Fully Committed

It has been too long since I've last blogged about my experience acting in Becky Mode's one person play Fully Committed, but the journey has been an intensely fascinating one and I am going to be publishing a lot more commentary about the experience soon.

I've learned a hell of a lot from this job and I'm eager to share a list of about 30 amazing things that I have learned or have been brought to my attention by doing this show.

I stopped blogging right about day five or six into the rehearsals not because I was too busy or didn't get "around to it" but because the time and energy it took to get this show up and running left no time at all for sitting and thinking about the experience while I was in the moment of experiencing it. 

I had imagined when I started the process that I would be able to recap each day's rehearsal after I got home, but I often found myself continuing to work on the show long hours after I left the theatre and just crashing after the work. Now that we are open and heading into our last two weekends, I want to look back on the journey and share my thoughts from the past with this, my now future, self.

Needless to say, I survived the rehearsal process, but there were times when I was not quite sure that would be the case. I'll share all of that with you as well, but for right now, let this short blog be a placeholder. Here is a link to a review of the show for now and I may have a few comments on that review at a later date, too.

A review:

A Fully Committed Evening of Entertainment at Shadowland Theatre

A slide show and some improv with the various characters of the show

In the meantime, if you've seen the show, please contact me and let me know what you thought. We still have two more weekends and we play on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville, NY. Thank you for your patience while I explored the play as deeply as I was able to. I look forward to sharing more of this all-engaging, sometimes-frustrating, ever-fascinating, often-humbling process with you soon. Keep Living Life Creatively and I'll see you on the boards!

WP

http://imdb.me/waynepyle

This Present Moment: Day Four and Day Five

The experience of life comes down to one of two options: either you are 

enjoying this present moment or you're not. Why not enjoy it?! #ypg

Day Four and Day Five of rehearsal each had their own challenges. I was exhausted after day four because we worked through the biggest chunk of the play and I was frustrated again that my mind wouldn't learn everything faster. I found out that I wasn't breathing, I was trying to do things too quickly and I was using a lot of negative self-talk that wasn't helpful at all.

Day Five kind of started off in a bad way because I was still feeling the stress of day four's rehearsal and couldn't get myself to calm down enough to just breathe through everything. I called Heidi again and she allowed me to vent a bit, which helped a lot. Sometimes just acknowledging that the doubts are there can be a very powerful was to keep them from taking control. It's when we resist what is there that it persists. So acknowledgement can be a very powerful tool for actors and others whenever we are feeling stuck. As usual she helped me to calm down just by listening very openly to my concerns and making a few suggestions.

I sat on a gazebo bench in the rain and breathed for a little while, starting to enjoy the day and the process and realizing that getting myself worked up wouldn't help. I went through my notes, went through my lines for the day and surprisingly, there was a lot more of them retained in my brain than I thought would be. I made a decision then and there to "enjoy the moment I was in" rather than wish for another and today's rehearsal went fairly smoothly. I still have a long journey ahead of me, but I am starting to learn the story and figure out what I need to supply when in order to make it as powerful and entertaining as possible.

I'm starting to look forward to the opportunity to get much more comfortable over this next week as I get the play deeper into my body and mind so that we can go into tech week with lots of energy and excitement about opening the play strongly for the audiences here in Ellenville.

After having a nice dinner of leftover homemade pasta and some delicious fresh tortilla chips from Gaby's Cafe, a wonderful local eatery, I took a long walk while going over the lines and beats and characters and I felt much better by the time I got back to the house, took a shower and then crashed for about an hour while my brain processed what I had learned today. On my walk, I stumbled upon the "haunted Shanley hotel" on my journey and took a picture of a Connecticut Paranormal Research Team vehicle that was parked outside. If you'd like more information about the hotel, visit http://www.shanleyhotel.com/.

Peace, Love & Misunderstanding or Day 3

Elizabeth Olsen, Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener in Bruce Beresford's PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING

I thought tonight's blog should be about the film PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING for several reasons. First, I'm in the film and the story about how I got involved is kind of interesting. Second, I'm feeling Peace, Love and Misunderstanding for the whole process of working on FULLY COMMITTED right now and wanted to share that with you as well.

