Day 2 -- Thursday, April 19
OK. Day 2. Now we're in the swing of things. Day 1 is always a little wishy-washy. After a table read, you never know how much re-writing will take place, so often there is no further rehearsal on a Day 1. But Day 2 is when you really get the ball rolling. The script is often filled with fresh jokes, new ideas, polished scenes, and you can put it all on its feet without worrying about too many changes showing up down the road.
Because of the new script, we had to be there first thing in the morning for a quick read-through. The script had changed only very little from the night before, but most importantly, the EXECUTIVE PRODUCER scene had not been cut. After yesterday's table read, there was a chance that a drastic overhaul had to take place with my two scenes. I was beginning to get the impression, though, that Peter Tolin doesn't work that way. On most shows, a team of writers will hash and re-hash a scene to death trying to make every line funny. This show seems to be the vision of one man. And if that one man is happy with things, then that's the way things stay. He must have been happy with the EXECUTIVE PRODUCER scenes.
Eric and I spent most of the day doing nothing again, but at least today we got to do some rehearsing. The scenes went well. It was a nice feeling to be back on a sound stage rehearsing a sitcom scene again. It had been waaaaaay too long. And any fears that I may have had that I had somehow "forgotten" how to do this were gone very quickly.
What struck me the most was that doing this job is so easy. And yet getting this job was so hard. Getting any job is, of course, staggeringly difficult. And yet I can do it with almost no effort. I'm sure thousands of people could do it with almost no effort. And still there's such a grueling process to choose the one who gets to. Why does it have to be so hard? (And why do curses have to last so long?)
Day 2 ended with a run-through for Peter. Funny stuff. Things look good.
Go on to Day 3