Actors Go Back to Jobs--If They Have One

As the commercial actors strike draws to a close, thousands of actors are preparing not to go back to work, as most workers would after a strike, but to go back to seeking work: auditioning, scanning ads, waiting by the phone.

But for many, the 6-month strike--which effectively ended this weekend with Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists board members approving a new contract--served only to underscore the precariousness of their lives in the lavishly profitable world of television commercials.

With strange, only-in-L.A. logic, the strike was reason for thousands to stay home from jobs they almost never get anyway--a strike on hope as much as a strike on work, because hoping is what actors do most of the time.

This hope is the sort that often veers toward self-delusion, leaving actors vulnerable to bouts of self-doubt and spells of wondering whether it is time, finally, to get out, open a business, go to school, move away.

“I don’t know an actor alive who hasn’t thought many times about doing something else,” said Randy Thompson, a 46-year-old Los Angeles-area actor.

Still, like most others in the industry, he was ready to head back into the world of auditions and uncertainty today after the board’s vote, with official ratification by the actors expected to be completed by the end of November.

Thompson is one of the few for whom acting in commercials has provided a comfortable, long-term income and a home for his family. Yet even he, with two decades in the craft and a career many actors would envy, said he coped during the strike by “telling myself I was having one of those low periods . . . there are times when I have gone six months without booking anything.”

Craftspeople Were Hit Especially Hard

The actor’s plight is unique in its severity, perhaps, but some of the same perils touch almost everyone in the commercial industry, in which luxurious lifestyles are paired with gnawing worry and sleepless nights.

The strike, in fact, was a particularly nasty blow for craftspeople, suppliers and commercial production crew members. Unlike many actors, such workers often depend on commercials for their sole livelihood and are at the mercy of any downturn.

From the most successful agents to the security guards on the sets, uncertainty over the next paycheck is part of life in this business. “It’s the most unnerving thing,” said gaffer Dennis Clark. “I’m 47, and the older I get, the harder it gets to take.”

It is actors, though, who seem especially ambivalent. For them, months spent not working--strike or no strike--allows time to contemplate their insecurity.

“You may be . . . good at your career, and it may not make a difference,” said commercial actor Susan Savage as she prepared to start auditioning again after the strike. “I never thought of that before the strike. I thought talent has to matter. It has to.”

Commercials are an important part of the Hollywood economy. On any given day, a quarter of the production in Los Angeles is commercials. Short on glamour but long on dollars, commercials keep lots of nonactors in boats and nice houses, and supply nearly 40% of the income of Screen Actors Guild members.

Commercials are the realm of the up-and-comings and the unknowns. There are a handful of recognizable stars, but mostly, even the top-earning actors in the industry are those to whom people say, “I’ve seen your face, but I can’t remember where.”

For actors, they are often critical to building a career. A single, moderately successful, national television spot can earn an actor $8,000 to $12,000 in a year.

But turning skills mastered for Shakespeare to the hawking of aspirin can be a little deflating. A few see the work as an end, but more typically, commercials are a steppingstone and a paycheck.

Despite their low status as an art form, commercials draw thousands more actors than they could possibly support. Of the 98,000 members of the Actors Guild, just 8% make more than $15,000 per year, while 80% make less than $5,000 a year. Many don’t perform at all for months or years.

“As an actor, there is no place that you are going every day to make you feel like you have a job,” said Marcus Folmar, a 26-year-old actor from Denver.

The hunger to act is so widespread, in fact, that it is one reason the Screen Actors Guild, the large actors union involved in the strike, exists.

“There are so many people wanting to do this so desperately, they would take whatever is offered to them,” says Greg Krizman, SAG spokesman. From the producers’ standpoint, the union also serves to sort the talented from the masses of talentless.

Hence the constant emphasis many actors put on tenacity and faith. “Have you ever been to a casting call?” said Verne Vihlene, a Laguna Hills producer. “You put out a call for a female, 40-year-old, all-American mom type, and 300 people show up for one part.”

Actors’ Other Jobs Caused Resentment

Standard practice is for actors to be the consummate freelancers. They juggle auditions, sometimes driving to several in a day. They pester agents for interviews. They pay their own costs for transportation, mailings, resumes, head shots, cell phones and pagers.

