Monday, July 28, 2008

Ten years ago today at approximately 4:30pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) I boarded a flight from JFK to Chicago. Why? Because I was relocating to Los Angeles. Yup, I was leaving the Big Apple for Tinseltown.

Was I nervous? Not too much. Not because I'm not a "nervous type"; (trust me, I get super nervous about plenty of things) it was more because everything was happening so fast. I felt like a passenger in it all; I was nothing more than a piece of the engine. I wasn't planning to move to LA so soon. I'd had a day/night job at the Harley-Davidson Café that I really enjoyed, a special "lady friend" that was very important to me, a theatrical agent (I stopped saying 'legit agent' about a year before leaving New York), I'd just signed with my top choice commercial agency (DBA) and I was only an hour flight or 6-hour bus ride home to Virginia Beach.

I wasn't really ready to leave New York...well, that's not totally true. Sure, I was tired of my 3rd floor walkup, my heavy-ass backpack, the stifling hot (and nasty) 42nd Street/Times Square Subway station, but I thought I'd be in New York for at least 18 more months - oooh, oooh, oooh, I almost forgot the mice in my apartment. Yes, I was tired of the mice (I had no idea at the time that I would move to LA and encounter the West Coast brethren of the New York mice- mice that fly – also known as BATS!!!!) BUT, all in all, things were working for me. I LOVED many things about New York, especially riding my mountain bike through the city dodging cabs along the way…and down the West Side Highway to Battery Park…and across the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges…

Of course I knew I was eventually moving here to Los Angeles, but I thought it would be a little more rehearsed and planned out. I was prepared, very prepared in fact, but it felt a little premature. Premature, but I knew I had to follow the signs of how things were unfolding for me.

It all started because an actor friend of mine that I met in Virginia Beach in my first acting class and moved to New York with (and shared a bed with for 4 months in Hell’s Kitchen) – long story. Anyway, he had relocated to Los Angeles from New York and booked a pilot for NBC. The pilot was picked up to series and he was coming to New York for the annual Upfront Presentation with his agent. He told his agent about me and she agreed to at least have a meeting with me whenever I decided to move to Los Angeles. That got my wheels turning.

Within a week or so I’d done a 42-piece targeted mass-mailing with cover letter to commercial and theatrical agencies in May of ‘98. The mailing resulted in 6 appointments including the one with my friends’ agent. I flew to LA in June to meet the interested agents, but had to cut my trip in half because of a commercial callback in New York. Fortunately, I was able to reschedule my meetings and get them all in before returning to New York. The meetings went very well.

The last day before leaving I looked at apartments and then hopped on the red-eye to New York that Sunday evening, my birthday June 28. I arrived in New York early the next morning, got cleaned up and went to the callback – it went great. Two days later I had another callback which also went great. Later that day I got the news that I booked the commercial. YES!!! It was for the first Ford Expedition SUV shooting in Brooklyn - Prospect Park to be exact, near where I used to live in Park Slope.

We shot July 20th & 21st and I left New York on Tuesday, July 28th on a flight to Los Angeles connecting in Chicago. I was flying stand-by and wasn’t sure if I’d arrive here in Los Angeles that night or the next morning. I called my new commercial agent from Chicago to tell her that I’d be ready to audition the next day after 12 noon and she already had an audition for me scheduled at 10:30am!!! (I’d sent my headshots to her a week prior from New York to help get the ball rolling.) So on July 29th 1998, 12 hours after moving to Los Angeles, I had my first audition. In fact, I had 3 auditions and 3 callbacks my first week in town. Wow, happy anniversary to me. Ten years!

I’ve experiences so many things along the way – great, no so great and many things in between. One of the things I’m experiencing right now is being at a job I worked at years ago – same shift, same place and even some of the same people. It would be easy to look at it as a step backwards, but I see it differently. I see it as a step, sure a challenging step, but a step nonetheless. Yes, I have to pull out my bag of mental tricks to get through it at times, but a brotha gotta do what a brotha gotta do. The job is a great diversion in my life right now and it occupies idle time.

Today I went to Magic Mountain with several co workers and rode some of the most insane rollercoasters in my life – Tatsu & X2 were two of the craziest.


me scared? c'mon.

I’m not much for theme parks in general, I’d rather ride motocross, ski, snowboard, fish, mountain bike, but I’m really glad I went. It was cool to hang out with my co-workers out of uniform and in a different environment. I had fun until I lost my cell phone at the very end. UGH! But I really like my new BlackBerry Curve that I bought the next day with a completely, COMPLETELY unexpected residual check from a foreign airing of “Bones” that covered the purchase and more - A new phone wasn't in the budget otherwise.

Where are my callbacks!?!?!

I didn’t get a callback on ANY of the last 3 commercial auditions I went on and, trust me, I was sooo good in them, LOL! Oh well – NEXT!


http://www.stephonfuller.com/consultations.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hRX79E75yA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vMXinr1N9w

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Stephon-

I'm a loyal reader who has been following you for 5 years but never sent you one e-mail or commented. I have been out of the USA for the past 6 months and so I had not visited your site for awhile. I'm not sure what inspired me today and I don't have much to say except for thank you for doing this. You have been an inspiration to me and I don't have anything to do with the acting profession. I'm sure you have many regular readers like me so keep up the great work. The world is a better place because of people like you. Keep fighting the fight, my man. Myself and many others are behind you all the way.

AC