danharmon:

Kids:

A few hours ago, I landed in Los Angeles, turned on my phone, and confirmed what you already know. Sony Pictures Television is replacing me as showrunner on Community, with two seasoned fellows that I’m sure are quite nice - actually, I have it on good authority they’re quite nice, because…

There is one simple, defining factor that separates a good actor from a great actor.

Passion.

Talent is wonderful and a necessity but some of the most talented people I’ve known have fallen by the wayside, dropping into other, more comfortable jobs.  This isn’t a judgement, it’s simple fact.  This job is hard.  You have to be exceptional.  You have to need to do this job.

One of the greatest pieces of advice given to me while in college at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy (www.amda.edu) was, “Do not give yourself a Plan B.” 

If you give yourself a Plan B, you will definitively take your Plan B, because this life is simply too difficult.

So, here’s our checklist: 

1)  Headshots - Check.

2)  Training - Check.

3)  Representation - Check.

Great.

Now what?

As a young actor you simply cannot just sit around waiting for the phone to ring.  If you do, you’re dead in the water.  YES, your agent will get you auditions, you will go to them, rock them and book or not book the work, but if you’re waiting for other people to determine the momentum of your career, how can you expect momentum to be maintained?

The goal should be to keep yourself busy enough to not notice when you’ve gone a couple weeks without an audition.  Opportunity comes to those digging every second of every day to find every little nugget of work they can possibly find and you will be shocked at just what opportunities will come your way when you’re moving forward relentlessly.

So here’s our “What’s Next?” checklist:

1)  If you’re not working, BE IN CLASS.  Acting is a muscle.  No ballet dancer would ever sit on a couch for 6 months, bartending at night without doing any physical activity and expect themselves to rock an audition for the New York City Ballet.  Yet, actors, for some reason feel they can just…not do it and be totally 100 percent just as good as they were when they were acting every day.  This simply isn’t true.  Don’t let your inner actor become a 600 pound fat guy.  On the day of the audition, you will blow it if you’re not sharp and consistently honed.  This is just common sense.  (A good place to start is www.armstrongactingstudios.com)

2)  FIND YOUR OWN WORK.  There are quite literally thousands of young industry professionals out there.  All of them making their own art.  Young filmmakers (from students to indie houses) would KILL for amazing talent.  If you think something is below you, look at a script for a Mac and Cheese commercial V.S. a well crafted Student Film and ask yourself where the real challenge lies.  Get yourself on camera as MUCH AS YOU CAN.  It builds your confidence, craft and resume and it shows us that you’re relentless, that you will work if we hire you or not.  That’s the actor I want in my film.  Forge your own relationships, meet up and comers, rise together.   (Note:  Commercials are an integral part of the acting trade, I’m not knocking them, just saying…you know…they’re not Shakespeare.)

3)  CREATE YOUR OWN WORK.  Do you write?  No?  WRITE!  If you try writing and you truthfully can’t, find someone who can.  If you’re not making your own work, more than likely you will not work consistently as a new actor.  This can be anything from short films to volgs to web series to indie feature.  Create.  What is an artist who doesn’t create? 

4)  Stay in good physical shape.  Don’t wait for the call to come in that says “Athletic Build” in the breakdown.  Put good shit in your body, work out at least 4 times a week.  It’s a visual medium.  Many actors (myself included) have been lured into the restaurant life of making a bunch of cash, spending that cash on booze after your shift, making more cash and three months later having a “Beer Layer”.  Don’t fall into the trap.  Stay active and stay out of the Restaurant Suck.  (Note:  For fitness advice see:  www.myodesign.com)

5)  Surround yourself with forward moving people.  Your friends all not auditioning and spending a lot of time bitching about it?  If you’re surrounded by them you are them.  How’s it working out?

6)  Read Scripts.  They’re your job.  You not reading scripts is like a chef not going grocery shopping.  Learn how they work, learn what makes them good and what makes them bad.  STUDY YOUR ART.  (For a wealth of all things screenplay check out:  www.script-o-rama.com, www.imsdb.com)

7)  WATCH MOVIES.  So many actors don’t go see great films.  This is like a football player not watching game tape.  Literally ALL the secrets of the people being paid millions of dollars to do this are up there for you to learn 35 feet tall!  Typically I see each film I go to more than once, and I bring a notepad and my iPhone (to light my notebook), taking notes on performance, story, screen craft, structure of shot, I even time scenes to see when writers are putting key moments in comparison to baser elements of the scene for the purpose of mapping out more interesting journeys in my scripts and auditions.