I met Bruce Beresford, the film's director, after going to an open call for extra's for Peace, Love & Misunderstanding. They called me back in and I went to the BCDF film studios in Kerhonksen, NY to meet with the famous director. We had a chat, I read some scenes and he said that he'd love to have me do something in his film. He just wasn't sure what. I thought that was interesting but kind of unclear.

I showed up on the set that day as an extra for a dinner party scene. No one had sent me a script, and I didn't have any sides until that morning. I just had my nice suit and was hoping to sit next to Catherine Keener at the dinner table. Sure enough, they called us onto the set and I was just to Catherine's right. She introduced herself graciously, but was in complete concentration mode, fully in character and it was really amazing to watch her work. Bruce directed her gently, getting shades and nuances out of her character that must come across as really powerful on camera. I learned a lot from him that day as well. When I'm on set, I try to learn as much as I can while I'm there.

They served us our dinner party dinners and I was actually kind of hungry since I hadn't eaten all day, so I started to dig in. The props people asked me to take it easy on the food and I laughed, because I realized I was chowing down and everyone else was talking at the table, so they weren't eating very much. When we got to a certain part of the scene, the other extras were all agreeing with Kyle MacLachlan's character about how mundane and old-fashioned Eugene O'Neill's plays were and how they should never be performed. We all nodded in agreement, "yes, oh yeah, definitely" but it seemed kind of weird to me.

Prior to showing up on the set, I had done some research on my smartphone about O'neill and his plays, just in case some improv might be called for. Sure enough, Catherine stopped the scene and said, "I don't think everyone should agree with him, someone should disagree." So I said, "I have something." Then I choked back my asparagus, because I put myself out there. We ran the scene again and when everyone else was agreeing with Kyle's character I piped in and said, "Come on, the guy has like four Pulitzers" which is true. I may have exaggerated and said eight, I can't remember. I haven't even had a chance to see the movie yet, so I don't even know if I'm still in the scene. I am still listed in the credits on IMDb, so I'm assuming I'm still in the movie. I hope I get a chance to see it soon.

Anyway, Bruce cut and said he liked the line so keep it in. But I kept stepping on Kyle's lines so he told me to wait until after he said the line to throw mine in there. It was a funny and awkward moment and Kyle seemed kind of peeved with me, but I thought it was a good line and so did Catherine. After we were done shooting, she leaned in and said, "that's how you get ahead in this business." It was quite a thrill to work with and talk to someone whose acting work I really admire and I was also bumped up to a day player, which increased my salary significantly. It's the most I've been paid to improv to date!

So now, with day three of rehearsals under my belt for FULLY COMMITTED, I have to let you know I was a little freaked out tonight and was feeling a bit of misunderstanding for myself. I'm still worried about getting all the work done that needs to be done and I was kind of freaking out that I wasn't PERFECT in the part yet (after three rehearsals). My voice is also a little tired because we worked some pretty exhausting sections of the play today, so the worry about the voice holding up also came up for me. But after talking to Heidi, my wife, she helped me realize that I really just need to be focusing on where I am, not where I would like to be, because that is completely useless. She was right, of course, as she usually is, and I went back to work on my lines, still having some trepidation, but with a much more peaceful and loving attitude. As I worked on the lines and the work of the PLAY, I started to realize that, "oh yeah, I really enjoy doing plays and performing and since this frustration and the tiredness is all part of it, I should allow that to be there as well because it is all part of it and wishing that it wasn't there is using energy that I could be putting into getting the work done." Although it is frustrating right now, I have to trust the process and know that "the work will get me there, not the worry."

The film Peace, Love & Misunderstanding opens tonight and I'll be here in Ellenville at the Shadowland Theatre still working on my lines and blocking. I hope audiences will enjoy everyone's performances in the film, even the "party guest" who is stuffing his face and throws out a random line about O'Neill's Pulitzer Prizes. Let me know if you see the movie and if the line is still in there and whether or not you can tell Kyle MacLachlan was kind of annoyed with me. 

*Update: Saw the movie, line was cut, my facial expression was awesome! Keep LLC'ing people.

