Burbank Airport is better than LAX, and much safer, just for starters.

Agents
You'll need one agent for commercial representation and other for theatrical (film/TV). You are not allowed to free lance with agents in L.A the way you are in New York or San Francisco.

Go to the Samuel French Bookstore, 7623 Sunset Blvd.(near Stanley) in Hollywood (213)876-0570, or their branch at 11963 Ventura Blvd. (just east of Laurel Canyon) in Studio City (818)762-0535, and browse through the many guide books. In particular, you should purchase one called The Agencies, published by Acting World Books. It costs about $10 and is revised several times a year. The enterprising writers have taken the trouble to comb through all of the hundreds of agents in town and make editorial comments on each of them so you can have a better idea of agency specialties, whether or not an agency only reps stars, that kind of thing.

You might also pick up the most recent copy of the Talent Agent booklet (also about $10) put out by Breakdown Services. It is published more frequently than The Agencies and, though it does not contain editorial comments, it is a bit more up to date in terms of listing the names of the specific agents within the agencies. You'll discover that agents move from agency to agency fairly often, the same way casting directors move from studio to studio. It is important that your references be freshly recent.

You might also make a trip to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They have been located on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills for years, but they have a brand new building at 333 S. La Cienega (at Olympic) in Beverly Hills (213)247-3020. This is the outfit that publishes the Academy Players Directory and gives out Academy Awards. You can browse through the directory for an idea of which agents represent which kinds of performers.

You'll notice a pattern. Some agents prefer character people, some like beautiful men and women. The library at American Film Institute on Western just north of Franklin in Los Feliz should also have a copy of the directories. Call first, though, because AFI has had budget problems, and they were talking about closing their library to the general public.

If you are a SAG member, you can visit the Guild offices at 5757 Wilshire Blvd. and spend five minutes looking at the computer printout of agency client lists. They won't let you copy anything down because the home addresses and phone numbers of all the actors are on the lists, and they'll only allow you five minutes. Still, this is a useful stop because you can see precisely how large a particular agent's client list is. Some agents represent twenty five actors and some represent five hundred.

Once you have your list of potential agencies narrowed down, read the chapter on finding an agent in my book, The Audition Book (Winning Strategies For Breaking Into Theater, Film and TV). Then, start chasing them. It may take a while to get good representation, so don't get discouraged.

Publications You Must Read Regularly
Daily Variety or Hollywood Reporter, not because of the casting info but for the overview you'll get of the industry. You should set up a reliable record-keeping system and start posting relevant information to it. Make notes of projects in development around town, who the producers are, and track their progress. Also, these trade papers are frequently where you first learn of casting director assignments and talent agent shifts. The Daily Variety TV production chart comes out on Thursday, and the film production chart on Fridays.

The CD Directory (published by Breakdown Services, (213)276-9166. You can subscribe to this for about $40 a year. It lists the contact info on every casting director in L.A., and you receive updates every two weeks. Invaluable.

Breakdown Services also publishes a list of casting directors, all of them CSA (Casting Society of America) members, complete with their credits. It costs $16 and is a very useful reference. It is always nice to know the history of a casting director when you meet them for the first time.

Dramalogue has been bought by Backstage West. You should keep an eye on Backstage for Equity Waiver casting and student films. Most other casting info in it is useless, however. Also, be wary of casting notices in this paper that turn out to be scams. If you think you've seen some slick moves in San Francisco, just wait.... Hollywood is full of folks who want to take your money from you.

Classes
Good L.A. acting teachers tend to be expensive, and I don't have all of their contact numbers at hand. You'll have to do a little research at Samuel French.

Milton Katszeles, stage director/teacher, charges $225 (MAYBE MORE) a month for 2 classes per week, I think, and has something of a cult following. He's also a Scientologist, if that means anything to you.

Joan Darling is a wonderful teacher/director who lives in Santa Fe now and buzzes in and out of L.A. to teach weekends. Her number is (323) 964-3410. She was charging $300 for 4 weekends, last I heard.

Gordon Hunt is popular, but he has something like 45 people in the group.

Jeff Goldblum teaches at Playhouse West School and Repertory Theater, which was founded by Robert Carnegie. No-nonsense kind of place with an impressive past-student roster. Oriented to Meisner Technique.

