Happy New Acting Year!

Hi all,

Happy New Year! It’s about 11 days after the fact, but there it is. In the Backstage Espresso Newsletter I receive, there are many columns and articles to assist actors. One article they had for the new year was making intentions as opposed to resolutions. I suppose the thinking here is to establish an attitude towards what you want to achieve rather than a finite goal that you must accomplish on penalty of failure. I am more on the side of goals and resolutions and mine are the same as ever: get into the Union(s), make my living off acting, and do major projects that a large audience actually cares about.

I have begun the new year with some auditions. I auditioned for the production of Cheaters at Carefree Theatre and I felt that the audition went well. I didn’t get the part but the director was impressed with me. My next audition will be for PCPA Theatrefest, who are having auditions in Tucson, this Sunday. I decided to meet with my acting coach because I wanted to feel more confident about my audition. I also want to audition for Shakespeare Santa Cruz. While they will not have auditions in my area, they do accept audition DVDs so I will need to have someone videotape me.

I received a pleasant surprise when I saw that I had 54 views on January 5. Thank you for visiting. There are usually only one to two people viewing the blog each day. I have been considering ways to make my blog more interesting. How about video blog posts? I have been testing that out and plan to have a video posting sometime soon.

I watched the Oscar-nominee announcements and I was incredibly happy to hear that Quvenzhané Wallis was nominated for Best Actress for Beasts of the Southern Wild, and that the director, Behn Zeitlin, was also nominated. The film was entirely non-union with a cast made up of first-time actors, which is not often the case. The talent you usually see being nominated is the 1% of all actors in the industry. There are countless actors you see on TV and in films whose names you do not know. An actress who is non-union and an unknown talent getting nominated for an Oscar is a triumph for the non-union and unknown like myself. I heard that the committee for the SAG Awards did not want to nominate the film because there were no union members in it. I guess that’s understandable. There was an article in the end-of-year issue of Time Magazine about Behn Zeitlin and his process in making the film. His goal for making the film was art, not profit. This goes to prove that you can match artistic desires with great success. I hope to see more breakout movies like this in the future.

On the other side of the coin, I saw The Hobbit and I loved it. I have never managed to read that book or The Lord of the Rings, which is not cool for a literary person like myself. A few of the dwarves that Bilbo has his adventure with were actually really good looking. And I probably don’t need to mention that the cinematics and effects are crazy awesome. I wish I had the crew and budget to have those kinds of effects.