8)  If you get rejected get back up on your feet immediately.  Somehow, somewhere there’s an actor pulling him or herself up by their boot straps.  Be that actor.

9)  Get to know yourself.  It’s not just about craft.  You need to know how YOU relate to your work, which you can’t do if you don’t understand yourself.  Spend time alone, walk, write, read, draw and invest in yourself.  The better you understand you the more specifically you will come to life in your material.

10)  Be the hardest working actor you know.  If you find someone who’s working harder, you have to up your game.  Pure and simple.

Bottom line:  If you feel like you’re not doing enough, it’s not the Industry’s fault.  It can’t be.  If it is, your fate is totally out of your hands and you might as well give up.  Yes, there are things that are out of your control, so LET THEM BE, focus on what is, be a shark, never stop moving.

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As always, thanks for the read.  Please follow, share on Facebook, Tweet and otherwise spread the word if you’re digging this blog.

A lot of people talk about being committed to their art and to their craft, but that’s the thing, a lot of people talk about it.

It’s only when you see an artist truly and mercilessly throw themselves into a new process, devoting every waking second into nothing but becoming a master at it—not without fear but with courage—that you see true transformation, that you see an artist become a completely different person in a matter of weeks. 

This is commitment.  This is what transformation it requires.

Every artist has to evaluate.  We take hard inventories, and if we’re not living in the space of “all or nothing”, we need to find out why.

You will shock yourself at how quickly you can evolve if you put your whole heart into it.

Well.  It’s Halloween.  Figured this was a good a time as any to toss out the first chapter of a horror novel I’m working on.  Enjoy.

Endless Hotel 

Douglas W. Nyback 

1. 

Edward 

When your son dies so do you.

These are certain facts.  Facts like how in the Rocky Mountains there are incredible orchards with majestic trees, overlooking sheer cliffs.  Like how certain trees, over certain cliffs have rope swings, with tires at the bottom that have been there for too many years. 

Facts like how when the setting sun hits him just right you can’t quite see that it’s your son climbing that rope too high.  You can’t quite see that the kids at the bottom are swinging the tire back and forth, getting more and more vehement in their desire to see your son fall due to a lack of parental supervision. 

As you’re paying your bill you can’t quite make out that he’s not laughing but screaming.

There are so many factors that go into creating the worst case scenario.  When your son’s up too high, in a position to fall—by the time you realize it—you’re thinking, at worst, broken bones.  Maybe a broken neck.  At worst.

Factors you don’t take in are the elements.

It was years of cold mixed with rain that caused the rope to snap.

It was the wind that carried him over.

Gravity has malice.  The assumption is that She’s relentless, but she’s not.  When the rope your son is climbing snaps She gives us a moments pause.  He hangs there, the rope he’s holding slightly slack, and there’s this look of shock on his face.  A look of dawning horror.  A look of realization.

With kids there are never consequences.  It’s how they can rollerblade down steep slopes and crash into trees then just brush themselves off. 

With kids there are never consequences until there are.  This realization was my son’s last moment.  Gravity gave him that.

The rope broke while the tire was swinging towards the cliff face.  My son was six so he didn’t weigh much.  He was looking right at me as his expression bled from pride to certainty.  He felt the pull of the tire and if he had let go of the rope he would still be alive.  But he felt that pull and he grabbed on to the only thing he could. 

The tire was from a big rig, the kind that eats roads like children.

By the time I heard the screen door slam shut behind me I was six or seven strides into a dead run.  By the time I heard the apples settle my son had hit the ground, the tire building momentum. 

The way he fell, he shouldn’t have been able to keep holding on to the rope.  Had both his arms broken along with his jaw when the left side of his body rebounded off the too-hard-earth, he would have lost enough motor control to go limp.  But it was only his left arm that snapped.  It broke clean and compound, the sound, like a brittle twig and a grown man’s scream.  The skin around his jawbone tore. 

