When I moved to Los Angeles in 1995, I considered myself an actor. So much so, that I packed up everything I owned into a U-Haul, drove across the country from New Hampshire with no real plan, and wound up in a small apartment at the corner of Sierra Bonita and Sunset: right in the gut of Hollywood. It was an unglamorous life, almost immediately. Within a week, I landed a job at a coffee shop on the corner called "Grounds Zero." Clever. It wasn't so much a coffee shop as it was a vagrant pit stop, and the hookers (who populated that corner outside our apartment building) used the bathroom to shower in the sink. One evening, while cleaning up the bathroom trash, I almost jabbed myself in the palm with a used drug needle. Great gig. At 23 though, it all made sense. I was an artist, chasing my dream through the bowels of Hollywood, just the way an artist should.
I didn't know anyone in "the industry" in this town when I arrived. I had one meeting with a supposed director, who was the half-son of a woman I knew, but he turned out to be a dead end. His rental house near Fountain was scarcely nicer than my hooker-adjacent apartment, and as he stroked his cat and babbled about projects he was developing, the hope drained out of me for a quick break in Hollywood. I drove home in my 1988 Honda CRX with New Hampshire plates, the Los Angeles summer much hotter than I imagined in my dreams of chasing dreams, and let the reality sink in: I was probably going to have to do a lot of work NOT acting to ever reach my goal of becoming a working actor.
It's a spirit and philosophy, more than it is a career. It begins with abandoning a traditional path for an extremely uncertain one. Health insurance, office life, 401k's, and water cooler talk weren't appealing to me. I wanted a life of happiness before a life of security, and when I stumbled into my first play in college, it seemed I had discovered a career that would allow me that life. I read every book I could find about acting. How did people actually launch their careers? How should I start? What did I need? The more information I had, the better prepared I'd be for what everyone seemed to insist was a very hard road.
Every book I read had some version of: "If you can think of anything else besides acting that will make you happy...do that." Instead of dissuading me, warnings like that strengthened my resolve. I could beat Los Angeles. Most people failed, but I was not most people. Maybe it was the gambler in me that told me I'd succeed, or maybe it was the foolish kid in me. Whichever it was, for ten+ years, that belief carried me.
That first year was tough. Paying the rent came from catering jobs, hotel jobs, extra work, waiting tables, and anywhere else I could make a buck. I was a telemarketer for the LA Philharmonic. I worked in a hotel gift shop. I worked in restaurants. I washed dishes. Every shitty actor job you can imagine, I did it. It was all part of the "paying dues" portion of the career. I expected it.
Years passed. There were no huge breaks. There was slow progress, eked out in small milestones. I managed to find an agent through an audition class. I got headshots. I went through The Groundlings Improv/Sketch program. I performed for a year in their Sunday Company, which led to a much better commercial agent and a few TV co-starring roles thanks to my Sunday Company director (and head of WB casting), Tony Sepulveda. I booked some commercials, and became a regular in the pool of commercial comedy guys that casting directors tend to bring in for everything. SAG card, sketch comedy shows, more improv shows, a bit of attention from other casting directors. It was slightly more of a career than the one I had when I lived near hookers, but it was still a very slow grind. Money was always tight, but my outlook on life was defined by this career that I had chosen. Being an actor allowed me the failures. When you're an actor, failure is the norm. As the jobs I took to keep my acting career alive came and went, my choice to follow a difficult dream fueled me. My resolve remained strong, and I started to see some of my friends land on TV shows and flirt with fame. Although things were slower for me than I had anticipated, I never once regretted my decision to forego a traditional career. Though broke, relatively unsuccessful, and slogging away in a relentless city, I was doing what I wanted to do more than anything else on earth. That mattered to me.
