March 28, 2000
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
This the sound of the end of pilot season approaching. The specific, final end is hard to pin down, but as the days get longer, so do one's chances of getting a pilot. It's not necessary to have a pilot every year, but it's nice to have a shot at the glory when the decisions are made in about a month and a half.
The roles of MARSHALL and DOUG are both within my grasp, but maybe as a result neither is quite spot-on perfect for me. MARSHALL would be more fun. He's more vibrant, more driven, and a closer friend of the lead's (JOHN, being played by Jeremy Piven). DOUG is the smaller man in a shy put-upon sort of way. Perhaps DOUG is closer to me, but the fun thing about MARSHALL is that I feel like he was exactly like me until he got hit by a bus and nearly died. So it's a guy who was me and is now crazier. That I can do.
The audition went well. Another long wait and drive through rush hour traffic. That can't be good for the creative process, but I guess at some point we're all on the same footing. Of the 22 pages of dialogue I prepared for the two scenes, I found out when I arrived that I only needed to read about 13 of them. One by one the bits and moments I had prepared flashed through my mind. Some of them would never see the light of an audition room. Sad. I also envisioned all the effort I put into learning so many pages and wondered why there couldn't have been some word ahead of time not to go so crazy. Anyway, neither here nor there as far as my reading went.
MARSHALL felt better. It was a fun scene to read and had a few nice moments in it. I wish we had gotten to his more subdued scenes, but they were not to be. The DOUG scenes were a little off, the timing wasn't quite there. Maybe it was lost in the transition from one to the other. I did do MARSHALL first specifically so they wouldn't get a DOUG image in their minds (or my own) before doing MARSHALL. That was a good idea because I think DOUG suffered that fate.
I think I have a shot at it. It's midnight now and no call came through after the audition, though. I think they are down to the wire on this so I wish we had heard this evening. I'll have to cross my fingers for one more night.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.