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- Mark Heinrich, Director
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- Mark – on the right – at the set of Trauma
It’s an expression that means you are so far from caring about your role and its emotional demands that you just give it nothing – you don’t even show up. You just “phone it in”.
A friend of mine – Mark Heinrich of LZ Films – emailed me last week to ask if me I would play a role in his film, The Saving of Julia; the role of the mother. He told me that, for once, I could literally phone it in because my character is only heard over the phone. Phone it in? Hilarious!
Mark and I met during Trauma – we spent four days at sea, as it were, in the “M’Aidez” episode. Yes, m’aidez is French for Help Me, and that part of the episode was about Hungarians, but there was so much misfiring with the whole nationality thing on that episode…I guess it didn’t matter!
And now Mark wanted me to do a voice-over for his movie! Last year I studied voice-over for a few months at Voice One, a voice-over training and production studio in San Francisco. It was instructive, interesting, and terribly frustrating. Suddenly, you think you no longer know how to speak! There’s a lot to voice-over work, particularly commercial work – literally, work for advertisements. I formed a new-found respect.
But last night I figured out that I do indeed know how to speak. Last night I was on the phone with Mark and his sound man, whose name, shamefully, I did not find out (sorry, genius sound man!!!!), and they gave me the lines, tested me vocally on regular phone, and on speaker phone (speaker phone had the right quality). I asked the necessary questions about the relationship between mother and daughter – who the mother is (cranky, warm, or pearls-round-the-neck-stiff), how frustrated/loving/cold/pushy/caring/uncaring the woman is – and so on! They gave me the reigns and said, basically, Giddyup! And off we went.
Everyone was happy, grins all around, and I had the best evening of the last three weeks.
A friend of mine who knows how dedicated I am to acting and how diligently I am working toward a full-time successful acting career, gave me a beautiful image. When I told her about phoning it in, she told me she saw an image of a bare tree with a green leaf growing out of it. It’s been a long time of getting my ducks in a row to even make the right kinds of acting efforts to put the tree into place.
Two weeks ago, my first day-player role for NBC. Last night, voice-over work and a resulting invitation to come to the screening.
So…if that’s the result of phoning it in, deal me in. The more leaves, the better, baby!
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www.LoriKirstein.com