John Kirby, (323) 939-5284, 441 1/2 N. Orange Dr., L.A. 90036, has a good rep for teaching cold reading technique and is supposed to be particularly good for sit com stuff. He teaches one-on-one for $65 per hour and has a regular night time class (Mon - Wed; 7pm start time) that costs $450 for 12 weeks. People say he is a bit frenetic but knocks himself out for you and is quite knowledgeable about what is going on in L.A. You can audit the class for $10 for a Monday night. You should bring a headshot and resume and get to class 15 minutes early to introduce yourself.

Howard Fine, Janet Alhanti and Larry Moss are three other acting coaches with good reps. Look for them.

Commercial workshops are a dime a dozen in L.A.,and most of them are taught by casting directors who are, to some degree, peddling access. An unofficial quid pro quo exists where agents send aspiring actors to the CD's classes, trying to curry favor in hopes that the CD will call the agent when they are casting something. Welcome to L.A..

One exception: Danny Goldman is a casting director who is also a working actor, and his classes are worthwhile. Also, he recommends a commercial teacher named Stuart Robinson, speaks very highly of him. I know Goldman personally and would tend to trust his advice.

Theatrical (film/television) casting directors turn up all over the place in cold reading workshops and showcases. Many actors consider these functions to be a wise investment, and I don't want to get into an argument about it. My general advice is that you should not be showcasing until your audition skills are already top notch. I think it is a mistake to go to cold reading workshops with the idea that the casting directors will teach you audition skills. If you don't know what you are doing when you arrive, they will simply identify you as a novice, and it will hurt your chances for getting meaningful auditions.

Networking
The Actor's Network (818) 509-1010 is an actors' support group. You pay a fee and then go to meetings at which you network with other actors about job opportunities, career tactics, etc. The group brings in agents and casting directors to speak about the industry and maintains a library of scripts, books and tapes.

Photographers
Michael Papo, 11120 Burbank Blvd, #A, N.Hollywood 91601, (818) 760-8160 is excellent. He takes my photos and has more energy than an electrical outlet. Joan Lauren, (323) 651-4070, takes wonderful shots but is expensive, upward of $650. Papo is a better value. You also might want to check out Tama Rothschild. Her number is (213) 658-7862, and she's been taking good photos for years.

American Film Institute
AFI is located at 2021 N. Western Avenue (just north of Franklin) in Hollywood and is primarily a school for movie directors. Therefore, it can be terrific for networking. There is a casting file there for SAG members, and the director/students (known as "fellows") are supposed to cast from it. As a practical matter, they also cast non-union people for their projects, but you'll have to go over there and hand your picture out on a director-by-director basis if you're not SAG. Anyway, AFI has some excellent seminars you should know about, and the library is wonderful, a lovely place to spend an afternoon reading scripts.

When I was living in L.A., it was open Monday through Friday, noon until 5pm but, as I explained earlier, AFI has been experiencing money trouble, and the hours may have been cut back. It's possible they have closed it to the general public altogether, but you really should check. The library number is (213)856-7655. When I first arrived in L.A. from New York in 1976, I had lots of stage credits, but not much film on myself. AFI is where I got it. That, in turn, led to decent representation.

Where to Live
L.A. is geographically massive, covering 4 thousand square miles. LA county actually contains 86 incorporated cities and has a population of almost 9 million. If you are used to the close-by feel of San Francisco, you're in for a big shock. And the rapid transit system is a joke, so you'll need a car from day one.

Think about this when searching for a place to live: when Los Angeles was young, back at the turn of the century, there was only downtown L.A.. Hollywood did not exist at all. There was no Santa Monica or Beverly Hills. As the city grew, it expanded westward, toward the ocean. Therefore, the oldest buildings with the thickest walls and biggest rooms are in the Los Feliz, Eagle Rock or Silverlake areas or even further east in Pasadena.

Hollywood itself is a bit too pre-fab and seedy for my taste, but a lot of folks like it. Santa Monica, Venice and Malibu are great if you like access to the beach, but rents are high and rooms, as I say, tend to be smaller. Santa Monica has just about the strictest rent control laws in the country, so finding a place there is particularly difficult unless you want to pay something under the table. West L.A. is nice, and you can find moderately priced rentals there if you look around.

