by Jen Rudin
Dedication
* * *
For my parents, Marcia Rudin and Rabbi James Rudin. Thank you for supporting my creative passions, schlepping me to all my auditions, and assuring me I was talented even when I didn’t get the role. Mother, I won’t forget to let you swim in my pool when I become rich and famous.
For my sister, Rabbi Eve Rudin. You are the best sister in the world and a constant voice of rational wisdom. Thank you for costarring in all of our childhood productions when I know you really wanted to be watching The Bionic Woman instead.
For Emma Mollie Weiner, my supercool niece. It’s clear from your always original Passover plays and love of singing that you’ve taken after your Auntie Jen. However, I would also be very happy if you decided to become a medical engineer or a rabbi like your mother and Grandpa Jim.
For Rabbi Elliott Kleinman. Thank you for encouraging me to read my book drafts out loud, and also for loving my sister.
And finally, for Andy Finkelstein. You encouraged me to bring the book to life and I am eternally thankful for your support. I love our life together and could not imagine a single day without you. Namaste, baby.
Epigraph
* * *
Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.
—BETTE DAVIS
Contents
* * *
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Janeane Garofalo
INTRODUCTION
THE CAT IN THE HAT SELLS BOLOGNA ON SESAME STREET
CHAPTER ONE
THE INITIAL INVESTMENT
CHAPTER TWO
AGENTS AND MANAGERS 101
CHAPTER THREE
LEAVE EARLY AND BRING A RAINCOAT: BASIC AUDITION PREP
CHAPTER FOUR
PILOT SEASON PANIC: AUDITIONING FOR TV AND FILM
CHAPTER FIVE
SOMEDAY I’LL BE PART OF YOUR WORLD: AUDITIONING FOR BROADWAY AND THEATER
CHAPTER SIX
GOING VIRAL: REALITY TV, WEBISODES, AND BECOMING A YOUTUBE SENSATION
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAKING MICKEY TALK: VOICE-OVER AND ANIMATION AUDITIONS
CHAPTER EIGHT
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?: COMMERCIAL AUDITIONS
CHAPTER NINE
DON’T TWEET US, WE’LL TWEET YOU: USING TECHNOLOGY TO HELP YOUR CAREER
CHAPTER TEN
STAGE MOMS: HOW TO SUPPORT YOUR CHILD AND AVOID MAMA DRAMA
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LOS ANGELES VS. NEW YORK: NAVIGATING FREEWAYS AND SUBWAYS
CHAPTER TWELVE
YOU GOT THE JOB! NOW WHAT?
EPILOGUE
THE FUTURE
Acknowledgments
Appendixes: Best Practices and Resources
Glossary of Useful Industry Terms
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
* * *
If only Jen Rudin had asked me to write a simple blurb for her book, we wouldn’t be sitting here at Le Pain Quotidien thirty-four days later.
For the last five weeks I have tried to prioritize, integrate, and concentrate effort in the service of effective goal execution: namely, writing this foreword. A blurb I could have banged out 48,960 minutes ago. Concise laudatory sentences are in my line. Write. Rewrite. Add. Edit. Stop. Instead, I’ve started and restarted versions of a foreword that in no way resemble what you see now.
The circumstances demand an explanation. What? Why? How could this have taken me so long?
Well. . .
Here’s the problem. Sifting through the necro-bag of disfavored auditions is upsetting. So many disappointments. Some of my losses are my fault. Some are not. All the rejection twenty-two years in SAG-AFTRA can offer. It’s bleak. Like Ethan Frome.
Would things have been different if I’d had Jen’s book? Absolutely, unequivocally: yes.
When luck found me in 1992, I had no training and very little acting experience. I just happened to meet Ben Stiller at a deli. A more enterprising person would have wanted to learn everything they didn’t know about acting, but enterprising would have interfered with my drinking. (I used to be a hoarder of alcohol, but I’ve given that up. Now I go to bead stores. I’m crafty.)
Focus, Janeane, focus.
