Pay to Play: Booking Roles in the Post-Network Era

Abstract

What people have to understand is that I have to make a lot of money, an enormous amount of money, to have a lot of money. At the end of the day I probably walk home with around 20 percent of my paycheck. Each has a whole sort of business around them.-Mark Ruffalo (qtd. in Smith)actors are the largest labor force in media production by a significant margin. There are 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild Overall; SAG Contract Earnings 2002-2008; SAG Contract Earnings 2004-2010), compared to the 20,000 members of the Writers Guild of America (Young) or the 16,000 members of the Directors Guild of America (Directors Guild of America), and this number does not account for the thousands of aspirants who have yet to obtain their union cards. According to a 2015 estimate, there are 276,016 actors in Los Angeles-approximately 7 percent of the city's total population.1 Put another way, the number of actors in Los Angeles is greater than the total population of Jersey City, New Jersey.2 Acting offers the possibility of fame and fortune, but the reality of the work is that it is contingent employment-a fact that has not changed despite the tremendous boom in television production in the 2010s. Without a steady source of income, most actors are forced to look for part-time positions in other industries in order to pay the bills to sustain their creative work and dreams of stardom.Actors are the most visible workers in the media industries because unlike directors, writers, or producers, performers' work is onscreen-audiences know their faces. What we see in these performances, however, is only the glamorous and remunerated portion of their labor, which is a fraction of the work that goes into making a living as an actor. There is a battery of costly and time-consuming activities involved in booking paying work. Ideally, actors can find agents who can send them out on auditions and negotiate contracts. Finding an agent (and later a manager) involves mailing letters with headshots and resumes in the hope that someone will respond and be willing to take on the as a client. In order to get to auditions, actors also need to be mobile, which in Los Angeles means having a reliable car. Internet access is essential because Web sites provide information about roles, and email facilitates communication with agents, managers, and casting directors. There are also some aspects of an actor's work that are less intuitive: the networking process with casting directors and others is an ongoing and crucial determinant in an actor's ability to book roles. Aspiring actors must constantly meet new people and maintain their contacts-often by spending money to send updated headshots or postcards with photos and information about new work and credits. In addition to actively looking for work, performers spend a great deal of time and money honing their craft with improvisation classes, auditioning classes, voice and dance lessons, and acting classes and coaching. For working actors (as opposed to stars with the name recognition that can get a project funded), all of these steps are necessary as they try to book their next gig.Despite the large population of performers in Hollywood, the acting sub-industry has drawn comparatively little attention from media scholars. Two categories largely dominate the existing work on acting: first, those studies that position actors as bearers of meanings, and second, those that treat actors as creators of meaning. How performers arrive at the position to bear or create meaning is often overlooked. Even explorations of stars' extratextual materials tend to focus on discursive traces of the actor's work rather than the performer's labor itself. As Richard deCordova asserts, [t]he emergence of the star system involved a strict regulation of the type of knowledge produced about the actor (17). For deCordova, knowledge of actors developed in stages: acting, the picture personality, and the star-these are the three categories that define how actors are discussed and understood in popular culture. …