Commercial audition today ...

I once had someone ask me why I never have bad audition experiences.

When I stopped laughing long enough to ask how he got that impression, he pointed to my blog.

Oh.

Hey, I have bad audition experiences. I don't write about a lot of them, because it's (A) unproductive and (B) this is a tiny town, and a little big industry. So even not mentioning names, I could potentially out or hurt someone -- which I don't want to do. Not professional, and not in my nature.

But I will write about today's experience, because it was ... not great. But it was less than stellar probably for reasons out of the hands of folks running it, and they had a great attitude about it, and were professional.

So, the audition window for my character was supposed to run from 5 to 6:30 p.m., with them "Absolutely having to stop" by 7 p.m. to get things together and FedExed out.

I got there at 5(ish), and had my audition at 7:25. Yeah.

There were wall-to-wall bodies, probably because some agency didn't send "a select few", but broadcast the opportunity to all of their talent, which isn't appropriate. But I'm just speculating. Besides, that's the agency's -- not talent's --fault.

So, what do you do in this situation?

I don't know what you do, but I know what I did. ;-)

I had a ton of people going for the same spot, so needed to differentiate myself, and wanted to take advantage of the time.

An hour and a half? A paragraph and a couple of tag lines? You can bet I was rock solid off book.

And I wanted to tweak the text (they said we could "make it our own"), without being disrespectful to the work the copy writers had done.

Easy. The copy was about a dog. I changed it from "he" and "him" to "she" and "her". Subtle, (I thought) better for the commercial, and made it more real for and applicable to me.

The piece was supposed to be serious and somber, but when I walked in the room, I so planned on being sarcastic and counter type and fun. But when I saw how stressed (but still professional) the casting folks were, I went back to more what they wanted -- not maudlin, but sensitive.

And I made sure to let the casting folks know on my way out I appreciated how patient and professional and non-negative they were being, in the face of a pretty stressful audition situation they didn't cause.

So, long night, not a great audition experience, per se, but a good experience.

Besides, any audition is gift ...