Compose a foreword that is filled with: Insight. Information. Advice.
So many roles. There are so many acting roles out there that don’t have to be played by white people, men, young kids, or girls with “high erotic appeal.” (Low erotic appeal is a phrase once used by a director to tell me why I couldn’t audition for a part where the appeal—erotic or otherwise—was irrelevant. But I liked the sound of it and I put it on my résumé.)
Now I’m not going to sugarcoat it—acting is tough. So many possibilities go unexplored. So many performances unrealized. Tapes unsent, unseen. Landing that first role seems near impossible when you’re new to the game, and it all starts with the hardest part: the audition.
I’ve had plenty of audition fails in my life—my most epic fail was for the movie Mona Lisa Smile. The audition was once described as “the worst audition she’s ever seen.” She = the casting director. I hope she’s okay. The Spanish Armada was “the worst naval disaster ever seen,” and it took Spain ten years to recover. Le Pain, Le Pain Quotidien!
My least favorite auditions are the ones that never happened. Careers pivot on access to opportunity. Frustration comes when diversity in gender, age, ethnicity, and aesthetics are seen as liabilities rather than assets. This is unfortunately a very real part of this business, and it takes a strong person to survive the inevitable rejections.
My favorite auditions? All of them, the ones that did happen. Even when they sucked. I enjoy auditioning. I take it seriously. It’s a chance to perform. Learn something. Meet people. Sadly, most scripts are not written by the Coen brothers. This means you will be polishing a few turds. It’s important to get good at that because the better you are, the less turds you’ll have to polish.
The epically awesome audition story? My hero, director Scott Elliott, cast me in a play called Russian Transport by Erica Scheffer. I loved being a part of the New Group Theater, and this was the role that got me my Actors Equity Card.
Remember, through all the auditions, the good and the not so good: Jen Rudin is on your side. Most casting people are. Casting directors want you to do well, and Jen is one of the best out there. She cast me in roles as varied as the voice of a giraffe in an animated movie and a federal agent looking for Nikola Tesla’s lost designs.
My advice to you? Take Jen’s expertise, knowledge, and skill set, and combine them with yours. Absorb the information until it becomes habitual, reflexive. Do everything in your power to optimize your chances for success, because it’s a large school of fish out there, and they all want to be caught. Regrettably, show business is not a meritocracy. Act like it is. (If you want a meritocracy, check out the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.)
And so, dear reader, the choice is yours. Read this book. Learn it. Utilize it. Or become a common turd polisher. Trust me, you need this book. It’ll make things a hell of a lot easier!
“Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just brunch.” —Iron Chef Bobby Flay.
Now comes my French exit.
—JANEANE GAROFALO
INTRODUCTION
THE CAT IN THE HAT SELLS BOLOGNA ON SESAME STREET
In 1978, I was six years old, and my older sister Eve and I were obsessed with the television show The Brady Bunch. The show ran in syndication every night at six and then again at seven. The Brady Bunch dominated our daily lives so much that our family had to rush through dinner at six thirty to make sure we’d
finish in time for the next episode.
By age six, I was already a budding young actress overflowing with confidence and certain that I was the perfect girl to play the role of Cindy Brady, should they ever need to recast. Cindy and I were both younger sisters with blue eyes and blond hair. And we wore hair ribbons made of colored yarn in our pigtails. Desperate to play Cindy, I mailed my first-grade class photo to the local station that aired The Brady Bunch. In my typewritten submission letter, I asked them to please contact me for an audition should the role of Cindy become available. At some point, my parents broke the news that the Brady Bunch episodes were actually reruns and not taped live. I quickly redirected my obsession to Melissa Gilbert, on Little House on the Prairie, and the Broadway musical Annie.
