You Get What You Pay For: My unlikely opinion on paying for seminars.

This is an interactive blog post. I encourage you to click the hyperlinks as you read it to get the full experience. 

There has been what I will diplomatically call a” gentle debate “on the Bitching Post section of Audition Update these past few days. It concerns the perceived preferential treatment a casting director (CD) here in New York gives to auditioning actors at their calls if they have paid to take part in one of the CD’s classes. Since I neither know this CD personally, nor have I had the experiences described by those taking part in the debate, I will not comment on the manner in which they conduct themselves, for better or worse, in their auditions. I am an aggressive, opinionated, loud-mouth jerk, but a FAIR, aggressive, opinionated, loud-mouth jerk. The debate did, however, get me thinking about the often controversial practice that has become so popular in our industry as of late; paying our hard earned money to take classes or single-night seminars with industry insiders as a means of getting seen by casting directors, agents, and managers. I mean, come on, a single night seminar can cost $30-40 dollars. That is the equivalent of an entire lunch shift at a BR Guest Restaurant (two if it’s August and they are filled with heavily cologned tourists!).

I feel strange writing about this topic because I count among my personal friends individuals who have conducted these classes and seminars, but I feel that this fact will keep me honest and force me to examine the issue from both sides of the topic and not just from my broke-ass actor point of view.  That is, however, where I will begin.

The term “payola” is often thrown about when taking on this topic. If you are not familiar with this term, payola is a contraction of the words “pay” and “Victrola” (for those not familiar, a Victrola is what grandma and grandpa used to call a record player (a record player is what mom and dad use to call a CD player (a CD player is what your older sister used to call an iPod))). It refers to the once legal habit of large record companies paying radio deejays bribes in order to get their songs played on the radio (a radio is that thing you only listen to when you are in a car (a car is that thing that causes you to say “it feels sooooo weird to be driving” when you go home for the holidays and realize that you are now faced with the conundrum of going out OR getting drunk, but not both; but I digress)). Payola is now the term that is used in a situation when you are describing the action of paying a third party that has influence in the free-market on how you and your competitors make money. It is not so much a bribe, as they are not the ones who decide how the money you seek to make is spent, but they certainly have influence.  So is that what is going on here? Are we unfairly being forced to pay to get a leg up on our fellow actors or are we just conducting smart business?

I am not going to lie. Every time I have confirmed my credit card number over the phone for the actor/receptionist on the other end at Actors’ Connection or The Network, I feel kind of dirty. Not the good kind of dirty that involves handcuffs and a safe word. The bad kind that makes me feel like I just willingly took part in something that might be wrong because “what can you do, that is just the way things are.” But is it wrong? Do we get something out of it other than the opportunity to slap our headshot and resumè in front of them and give our best interpretation of some monologue, tired standard, or up-tempo rock cover because, you know, it shows them you are totes right to be called in for the American Idiot tour (by the way, the last section of that sentence was dripping with disdain for the use of the word “totes.” Can we all just agree that this word, like hipsters, is an awful phenomenon that makes everyone around you not involved in your conversation want to beat you to death with a dictionary)?

We do need to examine the other side of the scenario though. We need to really examine those rich, powerful, and mysterious individuals on the other side of the table and find out where the hell they get off charging ME to meet with THEM.  I mean they should be going to every showcase and off-off-Broadway production they are invited to, every night, because it’s is their job to find new talent damn it! Well, that might not be exactly true. For starters, if you think that your agent, manager, or CD is Bentley rich, or even BMW rich, you need to back away from the Season 4 box set of Entourage that your dad got you for Christmas because he wanted to awkwardly show you that he supports your career choice, even though you both know he wishes you had double majored in finance. That just isn’t really the case. The hard truth is that those people on the other side of the table are probably just as poor, or in some cases, even more so than you are.  Yes there are a few big CDs and agents in the city that probably scratch out a decent living for themselves, and probably make more than mom and dad. But mom and dad don’t live in the city (I want you all to take moment to think about, while they may be wonderful, how terrible it would be to have your parents live in the city. After you recover from that thought and possibly pour yourself a glass of wine to help get over it, you can return to the blog). The CDs or agents tax returns are not necessarily reflecting their quality of life. For the most part, they are also trying to get by doing something that they love.