As my feet pounded three of my son’s teeth into the ground the tire flung itself over the edge.

All around, people were screaming, but none as loud as me.

My son was quiet.  He just held on and was pulled.

I dove for the edge of the cliff, just as he flew over, his limp left arm trailing behind him.  I reached for it.

A factor you don’t think about is weight.

I grabbed his left wrist but with the compound fracture and the tire’s weight, at the point of most dramatic tension something had to give.  His skin ripping was like fabric ripping, but wet and messy.  Veins and arteries stretch before they snap, like elastic bands.  By the time his head bounced of its first outcrop I had the good sense to let go of his arm. 

With all that he had just been through, I couldn’t help but feel relief when I was certain he was dead.

Just because he was dead didn’t mean he stopped falling.

He never let go of the rope.

His name was Aaron.

This was the moment haunting me when I first woke up in the Endless Hotel.

Emotion is the great white whale of the acting world.  I find a lot of actors live in constant fear of it.  They get a piece of text that involves extreme emotional connection and instantly they seize up, convinced that they won’t be able to access the level of connection they know is necessary to effectively interpret the role.

Here’s the thing:

Emotion is to Acting what Sweat is to Working Out.

A lot of my students have heard me say this many, many times.  But you don’t enter into a workout freaking out, exclaiming, “I just don’t know!  I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sweat!  I know I sweated on the way here, it was pretty hot, but now?  When it matters?  I just don’t know if I can perspire!”  You simply lift heavy shit and sweat happens.

But this is EXACTLY what actors are doing when they enter into an audition saying to themselves, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to emotionally connect.  I don’t know if I can do it.  I know I’ve felt before, hell, I felt ALL OVER my living room in rehearsal, but now?  I just don’t know if I can feel things.”

Emotion is a byproduct of circumstance.  Circumstance is determined by what I define as “The Current State Of Natural”.

“Natural” is a dangerous word.  Too many people in our industry use it to describe conversational.  Many actors, when getting the redirect “Ok, but can you make it more natural?” simply try to make their speech less affected and try to, in general, speak words without investment.  This proves absolutley nothing other than the fact that you can speak and not fall over at the same time.  Congrats, you’re a kindergarten graduate.

“Natural” is a very different thing pending on the circumstance.  Natural when storming the beaches of Normandy in WWII is a very different definition of Natural than say, proposing to your long time girlfriend.  Neither of them are particularly unaffected, they’re simply affected by the specific relationship dynamics, stimulus, objectives and needs within a scene.

Too many actors look at emotion as the base of a scene as opposed to a product.  Something happens to us, we feel something which causes us to do something.  It’s in the doing that emotional connection in born. 

Where auditions go south in a big way is when all actors are worried about is feeling.  We’ve all heard these auditions from waiting rooms.  They’re loud, they’re messy and on camera they look like absolute shit.  We can never forget that Film and Television is a VISUAL medium.  If all you’re doing is playing emotion, 9 times out of 10, you’re looking utterly ridiculous, and even if the emotion is genuine, we’re not going to cast you because no one is going to want to watch you. 

General Rule:  Our job isn’t therapy, it’s entertainment.  Leave that shit at home.  Emotion is a tool, a surgical blade, not a blunt instrument.  Anything other than that is masturbation, and masturbation feels great for you but it’s a fucking mess for everybody else.

The next time you’re worried you won’t be able to connect emotionally to a scene, break it down into its core components.  Truly define your character and who everyone even mentioned in the scene is to you, establish exactly what you want out of the scene, figure out what gets in your way, connect to your reader and mercilessly go after your objective.  If you do this, if you are truly invested in your scene, I promise you, emotion will happen.  How could it not?

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Thanks as always for the read.  If you found this article useful please comment, re-blog, tweet, facebook and spread the word. 

We’ve all got our crazy.

This love

picks up

the

smell of your conditioner

like

cancer

picks up

Red Blood Cells,

like

a

dandelion

picks up

wind. 

Beat.

I have looked at you

the way I look at sunsets.

Beat.  Michael breathes.  Christiana finds some stillness.  The light hits her.  Never has she looked more radiant.

Like there’s truly nothing more important happening.