WP

http://imdb.me/waynepyle

Day Two: Rollercoasters and Cash

My brain hurts...

Oh. My. Goodness. Day two was tough. Lines I thought I knew went flying out of the door that was somehow placed in my skull the night before as I was sleeping. Even though I had worked on the script all day before I went in at 4, everything just seemed kind of...slippery. I was nervous and skittery and needed to calm down.

Confidence shattered, Brendan reminded me that it was only the SECOND day of rehearsal. I breathed. I stretched. We worked through each of the moments, clarifying what each of the characters wants and how Sam, the actor character, reacts to them. Adding in the blocking and tricky finger choreography with the phones was mostly the cause of the lines flying out of my brain, but as I repeated each beat, the familiar feeling of a play getting into my body and brain started to come back.

Every time I would go offstage and wait for Brittney, our stage manager, to call "Lights!", I felt like I was strapped into a rickety, old, wooden roller coaster that was clickety-clacking slowly up a very steep grade and as soon as I came down the now imaginary steps and started into the lines of the play, it was the same stomach-churning excitement as that first drop on one of those familiar amusement park rides.

Brendan is so great because he is very, very specific about the play and the characters. He's helped me so much as an actor and as a director because he can really see what the whole play needs and develops the moments to serve the play. Brilliant work which I really appreciate and aspire to. 

I stayed after the call time a bit to just go through everything several more times and when I got back to the actor housing, I was beat. I allowed myself to have a bit of dinner and watched a little t.v. and it seemed kind of strange because I have not watched any television since I started working on FULLY COMMITTED. I spoke to Heidi then I crashed into the bed, dreaming of Carolanne Rosenstein-Fishburn yelling at me from her Long Island mansion. (Carolanne is one of the recurring characters in the play.)

An interesting thing that happened yesterday was that I stumbled onto these wealth manifesting videos from some acting sites I was looking at. The strange way that I came across these sites was that I got an errant email from an acquaintance. She accidentally sent me an email, I contacted her, cleared that up, but in the process of trying to figure out where the email was coming from, I came across some acting groups on LinkedIn, a site I'm still trying to figure out. 

While looking at these acting group sites, I stumbled onto a wealth manifestation video. I watched it, listened to it with earphones and it said that "people would give me money" and that it would work very quickly. On my way to rehearsal, I walked by a van parked outside of Aroma Thyme, a really nice restaurant here in Ellenville, and I heard, "Excuse me, excuse me, do you want to make some quick cash? My mom needs help carrying all of these groceries upstairs."

I was kind of floored, because I had just been watching the manifestation video. I couldn't actually accept the cash though, because I was rushing to rehearsal. Interesting coincidence or actual manifestation? Maybe something BIGGER is on its way.

WP
http://imdb.me/waynepyle
@waynepyle

Day One: First Read Through

I can see through all of your motivations.

Usually on the first day of rehearsals for a play, you get to meet the rest of the cast and crew, exchange pleasantries, look at the sets and costume designs, fill out paperwork, have an election for an Equity deputy with the Actors Equity members in the cast and do a table of the read of the play. Today was unusual because the cast is just me! We still had the Equity Deputy election and I voted for myself unanimously to be the deputy for the production.

When I first came into the theater, Brendan, Brittney and Michael were onstage around the usual "table" and I sat with my back to the audience to do paperwork and say hi to everyone. We did the election, took a "5" and I realized that I was really uncomfortable with my back to the audience, so I asked Brendan if I could switch places with him. It just seemed more natural to be facing out to the house. Plus, I want to start getting the feeling that I'm telling the story to the audience as soon as possible. It's amazing to me, how much more relaxed I was just turning and facing the potential of those seats being filled with people. Brendan said the playwright may come see the show as well. That made me a little nervous and excited at the same time. I'm looking forward to doing it in front of an audience and have them help me create this world.

We read through the whole play, well I did anyway, and I found new things already as I was doing it for the first time and re-hearing it which is what rehearsal actually means, re-hear-sal. The pace was quick and we got through it in about an hour and six minutes, which seems to be about right. There wasn't a whole lot of laughter, but I know we'll get there. I also know I still have a lot of work to do, but Brendan was happy with the overall feel of the characters and where they are going. After the read through we went through the play character by character (there are 40) and I took notes on what to work on with each role. Mostly I want to make sure that the characters have strong wants and are "fully committed" to getting them. I want them to have a truth about them and not just have them be caricatures.

