world!
And résumé-wise . . . I wrote it out by hand. By HAND. I want you to know that I had access to a printer, but did not use it. Instead I chose to whip out my ten-year-old-boy handwriting to really nail my professionalism as I wrote: Special skills include horseback riding, driving a car, and a Macedonian accent.
On that résumé I made a bunch of shit up. I knew that a list of high school plays was not going to impress a real life LA manager! So I added some fake local community theater productions as well. Boom! Ready to knock their socks off.
I handed it to my friend to pass along.
“Dude. This isn’t legible at all.”
“. . .”
Thankfully, she had much neater handwriting than I did, so she rewrote the whole thing more legibly. (But can someone tell me why we didn’t just go to the library and print it??? Why did we not think of that?)
Suffice it to say, I did not get a meeting with that manager.
I wasn’t exactly getting any auditions, but so what? I didn’t need auditions. I was MEETING people. LA is really stratified during the day. At nine a.m., the movie executives take their elevators to the twenty-sixth floor of their skyscraper offices and the unemployed actors smoke weed in their apartments (right?). But at night, we all drank at the same bars and danced on the same dance floors until three a.m. See? There’s a bit of community in having a cocaine problem.
The day might be filled with rejections, but at night, people loved me.
One night, I was standing outside the Argyle at two a.m., smoking a cigarette. This really pretty boy approaches me. Damn. Is he . . . prettier than me?
He came over to me. “You’re gorgeous,” he said.
“Oh God, you too,” I blurted out.
“Oh, thanks. You should be a model.”
I gasped, flattered, but the cigarette in my mouth made me cough a little. “Really? You think so?”
“Yes. I would love to shoot you.”
“Um . . . with a camera, right?”
“Ha-ha! Wow. You’re funny, too.”
But seriously, with a camera, right? Right?? His name was Damon. He gave me some cocaine, so I gave him my number. And just like that, I became a professional model. Well, not actually, but if you had tried to convince me otherwise, I wouldn’t have heard it. That’s the LA dream for you right there!
On one night out I met an agent from Endeavor with a huge cocaine problem. This was my chance to sell my talent to him.
“You don’t understand. I’ve got what it takes. I’m the next Charlize Theron.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Give me a script and I will fucking destroy it. I’ll interpret the shit out of it. You think you’ve seen real acting before, but you haven’t until you’ve seen me.”
I think they typically call this liquid courage, but in my case it was powdered.
“All right. I’m sold. Call me next week.” He handed me his business card.
And that’s how it’s done, bitches.
Although I was the slightest bit worried he was too high when we met to remember me at all. I gave him a call anyway, trying to channel the same confidence I’d had that night.
“Of course I remember you, Laura!” he exclaimed.
Oh thank God.
“I got you an audition for X-Men!”
My mouth went dry with fear. Excuse me? X-Men? Let me remind you that I’d never had a real professional audition in my life. And I was supposed to jump straight into X-Men?
“Perfect. That is perfect for me.”
“Great. We’ll see how you do on this audition and then we’ll talk about your future.”
“You won’t be disappointed!”
Oh, fuck.
In the daytime, my fearlessness drained away. It was like in the dark of night I couldn’t see all the things I was afraid of. Nighttime Laura really liked to fuck over daytime Laura. Mostly it was just hangovers and no energy at all, but this? This audition? This was terrifying.
I prepped as hard as I could. I learned the sides forward and backward, and then I got nervous that I would accidentally do them backward, so I repeated them forward twenty more times. I knew I couldn’t give myself any excuse not to show up. When I walked into the casting office, I was ready to give the performance of my life.
It was a basically empty room, except for a table, a camera, a few producers, and the casting director. The casting director smiled at me. “Okay, Laura, we’ve heard great things. I’ll be reading