Search This Blog

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Talent Agency Pet Peeves. In this installment, Talent Agent Pet Peeves #9: The “I CAN DO WHAT ROBERT DE NIRO and JACK NICHOLSON CAN DO” School of Acting video reel.


Talent Agency Pet Peeves. In this installment, Talent Agent Pet Peeves #9: The “I CAN DO WHAT ROBERT DE NIRO and JACK NICHOLSON CAN DO” School of Acting video reel.

Hey, I don’t believe in ghosts. But whenever I see a video of an actor trying to say “You talkin to me? Well there aint nobody else here…” or “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth,” I start to shiver.

Why?

Because next to that actor with 3 weekend workshops of acting skills under their belt, spewing out lines from classic films, I see the GHOST of DeNiro and Nicholson, standing there, dwarfing and belittling this neophyte’s performance. It’s cute when your 6-year-old says “use the force for good, Luke”. It’s anything BUT cute when a first year acting student pulls lines from Obi-Wan Kenobi while (in the agent’s mind) the actor stands next to the holographic version of Alec Guinness.

Don’t go to a gunfight with a sword.

And don’t go to an agency rep with a video of you doing Nicholson, DeNiro, Pacino or Brando.

In fact, don’t take any iconic performance and use it in your video reel. It brings up ghosts for agency reps and Casting Directors. And the actor almost always invites a negative comparison.

To sum up, unless you are Dana Carvey, Kevin Pollack, Darrell Hammond, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, Jay Pharoah, their understudies, or working on your impressions to get on SNL, please stop imitating your heroes and start using less iconic scenes for your reel.

Unless you want to end up like Carl, below, in GHOST, leave these iconic images alone.

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)