One of the biggest costs is time: Because auditions are held during the day, actors need to work at night, foregoing the opportunities of more promising daytime careers.

This tendency of actors to hold outside jobs sparked some resentment during the strike: “You can stay on strike forever when you have a job that’s not acting,” said Bob Mayberry, a key grip who borrowed on credit cards to get through the strike. “The rest of us just don’t work.”

Auditions are a numbers game. The more one goes to, the better one’s chance of getting work. At the same time, a spate of unsuccessful auditions can easily amount to weeks or months of essentially working without pay.

Outside work, many actors describe having a social network of actor friends struggling alongside them. They go to the same health clubs, take classes, share apartments and run into one another at auditions. It can breed camaraderie--or insecurity and competitiveness.

And while most actors say they love acting when they get a chance to do it, the stress of auditions, and the limited nature of many commercial roles, can engender “a huge amount of detachment from this job,” said twentysomething actor Quincy LeNear. “It’s like you just stand outside of yourself and watch yourself act.”

LeNear had a good year in 1999, earning about $60,000. But this year, the flow of work slowed and then the strike hit. He will be lucky to make $10,000, and has been supplementing his income by selling artwork on the side.

Time to Worry About One’s Career

The pressures, the rejections, the down time waiting for phone calls can be a toxic psychological brew, even for successful actors.

Identity issues are a hazard of the trade. “In this society you are what you do; you identify with your profession,” said Kathy Schrier, managing director for The Actors’ Work Program, a nonprofit group that offers help to actors seeking other kinds of work. “For creative artists, identity is even more important, the more so because the values of society say . . . it’s not real work.”

Actors interviewed sometimes offered unsolicited defenses of their professional identities, or the legitimacy of acting in general. They talked of disapproving relatives, or a sense that society views them as lazy or unskilled.

A more immediate problem is financial difficulties, said Schrier of the career program. “People have struggled so much that when money comes in, it goes out again,” she said. “We do a lot of seminars on the psychological relationship to money.”

Difficulties may sink in after a giddy start in the craft. Jane Wilson, a Silver Lake commercial actor, remembers a mentor telling her: “When you make the decision to be an actor, you let go of a lot of things people take for granted, from having health care to having a secure relationship.”

At the time, acting on a New York stage seemed a fair trade. “I was so in love with being a theater gypsy,” Wilson said.

Years later, although she has made commercials, Wilson has become more pragmatic. Like many actors, she was in danger of losing her SAG benefits during the strike. She and her husband-to-be had counted on those benefits to start a family next year. Coupled with the strike, the uncertainty “really makes you face yourself,” she said.

Some actors respond by redoubling their efforts. Los Angeles actor Cynthia Steele said the fears she felt during the strike made her even more determined to continue.

But even she is wistful. Like many actors interviewed, she would not give her precise age, but she said she is in her 40s and single.

“I envied the other ladies in SAG in the beginning of the strike who had husbands and families,” Steele confessed. “They would say, ‘We made plans together; we will move, open up a shop.’ I just couldn’t even go there.”

The financial stakes are higher too as actors grow older. Many described how the desire for relationships, family and security strains their ties to the craft as the years go by and they watch other opportunities recede.

Even successful commercial actors tend to lose momentum with age. Actors frequently end up seeking other careers later in life. Teaching, fitness training, law, massage therapy and acupuncture are common aims, Schrier said.

“When I’m not doing commercials, I look at the rest of my career and go, ‘Wow! This is sad!’ ” said Julie Pearl, a commercial actor from Illinois who has been in Los Angeles for two years.

James Weatherstone, who has been a successful commercial actor for 22 years in the New York area, went back to painting apartments during the strike to maintain his wife, daughter and newborn baby. “It pulled the mask down of how tenuous it all was, how acting was tied more to my youth,” he said.

Still, he plans to begin looking again for work in commercials, although he had recently decided he also wants to go back to live theater work.

“I really want my kids to see me on stage,” he explained. “I want them to know that their father was someone who wanted to perform--that even though there was a lot of fear and uncertainty in what I did . . . I stuck to it.”

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* COVERT ACTIONS

In a story made for TV, union actors used guerrilla tactics to target commercial-making in L.A. C1