My parents were very supportive of Eve’s and my artistic pursuits, which included weekly ballet classes. One day our Russian ballet teacher pulled my mother aside and said, “If I could combine Eve’s body with Jenny’s confidence and poise, I might have a ballerina. But I don’t.” So we quit ballet and I started acting classes at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Eve took up violin and music theory at the Mannes School of Music and started playing Vivaldi. I starred as Linus in our Hebrew school’s second-grade production of Charlie Brown Discovers Chanukah, and met my first talent agent at age eight. I loved being onstage; I was hooked.
My photographic memory kicked in during rehearsals, and I could recite the script by heart. I mouthed everyone’s lines during the performance while wrapping myself inside Linus’s blanket.
We lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, so it was easy for my mother to take me to auditions after school. I daydreamed of starring in my own TV series about a tomboy detective—Harriet the Spy meets Nancy Drew. I yearned to grace the cover of People magazine, like Aileen Quinn when she starred in the movie version of Annie. One small glitch in my road to stardom: I didn’t love the audition process. Each audition held so much promise and possibility, but I was often met with rejection. Though my parents always told me I was talented, even when I didn’t get the part, I lacked the ability to fully let go of the disappointment and took each rejection personally. I preferred to collect theater Playbills and pretend to be a theater producer, setting up an office in our living room. I also wrote my own original scripts and short stories. I devoured Frank Rich’s and John Simon’s theater reviews in the New York Times and New York magazine. My photographic memory made it easy to memorize which actor was replacing another in a current Broadway show. And little did I know, but a great memory would really come in handy when meeting the hundreds of actors I would audition in the future as a casting director.
My headshots over the years: 1984 (SUZANNAH GOLD)
1987 (GLENN JUSSEN, jussenstudio.com)
1988 (GLENN JUSSEN)
1988 (GLENN JUSSEN)
1995 (GLENN JUSSEN)
1995 (GLENN JUSSEN)
Epiphany #1: Getting Cast in an Afterschool Special
At age twelve, I had my first casting director epiphany at a final callback for an ABC Afterschool Special. The premise involved a group of five kids who lived in the same apartment building and often got into various forms of mischief. The casting breakdown* listed all the available roles in the movie, including a cute boy, a chubby boy, a trendy girl, a token ethnic girl, and a smart, sarcastic girl—the role I was up for. Over the years, I’d gotten feedback from casting directors that I possessed natural comic timing, so I always auditioned for the funny friend roles and rarely for the “dark and moody” girl. The one exception was in sixth grade, when I was cast to play a girl who died of typhus in a workshop production of a play about the Terezin ghetto during World War II. After my big death scene in Act II, one of the older actors carried my body offstage. I was out of my obvious comfort zone with this darker role, plus I had a major crush on the actor. After every performance, the director politely told me to “try not to smile” when I was being carried offstage.
It was the summer of 1985. I’d made it to the final round of auditions, and the director and ABC executives were choosing between two groups of kids. I’d had so many auditions for this particular television movie that I was practically commuting to the city on the Short Line bus from my fourth summer at my beloved Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center* in the Catskills.
My parents and I on our way to my first summer at Stagedoor Manor, 1982. I never played tennis. Sports were hardly the emphasis!
I peered at the casting director from behind my signature thick purple glasses. I was impressed at how she facilitated the combative audition environment yet somehow managed to put us at ease. When I left that final audition to board the Short Line bus back to camp, I’d made up my mind to become a casting director one day and share a brownstone in the West Village with my best friends from theater camp. Though ABC chose the other girl for my role, by some twist of fate, she turned the movie down after receiving a better offer for a Disney Sunday night movie. ABC asked me to audition one more time, so my devoted parents picked me up from theater camp at two in the morning and dropped me off at my manager’s apartment. Then they drove to western Massachusetts to attend visiting day at my sister’s music camp. My tireless parents were awake for about twenty-four hours, and it also happened to be their wedding anniversary that day. They wanted to help make my dreams come true, even if it meant sacrificing sleep.
When I got back to Stagedoor after the audition, there was a phone message waiting for me from my manager. I got the part!
1985: Here I am on set (far right) with the other child actors in the ABC Afterschool Special. Note my bow tie, feathered hair, and trademark purple glasses.