I came back to the actor housing after the rehearsal and started working on the lines again. The memorization still seems like such a bear, but I'm starting to feel like I'm getting a grasp on it. Because I was tired some of the lines I've known for weeks were a bit ragged but I know after I get a good night's sleep tonight and get some food in the morning, I should be good to go.

I did take a bit of a break in between eating dinner and working on my lines and stumbled on this very fascinating web series called, "KIDS react to" and "TEENS react to" by The Fine Brothers. The kids watch viral videos and the Fine Brothers show both the videos and the kids reacting to them at the same time. The multi-cultural kids are bright and funny and make great comments and the videos are well made with comments about the history of the videos as well. If you want to spend a few pleasant minutes watching internet memes and hearing the "darndest things" that kids say about entertainment on the internet, tune into "KIDS react to" or "TEENS react to." If you watch a bunch of them, you see the kids grow up, too, which adds an interesting poignancy to the series.

WP

http://imdb.me/waynepyle

The Journey Begins...

Studying my script for FULLY COMMITTED while at rehearsal
for Half Moon Theatre's 10-minute Play Festival. 

Here I am. At last. In Ellenville, NY. It's the night before my first rehearsal for Shadowland Theatre's FULLY COMMITTED, Becky Mode's one-person play about an out-of-work actor who works in the reservations office of a four-star restaurant in Manhattan. 

I moved into the actor housing, had dinner with my wife, Heidi, and my son and then saw them off as they headed home, worked on the first third of the play, Skyped with my Dad and Heidi, and decided to log on to Blogger to put down my first thoughts before we begin.

Nervousness is still there. This feeling of a long journey that has to be undertaken in a short amount of time is still there. Uncertainty over lines and character choices and storytelling is still there. The fear is no longer as prominent because I've spent some time with the script and I've been saying the lines and thinking about the people who inhabit this play every day.

It will be interesting to me, and I hope to you as well, how the process will work to get this play to where it needs to be for opening night. As I work through each section, I'm beginning to visualize ways to make the characters more real, more true, more wanting of something authentic and less just "voices" that I change to distinguish between who is speaking.

For those of you who don't know the play, Sam, the out-work-actor, arrives at his reservation job in the basement of a ritzy restaurant and his manager, Bob, and co-worker, Sonya, aren't there. The phones are ringing off the hook and he gets right to work putting everyone he can on hold and trying to handle everyone else's problems as efficiently as possible.

Needless to say, problems escalate at a faster rate than Sam can keep up with them, and as he tries to keep everything from falling apart he is also trying to figure out how to get home for Christmas to stay with his recently widowed father and he is waiting to hear if he is going to get a second callback for a part in a show at Lincoln Center.

The actor playing Sam also plays all of the 39 other characters who try to yell, plead, cry and cajole Sam into giving them what they want. By the end of the play, Sam has grown, based on some feedback he receives from his agent's receptionist and his willingness to stand up for himself.

It's a fun piece and will be physically and mentally challenging. I'm at that point now where I'm looking forward to seeing what the rehearsal process will bring out of me as an actor and a person. I'm tired as I write this, but look forward to tomorrow with a kind of nervous excitement like that feeling I remember getting when I stepped on to the big yellow school bus for that first day of school when I was a kid.

Right now, I've got to get some sleep so I'll be well rested. I'm going use one of my tried and true memorization techniques which is to put on my earphones with a copy of the play I recorded (on a cassette tape, no less, remember those?), so I can drift off listening to the story and hoping my unconscious mind will pick up some of the words and plot points my conscious mind is still resisting.

I've got several places in the script where I'm still not quite sure what happens next, but I know as I take the risks needed to play each character fully and as Brendan Burke, the director, guides the telling of the story, my body and mind will eventually start to know what part of the story needs to be told at just the right time to be effective. It's all a race against the clock of opening night, which I can already hear ticking LOUDLY in my ears. (or maybe that's just my high blood pressure)

They say "the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step," but I say it can begin with one word spoken on a stage. I'll be posting again tomorrow after rehearsal. 

