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February 13, 2012

Why every actor should own combat boots

Very important bit of advice for actors out there: Buy a pair of combat boots.

At some point in your professional career you will get hired to play a soldier, cop, security guard, EMT, or other character that will wear some form of black service boot. Now this role will probably be just two lines – if you’re lucky – but it could just be featured extra work.

(I know you’re better than that, but you shouldn’t be above it. You’re a professional actor, an emotion jockey. You whore your tricks out to whatever production has the cash… The only time you should be picky is when you have a better offer for the same day)

Regardless of whether you get to speak or just stand there looking pretty, the part will be small enough that wardrobe is not going to buy a pair of boots just for you to wear. Nope, you’re gonna get whatever comes out of the big cardboard box in the corner of the wardrobe trailer. Here are some facts about these boots:

1. They will probably not be real service boots, but whatever black boots happened to be on sale. I’ve seen Harley-Davidson brand boots with the Harley-Davidson logo greeked out*. They don’t really go with your camouflage, and it doesn’t really help you feel the part.

(*”to greek out” is Hollywood lingo for covering up a logo. I’m sure you’ve seen this before. Common techniques are to cover it with tape, scribble over it with a Sharpie, or slap a generic sticker over where the Apple logo should be.)

2. The boots they give you will be pretty gross. Yes, the wardrobe department will attempt clean them since the last person wore them… but having to clean 75 pairs in a row means it gets a bit slap dash at times, and then they get to go moldy in the big box o’ boots until it’s your turn to wear them.

3. They absolutely, positively, will not fit. Not even close. The conversation with wardrobe will go something like this:

“What size shoe do you wear?”

Size 9.

“Here’s an 11.”

Uh, do you have anything smaller?

“We have a size 6 if you want…”

All of Don Martin's characters got their shoes from the same wardrobe trailer that you will.

And it’s not like they ran out of your size because you got there too late. All those other guys standing around in their perfectly sized boots, comfortable all day long? Nope. No one is wearing the right size (except for maybe that size 6 guy, but he needs a win every now and then).

Also, keep in mind that someone called you the day before and asked for your sizes. They KNEW that a size 9 was coming in. Makes you wonder why the bothered to ask for sizes in the first place.

So now you get stand around all day in a pair of moldy, oversized boots that don’t really go with what you’re wearing, trying to move and act like a professional… Made somewhat the more difficult because you keep tripping over your massive clown toes. Great.

This last thing is a pretty big inconvenience, especially when you break a toe because of it.

Allow me to set the way back machine to distant past of 2001. I had been hired as an extra on the movie “Megiddo: The Omega Code 2”. It’s an action disaster film funded by The Trinity Broadcasting Network, which you would know as that channel with the scary pink haired televangelist woman. The movie starred R. Lee Ermy as the President of the United States; Michael Biehn as the VP; and Michael York as his brother, the president of the European Union (who is also secretly Satan).

Doesn’t really matter. The job payed $158 for eight hours, and because of overtime and other pay bumps, we were walking out of there with $400+ a day… And the job was super cool*. We were playing The New World Order Army (run by Satan), and were dressed in blue military jackets and red pants. We looked like god damn Cobra soldiers from G.I. Joe, and ran around with machine guns all day. It’s like those civil war reenactment things, only WAY more awesome. And we got paid $400 a day.

Not the best camouflage. Only the most awesome.

(*The job was also super cold. We were out in the Antelope Valley just north of LA, where it was below freezing on those long overnight shoots. Day shoots meanwhile were well over 100 degrees.)

I also made it a point to get shot and killed in every take. Which apparently was a rarity. A lot of the other extras were real military types, and all of them refused to die on camera. Guess they didn’t want to jinx themselves or something.

(Pretty sure that three out of every four bad guys getting killed is me.)

The first day of filming for me was the above climactic battle scene. There was one take where they would have a bunch of pyrotechnic stunts, assorted fireballs and a jeep flipping over.

Except the boots I had were way too big. I was wearing two pairs of socks and had stuffed a third sock into the toe of each boot, and while this did take up some of the slack, it did not make the boots fit like a proper shoe should. It was a bit more akin to wearing snowshoes… Attached to you yes, but not exactly the most efficient way of getting around from a kinesthetic standpoint.

This all added up to making it very difficult to run at anything faster than an athletic hobble. However, when there are tanks tearing through the set and machine gun fire going off all around you, you motivate to run a touch faster. 14 hours of that, and when I got home I was limping. Apparently jamming my toe all day long in ill-fitting boots caused a fracture of my small toe.

Have you ever broken a toe before? It takes forever to heal, because you always use your toes when walking… Which means you are going to re-break it half a dozen times over the next six weeks.