My college years, 1991. The ring in my nose and scarves were my signature look. This is right around the time I played Ophelia.
I spent the next ten years as a young working actor in New York City. Stints included Sesame Street, a bologna commercial that ran for years, and numerous plays for the Young Playwrights Festival at Playwrights Horizons. I had a fierce competitive streak that helped me overcome most audition rejection, except when I got close to getting cast on ABC’s Growing Pains and in the role of the younger cousin in Neil Simon’s hit Broadway play Brighton Beach Memoirs. Those were two lost parts that I never got over, and still haven’t at age forty!
When I graduated high school, I decided to leave New York and my acting career to attend the University of Wisconsin. I thrived in Madison’s vibe of political activism and the university’s excellent history program. In my spare time, I performed in experimental theater productions in an old warehouse on the other side of town. I played Ophelia in an uncut version of Hamlet which was called Hamlet the Miniseries, Parts 1 and 2. A bearded anthropology major I’d really liked had just ditched me, so I worked through my anger playing Ophelia as a cocaine-snorting blues singer dressed in combat boots and a Joy Division T-shirt. When I wasn’t playing Ophelia, I played Guildenstern using a puppet who talked in a falsetto voice. The actor who played Hamlet was often naked, and the entire “To be or not to be” speech consisted of him undressing, which viewers found either distracting or, in my mother’s case, extremely enjoyable. I wrote scathing theater reviews for the school’s daily Badger Herald newspaper, inspired by my idols Frank Rich and John Simon. When I mailed my clippings back to my parents, my mother politely suggested I ease up on my criticism and reminded me that I was reviewing university theater productions, not Broadway.
During school breaks, I interned for Meg Simon Casting and Marcia Shulman Casting. Today Meg is the vice president in charge of casting for Warner Bros. in New York, and Marcia spent many years as executive vice president in charge of casting for the Fox Broadcasting Company in L.A. Both women continue to serve as casting mentors to me.
After graduating from Wisconsin in 1994, I moved back to New York City, but neither Meg nor Marcia was hiring an assistant. I was equally interested in casting, directing, acting, producing, and writing. My father suggested I take a yell
ow legal pad and write down a list of career goals. My mother encouraged me to audition for a few more years so I wouldn’t have regrets later on. I called an agent whom I’d freelanced with when I was younger, and she began to send me out on auditions.
To support myself, I temped at Citibank and Grey Advertising, made espresso at Barnes & Noble, and taught Hebrew school. In 1995, I dressed as the Cat in the Hat in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, waving to the packed crowds from my parade float, then spent Christmas season parading around Macy’s in the cat suit. I had my own dressing room at Macy’s (in reality a large supply closet), and this gave me an elevated status compared to the hundreds of actors employed as Santa’s elves who had to share one common dressing room. I’d pass them by in my cat suit, certain they were hissing at me.
With my parents as the Cat in the Hat. Macy’s, 1995. When I shook my furry cat tail at my father, I heard him mutter to my mother, “We spent thousands of dollars on theater camp and acting lessons for this?”
Epiphany #2: Crawling Around Pretending to Be a Dog
My second and final casting director epiphany occurred in the late 1990s. My agent called with an appointment for a regional production of the hit off-Broadway play Sylvia, by A. R. Gurney Jr. Sarah Jessica Parker had just played the title role of a talking dog named Sylvia. Stephanie Klapper was the casting director.* She’d seen me audition as a child and was confident enough to bring me straight into the session attended by the director. Big mistake.
I wasn’t motivated and hadn’t spent time preparing the scenes. I tried to hide this by crawling around the filthy audition-room floor attempting to “bark” and “sit.” After a loud bark, I met Stephanie’s eyes. She was clearly mortified. It was pretty obvious how little I cared about acting at that point. She nodded politely as I snuck out of the audition room. In a state of shock, I walked up Sixth Avenue and ceremoniously tossed my box of expensive head shots into a trash can. Epiphany #2: my acting career was officially over.
