Los Angeles Graffiti: August 2011

I've received tons of letters from people asking advice about the entertainment industry and, in particular, pursing a life as an actor. People have also asked how I got to be on The Office. This blog, I hope, will address some of those questions.

I grew up in St. Louis Missouri. I always wanted to be an actor but when you grow up in a place like St. Louis that is sort of like saying, "I want to be a superhero when I grow up". It hardly seems real. The world of Hollywood is mysterious. You hear stories of girls being discovered at ball games. Success is about having "it" or being pretty or some other intangible magic. You have no model for how to succeed. Everyone's story is different. One person does stand-up for 15 years and then gets a TV show, someone else finances their own movie and it takes off at a festival and suddenly they are the hottest thing. But for each of those people there are thousands of stand-up comics and filmmakers who never got their break. How do you know what to do?

One of the milestones of being an actor is that moment when you are finally eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild, lovingly referred to as SAG. The next milestone is actually having the $2,335 in your bank account to actually join SAG, but that's a whole other story.

When I first began my acting pursuits, I really didn't know what SAG was, how to join, or the benefits of joining. I had taken some classes on the "business of show business" but nobody ever went into detail about SAG. For all I knew, getting your SAG card was just as easy and trivial as getting a Costco card.

I was fortunate enough, when I first moved to Los Angeles, to enroll in an acting class at the Baron Brown Studios. It was there that I met many wonderful people and learned so much about being an actor. I would ask my classmates about joining SAG, and everyone had an interesting story on how they achieved their SAG status.

But not everyone is as fortunate as I was to be surrounded by wonderful people who had been there, done that, and were willing to share their stories. I have been around groups of actors where wild fairy tales about SAG and the different ways of joining spread around the room like a bad high school rumor.

I couldn't stand to watch misinformed people try to misinform others, which is why I created HowToBecomeSAG.com I hope for it to be a reference guide for new actors on how to become eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild. No more fairy tales, no more hear-say. Only the facts.

There seems to be a lot of mystery surrounding SAG when there really shouldn't be. As actors, we have to stay informed and stop listening to stories about a friend of a friend; this is true for all aspects of the industry, not just SAG.

Be informed. Educate others. Rinse. Repeat. Share HowToBecomeSAG.com with your friends so we can all keep our careers moving forward!

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