The land of opportunity in the middle of nowhere

Hollywood just isn't a discouraging enough place, says Rob Long

The Hollywood sign near the top of Beachwood Canyon adjacent to Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Reed Saxon / AP

I have an actor friend who realised a few years ago that his acting career was essentially finished. This is a tough realisation for an actor to make, which is why so few of them make it, and why Los Angeles is filled with so many middle-aged waiters and waitresses who still think stardom is about to happen.

The problem isn’t, as some think, that Hollywood is a discouraging and cold place. The problem is that it’s not discouraging enough. Aspiring movie stars can go years without an acting job, but just when they’re about to pack up and move back home, something comes along – a small role on a television sitcom, maybe, or a minor part in a feature film – and that will buoy their spirits for another few lean years of working in restaurants or making espresso.

But my friend is a husband and a father, and so he had additional motivation to face facts. He set a silent deadline – if I don’t find acting work in the next six months, he told himself, I’m going to take serious action – and when that deadline came and went without a series role or even what we call an “under five” part – a part with five or fewer lines – he gathered his family around the kitchen table and made an announcement.

“We’re moving,” he told them. “To Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma is bedrock middle America, and by moving his family there my friend was turning his back on the California lifestyle and an acting career and the daydream factory that is Hollywood.

Except that since moving to the dead centre of America, he’s had more work – as an actor – in feature films and TV series than he ever did back when he lived 10 minutes from the gates of two major studios.

What he is, out in the middle of the country – “the middle of nowhere,” as I keep reminding him, “which is an insult to the concept of nowhere” – is what the actors’ trade union and the studio financial masterminds call a “local hire”.

When you put together the budget for a film or television show that’s going to be filmed on location – that is, filmed somewhere other than a studio soundstage or backlot in Los Angeles – you’re required, for complicated tax reasons, to make a certain number of your personnel “local hires,” people who live and work in the nearby area. The additional incentive is that local hires don’t require union-contracted transportation to and from the production location, which for a Los Angeles-based actor or writer or director is an expensive headache for the studio. Each of the major unions in Hollywood have elaborate and specific travel requirements for their members – always first class, always the priciest accommodations available – so whenever a production can hire a local actor who lives nearby, they jump at the chance.

The terms “nearby” and “local” are elastic, of course. The same Hollywood moneymen who can somehow make a successful blockbuster show a huge financial loss on paper are able, with a few sly definitions, to define a “local” hire as someone who lives 1,000 kilometres away from the production location.

So my friend, who decamped years ago to the vast plains of Oklahoma to give up his dream of movie stardom, finds himself tantalised a few times a year with acting jobs in the surrounding states of Texas, Kansas and Missouri. And since those states actively try to entice film studios to shoot on location, with tax breaks and subsidies and special film permits, there are just enough projects each year to keep my friend from making the clean, final break with his acting career that he, prudently, tried to do in Los Angeles.

He’s actually made more money acting in the years since moving away from Hollywood than he did in the five years before. He spends hours driving, of course, from Oklahoma to wherever the “local” production happens to be, but as far as he’s concerned, it’s worth it. He’s acting. In movies. Which is more than he could say when he lived in Los Angeles.

He tells me that he keeps making silent bargains with himself – If I don’t get work in the next month, I’ll really give it all up, seriously – but then some small “local hire” role always comes along forcing him to postpone taking action.

But, honestly, what action can he take? Where else can he move? There is – quite literally – nowhere else more remote from Hollywood and the media business.

Moving to Oklahoma, unexpectedly, has only made things worse by making them slightly better.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl