March 13, 1998
They say when you go to the track to play the horses, you should keep an eye on the horse that "drops a load" right before the race. From there, two interpretations are possible. One is that since the horse has relieved himself, he will feel more free and will run faster. The other is that he has no reason to hurry now that he has taken care of his business and will run slower. Two completely different interpretations, but I weighed the possibilities of both and how they might apply to me as I sat in the Fox Executive Building lavatory trying to focus on how "free" I was making myself before the big audition.
Once back in the thick of things, I sat/stood with the other eight gentlemen waiting for the "Studio" callback to begin. This was the preliminary step before going in front of the Network executives later in the day. Three contenders for each of three roles were readying to tread the boards of Room 258 in Fox Building 88. And readying. And readying. The 10:30am assembly time for an 11:00am audition was now fading into distant memory as 11:30am rolled around. Did the long wait have an effect? Maybe. But I don't feel like it would have affected me more than anyone else.
They read the Fletchers second and I was the third of the three of us. That is the preferred slot, as far as I am concerned. You want to go last if you can, show them the stuff no one else did and cement in their minds how much they like you. That is, unless, of course, they don't. It was a tough room, to say the least. They had simply decided not to laugh at the material in the scene, I guess. The only two moments when they approximated real laughs were for a couple of my own line readings I guess they found interesting and funny. That boded well, I thought. Sally Stiner, the casting director, was the only one even trying to laugh. She valiantly threw in a chuckle or two but no one else picked up the baton.
They then had the three of us wait for a surprisingly long time before telling us to check with our agent in about an hour and letting us go. In that time, I nearly said to one of the other Fletchers, "Do you think they hated all three of us?" And how sad it was to find out in about an hour that I was right. No one would be going on to the Network later in the day to read for Fletcher. They "didn't respond to any of us" was the official word. Maybe whatever part of me that couldn't resolve the "slightly effete, possibly gay" angle with what I would normally bring to a role like this left my reading too ambiguous to click. It was a stretch to get there and either I didn't make it or the character didn't. Either way, what I did wasn't quite right.
Well, well, well... new information has come to light which makes my earlier ideas seem a little quaint if not naive. Sally Stiner told my agent that I did not give the same reading for the executives that I had given at the first callback. In her words, I was "paralyzed and not funny." Woah. I don't even know how to react to something like that. Obviously my first reaction is to dismiss it entirely and defend my performance's integrity to the hilt. My reading cannot be judged by the response of the audience. If they are not going to laugh, that's one thing. But it does not make me "not funny." And to try to sort out what this character is supposed to be when the script says one thing, the casting director another, and the writer still another, is a Herculean assignment. Requiring that we satisfy everyone's input and then make him a "jerk who's still likeable" doomed the Fletcher readings from the moment we started waiting an hour to go in. So if you need to shift the blame to me by saying I didn't give the same reading as before, that's fine, but let's all quietly admit that we know that's not true and we can move on.
OK, now that we have that out of the way, I guess it would be more beneficial to figure out in what ways it is my fault. "Paralyzed." That's a tough one. What did I do? OK, maybe I had spent so much time going over the lines and trying to specifically recreate each line reading from the callback that I eventually sucked the life out of them, erasing any spontanaeity or realism, making them sterile instead of truthful. That would certianly come across as "paralyzed" given that she had thought I was talented and funny before and now it had somehow disappeared. The challenge is to make the scene funny when there's no feedback from the audience. There's no vibe, no rhythm, no communication between the audience and me. It's like trying to carry on a conversation with a puppy. You know he can hear you, but is he getting it? You know he's there, but he's not responding. In spekaing with Joel, my agent, about the hwole scenario, he remarked, "There's a reason sitcoms shoot in front of a live audience." Comedy is two parts material, one part performer, and one part audience. You can't do it in a vacuum.
Still, if the room is cold, you can't just stop and blame them. What it has to come back to is being real. If I am caught up in trying to deliver a precisely crafted line calculated to generate "x" amount of laughs, I'm going to look all the worse when they don't come and stand there, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. On the other hand, if I am delivering a line because that's the way my character would honestly respond, then whether the laughs come or not, the scene can play like two real people interacting and will have a life that exists beyond how long or loud the audience's response is.
And what about all the different signals and notes and interpretations offered up in the name of Fletcher? Well, the only way I can help them figure out what they want is to be it. The bottom line is still the same, though, and that is a truthful, honest performance. Trying to mold and shape specific lines to fit each and every requested nuance is only going to undermine the performance as a whole. Staying in touch with the character I want to create and finding the part of me that lets that character come out has to be at the core of the entire scene.
I haven't looked at an audition or a role in such a flowery, actor-speak way in a while, and maybe that's a big part of the problem. Could it possibly be that the presciption to solving this problem is as simple as just remembering what it means to be an Actor?