THE B-STORY AND FULL THROTTLE AWARDS SEASON BEGINS!

THE B STORY - MUSINGS BY THE OLD LADY PARTNER OF SPENT-LAURA BUTLER
I thought it would be great and deliciously self-indulgent (aren't all blogs?) to create a column within our Spent TV blog that talks about the trials and bumps of dreaming-the-dream at a non-traditional age. In my case - fifty plus. I'm not even a college grad - there I said it, much less a film school student. Did I mention I dated one once, does that count?

I'm simply a grown up little kid who never gave up the dream of winning an Oscar and sharing my stories with everyone on the big screen in that we-are-all-one, Kumbaya kind of way.

"The B-Story" I hope will make you laugh, cry and maybe even learn to hate my guts in my quest for my own golden statuette on the mantlepiece. So here's the first installment. Enjoy - or not. But be kind in your comments. I'm an old lady you know.

THE B-STORY #1  - AGE  
Yeah, yeah age. I'm not whining just pointing out that indeed there are those that believe my writing or ideas are about as relevant as an IHOP senior discount because I'm not thirty. What's fun for me, is my voice is somewhat younger than my birth years. My demeanor, too. So it's always an adventure when people talk to me over the phone and  expect a thirty to forty year old and get my fifty-plus self when we meet instead. I wish I had an iphone pic for every awkward look.

I began my real journey toward my dream when I was 41, penning my first script - THE COLUMNIST - which placed third in the American Screenwriters Association annual screenplay competition. Pretty frighin' good for a first try, or so I thought. Ha! I was naive and certainly ill-prepared when the agencies did call. I won't get too specific name wise here, cause the land of LA LA continues to be a small town, but what I will say is three agencies called and asked to read my script. One of the agencies, and yep, it was a big one, called me. Read it. And called me in for a meeting.

Lordy - I thought I'd died and gone to heaven! Hollywood, Highland and that little red carpet here I come! I parked my broken down Honda in the agency's parking lot, gelled my hair and made my way up the stairs to what my naive little ass was convinced would be a fabulous meeting and a signed contract for representation.

Welp, the good thing, and I mean the only good thing (besides validated parking) was that the meeting was good. The male agent loved the script, said it was incredible writing and he wanted to read whatever else I had. He was polite, engaged and earnestly shook my hand when I left.

In that instant, that excited kid inside of me could already taste the Wolfgang Puck Governor's Ball dinner and smell the excitement of Oscar night. I had hope and I thought my dreams actually had a future. But my immediate need brought me back to reality - I had to pee. Nerves and coffee. Laura the aspiring writer needed to find the loo. And wouldn't you know it, the ladies room happened to be located in the hallway on the way to the main elevator.

Nature called and finished. I washed my hands and stood at the door towel drying my hands and heard the voices of the same-shirted agents making their way toward the elevators for lunch. I heard them laugh, talk sex, and finally pause to tie a shoelace right outside the door. The shoelace tie-yer outside the bathroom was none other than the agent I'd just met with. Funny thing was their sex talk subject suddenly changed to me.

"Too bad she's old," my shoe-tying agent said. "If she were younger and a guy, I'd have signed her. Her script is a hell of a good writing sample."

"She's that old," another asked?

"Yeah. Like forty, maybe late thirties," the shoe-typer replied.

"Oh."

Oh. OH? Oh what? I'm too old cause I might be thirty-nine or forty? I guess now at fifty-four I'd give him a heart attack I'm so old - shriveled all up, like a strawberry pop-tart in the desert.

The truth is ageism is part of the problem in Hollywood. Guilds have addressed the issue more than once. What it's meant for me personally is I must try harder, ignore it even, and avoid botox at all costs. I'm proud to be fifty four, proud to be one of those who never gave up on my dreams despite my AARP card carrying status.

I never heard back from the ageist agent again. despite my email attempts to contact him with my follow up script. But I knew I wouldn't. I did send him a final email, tho, one that simply stated this fact:

"The average age of screenwriters when they win the Oscar is 57. Here's to 57."
I signed it "No-need-to-be thirty Laura"


GOTH AND SPIRIT AWARDS
In case you haven't read, heard or seen, the Gotham Awards were handed out last night in NYC and the Independent Spirit Awards nominations were announced today.  Below are partial lists of both, with links. Some great films this year, talented performances and direction. Spent TV extends it's congrats to all!

