Hi all,
Well, here I am in LA…or rather Long Beach staying with some friends. I’ll be looking for local housing, preferably in West LA where I went to school. But anyway, it’s good to be here. I hope to stay for a long time and be really successful.
So on the way, as I’ve said before, we stopped at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and saw Pride and Prejudice. As always, the play was fantastic. I especially loved this production, as did my mom. A lot of contemporary plays, while awesome, can be pretty violent with some major adult content. But this one was fun, witty, and uplifting. The costumes were great. All the sisters had pretty dresses with lovely lace details and embroidery. Often when they changed scenes, all that the actresses did was put on either a bonnet and coat for an outside scene, or gloves and a sash for the ball scenes. The acting was natural and solid. It’s often said that the audience has to feel they trust the people onstage. And there was no doubt about that. I hope that I can have this quality. And Mr. Darcy was so hot that he was worth the price of admission all by himself. I just submitted myself for an LA audition for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I hope I get to audition.
I have been working on submissions and networking this week. I will sign up with some casting sites and then get on some auditions. I dropped off headshots and resumes at the film schools of USC, UCLA, and my alma mater, LMU. (A side note, USC is one of the schools that I applied to for an acting MFA and did not get into.) Then I went through the list on the Actors Equity website for theatres with the Equity Membership Candidate program and looked for submission info for theatres I knew from the top of my head, and sent off headshots, resumes, and some cover letters. Yes, the dreaded cover letter is still in use. Not all theatres accept submissions; there is one that mostly uses agents. I’m currently going through contact info for upcoming filmmakers included in the monthly Filmakers to Watch feature from FilmNewsBriefs, and have e-mailed one already.
And I’m attending the screening on Tuesday for the pilot of Revivals, which my friend Sokratres was in. And the next day, I’m attending the IP Schmooze Fest sponsored by IndieProducer.net. I ‘ve been meaning to go to one of these events since I was in college. It’s a meeting of producers, actors, directors, etc. involved in independent film. I think it’s funny to note that in Portland, many of the films labeled independent were non-union and non-paying, and were called low budget. But here they seem to be typically SAG low-budget agreement, as in a budget of $1 million and under. I love independent film.
Well, I gotta go for now. I have to save some news for later.
Anna Sahlstrom.com 