Rance Rizzutto

Step 2: Easy Steps To Not Pissing Off Your Agent

You have your headshots. You mailed out your resume and cover letter to some agents. And you heard back! You are now represented!

So, now that you have an agent, here are some ways to not piss them off, and a little insight into the process they go through to get you work.

Not pissing your agent off can be summed up pretty easily: be on time, be prepared, stay in touch, and answer your calls/emails/texts.

Being on time seems like a no-brainer. I feel lucky to have worked for a lot of places that really drove this home: “If you’re 15 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” And I like to add for fun “If you’re late, you’re fired.” If your audition is at 1:00, that is when you should be slating and starting your session. If you show up at the door at 1:00 you still need to get buzzed in, fill out an info sheet, get a headshot out of your bag, and get any info from the casting associate. All of that takes a little time. Why not show up 15 minutes early and prepare yourself. Prepare?

Be prepared. Worst-case scenario you will find out about an audition day-of and have to get to the audition with little time to memorize lines. Use that time to learn your lines. If your agent tells you Thursday you have an audition Friday, you have no excuse to not have lines memorized. If you prepare, you get better and get jobs…or at minimum get called in for more jobs. If you get jobs, your agent gets paid…which gets you sent to more jobs.

Staying in touch can mean lots of things. If your agent doesn’t know who you are then they’re not going to know to put you on auditions. A big part of this is keeping your agent informed of your book outs…the days and times you can NOT audition or shoot. As soon as you know you’re not available for a day, let them know immediately. If you find out the next day that you have another day you can’t do, let them know immediately. Even if you know you’re busy 10:00am-2:00pm, it is better for them to know that ahead of time. If your agent knows you can’t be there on a date that ends up being the shoot date for a project, they won’t put you on it. If they think you’ll be perfect, they will probably double check with you and try to work something out.

Lastly, respond. Agents work in a very tight window of time. If you don’t respond to their call, email, or text it will be assumed you’re not available…with some minor stress. If you’re not available, call back right away…but you should have booked out in the first place…right?

Here is a little info on “the process” to let you know why ignoring these things makes you look bad and could piss off your agent:

-commercial or some other project requiring actors hires casting agents to run auditions. Casting agents have scripts and character breakdowns.
-casting agents send info to talent agents along with some actors they already know they’d like to see.
-talent agents send the casting agents a list of all of the actors they represent who a) fit the character description and b) are available according to their book out sheet.
-casting agents look through all the submissions from the talent agents, pick actors, and fill out the casting session schedule based on their choices complete with time slots and sends that info to talent agents.
-talent agents contact talent for confirmations.

In a perfect world all of the actors have followed all the information here and everyone confirms. Life is easy for everyone. Realize that you’ve already gone through an elimination process when you even get called in for an audition. But, it doesn’t really ever go like this.

What really happens is the cycle continues with:

-some actors are sick, or out of town and forgot to book out, or don’t answer the phone/email/text about the audition.
-those actors who aren’t confirmed create holes in the schedule.
-casting agents go back to the lists of actors the talent agents sent and find people to fill the holes.
-talent agent lets THOSE people know.
-cycle continues until everyone is confirmed

This is all before the audition even happens. Stay in touch and answer your phone/emails/texts play a major part in the pre-audition process. Especially letting your agent know when you’re booked out for partial days (10am-2pm). When they submit you in the first place they can make note of that when they’re building the initial session schedule. If your time slot doesn’t work for you all you can do is hope that someone else’s slot opens up.

So, you get the audition. You’ve confirmed with your agent. They email you the script. Your audition is tomorrow at noon. All you have to do is work the lines, a lot…and show up early. But let’s say you didn’t. You glanced at the lines and printed them out knowing you would work on them on the way to the audition. You receive an important call from someone…a long call. You don’t get off the phone with them, but finish getting ready, hop in a cab, and make it to outside the audition at 12:10. You were on the phone, so you didn’t work your lines. You’re late, so you don’t have time to work them before going in. Even at 10 minutes late there is a chance the auditioners put a call in to your agent to find out where you were…a call you don’t want your agent to get. And after all that, the read you give on-camera is your very first read of the lines for you. And unless you’re brilliant, that means it sucked. Which means you wasted everyone’s time for two days…from scheduling until now. AND you probably delayed the entire schedule 15 minutes.

Be on time.

Be prepared.

If you’re running even slightly behind the protocol is to call your agent immediately and they will contact the audition.

Oh, one other thing. Don’t lie to cover your butt or make you look good. If you go to an audition and say you never got a script from your agent either you’re lying, or you need a new agent. If it is the day before an audition and you don’t have your lines yet, contact your agent. If you were an extra in a movie filmed in Chicago and you try to say you had a part bigger than that, you will get caught. You’re auditioning for people who probably cast the movie, and if they didn’t, they definitely know who did. Honesty, yet again, is always the best policy.