Click  here for Independent Spirt Award Nominees

Click here for Gotham Award Winners

LLA SHOOTS THIS WEEKEND
Our next installment of our webseries LLA shoots this weekend. Actors Kurt Sproul, Catherine Brewton, Charlotte Rae and John Nagle join our wonderful cast. Check back next week for some onset pix!


VOTE VOTE VOTE FOR OUR ACTORS
Check out our series and vote for your favorite Spent actor people! These hard working talents deserve the kudos, so please click and vote on the right side of our Spent TV blog page.

Leftover Stuffing

So, if you are not dodging pepper spray at the mall today, hopefully you are out taking in a bargain matinee at the local theater. It's the perfect weekend for buttered popcorn and visual entertainment. Watching movies on the computer, on a mobile apparatus or a good old fashioned TV are fine, but nothing beats the shared experience of a room full of moviegoers reacting and enjoying the same thing on screen.  This weekend, you got your Muppets, a kid named Hugo and a bunch of Bloodsuckers, not to mention a silent throwback film thats got plenty of Oscar buzz around it. So forget the sales and hit the movie palace instead.

STILL TIME TO VOTE
January 15 we hand out our very first and not the last Spent TV best actor award.  So cruise our wbenet and vote for your favorite! Now!

CHANGES A COMING
We are making some changes to the webnet, looking for more feedback from you. We also hope to introduce a new live stream segment where you can chat with us. The new year at Spent TV looks to bring some great new surprises, so stay tuned.

Holidaze!

As the day of food indulgence fast approaches, the people at SPENT TV want to thank you for tuning in to our original online programming and for your support. This year has been a challenging one for us, the economy and personal hurtles within our families have made getting our projects finished and up on the web a sometimes exhausting one. But still we prevail. And as we look forward to juicy stuffing and bourbon soaked pumpkin pie we want to thank our generous talented actors, our amazing crew, and again all youze folks for sticking with us. Next year begins a new season, with two new shows we are sure will make you laugh, cry, and want to throw things at your television sets.

OSCAR DREAMS

For many, winning an Oscar or any award that recognizes excellence of craft, is a dream. It starts young, maybe watching the dress-up glitz and glamour on the TV screen or perhaps less altruistically, dreaming of the additional bucks and power an Oscar win sometimes bring. Whatever the reason, there are those who dream of walking that red carpet one day. And there are those who actually get there.
This time of year is officially the beginning of what is known in Hollywood as "Award Season," the weeks of new releases, promotions and parties that result in an award nomination. Or not. Historically it's the time that studios and distributors roll out their Oscar hopefuls onto the big screen. It's also the time when more "thinking" films are premiered, or so it's said. Trade-to-trade publications, like the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety used to love this time of year because it translated into big dollars from all the ads those studios and other trade business' would place to promote their films and stars.

But in recent years  "Awards Season" and ad money have not walked hand-in-hand. The growth of the internet, the continuing bad economy, and the uncharted world of non-traditional media advertising have for the most part taken away the big ad dollars for the trade-to-trade  business', diminishing their own sales staff's "oscar dreams" of pricey cover ads and those I'm-going-to-Paris bonuses.

But back to those wide-eyed Oscar dreaming creatives. Over time, many of those dreamers own golden aspirations have been tarnished or squashed by the entertainment industry's "politics." Good actors who watch roles go to not the best audition,  but to the best in bed. Talented writer's who take dozens of meetings and are told over and over again they are brilliant only to never be produced. Directors who spend years as an AD wondering what they may have said or who they may have pissed off to keep them forever in the second position. No matter what the craft or what the dream, everyone reaches that crossroad, that threshold of obstacle or mini day of reckoning that requires one of those life-changing decisions: go forward, stay put or turn back.

And what happens from there is the stuff of an Oprah, Dr. Phil or Good Morning America segment . The dreamer either walks the red carpet, or not. The journey is either a rewarding one or not. A person's life is either made rich by the experience, the situations and the people, or not.

It takes true strength, courage, and more than a little craziness for anyone to aspire to creative heights. Red carpet dreams or not. Seriously, what other vocation is based on so subjective a success?

