Ready For My Close-Up... Ish.

I have no movie-related photos, per se, for you, but I hate to post without pics. And the above is a very rare cute pic of one of my dogs, Timmy, a.k.a. Baby Boy. Tim is very camera shy and most often comes across looking extremely stressed out, for example:

Poor Timbuktu. I know how he feels. People who consider themselves to be a director, or at a minimum consider themselves to NOT be an actor, often have varying degrees of stage fright themselves, and I am no exception.

A friend of mine in Paris, Jerome, is an award-winning director who refuses to even allow a photo of himself to be taken. When I was making the short, "The Red-Headed Menace," Michelle, who is used to being behind the camera instead of in front of it, proved to need more coddling (well, perhaps, "threatening" would be more accurate in her case) than the children on the set. She was truly uncomfortable, though she pulled it off in the end and I have received many compliments from people who know her well on how natural her performance came across.

I have been on camera a grand total of three times. The first was in the preliminary trailer for Charm City/Smalltimore (click on the YouTube link at the top of the sidebar on the right and you can check out my debut for yourself) that was made waaaay back in December 2007, eight months before we actually started filming Smalltimore. I was more or less playing myself in three scenes, 2 of 3 with another actor who was a good friend and with whom I was very comfortable. The big factor, however, was that my friend Sean Stanley was directing the scenes, and I felt very comfortable doing whatever he told me to do. Okay, maybe "comfortable" isn't the right word, but I trusted him, and more importantly, I respected him and didn't want to screw up in front of him or waste his or the crew's time. It is not easy for someone, especially someone who is used to being the person in charge, to surrender themselves to someone else. That is what acting is, handing yourself over, and I have a great deal of respect for actors. I think it is important for a director to put her/himself in their shoes once in awhile.

The second time I was in front of a camera was in November of 2008, when I took Steve Yeager's Acting for the Camera seminar at the Creative Alliance. Talk about nerve-wracking. Each of the six students in the class were given a different monologue, each selected by Steve, to memorize in one week before our next class. If I remember correctly, mine was almost FOUR minutes long, That is an eternity, and a lot to memorize. I wish I could remember the play it is from, I'll have to ask Steve. But the gist of it was, I think, that a rather shy and sheltered rural housewife tries, clumsily at first, to seduce a young man who is in her house to repair her bedframe. I worked very hard to memorize this enormous chunk of dialogue. We also had to figure out all on our own, with no direction, what our body language, movements, and facial expressions would be. I studied the script and worked on it while I was drying my hair, doing dishes, taking a shower, whenever I could.

The day came and my heart was beating out of control from the moment I got up, just thinking about it. I had to deliver this monologue, standing in front of the camera by myself, while Steve stood in front of me behind the camera and my five classmates sat on the sidelines. I felt my face flush, feeling them staring at me, sort of seeing them in my peripheral vision.

"Aaaand, ACTION."

The great and perfect thing about the piece (which was actually very strange, and I don't think I even really understood it until I had read it a million times and had it fully committed to memory), was that the character starts off, in my interpretation anyway, quite timid and nervous but by the end of the piece has gathered confidence. And that is how it played out as I recited it. I was a WRECK to start off with, my stomach seized up tight like a fist, my knees wobbly. I could hear my voice shaking. I was terrified that halfway through I would blank out, or just look like a deer in headlights. But it worked for the piece. She was supposed to be unsure of herself. By the time I got halfway through, almost two whole minutes, I realized that I wasn't going to forget anything, and I could tell by the look on Steve's face that I was doing fine with my physical presentation as well. And I could tell by the complete lack of movement in my peripheral vision, and occasional laughter in the right spots, that I had the full attention of my classmates. As I ramped up towards the end, the character talks in an extremely sensual manner about the experience of opening a can of tuna fish. I was extremely NOT comfortable delivering this part of the speech, but it is like karaoke, or wearing a hat - it is all or nothing. If you don't belt out the song or have a little swagger in your step, you are going to look like an idiot. Better to only feel like an idiot, but look like you know what you are doing. I stared a hole through the camera and made sure that anyone on the receiving end knew that even though I was talking about a can of tuna fish, I was unmistakably NOT talking about tuna fish at all.

"Aaaand, CUT!"

I got a round of applause, and one of the guys in the class exhaled sharply and claimed that he would never look at a can of tuna fish in quite the same way.

The third time on camera was, of course, in "The Red-Headed Menace," this time definitely me playing me. Which is just about the hardest thing an actor can be asked to do, let alone a non-actor. Add to that pressure the fact that this was the largest set, almost 50 people, that I had ever brought together, and I am trying to direct myself, Michelle, and Craig Herron - the three of us all non-actors who are usually only behind the scenes - all in the same scene. These were my cast, my crew, and I am their director. Throwing myself into this fire was an opportunity to gain a deeper respect from them (and for them), or to lose any and all respect from them that I had already built up. It all turned out all right. Really good, actually. But that's the beauty of filmmaking - you will never see the terrible takes that came before the one decent one!

So, anyway... as I have recently mentioned, I am going to have a small role in an upcoming horror short, written and directed by Jason Koch, by Zinnia Films. I barely know Jason, but I can gauge pretty quickly how I am going to get along with people, and if I didn't like him (and the script) and trust him right off the bat, I most likely would have turned it down. If I had to read against someone else for the part I probably wouldn't have done it either. I am not an actor, so I would (a) just assume that almost any actor could beat me out for it, and (b) if I were any good I'd feel guilty taking a part away from an actual actor.

Though he has a great deal of experience within the industry, this is Jason's first creative piece that he is writing and directing himself, and I feel as strongly about not letting him down as I did about not falling on my face in front of Sean, Steve, or my own cast and crew. I'm excited. It's going to be fine. It's going to be more than fine. Stand back - I am going to nail this.