Leigha Horton :: Greenroom
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In the countdown to my first day as a full-time actor (Wednesday, December 6), I have been consumed by my working life. Blood, sweat, tears, and a slew of curses have been shed, and my social life has been anything but. Yet, I shall soon reemerge, Jean Grey-style, unto my fellow X-Men. Indeed, I am a Phoenix, and we actors are all just mutants when you get right down to it.

Until that day, which then I’ll have no excuse but to write daily, I’ll be offering aggregations of what’s been smoldering as of late:

1) Chasing Windmills won two Judges’ Choice awards at this year’s Vloggies on November 5th: Best Fiction Blog and Best Entertainment Vlog.

2) A Chasing Windmills episode is scheduled to air on The Tyra Banks Show in early December (I am not in the chosen episode, but it doesn’t matter – our team is getting national TV coverage, and that’s pretty sweet). The producers will inform us of the air date a few days prior, and I’ll be sure to give everyone plenty of notice to set their TiVos to record. It’s gonna be fierce.

3) The Easy Reference list of Chasing Windmills episodes that I’m in thus far –

overture – 9/18/06 (just a brief appearance)
relapse – 10/23/06
altar – 10/24/06
shopping – 11/10/06
telephonies – 11/14/06 (just a brief appearance via flashback)
PLUS – two/three more episodes to come this very week! Joy! Rapture!

I’m not providing direct links to these episodes because I think you should spend some time poking around the site. It’ll be a good time, I promise.

4) The Monster of Phantom Lake has continued to woo audiences at film festivals across the nation, and has garnered some great press to go with it – including a glowing review written by the kind and generous Duane Martin for Rogue Cinema magazine. I’ve recently come to know Duane via e-mail, and he’s tops.

5) The Monster of Phantom Lake has been officially picked up for DVD distribution! Here’s the news lifted directly from TMoPL site: “Shadow Creek Studios, a subsidiary of Braun Media Services, has signed an exclusive deal with the producers to distribute the film in retail and online outlets in the United States. A new ‘special edition,’ complete with additional special features, will be released first quarter 2007. As part of the deal, the current version of the DVD will no longer be available for sale on (the TMoPL) website and can now be considered a collector’s item!”

Okay – enough news for now. There’s actually more to tell, but I have to pace myself. If I share everything at once, I might implode.

I was lurking around The Callboard, an online discussion forum for Twin Cities actors, the week before last and stumbled upon a conversation about auditioning techniques. Someone suggested that everyone should read Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. Then roughly 20 more people responded that they too had read it and found its advice invaluable.

This lead me to two questions, 1) where the hell did everyone hear about this; and 2) what rock have I been living under? This just reinforced that I received a phenomenal liberal arts education in college, yet a highly uninformative (on a practical, business-level) theater education. I can tell you all about plays by early American women, but I can’t tell you why you’re supposed to wear the exact same clothes to callbacks as you did to the initial audition. Here I am, many, many thousands of dollars later, learning practical, business-level stuff on chat boards. Great. Somewhere I hear someone’s mother singing a hollow, yet loving, “I told you so.”

Anyway, reading the conversation on The Callboard made me feel embarrassed and a little ashamed… if I am to take myself seriously as an actor, it is my responsibility to be not only professional, but informed. It had immediately become apparent that I was not as informed as I had previously thought. And it had immediately become apparent that I have some work to do. So I hit the pavement. Last Sunday I walked into Uptown to scout out Audition at some of our wonderful independent and second-hand bookshops and found a lightly-used copy for three dollars. I also discovered a copy of Robert Cohen’s Acting Professionally: Raw Facts About Careers in Acting (had it in college, didn’t find it immediately useful, got rid of it…or so I thought. I came home to discover the college copy on my top shelf – oops.), Richard Brestoff’s The Camera Smart Actor, and a reference book entitled The Independent Film Producer’s Survival Guide. All for under $25.

I immediately sat down when I got home and read the first 25 pages of Audition. Thankfully, there was plenty that I already knew or had learned (the hard way, of course) over the last several years; but I also learned a handful of new tips and tricks that I had never before encountered. Those three dollars were the best that I have ever spent. Not bad for reigniting my practical performing arts education.