Whether you’re experiencing it yourself or whether you’ve been peering in with puzzling concern over the last handful of years, despite the Oscar buzz, things are… not great in Tinseltown and its environs.
January and February are known as pilot season–a time of year when all the Network Bigs (CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC) would each develop and produce roughly 20 pilots apiece as contenders for their fall line-up. At what are called the upfronts in May, they’d gather in New York to promote and screen them, advertisers vying for hot ticket shows, and you’d learn which pilots had been shelved forever, and which would go on to premiere in the fall. As an actor, this was Christmas. Who feels the January gloomies when you’re on the brink of the Seinfeld lottery? New Yorkers would sun themselves in LA for a few months, angling to land their breakout role, hustling to be one of the roughly 500 actors who would be chosen as bonafide TV stars (or, as our contracts call them, series regulars).
Just before March 2020, I was careening towards this magical Christmas morning like a sugared-up kid, fresh out of Sundance with a portfolio of pilots I’d written, starring in a short film that was already circuiting prestigious film festivals. I’d built a 10-year-career in TV and film, with more razor’s-edge close calls to achieving superstardom than I care to admit. I was sure (as so many of us were) that 2020 was the year that It Was Going To Happen.
And then, oh boy, did It Happen.
Fast-forward through COVID (and the never-ending global health disaster in its wake), an absolutely unhinged era in politics, an endless sprawl of streaming that once felt exhilarating but is now glutted and exploitative, the runaway train of human-less technology that literally MAKES MOVIES YOU TYPE INTO IT, and the insidiousness of everyone with a TikTok aggregating their own audience of followers and fans. And a flurry of strikes from underpaid and overburdened workers, trying to keep up with housing costs and health insurance when our paychecks have dwindled to a starving, near-endangered species.
We’ve just blown through pilot season 2024, and I barely noticed. Was it because I had COVID? (Not no.) Or was it because this year was a sad birthday party held by Dwight Shrute, announcing that a meager 3 pilots would be produced?
There’s something particularly awful about surviving an ongoing natural disaster, and then being thrust into the thick of several others that are unrepentantly manmade.
But here’s the unexpected silver lining to this stupid, maddening, skin-melting level of disregard and greed that brought us here: it has finally destroyed the Golden Handcuffs that were once essential to being an actor.
Even if superstardom was not in the cards for you, the life of a working actor was an endless string of concessions. You had to live in NY or LA, you could never take a full-time job with benefits, you had to do exhausting gigs like waiting tables or catering or some questionable third thing, and then… the Jump:How-High Ratio.
Your calendar was karmically doomed if it was full of anything but auditions and bookings. Sometimes even if it was full of the wrong bookings. Vacations, marriages, children, and sickness would almost guarantee you’d be discarded like leftovers in a staff lounge, quickly replaced by a human Lean Cuisine.
I’ve missed weddings, funerals, and fully-paid vacations. I’ve missed birthdays and baby showers. When my lifelong friend Tammy was getting married, her mom advised her, “I know you want Jen to be your bridesmaid, but what if she gets a big part?” I watched my cousin Ruby’s wedding from a livestream in a hotel room in LA, instead of dancing with her and my beloved late aunt in the streets of New Orleans.
The saccharine cocaine belief that it was all worth it could legitimize any heartbreak. Because with That Job, you could get health insurance. With That Job, you could put your kid through school. Pay off your loans. Buy your mom a house. And the race to get That Job required such surrender over the stewardship of your own life, it could keep you distracted and running from The Something that you know, deep down, is very, very wrong.
When 2020 Happened, my mad dash towards that shiny promise screeched to a halt. Without auditions and fashion week and film festivals and plays and premieres and screenings and and and—it was just… me. Seemingly without purpose.
Some actors dealt with it in …unexpected ways.
Some people made bread. Some sang sea shanties.
I felt My Something quake to life.
Each day I did not answer to fickle Hollywood was a day that I was confronted by this long-exiled self. Crone and taskmaster, she demanded every moment, insisting that I owed her. I knew that I did. I sat with her every day, even if I was shaking.
The more space and audience I gave My Something, the more she caught the light, the more her voice and touch softened with an easy knowing that she promised could be mine.
I began to sing to her, dress for her, take terrifying leaps of faith in her name. She began to sing me, write me, dream me visions of what happiness could look like if I let her in. Time discovering her was like perfecting my sourdough starter.
It’s been nearly 4 years since she settled into the home of my bones, and we are still discovering each other. We have cleansed and cried and CRIED oh sweet God so much crying and we’ve demolished and built and planted. We’ve written screenplays, essays, and now a stage play. I have crushed her hand in mine when I’ve pressed delete or restart, whispering a prayer that this, too, is for her.
Smelling my reclaimed anarchy, Hollywood twirls around my feet like a cat, still testing me. I audition, and I write, and I write. I return to the theatre. It’s all so different, less precious, less perfect. But I am more lit up and on purpose than ever. Because I know when the camera rolls, it’s finally me they’re really seeing.
xx Jen