I count myself lucky having gotten off with only a broken toe though. Some other extra made a wrong turn and had a pyrotechnic charge go off near his face, which immediately shut everything down for about an hour. A very EXPENSIVE hour.

(The extra was fine by the way, he scraped his cheek when he hit the ground and he was a touch singed, but he finished out the day. I would later hear him say “I was tempted to walk off set and call a lawyer, but I have a devotion to the majesty of film”)

By the way, I consider my toe to be a self-inflicted wound. See, I already had my very own set of combat boots, I just didn’t bring them to set. NEVER provide your own clothes if you can help it, because odds are that they are going to get ruined over the course of the day and the company will pay you a measly $50 to replace it if it happens. I own a Hugo Boss Tuxedo. I got married in it, and I look awesome in it. I damned well better, because it cost a fortune. I will never wear it to set.

I'm dashing as hell here. And by "dashing", I mean "simultaneously drunk and sleazy"

I still recommend that one should never bring their own clothes unless they are willing to have them ruined, but I now make an exception for combat boots.

The next day I dug my old combat boots out of storage, taped up my littlest piggy, and went back to set. Even with the crack in my bone, it was far more comfortable than running around in the wrong boots the day prior.

Man, I sure have been talking about my toe a lot. Toe toe toe.

Anyway, you don’t need to splash out on a pair of fancy boots, a surplus shop or discount sporting goods store like Big 5 Sports should have a suitable pair of black service boots for about $30. I recommend buying a pair of Dr. Scholl’s insoles and bringing them with you. Combat boots are not known for being the most comfortable of footwear and you will be standing around in them all day long. Best to make them as cushy as possible.

Also, save the receipts, as it’s all tax deductible.

Oh, and in case you were thinking that it was just a one time bad experience on my part, and that I might have got the right sized boots on another shoot? At some point when we were cleaning house my combat boots wound up in the “donate to Goodwill pile”. I have been combat boot-less now for the last year, and in said twelve months I have played a soldier three times and a cop once… Each time, with really grubby ill-fitting boots from the box of mutant shoes in the wardrobe trailer. So today I’m popping down to the surplus store to grab a new pair of sh*tkickers.

See you there?

February 10, 2012

The SAG-AFTRA Merger: Why you should join AFTRA. Now.

So unless you’ve been stuck under the Hollywood equivalent of a rock (Which would be the Betty Ford Clinic, where they don’t allow outside calls… Great place though, ask for the Robert Downey Jr. suite), then you’ve probably heard that SAG and AFTRA are merging.

Which means you non-union actors have 17 days to join AFTRA.

Allow me to explain to not just you but to the non-industry people reading this blog (i.e., my Mom). Forgive me if this gets a little remedial, I’ll try and keep it brief.

So in H-Town we’ve got two big unions that cover actors, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Back in the day, SAG was the big powerhouse that was in charge of anything that was shot on film (which was 100% of movies and primetime television), while AFTRA covered anything shot on video, like game shows, the news, soap operas, etc.

Technically there is a third union, Actors’ Equity Association, aka AEA (or just “Equity”). They govern theatre. They are really important in places like New York, London, and Ashland, Oregon. But this is LA, and we hate theatre. Too much memorization and you have to get it right all in one take.

AFTRA really wanted to merge with SAG for a long time, but SAG was always “pffft, screw that, we gain nothing but a bunch of game show hosts and weathermen. Call us when they invent weathergirls”. SAG was the jock that Molly Ringwald AFTRA always wanted to be with no matter how much SAG looked down on her.

(I have no idea who Equity represents in this scenario. Jon Cryer or Anthony Michael Hall I guess… But it’s not important to the discussion right now)

So AFTRA wants to get with SAG, SAG says no. But then something huge happens.

Digital Video.

Suddenly the image quality of video goes through the roof. You don’t need a $30,000 Panavision camera anymore. You don’t need to buy, develop, or store film anymore. And you can edit it all on a Mac. The cost of making a good looking show drops dramatically, and before you know it all your TV is being shot on video. AFTRA governed video.

“Fine” says SAG. “AFTRA can have TV; we were always about movies, really. And digital video isn’t good enough to do movies yet.”

Until about 14 hours later, when it was. Now SAG still has jurisdiction over movies even if they’re shot on DV, but the advent of digital video combined with the ubiquity of DVD’s meant the cost of making a feature film and delivering it to the consumer went down dramatically too. Now I’m not talking about big budget, high quality movies here. I’m talking about the millions of hours of crap available for direct streaming on Netflix. Those super cheap exploitation movies, all of which were made NON-UNION, and this segment has exploded in the last decade. And this has hurt SAG a LOT.

