Adventures Of Atom Smith

It’s nothing like The Italian Job. It involves neither Mini Coopers now Charleze Theron. It also doesn’t pay. Such are student films. But, I like the concept, and I think it’ll be a good piece to get on my reel. I’m not sure exactly how long the movie is supposed to be. The script is seven pages at the moment, but the director said that he is okay with some improvisation during the shooting. So, the final script may wind up being effectively padded by some unscripted banter. I’m guessing something like ten minutes, but I haven’t even time myself reading the script.

The audition day was a sort of comedy of errors. For one thing, it randomly snowed. The evening before was quite nice. Today, the day after, all the snow has melted. But, yesderday it was snowing like heck the entire day. The McDonald’s I stopped at to get something to eat during the drive down to Denver in the snow ran out of Chicken McNuggets. I ordered them, paid at the first window, and pulled up to the second window, and then was told they were out. At Kinko’s, their online printing system refused to believe that a JPG could be printed without all sorts of special instructions, and then never made it through to the people. That whole thing was incredibly annoying. Then, when I finally made it to the audition, the gal running reception was shown where the water bottles were, and kindly offerred me one. The minor oversight in her preparation was that nobody told her where the Men’s room was. This is sort of a mean trick. Best of all, the Men’s room I eventually found was apparently closed for cleaning.

The audition itself went well enough. I did a monologue adapted from Extracts from Adam’s Diary by Mark Twain. It was about the creation of Eve. Since it had biblical and relations between the sexes themes, it seemed appropriate for this particular audition. While I was rehearsing it in the wee hours of the morning before the audition, I was reading it to myself in various voices in order to improve my ability to remember it. One of the voices that I read it in was vaguely Woody-Allen-esque. It wasn’t the best Woody Allen impression in the world, but it was apparently recogniseable. Anyhow, I found that voice more amusing than the others that I had used, so it is the one that I went with during the audition.

The film itself is a short odd-couple buddy comedy about two college room mates who respond to a sex for hire ad and travel to Iowa in order to attempt to impregnate Amish women. Based on a true story. I have got the part of Jon, who is the sort of lead / straight-laced buddy.

My name is Will Rosecrans, and I am an actor, visual effects artist, and IT consultant living in Denver.

My Acting Resume is available online. You may also download my Full Resolution Headshot

My improv troupe, Mouth Off, has decided to go back on Hiatus. We are currently investigating the possibility of finding a new venue. As soon as we have that sorted out, I’ll let you know when and where and how we will be back up. We won’t be performing this weekend.

Also, I had an audition today for a student short film project.  It is about sleeping with Amish women, and I got the part.  It looks like a fun concept.  I’ll update my schedule when I have more information.

Thirdly, I intend to start a weekly Atom Smith Radio Show podcast. It’ll be a while before I have an episode up, but I’ll try to get some supplemental stuff up before then.

I did Freak Train last night. It was a good time. I’ve been spending most of my working time lately finishing up the screenplay, so I haven’t gotten around to bothering to write a standup-routine. I had been thinking Freak Train was next week, and I’d have plenty of time to write one during this week, but apparently I suck at calendaring. Such is life.

By the time I realized it was Freak Train day, I pretty much had to leave immediately so that I could stop by my Dad’s place on the way. I figured I could sign up for one of the performance slots toward the end of the show, and have plenty of time to think about what I was going to do during the other acts and the intermission. Unfortunately, only the first and second slots were still available when I got there, so I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with anything. I managed to sort out a few ideas about what I was going to say. Of course, dearly departing co-host Dave, co-hosting his last Freak Train, decided to do some of his standup before the show. Remarkably enough, he managed to hit some of the topics that I had half-thought out. Now, I can’t claim he stole my material or anything, because I hadn’t even said what I was going to do. He also did it much better than I probably would have, since he had obviously prepared his material in advance. So, for the sake of the audience, it was probably a good thing. Of course, this left me scrambling in my last few seconds to figure out some filler. I didn’t use my whole 5 minute slot, and I didn’t have a solid ending joke, so I just sort of finished by declaring, “That’s all I have.”

Maybe I’ll recycle some of the material into a routine in the future. It was just about the subjects of living in Boulder, jogging, and being terribly white and having no rhythm or musical talent, so it’s not like I would take his specific jokes. It’s just that covering the exact same topics scant moments after he did so would have been really awkward.

I finally finished the first draft of a screenplay that got started years ago.  I managed truly unprecedented feats of procrastination to get it to take so long, but it feels good to finally have done it.  It’s not sale-ready.  It actually needs a lot of work.  It’s very much a first draft.

I’m okay with it being a first draft.  But, seeing as how it is now about quarter past five in the morning here, I need to clean up my dinner dishes and try to get some sleep.  I’ll saving completely rewriting the script which took years to write for after some sleep.

Well, look at me. I’m posting a second blog entry. Technically, it’s tomorrow already, but I haven’t been to sleep since I last posted, so I consider this to be two posts in one day. This is, naturally, a pace which is unlikely to be maintained.

