Drew Lanning

Today I had an audition, a fairly easy one that was right up my alley. I was to wear a suit and just stand up and talk a lot, a skill-set that represents 99% of the jobs I’ve been booking this year.

The problem came with the talking part: see, for some reason I had convinced myself that there were no lines involved in this audition. Thinking on it now I think I got it mixed up with another casting call for the same day, one to which I was not invited. Anyway, I walked in and immediately noticed sides on the table. No problem, I thought, I’ll just fill out the forms and then get to work on the dialogue.

The problem there was that I had arrived on time to the audition, which means that I was essentially late. I didn’t have enough time to fill out my forms and properly prepare for the dialogue, because no sooner had I gotten a headshot out of my bag than I was called in to audition. I couldn’t even send someone else in ahead of me, I was the only schlub there.

So I went in, and luckily the script was on a teleprompter. It was, unfortunately, not the script for which I had minimally prepared (all of a quick glance in the waiting room); so I stumbled through it, choked on my words, swallowed syllables. I basically blew it.

Luckily I’m really good at what I do and even when I blow it, I come off fairly well. The director offered some direction and gave me another go-round. I composed myself inwardly, asked to have the teleprompter slowed down, then did it again like a pro. It was nothing like nailing it the moment you walk through the door, but at least I recovered somewhat gracefully.

Th real problem in all of this debacle is that I’m entirely too lazy a person and have never put in the right amount of work to achieve the goal that I’m after. It takes a lot of effort for me to do the bare minimum; it’s just that I’m generally so good at what most people perceive as the bare minimum that it looks like I’m doing a really great job.

So, to recap your audition checklist:

• On time means ten minutes early.
• Know your lines… the correct lines.
• Read the casting notice or email from your agent carefully, so you know what you’re walking into before you walk in.
• Review everything once more before you enter the waiting room.
• Don’t be sitting outside the casting room like a dunce if you’re not ready to go in and nail it. Better to be a few minutes late than on time and unprepared.

I recently took a three-week road trip across the country, visiting 13 cities in 14 states (we blasted right through Oklahoma without staying the night), meeting dozens of interesting people, and doing lots and lots of work. I know that there are questions that a lot of you would want answered about a trip like that, and I’m here now to answer what is undoubtedly the biggest outstanding question of them all: how did you use your iPad?

So yes, I bought an iPad more or less specifically for this trip. Not only was I the host for the show but I was also the production coordinator for the Red Team, meaning I had to collect and track receipts, get image releases signed and filed, keep everyone on schedule, and… I guess that was about it. It wasn’t a very hard job but it kept me busy.

Why’d I buy an iPad? I was actually confident that I could completely avoid using a standard laptop at all for the entire three weeks. I wanted to pack as lightly as possible considering how much I would be on the move, both from city to city and within each city once we arrived. I also liked the iPad’s battery life since I knew I would be spending long days shooting and wouldn’t necessarily be near electrical outlets. The form factor was a plus as well: anyone who’s tried to balance a laptop on one hand and type with the other because they have no nearby flat surface knows what I’m talking about here.

So the iPad’s form factor and battery life made it perfect, and for reference here is a short list of the basic tasks I would need my traveling computer to perform:

• track receipts
• track releases
• keep a detailed calendar
• sync with my iPhone (preferably untethered)
• basic web surfing and emailing
• video chat with family back home

Aaaand, there’s the rub. Anyone who’s even slightly interested in the iPad knows that it has no camera whatsoever. So that last bullet made it essential that I bring my netbook with me, but other than that I was all set.

Starting in the pre-trip phase, we had a production meeting with everyone to go over details. I searched long and hard in the App Store to find a good note-taking app that I could sport during this meeting, and found several good candidates. I already know about Evernote, but it along with several other apps I tried were exceptional at one thing: crashing and losing data. I was getting pissed off, this was the night before the meeting and I really wanted to start my experiment off right. I finally found and settled on an app called 3banana notes, which had an iPhone client and cloud syncing between the two. It was also free. I still wound up using pen and paper at the meeting since typing on the iPad was just too slow and 3banana didn’t allow for “jotting” or scribbling.