WP
http://imdb.me/waynepyle

10 Chances to Make Great Theatre

Half Moon Theatre's 10-minute Play Festival at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, NY was an exciting night of theater that really showcased our company and the playwrights who participated in the event.

The theme of this year's festival was anniversaries and it was the fifth anniversary of Half Moon Theatre being established. The first play was GUS AND GLORY by Darrah Cloud, the director of the newly formed Playwright's Collective. The play is a wonderful exploration of how we relate to each other (or not) in relationships by showing a couple who go to a drunk psychic and become possessed by the spirits of their dead mother and uncle.

AUNT PITTIPAT is a tour-de-force monologue written by David Simpatico about the first anniversary of 9/11 and remembering the loss of a loved one who was more than what the New York Times called, "A Planner of Family Fun." The writing is lyric, powerful and moving and the images will stay with you for awhile, much like the images from that event.

DEDICATED, by Suzanne Bradbeer, is another powerful piece about a mother who does not want her to son to go off to college because she can't seem to move on from her husband's death.

DAY ONE is about a young, newly married couple trying to get used to each other at a cabin in the woods. The husband is highly allergic to everything, and his agitation also seems to be symbolic of the anxiety he is having on day one of his new marriage.

MARY'S EDDY by Y York is a surreal piece about a woman who starts to make up an "imaginary" lover when her husband is out of the room. She swaggers around, trying to look sexy, changing voices for both herself and her lover. When her husband catches her, he says his name, trying to bring her back to reality.

DEAR CHINA by Rob Ackerman is about three window dressers in Brooklyn who take turns addressing the titular country about it's woes and wonders. I had the wonderful opportunity to play Duke in the production.

GOTCHADAY is a play by Rob Handel that shows us two parents who have adopted an Asian boy and they are semi-celebrating his "gotcha day" when they made the trip to Hanoi to claim him. They take turns telling their version of that day. The wife cajoles the husband into singing the lullaby that he has been singing to their son because it is the old Tin Pan Alley tune, "Rockabye your Baby to a Dixie Melody." The husband worries that his carefully edited but racist tune will somehow corrupt their adopted child in some way, but he sings it anyway, because it puts him to sleep. I had the privilege of directing this lovely piece and it was well received.

PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE is a play by Jude Albert that I didn't get to see because I was backstage tonight and one of the actors was ill during the rehearsal. From the audience response it was quite powerful.

I also had the great fortune to direct Chisa Hutchinson's BLUE LABEL. A milquetoast of a man comes into a tattoo parlor every year on the anniversary of his wife's death to get a hash mark placed above his heart. This is the tenth year and the tattoo artist has broken out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue to celebrate. They battle verbally and are attracted to one another and eventually he takes a step forward and kind of asks the tattoo artist out at the end. A very sweet and moving exploration of how to move on from sadness and loss.

The final play is ANNIVERSARY SEASON by Jenny Lyn Bader and this one skips ahead throughout the years of a couple's life as they celebrate their wedding anniversary with threats of hurricanes and unwanted guests.

I enjoy being a part of this festival because I like that we can put together a moving, funny, thought-provoking evening of theater without too much fuss and worry. We hold the scripts in hand, use minimal props, costumes, lighting and sound and the effectiveness of good words spoken by good actors is hard to top. I recommend that everyone experience something similar at least once in their lives. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how moving and enjoyable an experience it can be. Keep LLC'ing!

*Update: We've already had another 10 Minute Play Festival this year (2013)!

Crunching the Numbers: IMDb Starmeter Rankings

Wayne Pyle in Philadelphia, PA

At least once a week, I like to go to my IMDb profile and check my ranking to see how much it has gone up or down that week. If the little arrow chart symbol at the front of the ranking is green, it means it has gone up, if it's red it means it's gone down. If I hover my cursor over the words SEE RANK it tells me exactly how much I've gone up or down in the last week.

