A New Slant on Acting: A Hollywood Insider's Secrets to Succeeding on Set

By Charese Mongiello

You’ve arrived in Hollywood, and you are ready to become famous and to take over the world. You have a dream, and nothing is going to stop you. You’re on your way!

But in order to best succeed and keep booking work, you need to know everything about film sets, their crews, and how you as an actor can help directors tell their stories. A New Slant on Acting offers a clear, detailed description of how films get made, how to work on a set, and what filmmakers need from actors. Once you know what everyone on the set is doing, you’ll know what you can do to help films and their crew members be successful. As a valuable team player, you’ll gain a definite edge over your competition and build a life for yourself in the midst of the wonderful magic of moviemaking.

This guide for actors explains the ins and outs of filmmaking, providing a comprehensive overview of the process to help you raise your career to new heights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532070884

Charese Mongiello

Charese Mongiello has been involved with acting for most of her life. Over the course of her career, she has been a producer, director, actor, stage manager, and script supervisor. She loves helping artists realize their dreams and pushing them beyond their creative boundaries, and her recent performances include starring roles in a feature documentary and in a web series. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Book preview

Aspirations

I have written this book for newcomers to Hollywood and to filmmaking. There are many ways to become successful in Hollywood. I couldn’t possibly know or begin to write about all of them, but I will discuss a few. Let’s start with what you came out here to do.

You have arrived in Hollywood. You are spending your life savings, or you are fresh out of college, and you are ready to become famous and to take over the world. You have a dream, and nothing is going to stop you.

Your first mission is to get a place to stay and to find a source of income, perhaps with a nonacting job or from an inheritance. You pick your acting class and your headshot photographer. (I recommend resources at the end of the book.) Next you build your demo reel. Then you get an agent and a SAG card, and you book work. You get more work. You go on auditions. You book more work, and you are on your way.

Fairly simple, right? This book is primarily about showing you what to do on sets so you will know what others want from you as a professional actor and you will get hired again and again.

This book isn’t about how to act. You can choose from countless classes to learn that. This book is mainly about how a film set operates and about how you as a professional actor will behave once you understand that operation.

I can’t tell you how many actors focus on submitting headshots and taking acting classes to get work but have no idea how to enhance a movie set and get called back because of a solid audition. You can reduce your administrative work by doing an above-average job on a movie set. Anyone can be the next big producer, even that production assistant getting you a cup of coffee. But more important than being attentive to others is doing an exceptional job. That means learning on-set etiquette. I like to call this on-set acting. This is different from on-camera acting, which is done in acting classes when a camera is put in front of actors and they watch themselves perform. On-set acting is more detailed. It involves understanding the parts of a set and working with the members of the crew to get a quality performance delivered to the editor.

Some actors may look at projects as nothing more than auditions. They might say, I got the part. They can’t fire me now (which isn’t true) or I got the part. Now I just memorize my lines and do the scene study work I learned in class.

These actors will overwork themselves and their crews because they don’t know some basics that make for a much better movie. If you remember the suggestions in this book, then directors, producers, and crews will want to hire you over and over again. A crew member may put your name on a movie set list, and the director may need a great actor in a pinch. This happens more often than you might think. You could save a ton of money on promotional materials. You will stick in a crew’s mind as a star, a professional, someone who gives more than what is expected, and someone people are eager to have on their sets.

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Hollywood

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When I first came to Hollywood, I didn’t like movies at all. I was a stage actress, but I wanted to become successful to make theater more successful. I figured if I was a famous actress in movies I could influence more people and create my own theater company. Since then my dreams have expanded to building an international school where actors and all the other talented people on movie sets could train and could create their own productions. I would develop a platform for them to distribute these productions across the world. I decided not to work on plays because I already loved them and didn’t want to be distracted from my goal of falling in love with moviemaking. I was young, and this decision was the only thing I would change about what I did in Hollywood.

After two painful years, I finally did fall in love with the moviemaking process. But my advice is to follow your heart at least some of the time. I have worked on more than twenty-five feature films and more than fifty projects, including TV films, reality shows, commercials, industrials, and shorts as a script supervisor. I have also produced, directed, written, and acted in films and other projects and now work as a producer for a TV network called OKTV.

When I first arrived in Hollywood, I was bombarded with information on what to do and what not to do. I had owned a theater at the age of twenty-two, spending my life savings on my dream to create it. I had gone to college and had found a political scene in the theater department. There were the cool kids, the popular kids, the average kids, and the kids like me who had just transferred from junior college. I wasn’t popular yet. The most popular kids were the singers and dancers. I loved acting but hated singing and dancing. I worked on sets for directors and then directed and produced and quickly became part of the popular crowd.

I knew I would be successful in Hollywood because of my track record at junior college and at the four-year school and because I owned a theater in Colton, California. I just had to figure out the truth about Hollywood, and after two years I learned an important fact: Hollywood is what you create. Hollywood was created by talented individuals, and it wasn’t some giant corporation that hired only the coolest people. Art is extremely subjective. David Bayles and Ted Orland (Art and Fear) and Derek Thompson (Hit Makers) have written great books on this topic. In Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland tell how a sculpture class was separated into two groups. Members of group A were asked to make only one great sculpture, and members of group B were asked to make as many as they could. Group A didn’t produce a sculpture, just a bunch of diagrams and papers on how to make the perfect sculpture. Out of group B came one excellent sculpture. The more art you create, the better your art gets.

Hollywood needs artists to create, and without us Hollywood would not exist. Hollywood is looking for talent in every field of art. You don’t have to worry about whether others love you, because the more you create, the more your talent will be recognized. These two books show how this is true. Many people believe being the best depends entirely on whether you are born with talent. But even the most talented athletes train every day for hours to be the best. Do your art every day and tell me if you don’t become one of the best.

I received a lot of advice from people in every department on set and from teachers and other actors in acting classes. I was told, Don’t be background [also called extras, these people shadow actors on set during movie scenes], or you will get stuck doing that forever and will never be hired as a lead actor or Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Julia Roberts were background, and then they got discovered. I decided to do background, and I did it on well over a hundred sets my first year. Sometimes I got paid, and sometimes I did not. I worked on no-pay student films, zero-budget films, big studio films, TV shows, and commercials. I absorbed as much info as possible. I am one of those people who like to figure out everything before moving forward, and I was fascinated by what made a movie successful and what made a movie of low-budget quality.