For the trip itself, I briefly toyed with the idea of having people sign releases right within my iPad that I could then email to myself and them later on. Adobe Ideas is a free drawing app that allows you to use any image as a background (perfect!), so I could just set an image of the release as the background, have them sign, then email a PDF of that pic to myself and voila! I actually decided against doing this as well, my reasoning being that it would work well for one or two people but beyond that would be slow and cumbersome. No need to reinvent the wheel here, I just used pen and paper.

Sometime during pre-production I started receiving a lot of documents from the production manager: full schedules, hotel information, contact lists, blah! Frankly I quit my job to avoid this kind of crap, but hey, I was earning two month’s salary in three weeks! So now I needed a way to get these documents onto my iPad in a convenient way and not just that, get the inevitable REVISED versions of the documents onto the iPad as well. I dutifully bought Numbers for iPad, which instantly gave me the ability to open the spreadsheets I needed to refer to. At the time Quickoffice and Docs To Go hadn’t yet developed native Excel-handling apps for iPad so I was stuck with Numbers.

Getting apps on and off the iPad through email was a bit cumbersome though, so I got Goodreader. That’s a fantastic app which allows you to pull docs from your email account (by entering IMAP info, and it only shows you emails with attachments), pull docs from your Dropbox account, WebDAV servers, FTP sites, just about anywhere. The killer is that you can also pull a document from, say, an email and then copy and paste it to your Dropbox account, allowing you to safely archive the email without fear of not being able to find the original file.

This workflow was the least cumbersome option working the iPad, the only other way to get docs on and off this trinket being to hook it up to iTunes and drag them on and off through there. Since I was trying to remain totally untethered as much as possible Goodreader made the most sense.

Overall throughout the trip the iPad was exactly what I needed, no more and no less. Once my toddler tired of seeing Daddy on a computer screen I didn’t even ever end up needing my netbook for anything except the occasional hotel that couldn’t get their shit together and offer working wifi. For the most part I was actually able to get by totally on my iPhone alone, since I had entered our entire schedule as well as all important contacts into Google Calendar and Contacts, and had them both syncing with my iPhone and iPad. This meant that the only time I needed the iPad at all was really at the end of each day when I entered in receipts and release info. My iPad became a glorified data-entry device that I could probably have done without as well, although doing emails and web-browsing on the tiny iPhone screen gets quite old after a while, and the battery almost died on at least half of the days we were on the road.

The iPad though did have its brilliant moments throughout the trip, little things that only the iPad could have done in exactly the way it was done.

One thing the iPad did very well in pre-production was function as a ghetto teleprompter. We had a late-night shoot that went in to the wee hours of the next day and I had to learn dozens of paragraphs of new dialogue, one paragraph at a time. Not hard at all for me, but had I tried to totally memorize each before shooting it would have taken forever. I just had Yuri email me the copy, I put it in Pages, blew up the text size and went full-screen, then we rigged it up to a c-stand by the camera and had ourselves a simple teleprompter.

There was also a moment in Vegas where an ad-agency rep wanted to see the next few days of scheduling. I whipped out the iPad, locked it in landscape orientation, and showed the weekly view on the calendar. We just stood around and pointed and gestured at it for a few moments while planning the next few days’ worth of production, and it was much faster and easier than using a laptop to try and do something similar. Less of a production in and of itself, it was just very natural and fluid. Yes Steve Jobs, it was magical.

It was also very easy in Numbers to select portions of the expense spreadsheet and get quick totals on different categories of spending. This didn’t require any formulas or tinkering with the grid: just go to full screen, select the range of data you want with a drag of your finger, and it pops up a box showing you the total as well as the averages. Very slick and handy towards the end when we wanted to get a quick idea of how the budget was faring.

