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Day 3 -- Friday, October 9 |
KATIE JOPLIN |
The Day Three drama actually began on the tail end of Day Two. Sue, from the writers office, called to see if I had a fax machine, so that I could receive the new pages for Scene K as soon as possible. Upon their arrival, it became obvious that Scene K had undergone a metamorphosis in that nearly all of my original lines were now gone. Not just my lines were gone, however, mind you, but really every chance that I had of getting a laugh at all was also gone. (revised scene)
We ran our new scene first thing in the morning. Everyone seemed very pleased and content with how it looked and sounded. There was a little trouble amongst the writers as they tried to communicate to the director and me how exactly they wanted my role to be delivered. "Staccato" was the most specific direction I was given. It's not much of an acting direction, but I guess it got their point across. I tried to make the scene staccato for a take, and at that point they were either satisfied or ready to give up. Either way, we moved on to the rest of the day's business.
We ran Scene K in front of cameras and then taped a couple versions in the afternoon. This is the first time I've ever pre-taped something with the intention of taping in again later in the evening. I was told they're doing this so that they could tape it only once later, and thus speed up the process when the audience was in the house.
Around 4pm, I had dinner with Dan, who turned out to be a very nice guy, and then settled down for a long winter's nap. Five hours of milling about the set later, at about 10pm, we were ready to revisit Scene K. We did not do one take after all, but two very similar takes. My six or seven lines didn't generate much of a response from the audience.
In between the two takes, the director said to the series regular who was in our scene that he wanted to see a lot of face stuff, because he would be using a lot of his coverage in the scene. As he put it, "I'm going to be cutting to you a lot." So no need to worry too much about my makeup and hair since the only shot of me is gonna be when I walk past him.
I guess I had fun. Of course, it's tough for me to complain about working. I know that five years ago tonight I would've been overjoyed to have six lines on a midseason replacement for an emerging network. Maybe even Park Overall would have seemed eccentric and colorful at the time. But it's all relative. Compared to my Hanleys and Encore! experiences, this was one of my toughest job to date, in that it was so uninteresting and so psychologically draining to do virtually nothing and to be so unimportant.
So what did I learn from the Park Overall adventure? A. Park Overall should not be adding lines or writing dialogue. The bits she added during the week all tanked in front of the audience. A few of them were removed before shooting the second pass of the scenes. It seems to be a classic situation of trying to please the "star" to the point that the quality of the show suffers. And B. Not every job is going to be fascinating and rewarding. But the truth is that every job is a learning experience about the business, the creative process, and the challenges of producing quality entertainment, something that seems to be in short supply these days.
Thank you, Katie Joplin. Thank you, Park Overall. Thank you, Mr.
Wolfe. Good night.