“Your father long ago told you to grow up and quit pursuing acting as a career.”
Pursuing their dreams: actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases.
An excerpt from Book One in “The Knowledge Path Series” dedicated to helping you find more meaning and passion in your life.
It’s an old story.
Wanna be actors land in Hollywood chasing an elusive dream.
More recently, during the winter of 2012 – 2013, Kurt Streeter, writing for the Los Angeles Times, hung out at an unpretentious cafe in Atwater Village.
He profiled one of the neighborhood residents who moved there three years.
Like many others chasing his dream he had been acting since the age of three, but was still waiting for his big break.
The regulars, a group of a dozen or so, eased his loneliness and shared his Hollywood ambition:
Amy, the animator who had worked on “South Park,” Nicholas, whose latest film was well received at the Sundance Film Festival, and a rising African American actor who worried about being typecast in criminal roles.
They stayed for hours, talking, typing, hunched hard over laptops, nursing lattes.
They were actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases.
A woman reads over her dissertation; a freelance reporter plans his next story; two producers discuss financing for an independent movie.
Observing the scene, the servers and baristas say, look this is their place so you don’t bother them.
But over time you begin to notice.
“After a while you just see them sort of losing hope. And then, just like that, we don’t see them anymore.”
Privately, after so many failed attempts, the internal dialog goes something like this —
Is it time to give up on your dream of making it in Hollywood?
Your father long ago told you to grow up and quit pursuing acting as a career.
“It’s so easy to say that.
Easy to criticize, doubt, say ‘give up’ and ‘I told you so.’ … I’ve never been one for easy.”
Steps:
(4) Nurture your passions and express your uniqueness — no one else can or will, for that matter.