In 2000, I accidentally slipped into TV production. It started when a friend offered me a gig on CBS' first season of Big Brother as a Story Assistant. I convinced myself that it would be a brief foray into reality production. It was much better money than I made as a bellman, and since I had just been fired for falling asleep in the bell closet, it was also good timing. Though it would be the beginning of the long death knell for my acting career, I didn't realize it. It was just another gig to pay the bills on an acting career that wasn't paying for itself. Sure, I could work in production and make some decent money for a while. If anything, it would help get me ahead on bills, maybe help pay for some new pictures and most importantly, make me less broke.
The Big Brother job consumed me. For that summer, I spent most of my time either at the CBS Radford lot or on my way to and from the set. I slept there some nights. It was a crash course in reality TV production, and I loved it. I started as a story assistant, but by the end, I was helping to produce the show each day. I'd get all of the segments from the story department in the early morning, assign them to editors, give notes on the cuts, screen the segments with the CBS brass in the afternoon (which would then air that same evening), and get ready to do it all again the next day. It was an insane turnaround, and a gruelling work schedule, but it was exhilarating. It was the first time since my move to LA that I was 100% unavailable for auditions, but the truth was, I never had many to miss in the first place.
The Big Brother job led to a job at MTV on a show called Rich Girls, which led to a job on Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which led to a major turning point in my life. In 2005, through a lucky series of events, I wound up as the Supervising Producer on a show called Trippin'. Created by Cameron Diaz and Elizabeth Rogers, Trippin' was an eco-travel show, which meant...I was about to travel around the world. As a New Hampshire kid, I always dreamed of an exotic life of travel and adventure. As a young actor, I thought I'd be doing it for exciting roles in glamorous movies. As a fledgling producer, that opportunity had arrived, (minus the part about starring in movies). Not exactly as I had dreamed it, but I was about to travel the globe with a bunch of celebrities. For the first time, I started to realize that my career as an actor was in serious danger of taking a more permanent back seat to my career as a TV producer. I was surprised to discover... that didn't necessarily bother me.
I never stopped feeling like an actor. For over ten years, it was my identity. From 1993-2005, I proudly told people I was an actor when asked, even though there's always been a large percentage of Hollywood that can't stand actors. I didn't care. You become used to the resistance, and subtle scoffing, and pitiful eye rolls. They warn you when you start your career that you should get used to rejection, and that's true, but it's not just casting offices rejecting you. It's friends, and employers, and people you don't know, and people that were too scared to spend their lives doing whatever it is they love, and they always want to know, "What have you done?" as if that determines whether you're allowed to choose how you identify yourself. It doesn't matter what I've done. I chose a career that made me happy. How many people really have the courage to do that?
After Trippin', I landed on a show called "Rob & Big" on MTV. We did three amazing seasons, and then developed another series with Rob called "Fantasy Factory." We just wrapped our very successful third season of that (with hopefully more to come), and we also just got picked up for 16 episodes of a new series featuring Rob, which I begin work on this Tuesday. I love what I do now. I'd never be here if I hadn't moved to LA to be an actor.
For the last five years, I've been almost exclusively a TV producer. I still do a little VO work, and the occasional TV commercial, but I don't have time to audition enough to really consider myself an actor anymore. I keep a toe dipped in the acting world, because...well, because I can't quite let it go.
For a long time, I thought switching careers was admitting defeat. Now of course, I realize that those years I spent grinding it out as an actor were a necessary part of the journey to right here. I wouldn't change any of it.* As an actor, I learned to absorb the world and stay open to the opportunities around me. I played roles that let me see life from multiple angles and points of view. I watched artists far more talented than me, rise from nothing to stardom. I made friends that will last me a lifetime, and eventually stumbled into a career that makes me happier than I have ever been. So though I've mostly left my meager acting career behind for the career of a TV Producer, the spirit of the actor I once proclaimed myself to be still drives me. I am thankful that I had the courage to chase it as a lifestyle and philosophy, and especially thankful that it led me to where I am right now.
*Okay, I *might* change the rollneck sweater business card. :)
