Yes, can I possibly help you...?

I am going to London on Friday to act in a short arthouse film. Yes, people, my hobbling, limping, stuttering acting career is at an all-time high now, as I have had a week of being sent scripts 'for your consideration'. The director of the London short googled me (we worked together in South Africa) and asked me to be part of this film project. A day later, I got a phonecall from a director who had seen me in someone else's film and offered me a lead role in her play (maybe the girl-on-girl kiss in that other movie did the trick?)

My disappointment at my trip to LA being indefinitely postponed and the frustration with the writer's strike and how the bad guys are not stepping up to the plate to sort it out, is somewhat lessened by the work I have coming up.

But first... London Transport!!!!!!!!

Laugh, cry and wet your pants

A new week sees a new onslaught of spam...
I recieved a notification today of a workshop in Paris for professional actors that covers the following skills:

Learn to laugh: splintering laugh, uninhibited laugh, laugh till you pee your pants, till you're in knots, noisily, abruptly, joyfully, sadly, seriously, jokingly, mockingly, singingly, like a madman...

Learn to cry, blubber, sob, whimper: from rage, shame, laughter, joy, tenderness...

...and shed tears whenever you want to.

The classes run for four weeks, once a week for two hours. And it only costs €160 to learn all this - sales tax included.

(Please excuse me while I shed a little shame-and-rage tear on behalf of all actors who get ripped off by skanky coaches who insult us with workshops such as this one. After that, I shall probably have some ice-cream and shed a little joy-and-tenderness tear at the wonderful flavours Haagen Dasz invents to console us. Thankyouandgoodnight)

oh, the joys of a successful career!

Uhm...so I met with those people today and.... I shall be presenting the pilot episode of this mobile phone TV-thingy with a South American co-presenter. It appears I might be pretty enough for a postage stamp-sized screen and maybe one day, when I'm big, I can get my chance on the silver screen. But you gotta start little, right?

PS It's a hip-hop/R'nB music and celebrity gossip show!!!!! My friends will never believe this. Pwaaaaahhh.

mobile screen ridicule

I have a meeting with some producers tomorrow... for the pilot for a weekly TV presenting job. Celebrity gossip and music videos for mobile phones, actually. If I sound less than excited about this whole thing, here's why. Not only is it for a screen that is hardly larger than my earlobe, but to add insult to injury I have been briefed that these producers are sharks, cheap-asses who pay badly and they don't give a rat's ass about talent or artistry - they are looking for a b e a u t i f u l girl to present their insert on mobile-phone-TV.

Be beautiful tomorrow, make a real effort, okay?

the director who is taking me to the meeting said this evening.

Uuuhhhmmmm... the best I can do, is show up. I can't change my face overnight, if that's okay with you. I mean, I'd REALLY REALLY like to, but... even a real effort ain't gonna help, I'm afraid.

Sigh. I HATE this profession.

Snow White...again?!

In the ironic turn of events that is my life, my current acting gig sees me portraying the Disney character I couldn't even identify last time I had a run-in with her. I am Snow White, along with 16 other Snow Whites in a performance art piece being put on in a Contemporary Art Museum in Paris on September 16th. The artist directing the piece has been working with Snow White as a symbol of consumerism and American cultural imposition for about 4 years. The dark side of SW, if you like... the last time a gang of them were seen in Lyon, they were all carrying machine guns... so, who's going to choke on their apple now?

Viennese Big Cheese

I had another big-wig meeting today. The third of my career. I somehow manage to wangle an appointment with a very (read VERY) high-ranking industry professional and then....? Well, either I take high-ranking abuse, or I have an interesting meeting that took at least three weeks and hundreds of phone calls to set up, and when it's over, it's over. The people I see are too high up in the hierarchy to be involved with actors and casting - they have whole departments that do it for them! When you (in this case, me) get sent off to the casting people, you (in this case, I) can't get a decent meeting with them cos they're always casting and cancelling all my-boss-sent-a-random-person-I-don't-have-time-for meetings! And somewhere after the 96th cancelled appointment, you (in this case, me) give up.

For now, all I can say is that today's big cheese was a very kind, intently-listening cheese and I didn't take any abuse or ridicule. But I haven't had to deal with the production department yet...

You can overshoot your mark and come in way too high sometimes. Ask me, I know.

preview....

whewwwwwwww.....we made it.
Teacher's preview was last night. It was a success. After the calamities of the last few days, this is a) well deserved (all the stress, panic and hard work paid off!) and b) very, very neccessary because it was getting ugly. So, YAY!

