http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igr2ok-hvjg&feature=share

I am the caucasian gentleman.

HOW?!?

CF CASTING FRONTIER

on-line casting solutions!

NEW ROLE OPEN TO PUBLIC SUBMISSIONS

This e-mail is to notify you that your profile matches the required age range, ethnicity, and gender for the following role: I’m OBSESSED With Animals!

Please read the description below to verify whether or not you fit the additional requirements.

Description:

Do you have an extreme and unusual animal obsession?

We’re currently casting for a new documentary-style pilot (may or may not air) that looks into the stories of those whose obsessions are taking over, and ruining, their lives. If you feel you’re at a breaking point and need help – contact us. We’re open to ALL extreme situations.

Our documentary will give you the opportunity to meet with a therapist and get your issue to a manageable level.

This is a positive, uplifting show with a serious tone.

IF INTERESTED, please call 818-728-4165 or e-mail animalcasting1@gmail.com IMMEDIATELY.  Thanks!

Union Status: Non-Union
Rate: $400 if selected for pilot

Enjoy this peek into the glamor of showbiz:

NEW ROLE OPEN TO PUBLIC SUBMISSIONS

Your profile is a 3-star match (gender, age, ethnicity) for the following role: Men and Women With Double Lives

Please read the description below to verify whether or not you fit the additional requirements.

Description:

New TV documentary seeking people ready to confess a long kept secret!

Have you been keeping a secret from loved ones and it’s tearing you up inside? Do you feel you’ve been living two totally different lives and you’re now exhausted and torn? Could you benefit from working with professionals to confront the person or people from whom you’ve been keeping your secret? Overlay Productions is in search of individuals who are desperate to come clean and ready to safely confront the truth with the help of experts and professionals for a documentary style television project. It’s our intention to help you unburden yourself from whatever it is you’ve been holding in and transition to a more peaceful and honest place.

Are you…

·       A Secretary By Day– Making A Secretly Lucrative Living As A High-Priced Call Girl By Night?

·       A Man Or Woman Who’s Broke, But Pretending To Be Rich?

·       A School Teacher By Day, A Stripper By Night?

·       Someone With A Secret Gambling Addiction …Whose Family Doesn’t Know She/He Has Gambled Everything Away – Or Falsely Believes He Or She Lost His/Her Money By Getting Fired From His/Her Job?

·       Someone Who Goes To Work Every Day, Secretly Pretending He/She Wasn’t Fired Months Or Years Ago?

·       Someone Gay Or Bi-Sexual, Living A Straight Life With One Person While In A Gay Relationship With Another?

·       A Stay-At-Home Mom, Secretly Using Drugs Like Ritalin, Adderall Or Speed To Stay On Top Of All Her Household Duties, To Appear As The Picture-Perfect Mom Who Can Do It All?

·       A Lonely 20-Something Living As One Person In “Real” Life, But With A Totally Different Identity Over The Internet?

·       A Wealthy Woman In Her 50s Whose Secret Hobby Is Shoplifting?

If any of the above scenarios describe the life you’ve been secretly living – or if you’re keeping any other huge secrets from the people in your life, we want to hear from you!

Our show will be offering professional help and financial compensation for those willing to participate and share their compelling story.  A finder’s fee is being offered for selected referrals.

Union Status: Non-UnionRate: there is pay, but tbd

If Sharia law mandated that everyone involved with stuff like this had to be scourged with rusty barbed wire I would have to consider bowing toward Mecca.

2.  Would I still be watching “Boardwalk Empire” if it weren’t for the nudity and violence?  The post-WWI and prohibition era interests me and many of the actors are fine, but I’m starting to be less than dazzled by the writing. The world of ninety years ago when my grandparents were kids and women couldn’t vote is fascinating for more reasons than just its prurient details.

3. I still love “In Treatment” but I’m bothered by the likelihood that “Paul has a disease” could mark a serious downturn in its quality.

4. Thank goodness “Walking Dead” looks poised to live up to its source material. The first episode was great all the way through the climactic scene where Rick almost deafened himself firing his pistol in an enclosed space.  I love that the only fantastic element in the show is dead people walking around eating live ones.

Not “ha-ha, Scooby-Doo” scared but “really made you run and hide” scared?

For me it was Star Trek, The Original Series, Episode 1: “The Man Trap.”  I must have seen it in re-runs because I was three when it first aired September 8, 1966.  I know I couldn’t have been older than seven because I remember the house we lived in when I first ran and hid in a different room rather than look at the salt-sucking vampire that kicked Mr. Spock’s ass and made Captain Kirk scream.  I didn’t get a good look at the actual monster until years later when I made myself sit through it instead of hiding behind some furniture in the hopes that its powers were confined to mental dominance, sucking salt and kicking Mr. Spock’s ass.