What those individuals may lack in Benjamins, they make up for with a wealth of knowledge about the dos/and don’ts of the biz. Do they deserve to get paid for that? I can honestly say that I have taken at least some pieces of knowledge from the majority of the seminars that I have been to, aside from just having the chance to stick my 8X10 in their face. Now of course there have been a few that were, how shall I say this delicately, money-grubbing whores, but they have certainly been the exception and not the rule.  I took a class from Paul Russell a while back on marketing myself as an actor. Now, I could tell you that the whole reason I took that course with him was to gain a better understanding of how to market myself, but that would make me a big, fat liar. I know I really took the course to have access to a CD once a week for a month and then to have access to the agents he put me in front of afterwards. And I am sure he knows that too. But, I DID learn a lot on how to market myself, and he got paid for his knowledge and everyone came out ahead (by the way, that is a good class).

But this brings us back to the idea of “seminars.” I use those quotation marks with the full knowledge of what they imply because, while I acknowledge above that I usually take something away from them, let’s cut the bullshit. YOU ARE PAYING TO BE SEEN BY THEM. Now, is there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. Before you get you dance belt in a bunch, hear me out. When we go to meet with someone at a seminar, we are asking them to spend time with us above and beyond the normal scope of their office hours. I don’t like working for free, and I don’t think that they should be expected to do so either. Sure, you could take the alternate route of sending submission upon submission, postcards for showcases and such and that would be fine, though more time consuming. I know plenty of actors who have taken that route with great success. But that is not what you want to do. You don’t want to spend a few months getting on someone’s radar, so you are paying for a shortcut.

Now you may say, “Well, that’s all fine and good, but I have been sending so-and-so my headshot and resume and postcards and business cards and showcase announcements and review clippings and Christmas cards and locks of my hair for years now and they have never called me in.” To that I would say, “Why are you talking to a computer screen like a crazy person?” I would also say, “So what. Maybe they just don’t want to meet you.” That may sound harsh, but is an often ignored reality of our profession. You just might not be appealing to them…yet. So you are paying to MAKE them take notice of you, and I think that is fine. Whenever you want something faster, you are going to pay for it. I think that is just how the market works in any situation, so why should ours be any different?

I also think that there is another aspect of this argument that should be examined and that is that it actually helps actors be seen. Imagine for a moment that these seminars were free. Getting in would be almost impossible. Anyone who has been to an open call at the Public can imagine what that scenario would be like on a regular basis. Seminars would also be few and far between because who wants to continually work for free? Even if the CDs, agents, and managers spent those nights going to see your off-off Broadway showcases for free on the nights that they would normally be conducting seminars, they would probably be seeing fewer actors in your show than they could in a seminar. So by paying them for their time, we are actually getting them to see more actors in an efficient manner.

Let me finish this by saying that this opinion (which has surprised even me as I wrote it) is based on the notion that the individual behind the table at a seminar has a reason for being there. We have all heard, “That was great, but we are just not looking for anyone right now.”  Sometimes this is just a kind way of saying that they found you about as entertaining as the dry toast they had for breakfast. But other times, that is the God’s honest truth. They are sitting there without any intention of taking on new clients. If you are one of those people, you are part of the problem and please don’t waste our time by lining your pockets because you don’t have anything to do on a Tuesday. But if not, if you are looking for medium height, medium build, brown hair, blue/grey eyes, well then here is my $33 and I will be performing Jay-Z’s 99 Problems because even though I am whiter than season tickets to the Rangers, I totes think I am right for Usnavi in the In the Heights tour.

Tom Lapke is sometimes an actor, waiter, adjunct college professor, and the founder of Audition Update. He is currently in rehearsals for a series of one-acts with the Brooklyn Labyrinth at the Bococa Arts Festival. He was unfortunately beaten to death with a dictionary after typing the last sentence of this blog post.