You Can’t Be Serious(34)

I got my shit together and resumed going to auditions with my head held high.


1?An interesting piece on the demand for young actors at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/17/arts/for-all-the-tv-pilots-there-s-just-not-enough-youth-to-go-around.html.





CHAPTER EIGHT ON FIRE




Barbara Cameron’s associate Laura was beaming with excitement on the other end of the phone. We talked a few times a week and I had never heard her like this. “Honey, I have a fantastic audition for you! It’s a big part in a teen movie called Van Wilder, come to the office right now so I can talk to you about the script and the character!”

My calls with Laura and Barbara were always very warm. An actor’s agent ends up being everything from a math expert (you’re not making enough money from acting to pay your rent) to a psychologist (get another job and don’t spend so much on drinks—you can’t even afford rent) to a moral compass (just take a Xanax instead).1 It just wasn’t common for them to ask for an in-person meeting. That’s how I knew, whatever this Van Wilder movie was, it was huge. Getting to Barbara Cameron’s (non-porn) guesthouse office at the far end of the San Fernando Valley during rush hour was a gigantic hour-and-a-half-in-traffic pain in the ass. Though I had moved beyond my share of the Panoch (I saved up and bought a very-used Toyota Paseo with a salvage title after graduation), I was too excited to drive all the way out there. I needed Laura to tell me about this fantastic audition now.

“What’s the part? What’s the name of the character? Can you send me the script instead? Whatever it’s about, I can’t wait to read it!”

“The part in this movie is so great—it’s a supporting lead!”

“Holy shit.”

“I knowwwww! Come by the office!”

“Send it to me! What’s the name of the character, so I can look for it when I get the script?”

“You know, I would love for you to just come by the office so we can discuss it!”

She was starting to sound a little like a Nigerian prince from a phishing email. I felt a tinge of suspicion.

“Laura, what’s the name of the character? What’s the role? I’ll drive out to the office, I’m just too excited to wait!”

“Okay. The character… is… um… a foreign exchange student named…”

“Go ahead…”

“… Taj Mahal.”

I hung up the phone.

Laura called back immediately. “This is why I wanted you to come by the office!”

“I’m not coming by the office. How would coming by the office change anything? I didn’t spend years training as an actor to play an exchange student named Taj Mahal.”

Barbara got on the phone and the two of them broke it down for me. This wasn’t any tiny old gig. It was a supporting lead in a Lionsgate studio comedy, starring two well-known actors: Tara Reid, who was a hit in American Pie, and Ryan Reynolds, who was one of the two guys from the sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. These were real Hollywood stars! If I earned this job, I would have a big film credit on my résumé.

“I know it wasn’t the case after Brookfield,” Barbara said. “But this is a movie, not a pilot. If you got this part, it would lead to more auditions.” I rolled the options around in my head, going back to that promise I made to myself: Don’t sabotage an audition. Say no to stereotypical roles unless they could be career-changing. Taj Mahal could be career-changing. Did I really want to turn down the possibility of building a résumé and one day getting better auditions?

I appreciated Barbara’s business acumen and her candor. As much as I now believed in myself, it was difficult for her to get me auditions because of my ethnicity (well, because of Hollywood’s reception to my ethnicity). The Brown Catch-22 was this: The only parts you could audition for were stereotypically brown. You couldn’t read for non-brown parts unless you had more credits on your résumé, and you couldn’t get more credits on your résumé because the only parts you could audition for were stereotypically brown. I had been hustling hard. The role of Taj Mahal (Taj Mahal Badalandabad, if we’re using his full name) could give me a real shot, even if I had to swallow a bit of pride to take it.

I read the script. A few things stood out immediately: Yes, the character was very clearly a stereotype. A bumbling foreign exchange student speaking in an exaggerated accent, mixing up his metaphors, trying painfully to get laid by white girls—and failing miserably. They weren’t breaking any new comedy ground with that.

I also noticed that the character was a stereotype of every eighteen-year-old college guy in teen movies—like Jason Biggs’s character, Jim, in American Pie—trying to get laid at any cost, putting sexual experience over rational thought. The clichés weren’t entirely racial.2

Most important of all—it was clear that Taj Mahal actually advanced the plot of the film. If he was left out of the story, the arc would not progress. In that sense, this was a real character. Without Taj, the movie wouldn’t work at all. Exciting. I pondered this, trying to square it with my reservations about the name and the stereotyping. One of my frustrations had been that stereotypical characters never contributed to story arcs. Was this some sort of a baby-steps win? What to do?