As I hover over it right now while I'm writing this, it tells me that I've gone up 11,646 this week. Last week, I shot up over 106,000. In order to see the actual numbers, you have to look under IMDbPro which I subscribe to. From May 13, 2012 to May 27, 2012 I went from  being ranked 189,998 to being ranked 71,719. The lower your score, the better. Steve Carrell is currently 196. But if you go back to February 1999, when he was on The Daily Show, he was only ranked 109,267.

Some people think that the IMDb Starmeter rankings are related to the number of hits to your page, or the rankings of the films you are in, or even some mathematical formula that IMDb won't release, but no matter how it works, I just enjoy seeing how much it fluctuates depending on the amount of blogging I'm doing, how many Twitter posts I make and how much the films I've been in have been in the news.

I don't think the rankings really "mean" anything for someone at my level, but I do feel like I'm "active" in the independent film scene when my numbers hover around the 70's to 30's. People in that range seem to be working fairly often and doing interesting projects. Looking back at other actor's rankings is also interesting because you can get a sense of when they really took off and which of their projects  got them there.

In my everyday actor's life, these number don't really do much to advance my career. I'm busy right now trying to learn the lines for Shadowland's FULLY COMMITTED that I'm going to perform in June and July, preparing to do a performance for Marist's Center for Lifetime Study tomorrow morning and preparing for Half Moon Theater's 10-minute Play Reading Festival this Friday and Saturday. (Please join us!)

The feedback I'll get from these live theater events will be immediate and is part of the reason I love doing live theater. But the fluctuating numbers of IMDb's Starmeter rankings also give me a sense of satisfaction in knowing that I am part of the dynamic and fascinating world of filmmaking and that the films I've worked on are out there in the world affecting people's lives.

For other interesting takes on the IMDb Starmeter ranking system check out:

How to Boost your Starmeter Ranking by Tommy C. Kendrick

IMDb: The Basics and Starmeter by BENWHITEHAIR

Internet Movie Database on Wikipedia

Face the Fear

Wayne Pyle as Sam (and 40 others) in FULLY COMMITTED at Shadowland Theatre, Ellenville, NY.

This has been a particularly productive time in my actor's life. I played Franklin in Liza Johnson's film RETURN, starring Linda Cardellini and Michael Shannon, ended up in the trailer and it opened in some great theaters and had great reviews and lots of press across the country. I directed BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS at SUNY Dutchess. I just finished working on Eddie Mullins' new film, DOOMSDAYS, with Heidi. I'm prepping right now to perform in Becky Mode's one-person comedy FULLY COMMITTED at Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville, NY. I'm directing staged readings of two ten-minute plays for Half Moon Theatre Company in Poughkeepsie, acting in another, preparing two other readings for another Half Moon event, recording voiceover work for clients and working on my own scripts as well as finishing up one semester of teaching and trying to prepare for another at SUNY New Paltz.

Let's talk about the summer today. I've been working on Becky Mode's FULLY COMMITTED for a few weeks now, trying to get the 40 different characters I have to portray to play nice with each other and working on a few pages each day to get a vague idea of what each character wants, how they might sound, what physicality they might embody and what else I might have to do to fully commit to this whirlwind of a comedy. Each day brings new insights and new challenges and I'm looking forward to working with my director, Brendan Burke, to really get the play up on its feet and try to figure out to make this farce fly.

At almost 90 intermissionless minutes, the memorization task seems enormously daunting right now, but I know with steady work and concentration I'll soon have the whole story in my mind and be ready to explore these people and situations out there on the stage instead of in my cramped living room. This is the first time I'm taking on such a huge actor's task and looking at what I still have to accomplish, I would say that the emotion I'm mostly feeling is...SCARED.

I think it's healthy to be scared of certain things like heights, snakes, weird looking plants, some people, daunting acting challenges, because it's our body's way of telling us, “Proceed with caution. Harm could be done.” Even though it can be extremely painful at times, I do like to do things that scare me, that take me out of my normal comfort zone, because I know that in the past when I've “faced the fear” and done it anyway, I've always grown as a person and an actor. I've definitely gotten a few bumps and bruises and cuts and scrapes here and there, but what an adventure I've had in the process.