Let’s say you’re the SyFy channel. You can license one good sci-fi film made under SAG contract, or for the same money you can license ten crappy non-union movies. Oh, and you need to fill twenty hours of airtime. How are you gonna spend that cash? That’s right, you go generic store-brand chocolate sandwich cookie instead of name brand Oreos. (Your kids can’t really tell the difference anyway, it’s all just marketing you tell yourself.)

So the bottom dropped out. SAG was left holding on to the middle and upper budget projects, of which the exhibitors were buying less of because of the availability of low budget fare to fill their timelsots. SAG would scramble and introduce the Ultra-Low Budget contract, which was basically them legitimizing low-budget non-union movies and letting the producers pay SAG actors $100 a day.

Really, it was too little, too late; SAG had lost too much market share and what they replaced it with just wasn’t bringing in the cash… But more importantly their voice wasn’t as loud as it used to be, and this is what hurt more than the loss of revenue, it was the loss of power.

Defeated internally but still the big man on campus, SAG strolls back to AFTRA and says “let’s hook up”… And since this is the real world and not Hollywood – I mean it is Hollywood, but real world Hollywood, not Hollywood Hollywood. Look, quit being difficult, you know what I mean… Anyway AFTRA was still more than willing to merge with SAG this time around, creating the one super-union under the new name of SAG-AFTRA.

Inspired naming. Probably should have joined with the Writer’s Guild while you were at it.

(There’s actually a lot more to the Ross & Rachael history of the merger than I’ve laid out here, and a lot more accurate too, dealing with twenty years’ worth of contract disputes and backstabbing between the unions, not to mention AFTRA finally inventing weathergirls. But I didn’t want to bore you anymore than I already have)

So the vote is set for February 27^th. There are a few people against the merger, including Scott Wilson, who you probably know as playing farm owner Hershel Greene on AMC’s “The Walking Dead”:

This man does not want the unions to merge. He wants you and your people off his farm.

The complaint is all based on the new union voting structure and how it will switch from a direct vote under the SAG system to a delegate system like AFTRA has. There are also concerns about combing the Pension & Health plans of both unions, but blah blah blah this is all largely irrelevant to you because the vote WILL pass and the unions WILL merge.

“But you still haven’t explained why I need to join AFTRA”

You’re right, and I’m sorry. I was just giving you back story, like the crawl at the beginning of Star Wars. It’s freaking important even though YOU think you can do without it.

If you want to join SAG, it will cost you $2277.00 in initiation fees PLUS your annual dues ($116 + ~2% of your SAG earnings), AND you need to qualify. You can’t just stroll in there with a check, you need to be eligible to join SAG. There are a couple of way to do this, like getting hired for a speaking part in a SAG project (which is unlikely if you’re non-union, because they’ll just hire a SAG actor), or working three days as an extra under a UNION EXTRA contract. The latter is not as easy as it sounds. I became eligible to join SAG by doing extra work, and it took me a long ass time to get those three vouchers… And this was back in the day when SAG was still doing TV, and before Peter Jackson killed the crowd scene with CGI. There’s a lot less SAG extra work to go around these days, so it’ll take you ever longer to qualify. Sorry.

Yeah, it’s tough to join SAG, not to mention expensive.

AFTRA however, just requires a check. No qualifications, just cash. $1600, made out to them, and you are in the union today. Boom.

“Great, I’m in AFTRA now, but not SAG. Also $1600 poorer.”

Yeah, but the unions are going to merge in like, 17 days. And when they do, everyone in one union automatically gets into the other union… But when the unions DO merge, it will be a lot harder and a lot more expensive to join if you ain’t in a union already.

That $1600 AFTRA initiation fee? Gone. The proposed new initiation fee for SAG-AFTRA will be $3000, plus your annual dues. That’s a big chunk of change. If you were to get hired for four straight days on CSI: Miami, EVERY DOLLAR YOU EARN WILL GO TOWARDS YOUR INITIATION FEES. Also, the SAG eligibility requirements will still stand (if not get even harder) so you will now need to qualify to join the union… You can’t just show up with a check anymore.

“But what if I get Taft-Hartley’ed?”

Ugh. Again with the Taft-Hartley. Everyone always brings up Taft-Hartley.

(For those that don’t know, The Taft-Hartley act lets you hire a non-union actor for a union job, and grants the full union eligibility for 30 days).

Well, if you get Taft-Hartley’ed, you’d still need to pay that $3000 to join the union after the merge. Also, you won’t get Taft-Hartley’ed. I guarantee you there is an actor who looks just like you and who is just as good an actor as you auditioning for the exact same role, except THEY are already in the union. The production will hire that person and not bother Taft-Hartley-ing you. Or else there is a 19 year old non-union hottie that the producer really wants to bang. You are also not her.

