I have an actor friend who realized a few years ago that his acting career was essentially finished. This is a tough realization for an actor to make, which is why so few of them make it, and also why Los Angeles is filled with so many middle-aged waiters and waitresses who keep checking their phones for messages that are never going to come.
The problem isn’t, as some think, that Hollywood is a discouraging and cold place. The problem is that it’s not discouraging enough.
Aspiring movie stars can go years without an acting job, but just when they’re about to pack up and move back home, something comes along — a small role on a television sitcom, maybe, or a minor part in a feature film — and that will buoy their spirits for another few lean years of bringing you the wrong salad or making espresso and getting your name wrong on the paper cup.
But my friend is a husband and a father, and so he had additional motivation to face facts. He set a silent deadline. “If I don’t find acting work in the next six months,” he told himself, “I’m going to take serious action.” And when that deadline came and went without anything, even what we call an “under five” part, which is a part with five or fewer lines, he gathered his family around the kitchen table and made an announcement: “We’re moving.”
So, they moved out of town to someplace far enough away to finally kill his dreams of an acting career. They moved to a ZIP code so unfashionable, so red-state-middle-of-the-country, that there was zero chance he’d bump into someone at the local coffee shop or the carpool line who might say something about a new project with a part perfect for you or promise to arrange a meeting with a powerful talent agent, anything that might renew his hopes and keep him from doing what he needed to do, what we all need to do every now and then, which is to give up hope.
“Don’t give up your dreams,” people say. “Keep reaching for the stars,” they tell you. What they should be saying is, “Time to face facts and get a real job.”
My friend had made that difficult and painful adjustment and was ready to pack it in. He said farewell to Hollywood and never expected to act again.
Except that since moving to the middle of the country, he’s had more offers to work as an actor than he ever did back when he lived 10 minutes from the gates of two major studios.
What he is, out in the non-Hollywood sticks, is what the Screen Actors Guild and the studio financial masterminds call a “local hire.”
When you put together the budget for something that’s going to be filmed on location — that is, filmed somewhere other than a studio soundstage or backlot in Los Angeles — you often factor in the various tax credits and rebates some state governments offer as an incentive to shoot there.
But you’re required, if you want the tax credits and cash refunds, to make a certain number of your personnel people who live and work in the nearby area.
The terms “nearby” and “local” are elastic, of course. The same Hollywood money men who can somehow make a successful blockbuster show a huge financial loss on paper are able, with a few sly definitions, to define a “local” hire as someone who lives thousands of miles away from the production location. And as long as that person doesn’t live in Los Angeles, no one makes any trouble.
So here’s the problem: My friend has actually made more money acting in the years since moving away from Hollywood than he did in the five years before.
He tells me that he keeps making silent bargains with himself (“If I don’t get work in the next month, I’ll really give it all up, seriously”) but then, some small “local hire” role always comes along forcing him to postpone taking action.
But, honestly, what action can he take? Where else can he move? There is quite literally nowhere else more remote from Hollywood and the media business than where he is now.
Moving away, unexpectedly, has only made things worse by making them slightly better.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
