Adam nathan actor biography books

I need more death. I need more Eleanor. I use a tagline that would really, really irritate me if I read it on somebody else's site. So, I am about to charge. I need some barrier between my professional life and my bleed-it-out personal work. My worlds are now crashing into each other. This means that my most personal writing is getting paywalled.

I'll probably keep fairly long pre-paywall teasers. There are huge trade-offs here, many I worry about. Alas, modest monthly subscriptions aren't going to take me far with the cost-of-living in Brooklyn. I intend to plow the money directly back into the Substack subscription ecosystem. This means: I will match subscriptions for fellow writers as a matter of professional courtesy, and mutual support.

I understand the math. If lived through a near-fatal bicycle crash in Moab when an agent tried to push me over a cliff into self publishing where the agent would still get a cut — then I can handle this. The big one was the very first time I clicked publish on something deeply personal. I was shaking. Now I have none of that. Substack is all splinters and hard plank.

I find it solid. And then, in a surprise to no one with half a dollop of wisdom, the universe returned my call s. This will take me past retirement and solidly into This will possibly be the most regrettable artistic choice of my entire life. The stories will continue to be available to all. Somebody-or-Other comforted Ms. Crosby crying in the janitor's office.

In lieu of a final bow, the little madman mounted the ice cream sandwich table and tore off his pom-pom hat. I can act! The vice principal had to flick the cafeteria lights repeatedly to bring the performance to a conclusion. While there was no question Adam needed firmer direction, it was hard to disagree that there wasn't something dramatic in the adam nathan actor biography books.

These weren't even plays he'd seen. He crammed so many dazzlingly lead roles onto that resume, he could have memorized the Talmud with less effort. Well, one thing was real. True, the childhood credit was unlikely evidence that he had acting in him, but it was still evidence. My father took the headshot in the bathroom. We dragged lamps in from another room.

He was not an easygoing man, my father, but this sort of mission brought out something adolescent and playful in him. The task took some of the daring and panache one of his words that he admired in others. This was rare. Generally speaking, I did not involve my father in any of my activities other than proofing college essays and seeking his blessing on newspaper editorials.

There was almost no overlap between us, no shared history or interest in skateboards, electric guitars, rock concerts, or high school girls in back seats. These interests were my lifeblood, but they were alternately mysterious or inconsequential to him. But the afternoon of the headshot, we had overlap. I know he did. He was, at the end of the day, my father.

My mother was not in the bathroom as a co-conspirator, but she would have been within eyeshot of the bathroom door. The layout of the home is relevant. Our apartment was on the first floor. After the divorce of my parents, my mother purchased the home with her inheritance, and she rented out the second floor to maintain the mortgage. By the afternoon of my headshot, my parents were long since divorced, but they were reliably on and reliably off in a sine wave of platonic relations.

That afternoon, they must have been at full moon in the waning and waxing, otherwise the son and his father would not have been crowding lamps into the bathroom or back porch stools into the bathtub. The cost of defending her financial and psychic walls led to the ulcerative colitis that staggered her at regular intervals before it took her life twenty years later, but my mother could compartmentalize people, ideas and time.

You may laugh at my kitchen table, Barry, but not within my living room. His voice changed when he was comfortable, when he was the center of attention, holding court. It found a burr, a purr, something sophisticated and unusual that my mother must have adored in their early years. The two of them could banter with each other more intensely than with anyone else in their too-brief lives.

Neither backed off their opinions for each other, not a hair, and agreeing or disagreeing, they had the benefit of a marital shorthand, and they had shared interests and references and intellectual gifts. They had overlap. They were moons sharing the gravity of some dim planet. And when my father lay dying from cancer a decade later, my mother moved from Oakland to Minneapolis to care for him — and, still the two waned and waxed.

They laughed, they stormed in, they stormed out, and then they conversed for hours on his deathbed, my father beneath the sheets, my mother above. In the last year or so before the fallout of their marriage, and over a decade prior to the afternoon of my headshot, my father became an avid photographer for a season. Even with the strap draped carefully over my head, even then my father held the camera for his younger son — if not from him.

But I was invited to peer through the porthole eye rubber to look into his precision world. In that crisp darkness, I could see the mechanical, pristine elegance inside my father. My mother sitting in the DMZ outside the bathroom on the day of the headshot would have had time to think — and too much of it. Two of them in particular. These were not the first headshots my father had taken of his children.

He had taken passport pictures of my brother and me — in secret — directly before the collapse of their marriage. We were six and eight. Scotland, I believe, would have been the destination. For that photo shoot, the white living room wall must have been the backdrop. In the end, those two headshots were never used. My father had the daring to take the two pictures, but he lacked the courage for the deed.

His life needed one wild act of pure bravery. Oh, how my mother would have howled with good-natured laughter at the image of Barry kidnapping anyone. My father at that kitchen table would have closed his eyes, shaken his head, and, bemused, pretended not to understand. As for my mother sitting tight-lipped in the kitchen during the photo session — she would not have been supportive of the fraternity mischief playing out in her bathroom.

