I knew a guy in college who was a few years ahead of me. Handsome, talented, tall, and a very good director. He came to New York City. I saw him about a year later when he crashed a party on the ****us. A bevy of girls sat around him as he told them that in the big bad city it doesn’t really matter if you do good work because it’s all about who you know and how good you are at politicking. The girls nodded sagely, admiring the brave warrior who was bucking the system after a hard year of futility.
Egad, people, what a sham. One year of exposure to the industry does not qualify as a real attempt. And seriously– is anybody really surprised to learn that the entertainment industry has a political side, or that having connections is helpful?
When the news talks about a successful actor their career path is usually described in a linear format: a certain performance led to a particular agent who secured a specific audition, and presto! A star is born. Not surprisingly, many actors start out in a market thinking of their careers in the same way. They look for a sequence of events of increasing magnitude that will, eventually, culminate in a big break.
This is an attractive way to think, and also logical, and it is certainly true that some very lucky people have enjoyed just such a path. However, for the vast majority of working actors, the path they tread is more cumulative than it is linear.
Example: many actors pursuing representation grow frustrated because they meet an agent, receive excellent feedback, and then nothing happens. From a linear perspective, the effort has failed. However, if you keep putting yourself in front of agents, and you keep getting great feedback, and you keep all of these agents updated on a regular basis– now you are taking a cumulative approach. Eventually, inevitably, one of the agents that has met you and liked you will be ready to work with you.
We never hear about all the agent interviews and auditions that didn’t pan out, only the one that did. However, if it weren’t for the fact that the actor invested in this cumulative process, the one time that it did work out almost certainly never would have happened.
Query: is it better to have one casting director that likes you, or forty casting directors?
You guessed it, it’s better to have forty. Why? Because it’s more likely that at any given time one of the forty will be casting a project that has a part for you in it. And if you’re constantly auditioning then you’re much more likely to book a job than if you only get an audition once in a while.
The thing about the cumulative approach is that its nature requires a significant period of time. Just to throw out a number, I like to say five years. A more honest answer is, it will take as long as it takes (William Fichtner, whom I discussed in a previous post, needed eight years before his cumulative approach yielded a “big break”-level result).