In the Los Feliz area, where I lived for a long time, what you want to do is begin at Franklin and Vine Streets and drive east. Scour the neighborhoods north of Franklin for rental signs in yards. After you pass Vermont and Hillhurst, the neighborhoods are chock full of duplexes. Just stay north of Franklin, remember that. The good thing about this area is that you can get to most of the studios and casting offices relatively quickly. The Sony Studios (MGM) are in Culver City, and 20th Century-Fox is near Century City. If you live in the San Fernando Valley, say Studio City or Woodland Hills, you'll have to go across the Hollywood Hills on Laurel Canyon Blvd. to get to those places or to Hollywood, and it is a devil of a crawl sometimes.

Beverly Hills is expensive, and you should pretty much forget it north of Sunset Blvd. unless you luck out and find a guest-house rental. If you want a Beverly Hills address, your best bets are to look south of Olympic, in the southern fringe of the city. Remember, though, that Beverly Hills is not renter-friendly. No laundromats or street-corner telephones in the entire city.

The San Fernando Valley has lower rents than Hollywood but is hotter and has more smog. Not long on charm either, but then little of LA is. Bob Hope still owns big chunks of the Valley. A lot of actors live in Toluca Lake and Studio City, close to NBC, Universal Studios, Disney and CBS/MTM Studios. And there are a lot of theatrical agents in Studio City. Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks and cities further west are okay, but very "suburban", and you're bound to get jammed up in the Ventura Freeway traffic. Average speed on the Ventura Freeway is something like 25 mph.

Smog
The general pattern is that smog begins early in the day in the beach areas and builds eastward as the sun rises. By mid-day, ocean breezes push coastal smog inland, trapping it in the L.A. basin along with industrial and traffic pollution exhausts from downtown L.A.. The sickening soup winds up concentrated over downtown L.A., eastern Hollywood and Pasadena by 4pm or so. If you are sensitive to smog or have asthma, this is a definite consideration because things aren't going to get any better for a long time, if ever. LA fails to meet federal clean air standards one day out of three. School children cannot play on playgrounds over one hundred days out of the year because of bad air. This was one of the major reasons I moved north. Anyway, the closer you are to the ocean, the less you will have to contend with smog.

Ed's Favorite Restaurants
I prefer moderate to inexpensive places with good food, and I don't care much about "making the scene." Any restaurant owned by Wolfgang Puck bores me. The Authentic Cafe on Beverly Blvd. in the Fairfax district has wonderful Tex-Mex food and is usually crowded. For traditional and authentic Mexican, try El Cholo on Western or Lucy's El Adobe on Melrose near Paramount Studios. For Thai food, Chan Dara on Larchmont (also near Paramount) in Hollywood is hard to beat and is lovely to look at. Tommy Tang's on Melrose has great Thai food, too. He was the owner/main cook at Chan Dara before a divorce. Chin Chin is a great bargain if you like inexpensive dim sum American style. They have several branches now, one at Sunset Blvd. and Sunset Plaza in Hollywood, one on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City just east of Laurel Canyon Blvd. and one in Culver City somewhere.

For a real cheap lunch with funky coffee shop ambiance in wooden booths, meet your friends at the Village Cafe at the top of Beachwood Drive in Los Feliz. This was my old hangout, and it is chock full of actors, writers and such. Just get on Beachwood Drive at Franklin and drive north toward the Hollywood sign. About half a mile later, you'll come to a bend in the road and see the place in a small shopping center.

Movie History
If you don't care about movie history, you probably shouldn't even be hanging around in L.A. One of my favorite places is the old DeMille/Lasky Barn, now converted to a museum, located in the big parking lot across the street from the Hollywood Bowl on Highland Avenue. The tiny building was originally located on the corner of Wilcox St and Vine St.. in Hollywood and was where the very first Hollywood movie, "The Squaw Man", was shot (1906, I think) by Cecil B. DeMille. It's chock full of fun things like Charlie Chaplain's tramp outfit, old movie cameras, a chariot from the original "Ben Hur". A short documentary on Hollywood history is screened continually. Also, there is usually a Hollywood oldster or two hanging around who will bend your ear about how it was in the good old days. The museum is run by a non-profit outfit and costs maybe $6 to tour. It's a great place to take out-of-town visitors.