June 16, 2000
On paper this one looks like a shoe-in. Oh Grow Up creator Alan Ball has written a new hour-long show for HBO. He is the writer and director of the pilot episode, which gives him some serious pull in the casting process. The character is similar to Ford, from Oh Grow Up. He's about 30 years old, conservative, repressed, and struggling with announcing to those around him that he is gay. I know Alan was happy with my portrayal of Ford in all of those areas. How could I not be right for Ford's reincarnation? (Also in my favor is the same production company as Oh Grow Up. Executive producers Bob Greenblatt and David Janollari were fans of mine back in the day and, as far as I know, would come down in my corner for this project too.)
The largest obstacle is getting all of these fans of mine to believe that I can rise to the challenges of a dramatic script instead of a sitcom one. The mentality of Hollywood is to tend toward separation of talent into genres. "Crossing over," whether it's from TV to films, cable to network, or, as in this case, from comedy to drama, is not an easy thing to do. The money-men like to go with what has been proven to work. And all the success in the world in a sitcom doesn't prove at all that the same commodity will be successful in something dramatic. It's nothing against Alan or Bob or David or anyone above them at HBO. It's just the way the business works. It's too pervasive to ignore, and almost too endemic to overcome. But today I gave it a shot.
I prepared two of the four scenes as instructed. I thought they went very well. I had been instructed a few days earlier not to make the scenes too "sitcom-y," which may have been my first clue that I was swimming upstream, and I felt I accomplished that. They felt real, honest, and complicated. Nothing sitcom-y at all. They asked me to prepare a third scene and come back in to read in a few minutes. I went back into the waiting room and did just that. Third scene? Not so good. I never had a chance to rehearse it out loud and when I opened my mouth to speak in the audition, it sounded nothing like I had expected. My vision of the scene must have been of somebody else doing it, because my voice wasn't right. I settled into it, but it was a short scene and I think it ended up pretty clunky.
It shouldn't make or break the audition, but then again, I wouldn't have been asked to do it if I had gotten or lost the job already. I wish I had put them all together last night. It's rare when they have you do more than they tell you. I guess I should appreciate all those times I prepared a scene and it never saw the light of day. At least I wasn't caught off-balance.
This would be a great job to do and it would be wonderful to work
with Alan again. We'll see what the week brings.