Usually when I feel that fear coming on, about memorization, auditioning, a role that I'm not sure I'm cut out for, I try to focus on the work process and see where it leads me, rather than focusing on the outcome that hasn't occurred yet. By focusing on what I'm doing now, how I'm doing it, and why it is being done, I become more present and that chattering voice that says things like, “You'll never get those lines memorized, you're not really very good at this, don't try THAT, that will never work,” starts to get quieter. If I don't do that, that little voice gets very, very LOUD.

By engaging in the struggle, feeling the feelings of unworthiness or inauthenticity or stupidity or whatever else might come up and acknowledging that those feelings are there, I find that they dissipate much more quickly than when I try to resist them and pretend they don't exist. By acknowledging the fear and focusing on the process, I'm often left tired, but with a great feeling of having done something worthwhile just because I did it despite being afraid that I might fail.

What are some things you've done that you've been afraid of but were later really glad you did them? I'd love to hear from you.

Gotta go memorize some lines, but I'll leave you with this video of my first tandem skydive at The Ranch, in Gardiner, NY. I recommend jumping out of a plane to get your mind in the present pretty darn quickly. Scared, yes, but an amazing day and an experience I won't forget.

WP

http://imdb.me/waynepyle

Welcome to An Actor's Life for Me!

Although I plan on covering many topics in this blog, the main focus will be on what an actor's life is like from day to day. There seem to be so many ideas about what being an actor means and I'd like to dispel some of the myths that so many young people seem to have when they enter this business and explore my own reasons for becoming and continuing to pursue an actor's life.

I have a lot of experience as an actor in films, television and onstage and yet I still struggle day to day with finding the joy in the work and finding the best way to express myself within my chosen art form. 

I like to do many things besides acting as well. I garden, write poetry and scripts, teach classes at various colleges, do voiceover work, make films, videos and art, use social media like Twitter and Facebook and I've dabbled in many different kinds of hobbies and pastimes. I love spending time with my children, my wife and my family. I love that an actor's life is a collaborative one, not just for projects, plays and films, but also in the everyday living of life.

I'm about to embark on a more detailed journey than I ever have before. I've been acting since I was very young when my parents first enrolled me on Romper Room, a children's television program from the seventies. I've been doing this for a long time, but this is the first time I've ever explored what and how I do what I do in any depth by writing out my process, thoughts, struggles and rewards.

I hope you'll join me in this journey inward and outward and that my words will inspire, educate and entertain you whether you are pursuing the actor's life yourself, or  just a curious onlooker. Thank you for allowing me to spend some time with you, I'm looking forward to seeing what we create together.

Since I live near Hyde Park, NY in the beautiful Hudson Valley, I'll leave you today with this quote from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose home and library is nearby. 

"Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples."

*Update: Renamed the blog YOU, LLC and I'm currently living in Tivoli, New York. Although I will continue to cover topics on acting, I'm also looking at how we can all live our lives more creatively. YOU, LLC.

WP 
http://imdb.me/waynepyle

Fade Out

It was announced recently that Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. They are re-organizing, but there are other film companies that have disappeared like Polaroid, Agfa, Ilford and Konica. I always get a little nostalgic when I hear these stories because I grew up wanting to shoot film, making my own darkroom in a bedroom closet and poring over film magazines and books, trying to learn the mystery of making images on sheets of plastic and chemicals. I once caused my whole family to run from the house because I poured stop bath, a highly concentrated form of acetic acid, directly into a developing tray without diluting it. Oops. You should really read the directions when playing with chemicals in a closet.

The footage above is from a 1922 Kodachrome film test. It is eerie and ghostlike with the flickering light and the tentative models giving us their best sensual gazes. The gestures and facial expressions of the models are definitely from a different era, but if you take away the period clothing, there is a sense of that could be me up there in the future a kind of "we too will someday be a faded image on a screen."

Looking at dead or dying technology always makes me think, "What next?" (Along with twinges of nostalgia for my youth and lost hair) How will my children watch images of me? Will they even be able to? Will technology advance so quickly and change so radically that we won't even be able to access the old technology or will it all be absorbed into some kind of "super-cloud" network where any image, any moving image throughout history will be stored and accessible by everyone?

