Actorfest Blast

Hey everyone, if I met you or if I didn’t, I hope you enjoyed actorfest and meeting us as we enjoyed meeting you. So what did I learn and what should you learn?

Well for one thing there are 101 things to buy and do for your acting career. The big question is…do any of them work. The way I look at it…well, “You never know” or “They might work”. Problem with that is I can’t advocate (nor should you) doing anything that ‘might’ work. If you can’t prove that something works or worked for someone else, why would you do it. Would you join a gym if you didn’t know that working out makes you fit and look and feel better, based only on what the sales person said? Hopefully not.

Actors are deluged with offers from service providers that claim they will help your career but few of them offer any type of proof that anything they do or sell provides tangible results for your acting career. Since most of us don’t do these things for fun, we expect results for our hard earned money.

I wandered the aisles of actorfest for a while and the array of people and businesses was staggering. How would an actor have any idea of what to do and/or what not to do? I am a working actor and I sure couldn’t tell. Well actually I can tell what works and what doesn’t. What doesn’t work is doing anything that is what I would call random. That is sending out communications to people who don’t know you…what is known in the real world as junk mail. Unsolicited email is actually illegal. It’s not quite there in the postal world yet probably because they need the business. But the results are probably about the same…slim to none and slim just left town. So much time and money is spent on things where an actor attempts to market themselves without any prior contact. What actors fail to recognize (even though they know it deep down) is that unsolicited communications are rarely welcome. Sure casting and agents need to meet new actors, but getting something in the mail is hardly a way to meet someone. If you want to meet someone, get introduced or introduce yourself.

My message here is that it is far more productive to restrict your communications to people you already know. If there is someone you want to reach, but don’t know, then ask around. You’d be surprised at how few degrees of separation there are between people in the same town. Hollywood like every other city is a lot smaller than you might think so put the word out and get that intro. Then your communications will be sooo much more powerful.

See you on the other side.