HOLLYWOOD ACTOR PREP by Dana Kaminski

Actors, It’s The New Year, New Decade…

An Aside:

You think in ten years we will remember “streaming” and laugh?  (Like: “Oh we thought we were so cool using ‘Streaming’..! That’s like the dinosaur…!”)

My first Sunday Brunch of the New Year is right here, and I think, on this January 3, 2010–that we all are pretty cool. There’s nothing more hip, than artists evolving in their craft, and getting smarter about how to do so, and be able to share it with the world.

Undeniably…

Acting Elevates Others.

It’s huge.

So.

Today, we talk a bit about

A. time

–and–

B. focus.

In An Acting Career

Ten years seems like all the time in the world.

It’s either all the time to do it right, and succeed; get where you think  you should be. Actualize your talent and abilities.

Or.

It’s a lot of time to waste, and not get anywhere. You can spend a whole lot of energy, all the energy you have even, going nowhere.

“Barking up the wrong trees.”

Just like the barking dogs who are still, in my 3rd episode, splitting your Sunday-sensitive eardrums…

:::UPDATE::: I WILL BE EDITING THIS WITHIN THE WEEK–LISTEN NOW, OR CATCH HIGHLIGHTS LATER….EITHER WAY, READ WHAT’S IN RED JUST BELOW THIS, BECAUSE IT IS IMPORTANT!

Join my actor community on Twitter! Join Twitter here, click on this.  Or, if you are on Twitter already, click on my name here : @__dana___ (…which is also my Twitter name!)

A_N_D, if you really want to enter the Acting Business, and be a Professional Actor, then sign up right now for my workshop that starts next week…

Use the Contact Form. Or else you are going to miss out on the most important wisdom of your career.  Period. That’s a link, too.

My Best,

;~Dana

If You Think That Giving A Rotten Audition For A Big Film Role Is Bad…

Or you made a big mistake onstage in front of a packed audience…

Have you seen the photo of Rihanna’s new ink?

It’s Rihanna’s philosophy, and it’s been mine, too.  Everything is a lesson. An opportunity to grow. As an artist, an actor.  And as a human being.

As an actor, I knew that I could either learn something that accelerated me toward being the kind of actor that I strove to be. Or not.

In auditions, it only made the subsequent ones, easier. If I could get over not doing it as well as I wanted, or worse(!), I had three choices:

1. I could beat myself up emotionally, and convince myself that I was not up to par.
2. I could devote myself, even more assiduously to my acting craft, so that I could insure that my skills would not let me down, in future auditions.
3. I could accept that some auditions just are not going to turn out perfectly. Which had an unexpected outcome, in fact.  By that accepting that, I was more relaxed about audition expectations, and more relaxed altogether, in my auditions.  Which made my auditions much better, because it allowed my talent to flow. Because I was more relaxed, I had more access to my full acting skill; my ‘acting instrument’ wasn’t stifled, by nerves, to be nearly unusable.

None of my personal auditioning philosophy, that I shared just now, would have happened if I hadn’t experienced some very uncomfortable casting opportunities.  Talk is cheap. Experience is huge.

Sometimes, my lessons were that there is a lesson. That, simply that. Like a magic, and uncomfortable, pointer to a certain something that wasn’t being worked on, that needed to be. In my craft, in my attitude, or in my psyche.

Often, it was that I had fallen back into the bad habit of being negative. Or being too hard on myself. Or not enjoying the path, the process, the evolution of becoming a professional. Patience, and gratitude for being involved in something I truly loved with all my might, is pretty big stuff. Yet with a strong focus on a goal, it was easy to forget how lucky I felt, to be in the process of developing myself, and really doing something that I loved so much.

Professional Actors Audition Differently

An experienced, professional actor, walks into an audition much differently than a novice actor.  They do the acting part of the audition differently, and they leave the casting room differently at the end. The entire time, a professional actor with some real solid work on their resume, relates to the casting director differently, certainly, than the novice actor. Or someone who has a fresher acting career.

One of the most beautiful things about acting, I believe, is that a professional actor can spend the rest of his or her life growing as an artist.  I’m not sure other professions are like that.  But, I wouldn’t know, either. Acting is the only real profession I’ve ever had.

