Every so often, I write a short story. Here's the latest one:
The Actor Who Couldn't Act
Doing business in Los Angeles is always a challenge, although a certain sparkle does come in your eye when your boss tells you he needs you to fly to LA to get some contracts signed. There are people in the world who still want to do business with you face to face, who don't trust the internet, and who, basically, don't mind making you spend a thousand dollars for plane tickets, a rental car and maybe a lunch or two just to spend ten minutes with them signing documents.
But there I was, exiting the West Coast office of Fortner Provisions Unlimited, with next year's contracts signed, notarized and secure in the folder tucked under my arm.
I used to carry a briefcase, but they are obsolete now. Who needs a briefcase when there are only a few pages to carry, and besides, when you lug along a briefcase, you tend to put things in it you really don't need. And if it is stolen, as well it might be, you've lost the papers, the things you didn't really need to bring, and a relatively expensive box with a handle.
So I was hurrying down the sidewalk, heading for where I parked my rental car, and I saw a guy sitting in a doorway with a cardboard sign propped up next to him. The sign said, "Can't Act."
He looked a little down and out, not completely down and out, not a bum, but someone who was definitely having a bad day.
If you came to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming an actor, not being able to act is somewhat a downer. Los Angeles is, after all, the place where people go when they want to become actors and make it big in the movies. Hundreds of people, thousands of people go there, finding an overwhelming infrastructure of agents, acting schools, scriptwriters, publicity shot photographers, and all the rest of the support system for aspiring actors.
I stopped for a moment to read the sign, look at him and consider giving him a buck or two to buy a meal. "Can't act, huh?" I said, motioning towards the sign. "At least you admit it." I tried to sound humorous.
He raised his head and smiled weakly. "Didn't take me long to figure it out. One or two movies, and it becomes pretty obvious," he said.
"So you did get a couple of movies under your belt?"
He nodded. "Yes. Then I decided that acting required skills that I didn't have."
"Well, I hear they have acting schools out here," I responded.
He laughed a small laugh.
"As it turns out, I'm not bad at acting, I'm not good at acting, I just cannot act."
I knew I was going to regret this, but I saw a diner next door and nodded at the stranger on the doorstep. "Come on, I'll buy you lunch, you can tell me what happened."
He tilted his head slightly. "I'm not a bum asking for a handout. I just put the sign out to let people know I can't act. Don't ask me to act, don't offer me money to act, I'm just not capable of doing it."
"Come on, I'm flying out of here in four hours, and instead of waiting at the airport, I'd be interested in hearing how you came to that conclusion."
He shrugged and stood up. He walked towards the diner door, not with the hunched-over resignation of a man with broken dreams, but with a certain air of authority. He joined me at the door of the diner, and we went inside.
We took a seat near the window and the waitress brought us the lunch menu, single sheets laminated in plastic. He looked at the menu and laughed. "What's so funny?" I asked.
"Oh, I was once offered a script to read in which a super spy took a laminated plastic restaurant menu and cut a man's throat wide open." He chuckled and started reading the special for the day.
I sat in stunned silence for a couple of seconds and really began regretting inviting him to lunch.
He noticed my concern. "No really, I'm not trying to scare you. I really did read a script where this super agent fought off a whole bunch of bad guys armed with a laminated menu. It was so ridiculous I just tossed it aside."
I did manage a nervous laugh at that point, and went back to reading the menu. He ordered a chicken fried steak, and I chose the hamburger.
"So, what made you get into acting?" I asked, launching the conversation.
He pondered for a second, looking in the air. "Well, I guess almost everybody wonders at one time or another if they would be good at acting," he began. "You see a movie and you think, 'I could do that.' You know there are stuntmen for the action scenes and body doubles for the nude scenes, so you think, yeah, I did a play in high school, I could go to Hollywood and do movies, become a big star..."
I nodded. "Yes, that's the dream. Even I thought about it once..."
"When you were eighteen, right?"
"Yes, that's about when it hits you. Why work for a living when I can be rich and famous just being in the movies," I said.
He became a little more at ease and leaned back. "Yes, that's the dream. And I thought sure, why not try? So I came out here, did all the grovelling I could stand, got a few parts, even got second billing in some major productions..."
"So you did get some real acting gigs?" I asked.