We had an interesting role-reversal thing happening in our theatre. Instead of having a diva in the cast... we had some diva-action from the backstage and lighting crew! Us actors (there are only 4 of us) are a surprisingly well-behaved foursome. We were sometimes very crap on stage during rehearsals (I speak mainly for myself), but we could all learn a thing or two about how to be SERIOUSLY touchy from our lighting-designer (bless him, he did a GREAT job - once he got over his 'creative differences' with the director). So while the director and lighting designer were making decisions about light and dark and trying to agree, a mini-war broke out between the assisstant director, production manager and stage manager, who were all involved in scene-changes during a run-through. Between scenes 5 and 6, the stage manager was just about ready to push the set over and 'stage' a walk-out (fun pun alert!), hissing bitchiness at her colleagues and competing with the refusal to co-operate in the lighting box. I was awestruck.... how is it that actors have such a bad rep???????

We'd better throw a huge hissy-fit tomorrow, or we won't stand a chance of being taken seriously! I had suggested a cat-fight in the dressing-room to my co-star this evening - with scratching and shrill shouting to scare the boys in the dressing-room next door - but her reply was: "You're scaring me. I'm not good at being bitchy." Clearly, she won't last long in this business! :-P

update on the play

Just a quick post to say the s h i t is hitting the proverbial fan in the play I am currently acting in. We open next Monday - our preview is on Sunday. It is a very difficult piece. Extremely challenging. Panic is in the air. The smell of FEAR hovers over the backstage areas in clouds of gloomy stench... technical troubles abound... it ain't pretty.

BUT... all is not lost! My lifeline to LA comes via my trusty little iBook... and bar that pesky 9 hour time difference, help is at hand! LA is crawling with very dedicated craftspeople, who really know their acting stuff. I am lucky enough to know one such gem and she is coaching me, via my Plantronics headset, to prepare me for this mother of a play. It is an emotional rollercoaster ride and she is strapping me in and sending me off ... via iChat. We spent 1.5 hours dissecting the first 3 pages of my first scene. Line by line, beat by beat, moment by moment. When I need her to see a pice of equipment I use in the play, we google it and she has a photo of it right there. We are doing the most invaluable work here - working on the emotions and movements and events of a physical play and we are continents apart!

HOW BRILLIANT IS APPLE???? HOW MUCH DO I LOVE THE INTERNET???? Now, if Steve Jobs could just fix the time-difference, I'd have his children.

McTourism

Ladies & Gents, please forgive me, but I am 'plenty' proud of my neologism, McTourism. Now let me explain...

Although we had a lovely time, I can't help feeling like we did the Mcdonald's tour of Ireland... i.e. the Drive-Thru. 17 villages, 4 towns and 2 cities in 3 days, with a coffee, lunch or dinner thrown in here and there.

"you can tick another village off the list"
"cool - what's next?"
"kilsomeoneorother - shall we stop?"
"naaaah! We can see it from the car!"
"yip... tick another town off the list. Wow - Ireland is fantastic! You see so much in such a short space of time and for an authentic experience, you only need to roll down your window and kiss a gob-covered rock backwards."

However, some(travel) is still better than none(travel). It still broadens the mind a wee bit and it certainly whets your appetite to return and spend more time in a place. I do intend to go hiking in Ireland...someday. Time permitting. When I've ticked Japan and India off my Mclist.

PS My keyboard is doing that horrendous thing where everytime you want to place the cursor somewhere in the text, it puts itself 11 characters to the RIGHT of where you wanted it to go! I CANNOT remember how to make that nasty, useless, ridiculous function Go Away... and I don't think I can use the arrow keys much longer - the left arrow is about to wear off! grgrggrgr

Anyway, where was I?
Ah, yes, well... here's a spot of news about the Hollywood Reporter. I am no longer in Hollywood because I have an acting job in Vienna, Austria. So, Hollywood is a very clean, pristine, ordely place in central Europe for the time being. Thank you for your understanding.

An Evening at the Mark Taper Forum

One of LA's most prestigous theatres is the Mark Taper Forum. And since a friend taught me a little trick about how to get affordable tickets (he, he - it's perfectly legal, you just have to be in the know...) I was able to go and see a play there!