So here's a toast to those that do, those that dream to be the next Clooney, or Fuqua, or Spielberg or Apatow, Jolie, Hardwicke or Fey.

Casting Director Workshops - Up for Discussion and More

Spent TV has always been a production company that is pro-actor. We recognize and realize the important and immeasurable contribution actors bring to our projects. And while we ain't rich (Cary likes to say "yet") we have always tried to give what ever we could. We have gone out of our way to work and meet SAG and AFTRA standards, even when it was like pulling embedded teeth just trying to get information from them.
As an independent production company we often cast talented actors who are new to LA and looking to get active and get out there. We are also often asked about casting workshops and if they are of benefit or just cha-ching machines for those who put them on. We recently read an interesting blog by Matthew Lessall that takes up the subject. When asked, Spent TV has been a supporter of some of the LA based workshops that offer actors the opportunity to get in front of legit casting directors at a reasonable cost but at the same time have steered clear of those that promise the world and charge a mini-fortune or others that feature individuals that have not been on a show or part of any active film project for years.
In response to the criticisms circulating now about the worksops,  Lessall shares " Most actors in the workshop only want to get in front of me to show me that they can act and 90% of the time, they are trying too hard, not listening, not acting. So when it comes time for me to make adjustments, I spend time with each individual to show them specifically what I am looking for in an actor. I do this repeatedly during the class and I hope that by the 20th actor, the class begins to see that there is a method to my madness and that my instruction on technique has a purpose and comes from over 10 years of casting, 6 years of professional acting, and years of training in classical acting, Meisner, etc… So, yes, when I go to a workshop, it is about my conducting just that: A WORKSHOP ON ACTING. "
This is often in stark contrast to what some organizations do and say when it comes to the workshops they offer. Several actors Spent TV has worked with complain the casting director they've paid for gave them no notes on performance or just a single comment at best - that's a lot of nothing for upwards of $75. And some were no longer casting the show they were represented as being a part of.
So what are your thoughts? Where else might a new to LA actor go to get such immediate access?


COMING SOON: LLA EPISODE 2
After a summer-long hiatus, LLA episode 2 is shooting soon. Regular lesbian lovers KYLE HEFFNER, ROBERT BELL. DORIAN MARTIN and CORY GLUCK are returning for more of their lesbian loving adventures. If you haven't seen episode one watch it on SPENT or YouTube.

And check out our full webnet! We love your comments and emails, so keep them coming!

In Between

Over the past few weeks we've engaged in multiple conversations with other creative people on how Internet content plays into the distribution paradigms of the future. As we've made mention in this blog before, the challenge is always to get eyes on your product. The more eyes your stories reach, the more opportunity you have to actually realize some monetary compensation and be able to live off of the talents you have.

Today, there is no one true paradigm of how to get your series up, seen and funded to sustain them. One could also argue that much of the creative content up on the web is poor at best. The struggle some talented creatives also have is trying to work with both SAG and AFTRA even under their "new media contracts." Insurance is still required, often costing hundreds of dollars. It's also been our experience both SAG and AFTRA do not return emails or calls. So while we wait to fill things out and do the right thing, our shoot dates just roll by. For those with full financing, this is probably whining. But when you are working 40 hours a week to pay bills and support your creativity on the side, the lack of follow up from SAG and AFTRA are just another headache you don't need.

That said, we often find ourselves in-between - good enough for people watching our series to love them and ask for more from us. Not funded enough to be able to shoot through for two weeks and pay the thousands of dollars required to cover the requirements from all the unions. So we keep plugging along, grateful for the pioneering spirit of this new media world and grateful for the talent that opts to work with us despite the obstacles.

SPENT'S FALL SEASON BEGINS SEPTEMBER 30!

Every inch of our collective Spent TV bodies are sore and our brains are fried as we prepare away to make Spent's Fall season of web programming a good one. Our continuing series remain - Fast Track, LLA, The One and of course, It's Just a Moobie. But beginning in October we have some new surprises so stick around.

And stay tuned for the next Spent Brain Brunch, our get together for creative folks in LA. And our annual SPENT BOWLING bash.

Check out the newest  episode of FAST TRACK on our You Tube channel if you haven't already!

Awards season is soon upon us, so Gina and Eric will be extra busy at the cinemas to share their thoughts on the Oscar season buzz.