of acting, there has been a loss of focus. And the results are up on the screen to see. Actors have been getting distracted by all sorts of crap, only one piece of which is the body thing.

I don't want to say the sky's falling. We do still have great actors. Look at Samantha Morton and Daniel-Day. And Christian Bale.

But none of them are American.

The sky is falling.

Howdy.

By way of introduction, my name is Jeff. I hail from Phoenix, Arizona. I went to school outside Chicago, at Northwestern University, where I studied fiction writing, religion, history, and photography. I also worked there as a DJ for WNUR 89.3 and learned how to have loudly stated opinions about things. That's not true; I learned that from being a Born Again Christian. For the last 2 years I have been located in Los Angeles, where I've half-assedly pursued visual art and music while devoting my whole ass to becoming a MOVIE STAR. (Which leaves me with 1.5 total asses. Don't hassle me; it's like the dual nature of Christ.) To which end, I spend countless hours at the gym blasting my pecks, thrashing my abs, and fisting my rhomboids. To which end, I took a two-week intensive acting class, and can now CRY ON CUE. To which end, I've written a screenplay! Which I will star in and will make me cooler than Steve McQueen.
This is my blog, my very first, so forgive me if I don't speak the language (blonguage?) yet. Culture-Critiquing-Zingers to come.