He said," Sure. I was on screen with some pretty big names. I didn't have a title panel all to myself, like the big stars do, but my name was up there on the screen for a couple of seconds, so I was known, for a while."
"So what happened," I asked.
"You read the sign," he answered. "I can't act."
I must have looked puzzled.
"Those first two movies I was playing characters who were exactly like me, I was playing myself," he explained. "It takes absolutely no acting skills to play yourself."
I had to agree with that.
"Now there are some pretty big names in Hollywood, successful beyond belief, who got to where they are by playing themselves. They could sell tickets just being themselves, so nobody offered them a script where it required any real acting skills. The only movie characters they were tapped for were movies that fit them like a glove. And that's okay. Money was made, and bills were paid."
"But along came my third movie and there it was, a character that didn't really fit me, a starring role that I couldn't pull off because it required me to act. And, like I said, I can't act."
"But anyone can act, all of us act from time to time, surely you could take some acting lessons or something," I said.
He cringed a little. "Acting lessons work when you are bad at acting and want to become better. Me, I can't act, and you can't make better what doesn't exist in the first place."
"But you were good in the first two movies," I replied.
"Playing myself..." he reminded me.
"And acting isn't always what people think it is," he went on. "You not only have to pretend to be someone else, reciting lines from a script that someone else wrote, but you have to pretend that they are your own words, coming out of your own mind."
I thought about that for a moment.
"It's not easy," he said. "Here you have read a script, all hundred pages of it, everything you do and say are all laid out from beginning to end. Your emotions are all spelled out, how you are supposed to say the words, what feelings you are to convey. You not only have to memorize the words, but you have to say them like they just popped into your head. Not only say them like you mean them, but also say them like they are coming out of your mouth for the first time. Like a real person, a real person who doesn't think about what he's saying, he just blurts it out."
"Then there's the director and his take. How HE wants you to say the words. And if you don't get them right the first time, the director keeps shooting one take after another, each time a slightly different version of saying the same line. "
"A friend of mine once had to do a shot, a shot that was three seconds long, where he said 'well howdy.' You would think: how many different kinds of ways are there to say 'well howdy'? Well, it turns out there were 46 takes on that one shot, 46 different ways of saying 'well howdy."
I started to laugh, but he continued.
"The script didn't offer any hints whatsoever. It just said "Tex looks up and says 'well howdy.' So the director had free rein to decide what kind of 'well howdy' he wanted. They shot enough film to jam a projector, but they did 46 kinds of 'well howdy' and even then the director wasn't fully satisfied."
"Three seconds of screen time, but it took 46 takes, an hour and a half of saying 'well howdy' over and over again. Enough to make you puke. "
I stifled a laugh, because I could see this was a serious concern on his part. "But I'm sure the one 'well howdy' that got into the movie was the best 'well howdy' that's ever been seen," I said.
He shook his head no. "Naw, it didn't make it into the movie. My friend's entire part got cut. Nature of the beast."
He then recalled one script where he was supposed to look at a computer screen with 'alarmed indecisiveness.' "How in the hell does somebody look at something with 'alarmed indecisiveness?" he asked.
The waitress brought us our meal, and we set about eating in silence for a moment.
"Anyway, that's the real work in making a movie," he began again. "Not just memorizing and saying the lines, not just showing the right emotions, but saying the lines and portraying the emotions over and over again, for multiple takes, in minute variations each time according to the whims of the director. He's the boss, and when he wants a line said a certain way, then everything stops and the same shot gets done over and over and over until the actor gets it just the right way, according to the director's vision."
"The director's vision," he repeated in disgust. "Don't get me started on that. Everybody working on a film has a vision of what it should be, but his is the only one that counts. His and the budget office that tells him when he's going over budget."
The other big part of making movies is waiting, he said. "Nothing like saying a ten second line, then waiting an hour while the cameras are re-positioned and the lights are re-aimed. I've had some pretty good poker games while waiting for the director and the crew to get ready for the next shot."
I sighed. "Well what about you and your revelation about acting? When did that hit you?"
"Well, on that third film, the script was asking me to play somebody totally unlike myself. In other words, I was going to have to act, actually act. That was not pretty."
I took a bite of my hamburger and paused. "How long did you last? A day, two days?"
