Anyway: here's is the latest chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Enjoy!
Chapter Twenty
Commercials and Shit
The first commercial I ever did I was dressed up as a giant green
number 5. No shit. The Texas Lottery was launching a new game – or, as some
would state it, a new way to take money from desperate people who had a better
chance of being struck by lightning while
being mauled by a grizzly than they had of winning the lottery. The game
was called Pick 3, and some ad guys in a room somewhere, who drank way too much
coffee and probably never liked actors, thought it would be a capital idea to
dress ten people up in giant, foam-rubber Gumby costumes shaped like numbers. I
was the fifth of those people.
Like this. Except I was Number 5. Also, I'm not black.
I think we shot the commercial
on the stage of The Majestic Theater in Dallas. I also thought the Majestic had
not been paying its utility bills, because the A/C was off, and it was summer,
and I was in a black unitard and wearing a huge foam costume that sealed in,
rather than ventilated, heat. I later learned that the producers turned off the
air conditioning because it was too loud, and it interfered with the recording
of our dialogue. That there were ten of us in suffocating costumes, in an old
theater in the middle of a sweltering summer, with no conditioned air, seems
not to have bothered – or even occurred – to the director, producer, and ad
agency folk. At least, not until a couple of the female numbers started to pass
out from heat exhaustion and dehydration.
I was the “spokesperson” for the spot, which
meant I had the most lines. There weren’t many, as this was only a thirty
second commercial. But I found it difficult to concentrate, suffocating as I
was and about to drown in my own sweat. People who work on commercials very
often have to solve problems on the fly, because when ad agency guys think up
the crazy shit they want actors to do, they rarely pause in their brainstorming
to consider potential problems. Example: Once we all got into our costumes (no easy
feat), we soon discovered that mine had a problem. Picture the number 5 in your
head. See that straight line across the top? That was resting on top of my
head, and my face was poking out in the sidewall of the 5. Except the costume
was made of foam rubber, and so the top line of the 5 drooped on either side,
making me look like a very depressed and sad number. What was needed was
something to place on the inside of the top of my costume that would keep the
foam rubber straight and true.
Somebody’s ingenious solution?
Glue a piece of two-by-four inside the top of the costume. And it worked. The top of the 5 stayed straight and true.
The problem (only for me, and nobody else) was that the two-by-four now rested
on my head. And the costume weighed in excess of twenty pounds. And I wore that
costume for ten-plus hours. I still have a groove in my head, in the shape of a
two-by-four.
I wasn’t the guy who got the
worst of it that day. The dude who played Number 0 was asked by the director if
he’d be willing to try a cartwheel across the stage – because what’s funnier
than a cartwheeling 0? As we all wanted to make the director happy (because a
happy director might remember you for his next commercial shoot), our intrepid
number 0 said yes, he could absolutely
do a cartwheel across the stage. So the camera begins to roll, and 0 takes a
couple of halting steps (range of motion in these costumes was a joke), and
begins a cartwheel, realizing too late that his arms are forced forward because
of the costume, and he cannot get them over his head, and so what hits the
stage is not his hands but the top of his skull. For one awful second he was
frozen in that upside down position, before collapsing in on himself like a
jelly donut with its filling suddenly, violently sucked out of it. Many hands
rushed to the stage, to see if 0 was still alive, which would determine whether
they gave him medical treatment, or whisked his corpse away to a rock quarry
somewhere far out of town.
0 survived the incident, and I
think the first half of his failed attempt at a cartwheel actually made it into
the final spot. I lost five pounds (mostly water), and required an IV drip to
rehydrate, two numbers went down with heat exhaustion, and 0 sustained a mild
concussion. All in the name of a lottery
commercial.
See? This shit is as glamorous
as you think it is.
Notice that I did not say, “All in the name of art.” To me, making commercials isn’t art. Me saying
that might piss some people off, but I don’t care. It’s my opinion, which is
just like my asshole, in that I have one, just like you, and I am entitled to
it. (My opinion, I mean. Not my asshole. Which is to say that I feel
philosophically entitled to my opinion, given the whole free-will argument, and
the First Amendment. I feel no similar sense of entitlement about my asshole,
though I am grateful for it, and try not to take it for granted. And I realize
I have now spent way too much time talking about my opinion. And my asshole.)