Best,

;~Dana

PPS Do share, please, and thanks for paying this forward. Thanks also, for making an actor community in the world, and for being a part of mine!

♣

IMPORTANT NEWS:

I am doing a streaming workshop called the PRO ACTOR WORKSHOP. That’s right. I will teach actors how to be a professional actor…If you are interested, please use the ‘contact’ form to let me know.  You can find it at the top of this page.

I will be sharing all the things that I know and learned from being an actor, who was on the inside.  The real deal. I haven’t posted most of what I will be teaching, publicly; it hasn’t been here, or anywhere else; for that matter.

I’m not even going public with what my content will be, in this workshop. (Heck if I am going to give some of the fraudulent sites some real topics to hawk to gullible actors.)

I honestly know that you can’t learn this from any other “acting site”. Or live workshop, or class. It may change your life. I believe it will.  SIgn up, because I am getting very excited to do this soon…There’s a lot of material, and I can’t promise I’ll want to do this workshop again!

PPS  What I haven’t told you in this post is that I once made an onstage, cringemaking-for-life, error,  in front of a packed house. Only flat-out begging can get me to tell that tale…

In His First Film, Orson Welles Lead Actor Wasn’t Afraid

Not intimidated by size of the role, nor that his character’s name was in the title. Nor by the high-level reputation of A-List director, Richard Linklater.

He wasn’t intimidated to play an American legend, known for being larger-than-life.

Nor was he afraid of playing a real-life character, altogether.

He wasn’t void of fear due to an actor’s runaway ego.

Truth Is, This Actor Was Very Prepared.

From the outset, it all looks like sheer luck.

Fate did play a role, in the timing.  In that, stage actor and RADA grad, Christian McKay was doing a one-man show at the same time that the director, Richard Linklater, was looking for someone to play the role of Orson Welles; the same real-life person that McKay’s one-man show was about.

Watch him talk about being a novice film actor, and his lack of intimidation about it, in my video below. He reveals some of the actor prep he had done for this role, long before he ever heard of Me And Orson Welles.  Long before he ever met Richard Linklater.

On another Hollywood Actor Prep video, he talks about how he got the movie role. This video, here,  is really all about his lack of stagefright.

It also reveals something about the film’s director, Richard Linklater; and his own sense of confidence about his work.

Backstory: McKay’s Path To Playing Welles, On Film

(Telegraph UK)

Still, his sense of affinity with Welles remains with him. “I play him my way, I feel very close to him,” McKay says. He leans forward and smiles: “You can’t play the role without real belief in it.” Twinkling self-confidence indeed.

When he was an acting student at Rada, a teacher told Christian McKay that he wouldn’t find steady work until he was 50.

As it turned out, McKay beat that prediction by 15 years. In his debut film, Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, he plays the visionary actor-director of the title, sharing top billing with High School Musical heart-throb Zac Efron. His performance has elicited rave reviews from critics and he looks set to lift any number of Best Newcomer awards.

In the film, set in 1937 New York, Efron plays a fictional teenage student, Richard Samuels, who talks his way into a minor role in Welles’s landmark Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar. (At the time, Welles was all of 22.) The star-struck Richard makes his stage debut, falls for an older woman in the Mercury company (Claire Danes) and experiences the dazzling, beguiling Welles’s dark side.

McKay landed the role via a circuitous route. He had been portraying Welles in a one-man show, Rosebud, named after the key word in Citizen Kane. It played to sell-out audiences at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004; he still recalls fondly the Telegraph ’s review by Alastair Sooke, who called it “a stellar production” and raved about McKay’s “twinkling self-confidence”.

“I always wanted to be an independent maverick, writing plays and putting them on myself,” he tells me. “The one-man show was set up so I could earn a living from it while I pursued other things.”

But then the show’s writer and director relinquished the rights to Rosebud and McKay fell out bitterly with its producers, who wanted to dump him, take it Stateside and, as he puts it, “cast a fat American in the role”. He was living in Tunbridge Wells, considering his future gloomily and sitting in a pub called The Orson Welles (no, he’s not making it up) when the producers called and asked if he would return to the role.

