December 8, 1999
Second audition of the day... this time back trying to get the lead in a pilot. It's odd to have to begin that whole process from scratch, given the show's uncertain fate. As Patrick Rush and I were walking to go into the audition, he said, "Sorry about your show." And I tried to say we still have a little life left, but I think that's the overriding opinion these days, that if the show doesn't do something miraculous, the show will no longer be with us.
Went in, sat down at a table full of 6 or 7 people, talked briefly about upstate New York, a little about Harvard and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, where the director apparently directed one of the productions. You would think there would have been more to talk about with that, but that was sort of it. I said I did it, he said he did it, and we moved on. Maybe we both had things we were hiding...
So then we did the three scenes. Now, I've worked on a sitcom before. I worked on a sitcom a couple of weeks ago for goodness sake. And this is the first sitcom audition I have had since working on Oh Grow Up. If I had left this auditon room six months ago, given their reactions, I would be convinced that I had blown all of the jokes. But I can't believe now that it's all my fualt. For better or for worse, the last four and a half months have given me the faith in my ability to make things funny. But every time I hit the jokes in these scenes, it would feel like nobody would laugh, or even odder, only one person would laugh, almost as if he wasn't supposed to -- like there was a joke there and it wasn't really all that funny and I like to think that they thoguht I made it funny and no one else had been so they weren't used to laughing there. But then the person thoguht, 'Hey, this guy made that a little extra funny,' and so he laughed but no one else picked up on it because they were still on auto-laugh. I could even sense people looking around at each other as if to say, 'Oh, did you see what he did there? That was interesting.' but still when I hit the big jokes there was never a solid laugh in the room.
And so with all of this experience under my belt, I have to feel confident in what I did, and I think I can. So that only leaves one option: I have to blame them. They blew my audition. It sure makes the audition-excuse making an easier process. Instead of coming up with numerous little excuses why the audition didn't go well, I can't just use the blanket excuse that it's all their fault.
What I did today was good. It just wasn't what they wanted. It's the
way things were a lot before I got Oh Grow Up and
there's plenty more out there where that came from. I just need to
find people that get it.