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1. TIFFANY HINES has booked her first Series Regular role on a pilot. She will be playing the part of SHANE in the new pilot, “Americana.”
2. JULIA WHELAN has graduated from her Tea Sommelier studies and is officially credited. Her tea company is called, “BreedLove Blends.” She has just completed training the staff at the “Marriott Napa Valley Spa and Hotel” in proper tea making and service along with setting up their tea menu for the Hotel and the Spa. They will be carrying her specific blends. She is also currently shooting a Hallmark Movie called, “The Confession” where she plays the part of ALYSON. She has also just been nominated for an audiobook award.
3. JULIE MCNIVEN tested for the part of EMILY in the pilot “First Cut.”
4. DANIEL DITOMASSO continues to frustrate the industry, while simultaneously being frustrated by the industry. He booked a part on the new pilot, “Last Resort” and was blocked by Business Affairs from getting his Visa processed. Job lost. He was also going to be tested for the new Pilot, “UNTITLED BERMAN/WRIGHT/DINNER PILOT” for the part of Dr. Brett Robinson. So far, they are refusing to deal with the Visa issue as well.
5. MAX ADLER is currently shooting a Guest Star spot on the new Pilot, “Last Resort” playing the part of STERN. He will also be returning to “Glee” for another episode right after that.
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I was quite moved by this article about Jeff Zaslow. Who, you may ask, is that? Nobody, just somebody we look for in ourselves.
The brief e-mail arrived late on the morning of January 24. I keep looking at it.
It was from Jeff Zaslow. We first became friends more than 25 years ago. We got together as often as we could when we found ourselves in the same town, usually for long, laughter-filled dinners; Jeff, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, in recent years became the author of multiple big bestselling books, most of them on inspirational themes.
He was going to be making appearances for his latest book, “The Magic Room,” and he had looked at his schedule and saw that he had a few days between speeches in the South. He knew that I’d been holed up in a hotel on the west coast of Florida, trying to get some writing done. He was going to take those two days between speeches to join me and just hang out.
So we talked on the phone, and arranged the days. Today — Sunday, March 4 — is the day he was to arrive.
On February 10, on his way back to his home in suburban Detroit from a book signing in Petoskey, Michigan, the night before, Jeff was killed instantly when, according to police, his car skidded on a snowy road and was hit head-on by an oncoming semitrailer truck. He was 53.
Jeff’s wife, Sherry, his three daughters, Jordan, Alex and Eden, and his parents, Harry and Naomi, have suffered an unfathomable loss. The obituaries and tributes written by his friends and colleagues have all centered on Jeff’s never-ending thoughtfulness and compassion. The tributes have been entirely accurate; the constancy of Jeff’s kindness was one of life’s rarities.
Today, when Jeff should have been arriving for our time together, I’d like to pass on a lesson from him that I believe can be used to great effect by anyone, regardless of his or her line of work.
It has to do with the book that first made him a bestselling author, “The Last Lecture,” written with Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. The book was a publishing phenomenon: 5 million copies sold in the English language alone, translations into 48 languages around the world.
Some people thought that Jeff got lucky with that book.
But luck had nothing to do with it.
In early September 2007, Jeff was working on a Wall Street Journal column about a trend he was hearing about at U.S. universities. Professors were thinking what they might say if they had to deliver one last lecture, and were in fact giving those lectures, summing up what had been meaningful in their lives.
As he was reporting the piece, Jeff learned that a professor at Carnegie Mellon — Pausch — was going to give what might literally be his last lecture. Pausch was dying from pancreatic cancer.
It was going to be inconvenient for Jeff to go from Detroit to Pittsburgh for the speech; there was a problem with the price of the flight, and the schedule, and he also had obligations to attend to in Michigan that day. It would have been much easier just to call the professor and get a quote, or have the university send him an audio or video recording of the lecture. Remember: Jeff didn’t even know, at that point, whether Pausch’s lecture would warrant a whole column.
But he got up that morning in Detroit and — Jeff being Jeff — decided that he really ought to see for himself.
He was an established and respected Wall Street Journal staff member; no one at the paper would have faulted him for doing a quick interview with Pausch on the phone.
Jeff got in his car and drove more than 300 miles from Detroit to Pittsburgh to sit in the audience and listen to the speech. A five-hour drive there, and then a five-hour, 300-mile drive back.
It paid off spectacularly, of course. The column — moving, tender, insightful — was a sensation, and the book that he ended up writing with Pausch gave Jeff a new career in the top echelon of American authors, and provided financial security for his family.
But — and this is what is important — it was nothing he didn’t do all the time. In his work, he always went the extra step — the extra hundred steps. He never took the easy way.
I remember, seven or eight years ago, well before “The Last Lecture,” Jeff had come to Chicago to interview an old-time vaudeville performer. To the best of my recollection, the newspaper story was going to have something to do with audiences, or audience reactions. The old performer was going to be one sliver of a longer piece. An easy phone-call interview.
But Jeff didn’t do things that way. He flew to Chicago and, suitcase in hand (he hadn’t checked into his hotel yet), met me at the restaurant where we had arranged to have dinner. At one point we talked about why, at this stage in his career, he still pushed himself so hard. He said he just wanted to look into the man’s eyes when he interviewed him the next day. He felt the story would be a little better that way.
At the end of the meal we went to the coat-check window; they had taken Jeff’s suitcase down a long flight of stairs to store it on a basement level. Jeff didn’t want the young woman to have to carry it up the stairs, so he went down to get it. I stood there and watched as he came up the steep flight of stairs, visibly weary, huffing, sweating, lugging the heavy bag; we looked at each other and both of us burst out laughing.
“Look at you,” I said. “You look like ‘Death of a [cuss-word-adjective] Salesman.'”