Will there be a Step 3? Who knows? What do you want to know about? If I know, I’ll try to elaborate, if I don’t know I won’t make up stuff.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

This is the first Christmas in three years that I’ve been on land for. With some luck and strategic planning I managed to get contracts on cruise ships that started in late October at the earliest and would go for four months. This meant three Thanksgivings and Christmases spent in much warmer climates, but also away from families and more traditional holiday fare.

A Christmas Stroll Through Atlantis in Nassau

As we’ve spent this year re-adapting to the cold and turning an apartment into a home instead of a temporary respite between travels we realized something. We forgot how to Christmas. Not how to buy presents, but how to decorate.

On the ship you have a small cabin space and most of the fun decorations are deemed a fire hazard, so you rely on the decorations in the main lobby on good ole deck 7.

So what did we have this year? We put all our presents on what became known as “the christmas chair.” You might be imaging a festively decorated chair, disguised as a tree bejeweled and ornate. Nope. It’s the chair that is in the corner. Although, my mom sent a small light up christmas tree inside a globe…about 3″ tall. So, that was there lighting up the 3″ space.

I think we are more prepared for next year.

If you’re one of the many improvisors, dancers, actors, magicians, cruise staff, etc. on the ships for Christmas please enjoy turkey and CHRISTMAS BINGO! *cue Cha-Cha Slide*

Created by Del Close and Charna Halpern, The Harold begins with an audience suggestion. A team of improvisers fully explore the suggestion through scenes and games, creating disparate stories, characters and themes that eventually weave together seamlessly, like the instruments of a jazz band.

You can see Rance perform with the Harold team Chaos Theory.

The Deltones. Or its full name: The iO Musical featuring the Deltones. One of iO’s premiere ensembles performing a completely improvised musical. The cast includes members of other hit iO shows and teams including The Reckoning, Bullet Lounge, Improvised Shakespeare, Carl and the Passions and many more!

ComedySportz is competitive, short-form improvisation at its finest! Two teams compete for points, laughs, and the glory of the CSz trophy. Suitable for all ages, and every show is different so you can to see it again and again, as most people do.

I’ve recently just come away from some experiences that have given me, what I feel, is a more complete outlook on how to be a working actor…well, how to not blow it as a working actor for sure. What were the experiences? I found a new agent and I interned for a casting agency to find out more about the back end of the acting business.

Just so we’re clear, when I say “working actor” I mean “actor in Chicago with an agent who sends said actor on auditions for various commercials and such.”

Today, STEP 1: Where To Start?

First, you need to know two things: a) do you like to act? and b) do you have a firm grasp on how many other people do too? A lot. If you’ve done a lot of acting through high school and college you’re off to a good start for a start. If you’ve never done anything or taken any classes but you want to be just like [insert favorite actor name] you might want to start with a beginner acting class. But be aware that a lot of people out there are trying to make it as an actor. If you can’t handle rejection this might not be for you.

I’m going to assume you have some experience and have been in Chicago and you’re just not sure what to do next. Maybe you’ve done some plays, or maybe, as is more common in Chicago, you’re an improvisor who took an improv class out of college and discovered you liked it and you’re good at it and you keep hearing about people getting agents.

A good place to start is to get a current headshot. I’m not just saying this because I’m also a headshot photographer. If you’re current headshot doesn’t look like you it is useless. And when I say “like you” I’m not just talking about having old headshots. Did you get recent headshots someplace where the stylist was so awesome that you look the most glamorous you’ve ever looked? So glamorous, in fact, that you’ve never looked like that before? Not you.

Tobias Fünke's Bad Headshots (Arrested Development)

Also, so much casting done in Chicago now is done via the web. This means your headshot isn’t being viewed at 8×10 inches, but 300×480 pixels. The more of your body that is in the headshot, the smaller your head and more importantly your eyes will appear on the small web photo.

Find a photographer and get shots printed. At least 50. Most photographers will offer touched up images with your shoot…2-5 seems average. I personally don’t offer touched up images, but I do offer the entire shoot in high-res. Why don’t I touch up? Most of the printing places will either offer it for $20ish per image, OR when you get prints the $20 to touch up is part of the package…why pay extra to touch up a photo that has been touched up?

Once you have a headshot, print up resumes and make sure they’re 8×10 too. Put those together with a cover letter and mail them out to all the casting and talent agents.

This step is a summary, for sure. I can understand if there are specific questions. What should my acting resume look like? What is in an actor’s cover letter? Google.

Headshot and resume are the main things to get in step one.

The next step will be up soon, but you don’t need to worry about it until you have an agent. It is:

Step 2: Easy Steps To Not Pissing Off Your Agent

Created by Del Close and Charna Halpern, The Harold begins with an audience suggestion. A team of improvisers fully explore the suggestion through scenes and games, creating disparate stories, characters and themes that eventually weave together seamlessly, like the instruments of a jazz band.

You can see Rance perform with the Harold team Chaos Theory.