My point is, to me making commercials is craft. I would go so far as to say
that the best commercials are examples of good storytelling. But not art. Predator 2 is more art than any
commercial I ever made.
Which is not to say that I do
commercials because I can’t act. When
I first started in this business, I had the grandest of plans. I’d moved to
Dallas to do commercials for a year or two, build up my resume, and then head
out West to do sit-coms, and movies. But I don’t think I ever considered myself
an “artist,” even then. Acting to me has always been a job – a craft, like I
said. And it’s a job I’ve done for over twenty years. If I sucked at it, I
probably wouldn’t have been at it so long. That would be like a chef running
the same restaurant for twenty years, even though he was regularly poisoning
the guests with his shitty food.
The truth is, I like doing commercials. I LOVED doing a
television series, and if the right one came along I’d jump all over it again,
but I’m not disappointed that what I’ve mostly made is thirty and sixty-second
little stories. It’s a different kind of acting challenge to have to create a
believable character in the space of a minute or less. (Whether you like,
despise, or pity the character is beside the point. The point is, are they
believable?) That kind of thing requires good acting, and if you don’t believe
me, take a look at the tidal wave of shitty commercials in the ether. I’m an
actor, but please never call me an artist. Too many people I know who use that
term for themselves don’t know how to wash clothes, or change a fucking tire.
So, why haven’t you done more television shows and movies? A fair
question, and one that I’ve only recently assigned any brain power to. My
conclusions will probably disappoint you terribly, as they don’t involve drug
addiction, murder, or living a double life as a Jason Bourne-like black ops
agent (because that would be the most
kick-ass excuse for not doing more in my career, ever). The truth is, I get
bored easily. That’s why, if I ever do finish this book, let alone get it
published, it’ll be a fucking miracle. I. Get. Bored. I can never do one thing
for very long before I’m looking for something shiny. No, I don’t have ADD, or
ADHD, or AIDS, or anything else. I simply believe that there is a lot of interesting
shit in the world to see and do and experience, and I’m always afraid if I do
one thing too long I’m going to miss it.
The hardest working year of my
life was the first season of Wishbone. We
had 50 weeks to shoot 40 episodes of a show that was, from a production
standpoint, like shooting a new movie every damn week. We averaged 60-65 hours
a week when we were shooting, and that’s not counting the 8 to 10 hours I would
spend in the studio on Saturdays. And it wasn’t the long hours, the weather
challenges of working in Texas at any time of the year, the re-writes, the
myriad of things that can and do go wrong on a film set.
It was the fucking “normalcy”
of going to the same job, every day. Doesn’t that sound stupid?
I lived inside this one
character for a whole year. Maybe Daniel Day-Lewis can do that shit standing on
his head, but it almost drove me over the falls. By the end of that first year,
I was giving serious consideration to strapping on a back-pack and doing the
old Bruce Banner hitch hiking scene out of town. (If you never watched Bill
Bixby in the TV series The Hulk, you
don’t get that reference. Stop reading and go watch it right now. I can’t
believe you’ve never seen that shit.) When the producers told me we might not
shoot a second season, I wasn’t all that disappointed. I was exhausted. And I
had no clue how to operate in polite society (I’d never had much of a clue, but
being out of social circles for a year made it worse). I wanted – needed – to
do something different.
We
did do a second season, far shorter than the first, and then it was over. I
went from making a lot of money every week to making nothing at all, and
believe you me, I would have given anything to get that “normalcy” back. The
immortal 80s hair band Cinderella sums it up best: “Don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone.” We did a year in New
York, I befriended a mobster and learned some ju-jitsu, then we moved back and
I started doing commercials in earnest. I suppose Wishbone was – and still is – art, of a sort. But I’m still no
artist. I’m just a guy with a skill that made a small contribution to a larger
idea. As legacies go, I guess that doesn’t suck.
Next week, Chapter Twenty-One: Fuckin' Around With Fame
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