I am announcing a new start date for the Film Demo Workshop. We have one meeting now on Tuesday nights, and I'm going to start another on Thursday, October 25th, 7-10:30 Nine weeks, $600.

Scene study is meeting in Chicago on Monday nights, 7-10:30 and is on going. Free audit, start at any time. $135 per month, four month minimum. This is where we work on acting as an art form. It is the mother ship of my classes.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH ITEM #1: The direct financial cost of last year's SAG/AFTRA strike against the advertising industry, according to Daily Variety, was $2.44 million. Of this, AFTRA paid $268,177, and SAG paid the rest, over $2 million. I mention this because calling it a SAG/AFTRA strike implies a 50/50 split, at least to me anyway. As it turns out, there is nothing 50/50 about it. It is mainly SAG with a little bit of AFTRA tacked on.

FOR WHAT ITS WORTH ITEM #2: THE COUNTRY OF FINLAND SPENDS $91 per citizen on the arts; Germany spends $85 per person. France, $51 person. The United States of America spends $6 per person (1995 stats, National Endowment of the Arts).

OPPORTUNITY FOR SAN FRANCISCO ACTORS! Valerie Weak (comm'l -01) reports that there is low-cost, no-cost opportunity to do some cold reading and to network with actors and playwrights. Here's the skinny: The EXIT and Black Box Theatre Present The Playwright's Lab: 10-week playwriting workshop for intermediate/advanced writers facilitated by playwrights: Robert C. Barker and Trevor Allen. Monday Nights 7-10pm October 8-December 3 at the EXIT Theatre.
Playwrights pay $5, Actors are Directors free. To sign up or for more information, contact: playwrights_lab@hotmail.com.

SHOW AND TELL...
ED'S CROSS-COUNTRY DRIVE, SAN FRANCISCO TO CHICAGO, was as lov-er-ly as driving a fifteen foot Budget Rent-a-Truck can be. You sort of wrestle the damned thing along the highway, hope you don't encounter rain or weirdoes, keep an eye on the calendar and deisel-fuel exits. Our route took us northeast from San Francisco, into Nevada, a state that offers plenty of hot sun, gambling casinos and desert prisons. ("Don't pick up hitch-hikers", the road signs instructed, "This is prison territory.") I won $3 and quit while I was ahead. Utah was prettier. The massive white expanse of the Great Salt Lake probably should be one of the world's wonders. Very stark and gorgeous. We drove through Wyoming in hopes of me doing some fly-fishing, but we discovered that the state is in a drought. A BIG drought! No rivers or fishable streams anywhere, not even the famous Big Horn River. It was distressing to watch huge and beautiful trout trapped in non-moving pools of water, their fins jutting into the blistering sun. I could have walked out there and scooped them up in a net, but there's no sport in that. Pass. We drove north in Wyoming, across the Great Divide, to I-90 and then east into South Dakota where we eyeballed Mount Rushmore. (Pop quiz: Who are the four presidents whose images are carved into Mount Rushmore? No cheating.)

Continuing east, we pushed the truck -- its wheels by now pretty seriously out of alignment - across South Dakota and the Black Hills. That's God's country up there, I suppose. I was taken aback
by all the anti-abortion billboards along the I-90 interstate. Finally we got to Sioux City, Iowa and turned south, driving through more cornfields than I have ever seen in my life. It was a relief to
see that Iowa doesn't allow road signs of any kind for several hundred yards either side of the road. Just corn. Finally, after a week on the road, we re-connected with I-80 and made the final push
into Chicago, driving past well-marked exits for the birthplaces of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. Be still, my heart.

This was the first time either Cally or I have driven across America, and I have to admit that it is .... big. And pretty. And majestic. And sometimes boring. And the folks along the way were uniformly
nice and hospitable. In many ways, seeing America this way is like visiting a foreign country, especially if you are a big city kind of person, as I am. It takes a minute to integrate that there are
people out there along I-80 and I-90 that are mainly interested in whether or not it will rain tomorrow and whether the corn is coming up strong. Some of them have never heard of Vogue magazine, the
Taliban or Border's Books, and they don't believe those nasty rumors about tobacco use and lung problems.