This girl will get Taft-Hartley'ed before you. She will also get everything else in life before you.

Now I’ve met some young actors are eligible to join the union, but who don’t want to join the union just yet. They thing they are doing better staying eligible for non-union gigs at this stage in their career. This is a mistake.

First, non-union jobs pay crap. $50-$100 per day for speaking roles on most jobs IF you’re getting paid at all.

Second, have you seen the quality of most non-union productions? Even great actors look bad when you only shoot two takes before needing to move on. Sure It’s a credit on IMDB and you might be able to get something for your reel out of it, but you probably won’t be bragging to everyone to tune in once you see what the finished product looks like.

Moreover, you probably won’t get hired for a union job unless you’re already an active member. An ACTIVE member, not just one who is eligible to join.

“But it’s just as good to be SAG-E, as it is full SAG, right?”

No, it is not. See, if you’re only SAG eligible, you get to work one job without being required to join the union. So sometime between now and when you land that second job you need to go down to the SAG building, fill out a bunch of paperwork, get your photo taken, and write a check. If your agent calls at 7pm tonight to say you’ve booked a job and your call time is at 8am tomorrow, there is NO WAY for you to join SAG in time. And trust me, the vast majority of jobs you will get shoot tomorrow, and you don’t find out till the evening, after SAG is closed for the day. If you show up on set and you are not a full SAG member yet, the production company gets fined for hiring you. In today’s acting wasteland, name actors work cheap, and they could have got a name actor for the money they paid for you and your fine. You can then count on never working with these people again*

(*hypothetically. Like I said, they won’t risk it and just WON’T hire you in the first place.)

Oh, and if a casting director sees “SAG Eligible” on a resume, this says to me that at most you have been hired once… and only once. All those other credits on your resume? Those could be youtube videos as far as they now, and you should just assume that they will just assume they are.

And look, if you really want to keep doing non-union jobs, then just go Financial Core. You pay your initiation fees and your annual dues, but you aren’t a member of the union and can still work non-union jobs. You get all the same protections, you just don’t get to vote and don’t get free screeners come awards season.

Or you can just work non-union jobs and hope the union doesn’t find out. Which realistically, they probably won’t. The only way they might find out is if someone on set rats you out to the union, and that’s if said person really has it in for you. Yet another reason why you really shouldn’t be a primadonna on set.

Anyway, if you’re eligible to join a union but are holding off, stop and just join the union already. The price is only going to go up and it is keeping you from landing some jobs.

Everyone else? Join AFTRA today. It’s $1600 and there are no eligibility requirements. That all changes when they merge with SAG, then it will be $3000 and you’ll need to satisfy their eligibility requirements. Pay a lot now, or pay a lot more tomorrow.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go watch my screener copy of The Artist.

20 comments

February 9, 2012

First!

Right, my first blog post. Bear with me as you watch me learn while doing. I promise I’ll get the hang of it.*

*(no actual promise implied)

So what is the point of this blog? Why must the world be subjected to graced with my musings?

Well, because G*d damn it, I need a place to rant. Twitter isn’t long enough and my Mom is on Facebook, so those are both out. My other option was the street corner, but that’s occupied by that end of days bible thumping guy and no way am I competing with him. It’d be like whoever was on Ed Sullivan the same night as the Beatles.

(TV historians will point out that Davy Jones of the Monkees and Frank Gorshin – aka The Riddler on the 60’s Batman – were the other Ed Sullivan guests that night, and while they were no Beatles they still did alright… But screw those TV historians, they’re just saying it to be contrary)

So what will I rant about? Hollywood mainly. See I’m an actor and a writer, which you undoubtedly knew already since you probably found this blog linked to my professional website. But what you probably didn’t know is that I don’t get to act and write nearly enough, and when I do I’m never really allowed to do it the way that I want. And that causes frustration. And that is what causes rants.

Conventional wisdom says you should not do this. They say you should keep all of your Hollywood stories private, because it could cost you a job. This would be true… IF people in the position to hire me knew about me. But seeing as how not having a blog and toiling in relative (read: absolute) obscurity hasn’t bust down any Hollywood doors, might as well try to opposite tactic. Worst thing that happens is that I lose out on a job that Kip Pardue was always gonna get anyway.

Hopefully, hopefully, there will be a few nuggets of wisdom in there too. See, there are all those things they teach you in theatre school, or advice from actors and agents about believing in yourself and doing the best work you can… And it’s mainly bullsh*t. It’s theory and wishful thinking, but not actually how the mechanics of the industry work. So I’m going to tell you how it is… At least in my limited experience so far.

So yeah, bear with me.

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Ed's blog-o-rama