After 26 years as a regional sales manager for a packaged foods company, my father was laid off. He spent a year puttering around the house and relying on my mother's rapidly failing small business for income until he found his true calling: to be in the movies. He wasn't going to be discouraged just because he was a 52-year-old man who lived nowhere near Hollywood and had never so much as auditioned for a high school play.
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Dad. (Via ArrestedDevelopmentWiki)
In actual Portland in the actual '90s, the dream of the '90s was not yet alive in Portland. Back then, it was a remote mini-Seattle, such that it was a pretty big deal Touchstone Pictures picked the city to film Mr. Holland's Opus. It starred Richard Dreyfuss as a failed composer who becomes a high school band teacher, and he is Very Inspirational. The local news media breathlessly and extensively covered the production of this otherwise forgettable movie. As my father was 52 and unemployed, he watched a lot of local news, which is where he heard that the movie needed hundreds of extras. Also, it paid $80 a day and included free lunch, which cinched it.
My father, a trim, youthful, super-cocky dude (26 years in sales), was picked not just to stand in a crowd, but to stand at the front of a crowd—in the movie's pivotal parade scene, no less. This is when Mr. Holland, still a green teacher, sends his ragtag marching band into its first parade. Then a fire truck siren goes off and when his baby son doesn't react, the music-loving Mr. Holland learns that his boy is deaf.
It was also a pivotal moment in my father's life—he was “discovered." During the shooting of this scene, however inexplicably, an assistant director pointed at my father and asked, “Hey, do you want to have some lines?"
Twenty years on, this still makes no sense. This was a very important scene in the film, plot-wise, not to mention a difficult and expensive one to shoot involving hundreds of extras, a marching band, a fire truck, and an infant actor. It was presumably already scripted, blocked, and lit. And then the AD just decided to add in a new character?
Nevertheless, he was elevated from extra to “Parade Director" (my father's invention, because he sadly didn't make it into the film's credits) and told to improvise his lines, which are directives to Mr. Holland's Kennedy High band to get into the damn parade already. Mr. Holland then comically explodes at my father, and my father throws up his arms in frustration. That's the whole scene.
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SO FRUSTRATED. (Via YouTube)
You know how in junior high, when you immediately get a powerful crush on some person simply because you found out they had a crush on you? Similarly, my father decided that getting picked out of a crowd from the thing he did on a lark meant that God was telling him to be an actor. He was also bolstered by the mood in Portland, namely that Mr. Holland's Opus would lead to a burgeoning film industry in the city. It didn't, really, but it led to a boom in predatory film-adjacent industries. That is to say my dad spent lots of money on a fly-by-night casting agency's "casting fees," and headshots from a photographer recommended by said casting agency.
The agency promised to set him up with real acting work, but all he could ever get were more gigs as an extra. Perhaps the agency was a little illegitimate, but my father's inability to get acting work was not helped by his unwillingness to learn anything about acting. No acting lessons, no improv class, no nothing. Like many actors, he was hoping to coast on charm and luck, and why shouldn't he think that—that was how he'd gotten his big break, after all.
He was in a true crime movie-of-the-week as a limo driver (and you couldn't see his face on screen) and popped up in a short-lived crime drama called Under Suspicion. After Mr. Holland's Opus, the only steady work he ever saw was on a show called Nowhere Man. Do you remember Nowhere Man? It was the first and only critically acclaimed show on UPN. It was a show about a guy on the run, and they filmed it in Portland because the city could be easily "dressed" to look like other cities. Because it was a different city every week, it didn't matter that the same handful of people played the same background people in every episode.
As such, my dad was an extra on six episodes of Nowhere Man. Because he was a 52-year-old guy, he was cast as characters as varied as “guy in suit," “businessman," or one time, as Nowhere Man had a tiny budget, “guy in car" because he had his own car. (Ironically, this was a company car from his old job that his mother-in-law had purchased, and then later gave to him because his family, going broke while he pursued “acting," needed a car.) He got to play a guy who tries to pick up a prostitute, but whom the prostitute rejects because he is both a pervert and cheap.
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I really hope he isn't Method. (Via YouTube)
The actress ad-libbed her lines, based on the off-mic dialogue between herself and my father—which my father improvised on the spot. “That guy wanted me to wear baby clothes. Hey, if he wants to spring for the diapers, I'm game." He was failing at this whole screen acting thing, but my dad might've done alright at Second City or UCB. (Again, he really should have taken an improv class.)
Nowhere Manwas watched by no one, because it was on UPN. It was cancelled after one season, more or less shuttering the Portland film industry. My father, however, didn't take the hint, and kept pursuing acting work that wasn't there. Yes, part of this drive was based on the delusion that he was so handsome and awesome that the universe would once again reward him with another amazing opportunity. It was also built on his steadfast refusal to work—as I heard him once explain, he had done the grind for 26 years and felt that he was owed "a break." (That soul-killing grind, by the way, involved a company car with free gas, a very liberal expense account, working from home, and setting his own hours.) I've never seen my mother more stressed out in her life. My father couldn't understand why she wasn't happy for him, or supportive as he pursued his late-breaking dream. All she ever wanted to talk about were trivial things like how were they going to afford to send their son to college, or where they were going to live when they lost the house in three months.
But he didn't let the haters get him down, and he kept going. Somehow, he found more extra gigs, appearing in a handful of industrial training videos because he looked like a middle-aged, mid-level businessman. Which is what he was. And he finally realized that. Two years after his star-making turn, he became a middle-aged, mid-level businessman again, in real life, accepting a job as a regional sales manager for a different packaged foods company.
But, right after he took the new job and was unable to devote any more time to the craft of acting, a biopic about University of Oregon track star Steve Prefontaine called Without Limits began filming at the University of Oregon, my father's alma mater. He had to give the movies one last try.
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Sweet blazer, though. (Via YouTube)
If you would like to see more of my father's film oeuvre, please visit his TV room and peruse the stack of VHS tapes that are all cued up to his scenes. Headshots are also available.
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