At the time I felt no reason to assume it could not also climb out of a TV and kill a child.  This was where no man had gone before after all.

Anyway, years later I saw the whole episode and yeah, the monster was pretty horrible, but mostly because it appeared both much smarter than the crew of the Enterprise and cruel enough to induce you to make out with it right before it changed into a monster and killed you.

I guess the best horror stories have a lesson if you listen hard enough. This one was: “Before sneaking off with the chick who is way too hot to be interested in you, run a tricorder analysis.”

If only I had known….

If you click here I might make some:

http://www.amcspreadthedead.com/share?ref=1183771011

I really do love “The Walking Dead.”  If the show’s as good as the comic it will eat “Mad Men’s” brains.

And what should be running but this beautiful, eat your mind bit of hypnosis:

#mce_temp_url#

I saw “Playing for Change” out in LA before we left and ordered the CD.  Must have played it dozens of times during my drive east, burning it into my brain as some kind of theme music for blasting across the deserts of the American West.  Listening, I keep thinking of crossing the Hoover Dam, driving to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, Four Corners, Oklahoma City, even the final interminable stretch when it was too dark and I was too tired to try switching CDs and I just let it keep repeating while I tried to find a motel where I wouldn’t be eaten by cockroaches.

You’d think I’d never want to hear those songs again, but aside from their innate beauty, they still bring back all those great feelings of being alone in a small car in the middle of huge places I’d never been, stopping only for food and gas, feeling the sun all impatient at my inability to pick a time zone and stick with it.

So I’m up late again despite my promise to my wife not to be.

It’s PBS’s fault. No pledge for them.

I’m writing this for me because I need to get all the crap in my head about Andrew out there.  I was very far away from him and everyone else who knew him when he died.  I talked to friends out here who didn’t know him and to my wife who did, but I wasn’t able to go to Vancouver to look for him or to LA to mourn with his other friends once it was over.

Maybe “over” isn’t the best way to put it.  For Andrew it’s over and has been for a little more than a month.  For the rest of us the end of Andrew’s life is an on-going matter.  I’m not in constant grief and I have laughed and been angry, bored and petty since then but there hasn’t been one day when I haven’t thought of him and how wrong it is that he’s not here anymore.

What I’m going to share are some of the reasons why this guy, who too many people know only as a minor eighties sitcom character or a member of the extended phenomena of “Star Trek,” has inspired so much confusion and despair with his loss.

I’m going to have to break it up into separate entries because there’s a lot to tell and I want to get it right as best I can.  That takes time, something I don’t have a lot of with two young kids and a third on the way.

If you don’t like long sad stories about dead friends you should skip it.

If you’re looking to know more about Andrew I can tell you a little bit.  Others could tell you more and maybe some day they will.

But I’m limited in what I have to share.  I didn’t know him long and I didn’t know him as well as many others.  I would not consider myself part of his Inner Circle, if there even was such a thing.  I consider this my misfortune and, even after all the soul-searching and absolution, a failure on my part.  If I’d been closer to him maybe I could have done something to change how it turned out.  That’s irrational, since it turned out nobody was close enough to see it in time.  But I know I reached out.  If he’d wanted my hand it was there.

Re-winding.

As is the case when you’re talking about someone with a measure of fame, I knew of Andrew before he knew me.

I first encountered him when I was in high school and I was reading a book of short stories by Harlan Ellison.  This would have been anywhere between 1978 and 1981.  Andrew’s name was Josh back then and Ellison credited him with inspiring his great and tragic short story “Jeffty is Five” from his collection “Shatterday.” I’ll quote Ellison below on the subject of where he got the idea:

“My friends Walter and Judy Koenig invited me to a party. I don’t like parties. I do like Walter and Judy. I also like their kids. I went to the party.

“Mostly I sat near the fireplace, friendly but not ebullient. Mostly I talked to Walter and Judy’s son, Josh, who is remarkable beyond the telling. And then I overheard a snatch of conversation. An actor named Jack Danon said  or I thought he said something like this “Jeff is five, he’s always five.” No, not really. He didn’t say anything like that at all. What he probably said was, “Jeff is fine, he’s always fine.” Or perhaps it was something completely different.

“But I had been awed and delighted by Josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is Josh: the sweetness of Josh, the intelligence of Josh, the questioning nature of Josh.

“Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered.”

What can I tell you?  Andrew/Josh had that effect on people.

So I first “met” Andrew when I was not older than 17 and he was not older than 12.