The show was pretty good. It sort of ran out of steam by the end, though. The audience wasn’t especially crude, they just didn’t want to say anything at all. We do a structure called ‘hesitation’ to warm up the audience near the start of every show. In short, we play a scene but will occasionally pretend to be at a loss for words, and gesture invitingly for the audience to suggest a word to finish our sentence. The classic example is something along the lines of, “I was excited on Christmas morning because I opened up a box under the tree and I got a ummm… ummmm… ummm…” The audience gets to shout out whatever it is that the player got, and he states that it was exactly what he had been hoping for, and offers some token justification. I think that the most common answer seems to be Nuclear Reactor, but I haven’t bothered to really keep track. Anyhow, most audiences will get the concept pretty quickly. It may take one or two promptings for suggestions before they start to feel comfortable, but tonight’s audience consistently took an annoyingly long time to come up with anything. It really slows down the scene when you are prompting for a bunch of suggestions in the middle of dialog.
Since I have started by talking about the show, I guess I can give a basic summary of all the structures. Show summaries will be an easy enough way to fill this blog up with content every week. We started with Hesitation, which took place in a tattoo parlor, and was about the crazy fad of young men all getting tattoos of grilled cheese sandwiches, particularly on their bottom. When the tattoo artist suggested a nice mermaid tattoo, the potential clients compromised to get a tattoo of a mermaid either eating or grilling a grilled cheese sandwich.

The next scene was Forward Reverse, AKA the DVD or VCR game. A caller gets to tell the players to go backwards, forwards, switch to alternate language tracks, go in slow motion, etc. The suggestion for a task you actually like doing was “going fishing for crabs.” John and I were fishers, and The Markle was a crab. The Markle ate John. it was fun.

Third scene was “Open Replay,” in which we repeat a scene various times according to genre suggestions from the audience. The basic suggestion was washing your car with a vacuum. This is one of the slightly nonsensical suggestions we sometimes get which sparks a slightly absurd scene. Last week we got oil mining. So, I drove into the scene, got out of my car, and started vacuuming the hood. The Markle decided to help me wash my car by throwing a bucket of water on the car while I was vacuuming, which electrocuted me. Then, he came closer, and was electrocuted, and Michael stopped by to notice.

Then, we asked for some suggestions of movie, literature, and TV styles, and replayed the scene. First up was Shakespeare. I rode my horse onto the scene and started vacuuming it. After all this time, that was the first time I have ever gotten to do Shakespeare with this troupe, and I had almost nothing to say, and I spent most of the scene as a corpse. We used to do Shakespeare stuff all the time with Denver Improv Repertory Theatre / The Weiss Men. (That’s one troupe – it’s just gone by a lot of names.) Second was in the style of the TV show MASH. None of us have seen MASH in ages, but I flew my helicopter into the scene and started vacuuming it. Lastly, we had action movie. I crashed my car into the scene and started vacuuming it.

Fourth scene was interrogation. It took forever. It’s a guessing game where the ‘suspect’ is sent out of the room while the suggestions are taken, then he is interrogated until he is able to confess to the absurd crime of which he is accused. I was the suspect. The crime was that I flipped “the bird” to Barack Obama in Wall Mart while driving a golf cart. Golf cart took forever because the other guys apparently know golf a lot better than I do, so they were dropping references to things like a brand name of golf balls, but I didn’t get any of it.

Fifth structure was Slide Show. I’ll explain it later, but we all left the stage on the third slide, leaving our audience volunteer standing all alone on the stage with no idea what was happening. That was probably mean, but it was also funny as hell. I need to make a small wiki where I have definitions of all the structures so I don’t have to explain them here.

Sixth was our musical number Doo Run Run (Or Die.) I won, so I still haven’t had a chance to die by giving out promotional flyers for safety awareness week.

Seventh was Jeopardy. I tried a new character who is completely paranoid. “Possibly David.” It wasn’t anywhere near as well received as other popular Jeopardy characters “Chip Friendly,” or “Angus MacLeish.” I’m not certain if Possibly David is just a worse character, or it was the audience. I’ll have to try him again at some point. I’m always torn with trying a new character for Jeopardy because my stock characters are generally popular with the audience, but I hate to be so repetitive that I’m just doing the same two characters every other week.

Next up was Superhero. I played a superhero called Leprosy Man. It wasn’t that great. I tried to save the world from Bugs Man.

Lastly, we had Arms Expert. I was John’s arms. It was about Magic Koalas. It was going fine until we got to the audience Q and A section,a nd the audience just sort of awkwardly sat there and didn’t ask any questions.

Well, since I now have my domain and I have installed blogging software thereapon, I guess I may as well start journalling my various adventures. I actually got this domain set up primarily as a private document repository, but I figured that since I have it, I may as well try to make myself feel terribly important by blogging.

So, okay… I guess the bloggerful thing to do would be to explain current events in pointless detail. I had an audition yesterday for an online video project to teach students about the dangers of alcohol. Dave Dalton’s birthday was the day before the audition, so naturally I was out until the wee hours of the morning drinking with him. I’m not at all confident that I got the part.

But, it was my first audition for a paying gig since I stepped away from my day job as a system administrator. I was slightly discombobulated, naturally. I expect that future auditions will go better, just because I wan’t have the subconscious ‘firt time’ jitters. It’s annoying how the conscious mind can be completely unconcerned, and take things in stride, but the subconscious feels a need to get all huffy and mess you up. ::sigh::

Mouth Off show tonight. Should be a good time. Like half the cast is out of town, so we are using several of the newbies. Zane, or least predictable, and The Markle, who I think is the most disciplined of our newbies will both be on. I think Michael will be, also. It’s going to be the first time all three of them have been in a show together. Hopefully, we don’t wind up with a horribly crude audience like we did last time. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy crass humor, but when that is all you get from the audience, the jokes are always really simple and on the nose. Okay, I guess I’ve done enough rambling for my inaugural bloging post. Now, the page won’t look so damned empty.