USEFUL WEB SITE FOR CHICAGO ACTORS...
I was browsing around the Internet and came across a quite nice site about Chicago theatre and acting. It appears to be a labor of love and has nothing in particular to sell. Lots of very practical info
about the local scene. Check it out. http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Mezzanine/4089/index.html

NEW BAY AREA THEATRE COMPANY! Good luck to DONNA DAVIS (s.stdy -'01), TERRY LAMB (f/tv -'97) and Michael Brown. They are forming an East Bay theatre company called Many Rivers Theatre Project. This kind of thing is precisely what we need more of in the Bay Area!

HOOKS PEOPLE WORKING...
KARI WISHINGRAD (comml'-'92) performed in the San Francisco Fringe Fest in Cathleen Daly's Production of "How to be a Secret Agent Girl (as seen on American Television and in Movies)". Her show got into Best of Fringe plus an award for "Best Female Ensemble" and two "Sold Out" awards. FRANNIE LOGAN (pvt coaching - '00)I landed a principal role on an episode of "It's A Miracle" for PAX TV. Will air in January. PHIL SHERIDAN (comml'+f/tv-'97) did the voice of an angry
Samurai Warrior for a Namco CD game. Reed Evans produced & Digital Annex recorded. To assure that the mouth-movements of the animated character will conform to Phil's, a video camera recorded close-up his shrieks, bellows & curses. KEIR BEIDLING (s.stdy & comml - '01) landed an industrial project for wadsworth publishing through spoonfed Films. SONJA SORIANO (s.stdy - '01), now living in LA, got cast in "Of All the Luck", an indie film by Isolated Pictures. TERRY YOUNG
(f/tv - '00) recently appeared in "Antony & Cleopatra" at the Knightsbridge Theatre in LA. MELINDA MEENG (s.stdy-'01) has been cast in "The Scarlet Pimpernel" at the Diablo Light Opera in Walnut
Creek. It will run Feb - March.

CRAFT NOTES
"PLAYING NOT-SMART CHARACTERS..."
Sooner or later, you'll get the opportunity to play a character that is not a rocket scientist. I met quite a lot of such characters during my cross-country journey, and I have a soft spot in my heart
for them. Indeed, over the years, I've played more than my share of such characters, in movies, on television and on stage. They are great fun.

The trick to playing a character that is not too smart is to downsize his or her curiosity. Shrink the world. Everybody, even a person with a low IQ, thinks he is pretty smart. Everybody, even people
with low IQ's, gets out of bed in the morning and does the best he can to get through the day. Therefore you don't want to "comment" on the character. You don't want to send a signal to the audience that you personally think the character is stupid. Never play a stupid person as stupid. There is nothing that is much funnier than a not-smart person who thinks he is being clever. That guy pumping gas at the small town gas station is only interested in fishing and whether or not the delivery truck is bringing a fresh supply of Mars Bars. The waitress at the diner is mainly interested in the biceps of the telephone repairman who stopped in for a burger. If you ask these people for their opinion about Salvador Dali, U.S./Canada relations or the legacy of Pinochet, you'll get a blank stare and a chill. Nobody likes to be put down or looked down upon.

People who are not smart tend to be good-natured, eager to please and focused on whatever they can physically see in their immediate vicinity. In the movie "Deliverance", these traits were made
menacing by all of those in-bred relatives that were chasing Burt Reynolds and friends. And I remember some wonderful not-smart performances in a small movie entitled "Will Penny", starring
Charleton Heston. Strother Martin is a total master at playing brain-challenged characters. I could watch him do it all day long. Remember his performance as the warden in "Cool Hand Luke"? In
short, if you want to play a not-smart person, keep it simple! Play him or her smart, not dumb, but make the world smaller.

The answer to the Mount Rushmore quiz: George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. (I'll bet Teddy Roosevelt
tripped you up, didn't he?)

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