The SOPA Act and the protests yesterday are important because if we let corporations or governments take away our right to access the past, to access images, ideas, stories because part of those images or stories might have "property" belonging to a corporation, we will then be letting the corporations tell our stories for us. We could lose the boundless creativity that comes from open access to images and ideas. We could lose our stories of who we are, where we've been, what we've done.

Although I love film and its processes and chemicals and messiness and feeling and "there-ness", I don't love it's expense and the amount of time it takes to produce a finished product. I'm looking forward to seeing where we go next and I wonder what my son will be looking at and thinking, "Wow, that was the beginning of that technology, how crude that was, look at how far we've come!"

The Lytro camera is an interesting emerging technology that uses a sensor to capture the light field in front of it with no focusing. You focus the image after it has been taken. It has an 8x optical zoom and f2 constant aperture. It looks like an old slide viewer with a square aspect ratio. Will it take hold? When will it be available? Check out this video http://bit.ly/qBtc4a or visit http://www.lytro.com I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find the camera fascinating.

WP 
http://imdb.me/waynepyle

Myths and Sleepovers

So, people are taking a look at these blogposts already, something I'm surprised by. We're having our first winter storm since the freak snowstorm of Halloween '11 and little ice bits are pinging off my window as I write.

I watched the film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, tonight and recommend it as a Netflix streaming option. It was written and directed by a fellow tweep, @DRobMitchell, who is currently working on Ella Walks on the Beach. The film was gorgeously shot, fun to watch and has a mid-90's feel with it's lack of cellphones and chunky t.v.s playing brilliant snippets of films that I seem to remember from that time, but from the credits on IMDb, were almost certainly shot just for the film.

Following Marlon Morton, Claire Sloma, Amanda Bauer, Brett Jacobsen and other gangly youth around a Detroit suburb on a wet evening (lots of gorgeous water imagery) as they try to find their way through the myth of the American sleepover and discover what they want out of life, felt real and rang true to my memories of similar sleepovers as a hormonally mixed-up teen in Pennsylvania. I remember having grandiose ideas that crashing the girls sleepover was going to result in some kind of magical sex party or a sudden complete understanding of what women were all about but they usually just ended up with a bunch of girls throwing stuff at us as we laughed at them in their pajamas and ran away. Later, we told highly exaggerated stories about our prowess with these girls to any of the guys who weren't around and mostly never spoke about any of it again to the guys who were with us. 

The film left me wondering about my own myths from when I was younger and made me want to write down some of these stories too. I remember the one time my friend George and I decided to tell each other's parents that we were going to stay at the other person's house. We just wandered around in the humid summer night, climbing fire escapes, talking about random things, buying snacks at the convenience store and running through people's backyards. We had found a six-pack of beer that someone was saving in a hole in a creek and we drank three beers each and got tired and dizzy and just went to his house and crashed on the sofa bed down in the basement. The next day I had a mild hangover and ate breakfast at his house. He had three sisters, two who were twins, and I had a crush on all three of them. I used to look at them the way Rob in MOTAS does and I always wondered if they ever knew. Years later, I've been trying to track George down, but he's fallen off the map, even in these days of Twitter and Facebook. It would be fun to ask him what he remembers of those days we would wander around the neighborhood trying to figure out who we were and dreaming of who were about to be. Thank you for the great film, @DRobMitchell, would love to work you on something in the future!

WP 
http://imdb.me/waynepyle

 

Twitterish

So I listened to a webinar the other day presented by @dallastravers. She's a marketing guru who coaches actors on how to market themselves more efficiently for this crazy business. 

Today I decided to implement some of her ideas. I used to ignore Twitter completely, but after listening to the webinar, I realized that it's quite a powerful tool. I tweeted about the coming premiere of RETURN and I sent the tweet out to several new people I've started following. I only have 150 people following me on Twitter, but with retweets today I was able to reach a potential audience of half a million people!
 
I was amazed and now a firm believer in what @dallastravers is teaching. I'll keep you posted on how everything goes as I put these ideas into play. Follow her for more great ideas!

WP 
http://imdb.me/waynepyle

P.S. Since writing this I'm over 729 followers as of Tuesday, May 22