For some reason, however, I ended up at 'Senior's Night' as I seemed to be the youngest person there on a Sunday evening. There was an excessive amount of shuffling, whispering and coughing going on throughout the play. Towards the end of the performance, someone's medication started wearing off. This lady, sitting on the far right of the stage, started remarking on the action rather loudly. In an emotional moment, the lead actor brought a photo onstage to give to his niece - we all knew who was in the photo, but we were patiently waiting for the actor to tell us himself. After all, that's what he is paid to do. Well, this lady wasn't waiting for anyone. She yelled out, " It's the BROTHER in the picture." She was so proud of her helpful contribution that she continued to reveal ALL from the sidelines until her peers eventually shut her up. When the cast received a standing ovation, she pointed that out to them too, lest they didn't notice that the audience was on their feet. Who says the theatre is dead? It may be on it's last hip-replacement legs, but quite dead it ain't.

yoga diaries

A day in the life of a non-union, non-work permitted, non-American actress hanging out in lalaland...When at all possible, my day starts out with a Yoga class in Runyon Canyon. These classes are offered 7 days a week, outdoors, at the foot of the canyon where everyone and anyone (celebs included) come to walk their dogs (and their bottoms) up the hillside and back down again. There are various trails of varying degrees of difficulty one can take and all are rewarded by a spectacular view of the city and surrounds.

I'm using 'spectacular' here in both a positive and negative sense (regardless of whether this is a grammatical possibility). After strong winds or rain, the view is spectacular as you take in the Hollywood sign, the sprawl from Los Feliz to Hollywood, Century City, Beverly Hills and even a glimpse of the ocean in the distance. The sunlight reflects off the buildings and the hum of sirens is like the faint buzzing of hyperactive mosquitoes.

On other dry, sunshine-filled days (like today) the prized view is spectacularly bad. Pollution and smog as far as the eye can see. In fact, the eye cannot see very far at all and those happily sun-reflecting buildings are all but invisible behind the dirt in the air! This is no exaggeration - you cannot see the Century City high-rises for the smog. It's SO depressing - especially when you're out on a hike and that is what you're looking at. In these conditions, terminating one's respiration would be an appropriate, albeit life-threatening, decision - either way you lose. It amazes me that Los Angelenos are so patently aware of how dirty their city is... yet NO-ONE wants to give up the SUV....

meeting Charlize...

A few years back just before she won her Oscar for MONSTER, I went to a screening of the film and a Q&A with her. I had been obsessed with running into Charlize since I first got to LA on a 90 day tourist visa. Anyway, 88 days into my (first) 90 day stay I not only saw her, but spoke to her, shook her hand, hugged her, asked her stuff, told her stuff - she is a very, very accessible movie star.

As always, after 5 questions in the Q&A the dumb interviewer starts on the "well, we have to wrap this up - last question"-theme. Charlize says: "Oh, why? I'm having such a good time. Do we have to go??" To which the audience howls: "Noooooooo" - so the questions continued. However, after about another 20 minutes the management of the Laemmle Theatre was adamant that we stop, so Charlize took the session into the lobby. Just like that. She was like:" Wait, let me come down to you guys " (she was on a stage) and walked to the lobby with the audience in tow, stopped there and continued to answer people's questions and chat to people individually. The crowd thinned out, but I had rented the spot next to her left elbow and for the next 45 minutes, I was not moving from there. I guess I was being a real hog, but I did let other people ask questions too and about 3 people wanted autographs. In between, I kept firing off questions and I told her that I had been waiting to run into her during my time here and now it had happened. We eventually got kicked out of the lobby, so we carried on on the pavement. She told me she also came to Hollywood on a 90 day tourist visa and asked how long I had been here and what I was going to do and I told her... and she listened. She wanted to know where I was from in Jo'burg and when I said Randburg she was all: "Oh, I went to De Kruin art school there!" Anyway, I won't give you every question and every answer..blah, blah, but I am absolutely amazed at how available she is to her public.

There was a guy filming her with his handycam, so I know I'm all over that home movie - I just did not want to leave! I know it probably looked a little excessive, me glued to her elbow like that, but I had hatched this plan to ask her in Afrikaans (so that no-one else would get it), if she had time to have tea with me...I chose tea, because "koffie" in Afrikaans still sounds like coffee in English! Well, at the last moment I thought I may be pushing my luck and then I thought a guy near her was probably a bodyguard, so I dropped my plan. As it happens, this guy walked her to her car, but then she got in and he walked the other way. I could SOOOOO be having tea with her right now! I considered racing up to the car window with my proposal....but, luckily, I realized just in time that that would have been a very dumb move. Maybe. Actually, maybe it wouldn't have been such a dumb move after all - ? oh, W H A T E V E R. Now that my little fantasy about running into her in Hollywood has actually come true, I have a new obsession - how to invite her to the screening of my short film ... never fear, I have a little plan already (and yes, it does involve the use of Afrikaans).