He looked up as if trying to remember. "Well, you have to realize that time is money in the movie-making business. If something isn't working, the director knows it pretty quick. He isn't going to do 46 takes of something that stinks to high heaven the first couple of times he calls Action! So it quickly became apparent that I was not going to be able to pull it off, my character."
"What kind of character was it?" I asked.
"Some slimeball, a jerk. Somebody you would think, well, I can do that. I can pretend to be a slimeball jerk. I know what a slimy grimy ripoff artist looks like and acts like. I can do that."
"And?" I said.
"I couldn't do it, I couldn't pull it off. No matter how much the director coached me, no matter how much he set the scene, made up some background for the character, it only took a few minutes for him (and me) to realize I wasn't carrying through. I am not a slimeball jerk ripoff artist, so I couldn't pretend to be one. "
I sat back and paused. "Because you can't act."
"You got it,"he laughed, taking another bite of his chicken fried steak.
"Well, if you can't act, then you really can't say you're an actor," I pondered.
"Oh, I'm an actor. I've got the movies to prove it, the screen actors guild card to prove it, and my mother tells everyone her son is an actor. There's just this one little problem..."
"Well if your mother thinks you're an actor then it must be so," I said.
He nodded. "Being an actor is not like anything else in the world. If you call yourself a plumber, then you damn well should be able to install and fix plumbing. If you're a lawyer, you're pretty much on the line for knowing the law and getting your client off the hook."
But acting is in a class by itself, he said. "Parents don't want their children to lie, don't want them to grow up play pretending to be someone else or mouth off words that aren't their own. But they are thrilled when those same children decide to become actors."
"What I'm getting at," he stated, "is that if you try hard enough you might be able to become something you're not good at. If I was good at flying a plane, I would have to be a pilot because you don't become good at flying a plane without doing some piloting along the way."
I was getting confused. "So what's your point?"
He carefully framed his words. "Being something and being good at something are two different things. Becoming an artist means you are capable of creating art, but having the skills for creating art doesn't make you an artist."
I disagreed. "An artist is an artist," I said. "Whether or not he produces art is besides the question."
"Or is it," he questioned. "Are you an artist if you don't produce art? Are you a pilot if you don't fly a plane? Are you an actor if you can't act?"
I frowned. I didn't like where this was going, especially since I didn't know where this was going. "Well, speaking of pilots, I have a plane to catch," I interjected, wrapping up the meal and the conversation. "I can let you have some money if you're tapped out," I said, standing up.
"Thanks, but I have some money saved up from the first two jobs I did, plus some other bit parts. I'm doing okay."
"But what about the sign?" I asked.
"You'd be surprised how many people read the sign and offer to buy me lunch because of it."
I laughed. "Well, you sure got me. So this is some kind of acting exercise?"
"More like an investigation," he answered. "Actors are supposed to study people, but in trying to do so, I have discovered an amazing thing," he said.
"What is that?" I asked.
"In general, people are hard to 'study,' because every one is an individual. You can study an individual," he explained," but that's doesn't do an actor much good as far as learning what people are like and how they think and what they would do in specific situations. Individuals are a wild card. No telling what a real individual will do.
"Psychologists love to categorize people, stick labels on people, generalize and compartmentalize people, but everybody is different," he said, "and when a script calls upon you to be a particular type of person, a certain kind of character, you not only have to 'act' like this imaginary character, you have to 'not act' like anyone else. Acting not only requires you to pretend to be someone else, but at the same time you have to pretend to not be yourself," he said.
I began to think that this was getting a little too technical for me to comprehend, but he was obviously interested in his craft. Too bad he couldn't act.
In an effort to wind down the discussion, I said, "Well, you are lucky that most movies nowadays have enough special effects and stunt work to give the actors a break."
"It just makes it harder," he replied. "Fortunately I'm not the action hero type."
I laughed. "Few people are," I commented. "Well thanks for the movie business insights. I've learned a lot, mainly how I don't want to become an actor."
He stood and we shook hands. "Acting is grueling work, emotionally-draining, maybe financially-rewarding, and possibly the best damn job in the world," he smiled. "People are still giving my agent scripts for me to read. Hopefully there will be another one where I can just play myself. Otherwise I may have to find a way to make a living doing something useful."