There are of course things the iPad doesn’t do very well at all. Some people know about a few already (no ports, no way to get documents on and off except via email or iTunes, no Flash), but there were a few unexpected things that came up on the trip that kind of surprised me:

• I keep my personal checkbook register as a spreadsheet (I’ve always done it this way, very simply and portable). It’s a basic, albeit long, document. It’s over 500 rows but I would expect this little magical device wouldn’t have any problem with that, right? Wrong, it practically chokes when opening the damn thing and only gets worse as I add transactions to it. I like the form-based entry available in Numbers which is why I moved my register into there, but now that Quickoffice has a native Excel app I may just go back to that. This brings me to my next point…
• Numbers only current export option is via, wait for it, PDF and Numbers file formats. Wow, fuck you Apple. I mean, I knew this going in but I think I kinda figured they would sort this out already within a few months. At this point I think they’re locked into having no XLS export option from Numbers on iPad (Numbers on Mac allows you to export to Excel), so if you plan on using Numbers for iPad just make sure you also have iWork for Mac or have a Facebook friend who can convert it for you (thanks again Jeff!).
• The lack of Flash had a surprising side-effect: I couldn’t access my online banking without firing up my laptop. You need Flash to be able to enter the security code that is texted to you, so that you can authorize a new device to access your online banking. Your only other option is to temporarily turn off the security code feature (by calling Bank of America… ON THE PHONE?!), add the device, then turn it back on again. Wow.
• The lack of multi-tasking was a known issue going in, but created some awkward technology setups along the way. I would frequently have multiple documents open that needed to be compared so I would, I shit you not, have my iPad, iPhone, and laptop all open at the same time so that I could effectively get work done. I think I even had a pad of paper out to take quick notes as well. To be fair to myself this was probably at a hotel with shit wifi so I had my netbook tapped into the ethernet cord while my working documents were on the iPad.

I think that about wraps up the iPad real-world recap. It was overall a fun trip, and with the iPhone 4 (and its sexy Facetime app) coming out in a few days I know that for the next trip I won’t be bringing the netbook at all. All in all I’m glad I got the iPad, it did for the most part make my work easier even though it required a little data-manipulation on the back-end to get the spreadsheet information out.

P.S.: I wrote this entire post on an iPad, except for this post-script oddly enough. I do however have the keyboard dock accessory, I’m not a masochist.

And now for your moment of Zen:

I recently went to Los Angeles to help cast for an upcoming project, in which I am already cast. I was technically there in my capacity as “host”, but due to my long relationship with the producers and my constant interaction with the talent, I was included in every casting discussion from start to finish. Here is what I can tell you that you, a fellow actor or performer, need to know,

Some of this stuff you know already, or at least you have no excuse not to know. Some is stuff your acting teachers have been telling you for years, and the rest is probably just common sense.

• Look like your headshot. Seriously people, this is rule #1 and just common sense. If you don’t resemble your headshot then just don’t show up. We’ll never be able to remember who you are later when we’re trying to work out callbacks, and every time we do mention you it will be prefaced with “but they didn’t even look like their picture.” No excuses, just do it.
• I know it’s an audition and you’re trying to get noticed, but just be yourself. If you’re putting on an act we can usually tell and we’ll just be distracted wondering who you really are. You need to perform and you need to stand out, but you don’t need to completely transform your personality.
• The casting directors and producers are not evil; they just have a tough job and are really, really tired. Even if the people for whom you’re auditioning aren’t as awesome as we were, that doesn’t mean they’re jerks.  Well, maybe they are jerks, but it’s still not directed at you intentionally. They have way too many people to see and not enough time to sleep and eat throughout the day.
• If you’re not cast, it’s not really about you. It’s weird to say “it’s not personal” when you are sent home but the truth is that you could actually be the best actor there, but there are so many other variables that the casting director and producer are considering that raw talent is only a small part.  I’m not just talking about looks either, although that is a big part of it. Charisma, personality, wit, and how you interact with those around you play a huge role beyond just how well you interpret the script or perform in the improv games. People like to work with people that they like.
• Show up, and not just physically. Commit yourself to the audition constantly, or at least be aware of when you are being watched. You have no idea that the guy running the camera or signing people in isn’t actually one of the producers and founders of the production company. Is it really that hard to participate in a conversation, or stop texting for fifteen minutes while you wait to go in?
• Also, be nice to everyone. Again, the person taking out the garbage could actually be on the production team and have a major voice in whether or not you get cast. The decisions are not being made solely on what goes in the casting room and in front of a camera.
• Commit yourself to what you are asked to do in the audition. It may be something you’re horrible at, but what is being judged is not necessarily how well you do a task but how willing you are to just jump in and have fun.
• Be persistent. I hesitate to mention this because it can go too far, but I’ll give you an example. One woman showed up late on the second day of auditions, and was turned away. We simply had too many people and had to leave the space on time. This woman found myself and a cameraman (who was also a producer) out back and asked if we could audition her. We really didn’t want to but we liked her look, so let her horn in on the next group of people (we had to resort to grouping them, there were just so many). Long story short, this woman is in the final cut of people selected to be sent to the client, and is everyone’s top pick to get the job. She could definitely have helped herself out by showing up earlier, but she asked us politely and directly if we could get her on camera. She did what she had to do to get the job.

