Category: Actor/Musician

I just realized something I haven’t written about yet. Larry and I have been writing and rehearsing an original improv/sketch comedy show with our friend, Jon Steele (his real name). It all started a couple of months ago when we decided we wanted to put something together and by the end of the first rehearsal we already had almost an entire show’s worth of ideas to flesh out. There’s a few strictly scripted pieces, but most are just loose skeletons that we improv around. They’re still kind of scripted but just not strictly. They’re more like specific plot points to create the basic story flow and resolution with room to play. We also have a few pieces that are just a very loose concept and are improv’d from audience submitted suggestions. We’ve done two test performances in our living room for friends and have received very positive feedback.
We’ve settled on the name “Damn Dirty Apes” for our troupe and the show is called “The Madhouse” as there is a running set of sketches involving me as Charlton Heston.
I wanted to present two of my favorites to here now. Naturally they are the fully scripted pieces since I can’t really present any of the improv pieces.
The first one is “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s General Store”.
The second is one I’m particularly proud of, as we’ve taken one of the most basic lowbrow comedy staples, the dick joke, and turned into one of the most densely pun and innuendo packed and dare I say, intelligent pieces we’ve written. It is known to us as “Dickin’ Around”.
We hope to start booking the show soon and perhaps participating in some of the improv Olympics that go on weekly around here.

Which picture will get me tons of acting work and rocket me to superstardom:
Number 1
Number 2

I’ve got my new stage name: Whatshisface Allyn. That way when people are casting some good character role they’ll say “You know who we need? Whatshisface! That guy who was in that thing!”
Then they’ll call me because I’ll be the only actor named “Whatshisface.” The spelling doesn’t work too well though. Maybe I should be “Watzizface” or something. Perhaps “Whats-his-face.” I’ll never have top billing, but that’s O.K. I’d rather have a great character actor career like Gary Oldman anyway.

Some of you might remember when I was an extra on the upcoming film about Truman Capote titled “Infamous”. In the new trailer for the movie, there are two short clips of the scene I was in. In one of them I’m fairly positive that youc an actually see me in the background. Take a look:

I’m almost positive that’s me. Such a glamorous life I lead.

I’ve been working on my self-marketing in preparation to try and get an agent and some real acting work. I decided to make up some kind of post cards or something to send as thank you notes or whatever and came up with this collage that I’m going to put on the left hand side. I thought it was pretty cool.

Next update: my grueling week of work as an extra. Oy. Quite possibly the some of the hardest days of work of my life. stay tuned.

After my last tale of boredom and career frustration as an extra, I immediately got four days (so far anyway, possibly more) as an extra on the Robert Rodriguez portion of “Grind House”. Sadly, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so I can’t actually tell you anything about it other than this has reminded me in some ways why I do this. It has been, for the most part, a very fun experience, though still tinged with the ever present frustration of being only only peripherally near the things I want to be doing (acting and crew work). At least this experience has been slightly more satisfying to the hungry beast inside me that craves the fruition of my dreams.
I think the most frustrating thing as someone looking for work as a Production Assistant (with my professional sights set on rising up to Assistant Directing as the next step) is that it doesn’t seem to matter what you’ve done as much as it just seems you have to “know someone” to get onto the big sets. I already have some Directing and Assistant Directing experience, but not enough to get those jobs professionally.
I really hope to make a career in Austin, as I love it here, and really do not want to live in L.A. I thought I’d use the recent layoff from my day job to channel all my efforts into pursuing acting, crew work, and music. Unfortunately, since these aren’t things you can make a living at overnight, I just might have to sell my body as a medical research volunteer for a while too…
I love Austin. Hopefully Austin will show me some love back! It’s time for my big break, Austin! Ya, hear me?

Last week I got the call to be an extra on “The Hitcher“. They wanted me to be a paramedic. Being the considerate guy I am I told them that I was pretty sure they had my out of date headshot where I was 60 pounds heavier and since I recently shaved my head for a role I wanted to send them a current snapshot to make sure they still wanted me. I emailed the snapshot and got the call back that they did still want to use me, but I would instead be a prisoner. Fitting, since I called this my “Prison Break” hair style, but kind of a bummer since I think the paramedic ended up getting used a lot more and got some good camera time. I’m not sure why they changed me since the paramedic didn’t look all that drastically different from me.
The location was down in San Marcos, about a 45 minute drive away, so I got up at 5:00 a.m. to be on set by 6:00 a.m. I was told that I’d be a “new prisoner” being brought in after having just been arrested so I should bring 3 changes of clothes for wardrobe to pick from. The location was the Hays County Law enforcement center. It was interesting filming there since they obviously couldn’t shut the place down, and periodically everything had to stop while an inmate was brought in or taken out. I parked my car and hauled all my stuff across to the catering tent they had set up outside where we’d be hanging out. I signed in and got some good food for breakfast from the table. After a few minutes I was taken to wardrobe. I told them I was a “New Prisoner”, but instead of keeping me in some of my clothes, they put me in the black and white striped prisoner clothes. Hair and make up looked me over and gave their approval, and I was off to the tent to wait. And wait. And wait.

Continue reading…

I thought I’d post this little recording here in case anyone was interested.
I was finishing up a comedic short film that me and a friend had made when I decided to add some music underneath one scene at the last minute. I fired up the DAW and threw down two pieces of music really quickly for the scene. This was during the course of a marathon editing session in order to get this piece out quickly, so I didn’t have a lot of time to be my obsessive perfectionist self.
The playing is sloppy as **** , there was no effects or other post processing done to it at all. Just hit record and went. I pieced it together over many, many, many takes.
So as I said, it’s sloppy, unprocessed and unpolished, but without further disclaimer, Gustavo’s theme
As a bonus, here is the other piece of score I composed for the film.

For our “Movie Musketeers” segment filming last night, we were interviewing viewers coming out of “Superman Returns”, so Larry once again got some more mileage from his Superman costume, Hillary was Supergirl and I was Lex Luthor. Hopefully I can get my hands on some of the many pictures that were taken of the three of us together.

I’ve uploaded some of the segments that we’ve produced for the Austin Movie show. More to come! Sadly, I can’t seem to get any better quality from my uploads, but they should suffice for now.