Whatever this male thing was, it threatened the handhold-by-handhold achievement by academic certificates that she trusted and had benefited from.

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A bathroom headshot and a fake acting resume were cheating to her, anathema. Acting in movies should follow years of acting on the stage and training and study and, inevitably, reading. My mother herself was at times spectacularly courageous, but she was not the joyful possibility that shines through in acts of daring. My father dared to take the pictures when she was out one afternoon.

My mother had the courage to steal the children off to Italy with no money and no husband. Undoubtedly, this was possible because she was no longer afraid for me. My mother was in the bathroom photography studio. My mother was the parent that loved the movies. She would spend her last five dollars to sneak out and see a foreign film with me. We would rummage and pilfer from our separate coin jars as accomplices.

The rides to the foreign film theater, miles and miles away, with the radio blaring or the two of us swept away in conversation, were our mischievous joy. We had overlap, my mother and I, and a great deal of it. In these films my mother loved, there were no dreams too far. In the darkness of a movie theater, it was safe for her to pretend and to weep with delight for proxies of the ones she loved.

Actors were her People, and in the iridescence of movie light my mother freed her hummingbird soul. I had my successes, significant ones, but when I failed, I felt the gravity of their moons. Both of my parents would have had it otherwise and wept to read this, but they were not coaches for a dream team that came in first, and I was not a dream team player.

The band was unknown. The song was called Life on Earth. It was my first time on camera. But, oh, the relief of solving a forty-year nagging mystery! This, my grown children, was the day I melted my fingerprints off waving a Bic lighter in the air for twenty-two hours. Can we stop for a second? If you don't have to go through 18th-century hair and makeup, being an extra is the lowest stress job in Hollywood.

And your employers are okay with that. If you turned into a prop department stop sign between takes, they couldn't be happier. The whole career is a glorified game of red-light green-light. Reset the fruit stand. In a full career you might get to punch a blue-screen monster in the knee cap, knife into a rubber steak, or crash repeatedly through a sugar-glass shop window a good yards behind the real actors.

The worst thing you can do as an extra is act. Oh, my god.

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If you are an extra and you start acting, you will be placed so far into the background you turn into a bald spot. And woe betides these Thespians unloading great duffel bags of make-up, dog-eared volumes on method acting, curling irons, and high-grip Spanx onto their grey folding chairs. At in the morning they are pinning SAG cards to their astronaut costumes, spray painting their bald spots, and working their way through vocal exercises at Shakespearean volumes: Lallery, Lillery, Lollery, Lullery.

Oh, for a Muse of fire! Heavens of invention! The sound! The fury! And the strutting! But Blessed Are the Extras that work themselves to the front of the music video with elbows sharper than the spiked wheels of gladiator carriages for they shall be Visible. The Old Timers know this is the best job in show business. By Old Timers, I mean anyone who has been an extra for more than three days.

They know the lowdown. First thing on the set in their morning, Old-Timers are filling their empty knapsacks with food pilfered from the craft services table. This is definitely not sitting behind a boring old desk. What a job! What if you could go back and tell your ten-year-old self that this is what you will be doing someday? Break by break they storm and norm and form and burst into tears reading their resumes to each other.

You dented the head! Run comma asshole! Because being treated like a complete idiot in a group of other people that are also being treated like complete idiots, is a recipe for horseplay and hijinks! My music video never made it to MTV. Maybe it was the crushed alien heads, but I never had a better day on a set my whole career. The character was Paul Pierce.

It was my first audition, for a lead role no less. Irreverent I could do. Irreverence was a sweet spot. So I wrote mine. Then, typewritten script in hand, I paced back and forth in the fraternity basement, jumping onto and off a collapsed sofa memorizing it, acting it out. I stopped cold from time to time listening for footsteps that might be coming down to the basement to figure out what the hell all the drama was about.

My monologue might have been funny. Oh, fuck it. It was funny. The guy was starring in a movie called Gremlins. This was mind-blowing to me. That a college student could be in a movie was as farfetched as a classmate being an astronaut.

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An Italian girlfriend had her hand in the bet. She was moving back to Rome to live with her mother. The two of us hung out endlessly as that romantic clock wound down. She had seen Gremlinsand she promised me I was better looking than my classmate. With a flap of her Italian butterfly wings she changed the next decade of my life. He took my bet.

We sealed it with a handshake and a laugh. He was happy to lose for the adventure of being close to such an outrageous outcome. I had no resume. I had no headshot. I imagined a few tidy essays on my time in the movies. Flecks of drill sergeant spittle were the least of my problems. By class seventh take my giggling was like clockwork. When you come write this office, I talk and you listen.

Your entire wretched generation has poisoned itself with narcotics and abominable music. And… wait for it…. It could happen to anyone. Twenty-seven takes following we were approaching the we-can-only-afford-three-takes bad-film-acting-budget-completion barrier. On the spectrum delightful talent, every one of the non-union actors amusement that film could be placed somewhere in dignity ROYGBIV hot red zone.