That should about do it for now kids. One more little thing I’d like to add is something that I was talking about with my agent last week. While getting the job is definitely the goal, and the audition is a means to that end, how would it change your attitude if you thought of the audition as the end in itself? Or the callback? Most of the jobs that I and my wife have ever booked are the ones that we, quite frankly, just didn’t really care about one way or the other. We showed up, did the best we could do, and never gave it another thought. Your job as an actor is to act, and that actually means that auditions are an acting job the same as any other.

Above all else simply show up on time, look like your headshot, be yourself, and have fun. And don’t be an ass to the person taking out the garbage.

I’m in Los Angeles, taking part in four days of auditions for a big project that happens in May. Some of you may or may not already know a little bit about it; rest assured that an update will be coming as soon as I can release the information.

For now here’s a hint: follow me on Twitter at @FollowDrew.

Also be sure you’re following me on Twitter at @dancemonkey, though that account may go dark once the real fun starts in early May.

File this under “What The Hell Were You Thinking?”

I heard (in a roundabout sort of way through Yuri) that a wise man once said “No bad idea ever started with ‘This may sound crazy, but…’”.

I thought I’d better get my thoughts out on this and in the process answer any questions that may come up.

There are a lot of little reasons that I quit my job. It’s not one of those “straw that broke the camel’s back” things, where someone yelled at me and I just snapped. The decision has been in my mind to quit this job for just about the entire 15 years that I’ve worked for the company. In the absence of a truly good reason to quit, I just never did!

My son is four, and lately he’s been shooting off about what he wants to be when he grows up. Being that age his decision changes almost daily, sometime within the breadth of a single sentence. Two days ago he said he wanted to be an astronaut… OR a garbage truck guy. Then he decided he might just do both, at the same time.

I (and my wife, hopefully? Sina?) tell him that he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up. I think we say that because that’s just what parents say, but also because we believe it to be true. The obvious logical conclusion he would draw from this is that Mommy and Daddy must be doing what they want to do, right? I mean, if you can be anything you want to be when you grow up then Daddy must be exactly what he wants to be. Why would he be anything different?

So there’s that. I’m not doing what I want to be doing, and I can’t think of a really solid reason to give Ronin as to why, were he to ask, which he will, because he’s smart and figures logical things out very quickly.

There’s also this: 15 years ago when I took this job I had no intention of having it for even one year. It just seemed like a good way to help me move to San Francisco.

Hehe, oops.

And there’s one more big thing, but this requires time-travel to the year 2015. Ronin will be 14 and will be asking me about my past, watching my old films and commercials and wondering (out loud) why I’m not an actor? He’ll probably ask something like “So what happened, did you try and it just didn’t work out?” What answer could I give to that? If I hadn’t quit my job then the answer would be “No, no I never really tried to make it as an actor. But dreams can come true son, I feel it in my bones!” Being 14, his response would probably be outward silence, but inward “What a loser, I don’t want to be like my Dad when I grow up.”