Flash forward 22 years or so.  It’s 2003 and I’m working part-time at Hi-De-Ho Comics in Santa Monica and there’s talk of a Batman flick getting made, re-booting the franchise, and one of the fanboys hijacks me in the parking lot telling me I’ve got to see this thing on his portable video player.  ”These are the guys who should be making the movie!” he tells me.  ”They understand!”  And I watch an impressive live-action short called “Batman: Dead End” in which Batman dukes it out with James Cameron’s Aliens, a Predator and the creepiest, most impossible-looking Joker I’ve ever seen.  Played, unknown to me at the time, by an actor named Andrew Koenig, who I would not meet in person for another three years.

Batman: Dead End

Flash forward another three years to August 2006.  I’d been doing a sketch show called “Big News” at the IO West in Hollywood for about three and a half years.  A lot of people had been in and out of the group by then and we were advised it was time to deepen our bench.  We’d had auditions and gotten some good talent added to the roster.  But the group’s founder, Michael McCarthy, was moving to Chicago for a radio job and we were scrambling to figure out how to keep the show moving forward.  A few of the other actor/writers and I were taking the lead in organizing stuff week to week and somehow I ended up being one of the people who slotted in the new guys for their try-out shows.  Our audition dates had passed when, if memory serves, I got an e-mail from Andrew or maybe one of the other Newsies suggesting him for the show.

I had no idea who “Andrew Koenig” was.

I remember a phone call with my castmate and Impressionist-in-Chief Phillip Wilburn in which I asked for some detail about this mystery man and Phillip replied that he had done some stuff with him and he was good.  Phillip also said Andrew had played Boner on “Growing Pains.”  This meant nothing to me since I truly had never seen the show.  In fact the thought of a sitcom actor may have even been a negative in my mind.  Then Phillip dropped the other shoe: “And he’s the son of Commander Pavel Chekov from “Star Trek.”"

“Oh well, then he’s definitely in!”, I replied without hesitation.  I was being facetious but having any association with “Star Trek” is automatically a big plus with me.  I’m easy that way.

In all seriousness though, I was protective of what quality we had managed to give the show at that point and was mentally preparing to deflect Andrew and any of the other new guys who might not pan out.  We’d had a couple of real problem children over the years and I didn’t want to screw around with any more of them.  As it turned out with Andrew it wasn’t an issue.  The guy was good.

I don’t remember for sure the first time I spoke with him.  I think it was on the phone, me calling him and inviting him to play with us.  Or I might have e-mailed him.  Either way, I remember I approached by saying Phillip Wilburn had said he was funny and that was good enough for me.  No mention of “Star Trek”, “Growing Pains” or Harlan Ellison was made and Andrew came in and became One Of Us.

I’m pretty sure the first time I saw him in person was during a day rehearsal in the IO West bar.  My initial impression was that he was friendly, unassuming, charming and a good-looking guy.  I specifically thought that Walter Koenig must have done a rock star thing and married a model so that all his kids would be as good or better looking than he was.  Andrew was a guy who had a lot going for him right from the jump.

And that’s how I met Andrew Koenig.  In my next entry I’ll talk about working with him and getting to know him.  Those are good stories.

Andrew Koenig as The Joker in "Batman: Dead End" 2003

http://daveholmes.tumblr.com/post/401165797

I wrote to FoxNews, the Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC and America’s Most Wanted with the subject line “Growing Pains star disappears in Canada.”  I then included the above link and a few lines about how Andrew was the son of “Star Trek” actor Walter Koenig and that he’d become politically active in recent years, going so far as to get arrested for protesting the military government of Burma during the Rose Bowl parade a year or two ago.

I deeply hope he’s shacked up with some Vancouver girl or locked up in a holding cell wearing a “Free Burma” sweatshirt waiting for his phone call and planning his next one-man show about the experience.

If you know anyone up in that area please forward this blog or the just the link above to them.  I can’t think of anything else to do from here.

Andrew is a good guy from a family of good people and I’m sure they’re a million times more worried than I am now.

Please help if you can.

Not long ago I blogged a musing about the process of cannibalistic elimination on “The Isle” and tonight I just watched the video I’ve embedded below.

Stairway to Gilligan\’s Island

Now I’m thinking of how sad the story is and how I’d do the movie version if I had an unlimited budget and absolute creative control.

My cast would be:

Gilligan: James McAvoy

The Skipper: John Goodman

Thurston Howell III: Jon Voight

Lovey Howell: Christine Baranski

Ginger Grant: Christina Hendricks

The Professor: John Malkovich

Mary-Ann: Keira Knightley

And they’d never get off the island…

(Jesus, is “Lost” just a darker version of “Gilligan?”)