“I know,” he said. “Why do I do this?”
We both knew the answer. He did it because it was the right way to do a job. And it doesn’t matter what a person does for a living. It can be the lawyer who stays late to look up a few more citations of case law, to give his client the best possible chance. It can be the teacher who goes over the lesson plan one more time, adding something vital to it at midnight, even though the students or the school administrators will never be aware of the effort she has put in. It can be the factory worker who takes it upon himself to check the specifications a third and fourth time, wanting to be absolutely certain that the product will be as close to perfect as humanly possible.
Does it always pay off, as Jeff’s 10 hours on the road paid off with “The Last Lecture”? Of course not. It hardly ever pays off that big. Most times, your boss, your colleagues, your own family will never know that you put in the extra effort when you didn’t have to.
But you’ll know. That’s what counts. And when the day finally comes when you have your big success, when you get your big break, it won’t be because you made the extra effort once. It will be because you made the extra effort every time.
Jeff did. And that’s the lesson I’d like to pass on for him. Especially today. The silence at the dinner hour tonight is going to be awfully loud.
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One of the crew, Jimmy Brighton, came across this passage in Tom Robbins, “Villa Incognito.” I found it applicable to many of your individual pursuits.
-This is a girl speaking to her teacher/fatherly figure-
“The fine things you taught me can be seen on one level as a negation of the wisdom passed down to me by my ancestors (Zen-piqued) – but I am, I think, the better for the lessons. One cannot arrive at no-mind unless one has a mind to start from. The brighter the mind gleams, the softer the silence of the eventual no-mind, just as the overturned bucket that was once brimming seems so much emptier than the bucket that never held milk in the first place. Thanks for filling my little pail.”
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Greetings fellow Prysirr-ites! I hope this message finds you all well and in good spirits, and that you are having a successful, stimulating, fulfilling, fun, and rewarding pilot season thus far. This is Max Adler. I just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the one and only, the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Geof Prysirr. In the past couple of weeks, I have had a couple of my Glee episodes air, that I worked on in great detail with Geof. The work has earned me much praise, amongst industry folks, peers, the media, my team, the producers and the network. Working with him allows me to walk onto that set with the complete confidence and ownership of who I am, and the work I am about to bring in. It is impossible to not feel 100% prepared and excited about your work after coaching with Geof. He has assisted in bringing me from a two line co star on Glee three years ago, to now shooting over 20 episodes and having the fortunate opportunity to play one of the most complex and compelling characters on the show with a great internal depth, which resonates strongly with audiences worldwide. In addition to the work on the show, Geof and I have spent hours discussing global issues, technology, the human experience, the human connection, human motivations and desires and struggles, etc….in order to prepare me for the many interviews I have had this past week. Not only is talking with Geof extremely fascinating, stimulating, thought-provoking, and mind blowing, but this man will give you the most brilliant one-liners and quotes that you could ever ask for. If any of you are about to do interviews, I can not recommend strongly enough how beneficial it would be to discuss everything with Geof because again, to walk into these interviews feeling so confident and with the pride and ownership of your beliefs and what you are about to say, is so freeing and exhillirating. And trust me, once you have 4 cameras in your face and 30 crew members and your team all 5 feet away watching you, you will want that extra preparation to just relax and blow them all away, which Geof has provided me. Well, ok, that about wraps up my love letter to Geof! But, in all seriousness, the man is truly brilliant, and has a natural gift that can’t be denied, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found him, and to have worked and partnered with him through this wild journey. Thank you all for your time, and I wish everyone the very best of luck in all of your continued endeavors and goals!
Sincerely,
Max Adler
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.
I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.
Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer…..
…..Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?
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If you ever doubted yourself during Pilot Season. If you ever wondered what it might be that you didn’t do, could have done, or did do to lose the part, please take a moment to read this. There what we do, and then there is everything else.
http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/02/guys-are-not-going-to-want-to-fk-her.html
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One of the individuals I work with shared this feedback story with me and I felt it was relevant to all of us.
So, my manager sends me feedback for a project this past week. The feedback read as follows:
“(actor name omitted) did well but it’s not going further.”
I called my manager and said the following:
“Don’t you remember, I passed on that pilot? I never went to that audition.”
Manager:
“Oh, that’s really weird. Got it.”
Manager email to the actor’s team:
“Please ignore … (the actor) didn’t even go in.”
Moral of the story: At least the feedback was positive.
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As of February 1 2012 the following has occurred:
1. JENNIFER BRONSTEIN has been cast in the part of “ANNA” in the play “CLOSER.” If you would like to see the production, it will be at the Avery Schreiber Theater (North Hollywood) and runs from February 17 – March 17, Friday and Saturday each week.
2. JULIE MCNIVEN has been cast (her first offered part!) in an independent feature film called, “THE CATERPILLAR’S KIMONO.”
3. VALERIE AZLYNN has been cast in a GUEST STAR part for the show SOUTHLAND.
4. NICO EVERS-SWINDELL has done an AUDI COMMERCIAL that will play on the SUPERBOWL and will begin airing shortly.
5. MAX ADLER has been cast in the FEATURE FILM “23 BLAST” (formally SIGHT UNSEEN), playing the part of CAMERON. He is also returning to GLEE as DAVE KAROFSKY in some upcoming episodes.
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For any of you interested, Gary Oldman will be speaking at LACMA this Friday evening. It will be preceded by a showing of “State of Grace” at 5 PM, and then followed by a screening of “The Contender” (Great performances in this, all around). Go to the link below for specifics. Tickets are $10.00 a piece for non members. If you go, I will look forward to seeing you there!
http://www.filmindependent.org/lacma/films/an-evening-with-gary-oldman/
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EnterPrysirr 