I’ve been teaching him that there’s nothing wrong with failure, failure is how we learn, failure is actually good, we learn more from failure than from immediate success. But how can that lesson jive with my never having just quit my dumb job and made a go of acting, and writing, and freelance work, and grip work, and whatever damn odd jobs I could get to keep my family afloat?

So for all of those reasons, I’ve quit my job. My last day for now is April 15th, so I’m still floating around there for the time being but I’m a bit of a lame duck. There you have it.

Oh, and there is actually one final, practical reason that fits nicely with my decision making process. As of May we no longer will need to pay for our son’s education, and as of June the car is paid off. That’s like $900 off the monthly tab right there, so what better time to jump into the deep end?

Thank you for reading, donations are accepted in the form of gift cards for toy stores, Target, Gymboree, Carter’s, and Amazon.com.

Check them all out, great stuff. Everyone did a fantastic job, and in this case I’m not just referring to myself.

So this week I had my first paid acting gig of 2010. Yuri let me eat a raw potato for something we shot back in January but he’s always feeding me undercooked food so that doesn’t count.

The paid acting job I just had was a commercial for sausage. Yes, I put sausage in my mouth followed by a blissful smile on my face, it’s what we actors do to make a buck.

I’ve also started writing more. I now contribute to an iPhone app review website (link in the sidebar there, right?) and get a little scratch for that too. It’s not much much money, I mainly do it to keep myself writing semi-regularly and to eventually start scoring some free apps. Why I would value a free iPhone app over the pay that’s an order of magnitude higher I don’t really know, but I just do.

I’m also almost done with my first “real” screenplay, and it’s a doozy. By doozy, I mean “doozily horrible”, but that’s fine. It’s supposed to be bad. When I’m done with it, it will be bad and finished, and that’s all I want. The road to my masterpiece is paved with many days of waking up at the butt-crack of dawn just to try and crank out 1000 words before I hit the train and head to work.

850 of those words will eventually be deemed utter garbage, but someone once told me that writing is hard work. I hit that person, hit him so hard his nose bled, but that didn’t change the truth of his words. I thought maybe scratching his face would do that, but no such luck. Violence truly does solve nothing apparently, though the scientist in me will be constantly testing that hypothesis on random passers-by.

Here’s hoping that by the next time you hear from me I’m on a 3-week road trip across the country for a brewery, drinking beer and dancing with the natives. I don’t hold out much hope for that casting, when asked if I had much road-trip experience I told them about how Sina and I circumnavigated Maui after she got stung by a Portuguese man-of-war in ankle-deep water. I don’t think I much impressed them with my experience, though I demonstrated that I’m a fine raconteur.

One piece of advice for this, my first full post of the new year: just don’t ever watch Valentine’s Day. I know, most of you wouldn’t want to anyway, right? Look, it’s just you and me here, we can be honest. I know that you actually think it looks cute, and even though when you’re with your friends you say how much you hate Bradley Cooper or Julia Roberts is a bad actress, deep down you just love the idea of them (and Jessicas Alba and Biel, and Eric Dane & Patrick Dempsey, and Jennifer Garner) all being in a movie together. Admit it! Valentine’s Day is supposed to be not that great, just schmaltzy and syrupy and fun and loving and just all of the things about the movies that we truly love to hate but somewhere inside we also hate to love.

Well the movie is a damn train wreck people, no fucking joke. It’s utterly incoherent, poorly written, and most of the performances are terrible. There are a few standouts and some cute scenes, but all in all this is a stinker. And just to kick you in the nuts before you even know what a wild ride you’re in for, the previews take the cake as being trailers for what can only be apparently the worst movies ever made.

Hope your year is going well, time for me to watch a decent movie.

Heading out tomorrow with a mountain of clothes that the stylist won’t use, for what I’m calling “Sausage ’10″. She told me to bring everything on hangers. Who hangs their t-shirts and sweaters on hangers? And socks, should my socks be on hangers too?