“I said yes, on one condition,” he recalls. “I said, ‘You give up the rights and I’ll set up a little company and produce it myself.’ ” He thinks they imagined he would continue taking Rosebud round small British provincial venues. But that’s not how it turned out.

First his wife, actress Emily Allen (who plays Orson’s wife Virginia in the film) set up their production company, Atomic 80. “That sounded so hip to me, not being very hip myself,” McKay confesses. “But as she pointed out, 80 is the atomic number for Mercury, the name of Welles’s company.”

When he was asked to accompany the Theatre Clwyd stage company to a “Brits on Broadway” mini-festival in New York, McKay seized the opportunity to present Rosebud for 16 nights in a tiny off-off-Broadway theatre.

Word of mouth was phenomenal and Linklater, who had written the script of Me and Orson Welles, flew from Texas just to see McKay. He offered him the film role, resisting pleas from backers to cast a big‑name actor.

Richard Linklater, Christian McKay, On The Set, 'Me And Orson Welles'

Photographs by Liam Daniel © Freestyle Releasing

Best, Dana

Please do pay this forward by sharing it with someone else. Thank you, karmically.

This post was one of two that were corrupted today and will be back on soon.  In the meantime… If you are inquiring about the workshop, and want information about it, please use the contact form.

Why A Form? …Because of the “Must-Do’s”, for one.

They separate the Professional Actors from everybody else.

I am only giving out what kind of information I will be covering in my new workshop, to those actors who are interested in attending! It’s far too valuable, and this is one category of information that I am just not giving away for free. Plus, I will be sharing real insider experiential stuff, and that is nowhere else…to be found.

If you are interested in really knowing what separates the professional actors from the non-pros, and how they got to be that way, and how you can be that, too.

Leave your name and email, on this form. Click here for the link. Only Dana Kaminski will see these email addresses…This form is very secure.

…Getting very psyched, and I hope you are too!

Best,

Dana

(This is what that other post said in it’s little summary—

Legal Disclaimer:

No promises, claims, or statements here. Except, of course, a virtual truckload of experiential, and individually-focused, information about how to be a professional actor. And getting you that knowledge, so that you meet the qualifications of professional acting. For this New…

Do you think that was what broke the database? …The idea of that ‘whole truckload of information’ that I have been holding onto for all this time, and about to release…??

Or was it the authentic emotional chops of the  Crying Actors post that went up the next day?

Just After I Saw DeNiro In ‘Everybody’s Fine’; Outside The Theater, I Met Michael Cera

He was standing very close by, when I looked up from digging through my bag with cameras etc, to find my Film Fest Schedule. Figure out what’s next. Felt a little ready to not watch another film. Was ready for some human conversation, after days of watching film-after-film.

Surprisingly, the  10 PM showing was ‘Youth In Revolt’, the new Michael Cera movie; the one you’ve probably heard about because Michael Cera plays two different characters in it.  When I picked my head up I saw him, unexpectedly, standing right nearby.

Our conversation isn’t on tape, but basically it was a reviving breath of fresh air. Ahh. The decency of mankind…most of it.  And, of course, the decency of artists. I have always found that artistic people, truly artistic ones, are usually very down-to-earth and treat other people decently. I told him about Hollywood Actor Prep, and what it’s all about.  He seemed to be open to it, and promised to look it up. I gave him my card.

Just following that, was when this gathering happened. The publicist had scheduled the cast of actors, and ‘above-the-line’ people, outside for a photo shoot. When all were present, she briefed them, about how the live introduction would go, after they all got into the theater. ‘Youth In Revolt‘ was about to be screened.

Each Movie Has A Publicist, So Has ‘Youth In Revolt’

So what you hear and see is the little bit of publicity that occurred before that screening.  You can also see Michael Cera looking over at my camera. Was he wondering why the heck I was not inside already to watch his work? Especially because I had told him all about this website, and interest in actors and acting, all high-level blah-blah?  If I was so into acting then why was I standing outside taking pictures? Sheesh, I hope he doesn’t think that I am paparazzi.

(Yes, I do know that he probably wasn’t thinking any of that. )…(Maybe.)

I just hope that when he rifles through his pockets and finds the card for Hollywood Actor Prep,  he remembers to look it up online. I hope he wants to do an interview, or be involved in some way. Which is what I told him.

