For several decades as an actor and stand up comic I kept hitting a wall. The phone wasn’t ringing.  Auditions were lame.  But I kept getting decent acting gigs here and there and it paid the bills.  But there was nowhere to go but sideways.

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This wall was my fault – primarily based on me thinking I needed to ’stay in the acting game’ so my peers, friends and family wouldn’t think I gave up.  Gotta act full time.  Gotta stay on the grind.  If you’re not studying your craft, you’re losing your muscle.

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Knowing what I know now, I think all that is horseshit.  But I never had the courage to say it out loud.

My theory was proven accurate with my first entrepreneurial venture, which happened almost by accident.

In 1997 I was performing at a dinner theatre/magic show at Caesar’s Palace and a lot of the guests were Japanese.  I lived in Japan until I was ten, and I speak the language.  I knew Japanese tourists love that combination, and I saw an opportunity there.  So I translated the English language script to Japanese and licensed it to Caesar’s Palace – and they paid me for it.  I performed in two languages for three years.  I added value to their brand and some cash in my pocket at age 23.  It wasn’t a massive check, but it was the first time I realized that my ideas and creating opportunities OUTSIDE of acting could be just as valuable as my acting, and that I could be more than a cliche.

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Fast forward to 2003: I used my acting class with Jeffrey Tambor to sow the seeds of my one man show, Basic Training.  Broke and working four jobs, I rented a small theatre and invited everyone I knew in LA (there weren’t many).  Within a year I had secured a major investor and leveraged that relationship to secure an additional two investors who then partnered with me to take the show to Broadway with a six figure capitalization. In the fall of 2008.  With a few speed bumps in between, I served as my own actor, agent, manager, attorney, director, producer, and technician until I got the attention of people who could do it much better than I.  Took longer than I hoped but unlike Caesar’s Palace, I had to build the brand and refine the product.

April 2010: My two business partners, Justin Sudds, TJ Dawe and I optioned PostSecret.com to develop it into a stage adaptation.

Oct 2012:  After sinking two years of time, sweat and capital into building a script and a ‘test cast’, we have secured the interest of one of the top 5 theatre investors in North America.  PostSecret: Unheard Voices is the name of the piece.  In this venture I am an actor in the piece, a producer, writer, co-director, tour manager, technician and contract-drafter-person.

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What will my roles be as a co-founder in my new tech venture, ReceiptNest.com?

The most common question I get when I meet investors in the tech space?

Wait…I thought you were an actor!

That’s correct.  I’ve filled whatever role life threw at me and added my own color.  I don’t have a BA or an MA.  I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I never attended a performing arts school.  And I hate musicals.

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Maybe I’m more than an actor.

Kahlil (at) gigsmacked (dot) com

By Sept 2002 I had lived in LA for over a year, had been to a crazy number of auditions, and I wasn’t getting anywhere.  I was working a desk job to ‘pay the bills’ and ‘fall back in case acting didn’t pan out’, but I reached a point where I realized I didn’t move to LA to hide behind mediocrity and everybody else’s expectations.  So I quit my secure, 9-5 well paying job.  Since then I’ve been working towards a future that I wasn’t sure about, never really knowing how it would unfold, nor how long it would take for me to realize my dreams.  I just knew I didn’t belong behind a desk.

This journey began with me facing my fears and inadequacies (I was a stand-up not a writer) by writing and staging the seminal scenes of my bare bones solo show Basic Training during acting classes, the first of which was taught by Jeffrey Tambor.

The success of Basic Training has taken me to more cities than I can remember, won more awards than I can name and sold more tickets than I care to count.

But it wasn’t an agent or a manager, nor was it some gatekeeper ‘discovering me’ that made the difference.  It started with me creating an opportunity for myself.  Broke and on the ropes, I had to create to survive.

People see the names attached to the recent Humanitas New Voices television development deal based on my show and they assume that these well heeled and famous television execs came on board early on and whisked me away to Hollywood board rooms and pitch sessions with the greatest of ease.  I won’t list the names of the execs here because the name dropping isn’t necessary, but suffice to say you know their work.  And that’s not the way it happened.  I had to build it, and build it…and build it.  And then I had to seek them out.  Yes, there were introductions along the way.

Here’s what I learned:  If you want a break, create it.

