There’s a simple way tell who the big actors are, and who have just started their careers: ask them if they would like script revisions e-mailed to them, or delivered to their house.
The ones who’ve been around forever, the ones who aren’t worried about impressing anyone, say, “Go ahead and e-mail it to me.” It’s the insecure newbies who insist on having a PA drive to their house.
(Occasionally, you’ll run into an actor who claims to be dyslexic, but unless there’s a greater incidence of dyslexia in actors than the normal population, this is the lazy-reading equivalent to telling the waiter you’re allergic to olives, when you really just don’t like them.)
The thing that bugs me the most is that these actors never, never come to the door. Some of them even explicitly say, “Don’t knock.”
Even the ones who aren’t Howard Hughes-like recluses, when you buzz them with the call box, tell you to drop it on the stoop. I can only think of two reasons for this:
1) Even though it’s two o’clock on a Tuesday, they’ve just woken up, and without a team of make-up artists at their beck and call, they look hideous.
2) They plain refuse to mix with the commoners; they want you to just lay the script on your porch like an offering, and back away, bowing.
And remember, these are the day players or recurring characters. The actual stars don’t have anything to prove by cheating you like dirt. They already know that you are.
6 Responses
Just came across your blog and I love it. It’s insightful, it’s witty but boy does it sting like a bitch when read. lol! Still I rather have a hard dose or reality than fed bullshit so thank you for writing and thank you for sharing!!
When I was a young script coordinator, I ran a script over to the star of our show. I was new on the job and had never met him. He answered his own door and tried to make conversation, asking my name, etc., but I was so intimidated and afraid of ‘wasting his time’ that I hurried rudely away. In that case *I* was the one delivering the “I’m not worthy” message. Silly me. And of course, since actors are inherently insecure, he probably took my retreat as rejection. It took me years to repair that relationship from my initial rudeness.