P.O.V.

It's the holidays in Los Angeles, which means 75 degree days and a mass exodus at every airport as the transplants head back to New York and all points Midwestern to spend a few days with the people they’ve come to despise since moving to California a few years ago.

Hollywood is shut down through mid-January, because the producers actually take some time off to visit their kids that they never see during the year. With no producers around, there’s no one for the agents to schmooze and harass because no work is being given out, so the agents take off as well. And without agents sniffing out work, the actors and writers have nothing to do but sit on their thumbs and drink and wait to be rejected until the new year rolls around.

When the new year does indeed roll into focus, that means casting season is right around the corner (mid-Feb through April), and so all the good little boy and girl actor-standups are scrambling to get their showcase sets together so their managers can get them on showcases at The Laugh Factory and The Improv so they can mesmerize the people in suits who have all the green stuff to give away.

Showcase season is alternately painful and hope-filled in LA. Painful to be in the audience, as comics and "actors" go up not to be funny, but to show their energy and their acting and their zany chops. Hope-filled in that comics know that if the right person sees them, they might be summoned in for "meetings" with casting people or producers, or called in to do cold readings, or maybe even called in for a hot reading where they already want you for the part, but they have to see if you can handle it in the way they want it handled.

There’s a big separation of veterans and newbies during this season. The veterans do the showcases and try to summon some genuine expression of interest, but they really don’t believe in the process anymore, knowing that during showcase season the clubs are mostly filled with assistants and people without power, and it is really up to your management to get you real auditions where you will surely "seal the deal." Newbies are more frenetic, and believe wholeheartedly that showcase season is an open door to stardom, and so they pour their hearts and souls into every single set, turning to the industry-thick audience with all the earnestness and zeal of Shirley Temple on her best night.

I’m not sure which I hate to see more, the burned out vets trucking through their hundredth showcase set, or the wide-eyed newbies who don’t have any idea what they should actually have in their set, and are so all over the place that they don’t end up exciting anyone because it’s so hard to figure out what they are actually offering.

I do know this: there’s nothing like casting season anywhere else in the standup world, and so standups come ramming into the season unprepared, like salmon smacking into a dam they never realized was hidden upstream. Comics are either burned out, thus in no decent psychological space to do themselves much good, or uninformed and under-experienced, thus also unlikely to do themselves much good.

So here are my holiday wishes for the new year and the new crop of showcasers. If you are a vet, I hope you find some way to come once into the breech once more with your best game, realizing that even if this is all mostly futile, it’s so much more poetic to be your best even if they never wave the starting flag in your direction. And I’ve heard talk that the money is starting to flow back into Hollywood, advertising revenue is up, so maybe this is your year. Let’s believe so, it’s so much prettier to see it that way.

If you are a newbie, it is my hope that you find the set that will show your skills without revealing your weaknesses. I hope that the acting classes you’ve surely taken during the past year begin to pay off. I hope you can feature that one thing about yourself that will help execs look past everything you cannot do, and hire you anyway. And I hope they bring you along slowly, so you learn to swim before the room fills to the ceiling with water.

And so once again the season is upon us, my friends. Raise your toasts to your friends who will make it, and if they retain their souls they might bring you along for some of the ride. And raise your toasts to your friends who will not make it, and bid them farewell as they trudge away, cursing the day the road dried up and they moved to this soul-sucking purgatory named, we all know, after Lost Angeles.