I had to get my ass kicked in acting class, take the show out on the road to Fringe festivals, go back to class, listen to countless agents and casting directors tell me that it was time to write something new, and then keep writing and rehearsing while working four shitty jobs like stocking shelves at Albertson’s Grocery Store on midnight shift with ex-cons, sometimes sleeping in my truck or wherever I could crash.

Whether you’re an actor or not, waiting for someone to give you a break is a dead end.  Will yourself to failure, seek out people smarter than you and listend to them but don’t worship them, and mediocrity won’t become your legacy.

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Pick yourself.

Whenever I go to an audition I can’t help but wonder:  If I don’t get this gig should I take more classes?

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Despite all the reviews and accolades about my performances around the world:  Am I really as good as I can be?

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I gotta be honest.  Part of me thinks taking classes is cheesy and benign.  It seems like the idea of taking classes and bragging about them is much more attractive than the act of taking them.  It just sounds better in conversation doesn’t it?

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‘I’m in class three times a week and I’m learning SO much’.

Does it help you get hired?   For every actor who says you don’t need classes there’s a DeNiro or Pacino who have obviously made it work for them.

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Jeffrey Tambor’s class (which I took while living in LA) was full of working actors you’d recognize from television and film but they were only taking class because they were between gigs.  I was taking the class because – well actually I couldn’t afford to take his class but he saw something in me and allowed me to take it anyway.  As a result of his class I wrote a one man show that gained worldwide recognition but kept me on the road so I didn’t have time to take class.

The other part of me thinks that there’s nothing better than sharpening your skills with fellow thespians but I can think of nothing more boring than talking about acting with actors.  Sorry if that sounds harsh (no offense fellow actors out there) but it’s something I do, not who I am.  But I digress.

What’s your take on this?  Feel free to comment below and take the poll.  This is one thing that needs more conversation.

Kahlil (at) gigsmacked (dot) com

‘We are one skill away from the success we so greatly desire.’ – Unknown

What’s yours?

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When I moved to Los Angeles in 2001 I was broken.  My life was in pieces (three to be exact) as I arrived in Studio City with all of my worldly possessions: three suitcases, my Isuzu Amigo and my desire – which could hardly be called that because I was scared to death.  Scared to move to LA but I had nowhere else to go.  Scared to do the ‘acting thing’ but after performing at Caesars Palace as a comic for three years I felt like I was ready.   Scared of my own shadow…but I was so broke my shadow was welcome company.

I quickly fell into the hamster wheel of what aspiring actors in L.A. ‘do’.  Get a crappy day job.  Find an acting class.  It was my delusional way of convincing myself that I was doing something for my career while holding down a day job ‘just in cast things didn’t work out’.  Fear.  And then I found Jeffrey Tambor’s class.  And fear took on a new meaning.

Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development) is one of the most respected character actors in the world.  You can find more about him here.

His class wasn’t one that allowed you to sit in the back and watch. Newcomers had to do a monologue.  My monologue was funny as hell, so I thought. The audience of 200+ actors were rolling in the aisles.  Jeffrey tore it apart.  He offered to give me my money back because I was wasting his time – ‘you’ll get work’, he said.  ‘The question is, do you want a career?’.   Another guy got up and started doing a scene about his family – it was really compelling.  Jeffrey told him to pack it up and hit the road – sympathy has no place in this business.  One by one he picked us off, male/female didn’t matter.  He honestly offered to write several of us checks unless we got onstage and showed him something we were afraid to do with our talent.   Doing things in your comfort zone leads to complacency and complacent performers can’t cut the mustard.  Grow or Die.

For me it was drama vs comedy.  Jeffrey suggested that stand up comedy didn’t allow me to show the depth of my skills.  He had me do the same monologue in a dramatic way but without making it so obvious that I wanted laughs, (Uta Hagen – play the intention, not the laugh) and not only did the audience laugh harder, it changed me forever.   All of a sudden the fear of not being funny on stage was fuel instead of an excuse.  I was proud to not be just another funny black guy in LA.  The monologue Jeffrey helped me cultivate became the foundation of my award winning one person show Basic Training.

Find your performance fear and work it.  Because life is short…one day somebody’s going to take your body and put it in a wooden box.  And then they’ll cover it with dirt, sing a few songs and walk away.  That’s how the story ends.  What will you do between now and then?

Kahlil (at) gigsmacked (dot) com

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