He didn’t realize, most likely, that I had learned that it was easier to get in the films at this festival if you weren’t press. If you were press, you had to let them reject allowing you in, first, then realize that they didn’t have enough public that showed up,  to fill the free seats, at which point they begged you to come in and sit in an even better seat, down front, than they would have given even if allowed to attend. I had, luckily,  been given prior access to the DeNiro screening. But, because I hadn’t seen this movie on the schedule I was given, way before the Fest began, when press got to request, I didn’t have prior approval of access.

To try to gain access that hadn’t granted prior, well, watch out. I met more Gatekeeper-Magna-‘Tude, of the highest during those few days, than I had in years. And, Gatekeeper-’Tude is the worst kind.

Still, Michael Cera Playing Two Different Characters?  Zing! Go My Chimes…

Even though I was already burnt out, I would’ve been happily in between the rows of 6 to 16, center, if I knew it was going to be this particular movie. I would have loved to watch this new Michael Cera film. This new acting dual-character-play is right up my alley. Extremely jazzed am I, about seeing it.  Heavy props to Michael Cera, as well; for tackling such a wonderfully fun, yet difficult acting challenge. (The best kind, hm?)

So.

I’m sorry, Michael Cera, if you do get to see my blog and it happens to be today. I apologize for not going in and watching your hard work, your lovely work, on the screen; after this PR bit occurred outside. I will see it, you can bet. And I will talk about your acting, and your playing “Francois” (the break-a-way, alter-ego) then.   Count on it. Actor-to-actor.

And as an actor, you probably will understand this next part very well: there is only so much Hollywood ‘tude that I can take. I have a line. At the time we met,  I had been at this Fest for a few days, and, I was already over that line.

Graumann’s Chinese Theater…Movie Photo Shoot…

Anyway, for all the actors, and others, who have not been around anything like the publicist’s prep, I thought you may find this video interesting. A slice of life. Movie-actor-life.

It’s also at a location that most identifies Hollywood. Hell, the best thing about this particular festival was that it was at Graumann’s Chinese Theater, right smack in Hollywood. Isn’t that the most famous movie theater in the world? Watch for those footprints in the cement, which I filmed a little at the end of the tape.  The cement where we are all standing on. Adjacent to the cement where all those costumed characters walk…You can also hear some foreign languages on the video. Even at night, tourists are there to see the theater.  They weren’t aware of the film fest, or even Michael Cera. (Nor the actress standing next to him, Portia Doubleday. She’s his love-interest in ‘Youth In Revolt‘.)

It’s also where the ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ is. That’s where I took a photo of Michael Jackson’s star for y’all.

This woman is dressed as a Disney character, Belle. Please give her a tip, if you see her. I didn’t, and I still have  guilt.

There was another actor in the video, did you recognize M.Emmett Walsh? He plays the female lead’s father, and has acted in many other films, and television shows. You can hear the publicist telling him to go inside and sit in “row 14″.  She was basically telling him that he wasn’t going to stand at the podium for the introduction. That he should go inside, and take a seat, before she took the others inside to make an appearance.

And, upon second view, I now think that Michael Cera was looking over at my camera, just to be kind. Participating.

Thanks, Michael.

And thanks for being an actor, and so very open and responsive, about this actor website.

Best,
:~Dana

The only fee for this post is to share it with at least one other person. Thank you for helping to connect all actors, and supporting…

Voiceover In Vintage Popeye, Curses When Speed Is Slowed

::

::

::

::

Tony Danza Impulsively Reacts While Promoting A Movie

This one makes me cringe, because I, also, can be guilty of too easily sharing my opinion or frustration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eam6BsNfWgU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eam6BsNfWgU/0.jpg" alt="YouTube Preview Image" />

::

::

Actors, Draw Your Own Conclusions

I know that the word “professionalism”, colloquially, means:
“Hold  Your Tongue”.

Look at how old the Popeye video is.

If the aliens that come and  look  at our  artifacts,  long after human civilization is gone, they’ll be watching that “Popeye”.  Listening to that “G**D@@**8″.

Best,

;~Dana

Please put this on your Facebook. Thanks.