The Fall Back

Okay thanks everyone for your questions and requests for blog topics and titles. I have over 20 emails to sort through, with perhaps, about 200 blog ideas and questions to address over the next 12 months! I’ll start with one (of many) from BellaLuce, she wrote:

“Do you agree with Macy and Mamet’s philosophy to never have a fall back and you won’t fall back?”

Boy oh Boy oh boy oh girl, I’ve got to be careful not to write a thesis on this one. Okay, well, here goes.

Short Answer: Yes.

My experience of life in the arts has been that those (including myself) that have given themselves a fall back will ALWAYS fall back. As I wrote before ‘everything is easier than being an actor’ – everything else – making money, paying off college, getting married, having kids, everything is more important and quite often, we’ve fallen back before we know it. I’ll be honest and say I spent four years at the University of Ulster teaching practical skills in a fall back position. I don’t think I had a vocation for university teaching (I should say UK and US lecturing is like chalk and cheese) and I realised I had fallen back and threw myself into the new.

It’s natural. If you choose a fall back, you will choose it every time. Necessity is the Mother of Invention. If you HAVE to make money with the thing you’re good at, you will, or you’ll die trying and then where’s the shame? It would be horrible in thirty or forty years time to be watching the television, eating your donut, drinking your coffee and saying to your kids ‘I could’a been a good actor you know’, if I hadn’t copped out and took the safe route (of course you wouldn’t say THAT bit).

I know a lot of people that fell back and became teachers, administrators, agents etc. Good for them, but I know that most aren’t happy, because they were born with a talent to amuse and in front of a camera or on stage is a major necessary (perhaps hidden to themselves) part of their nature.

‘Those Who Know Better’ will want to save you from a life of depravity (well, at least poverty) by encouraging, nay counseling, you to give yourself a fall back. And whilst they give you this good advice with the best intention. But frankly, they’re doing you no favours, even if they think they are.

Here’s some advice. Don’t go to college, don’t get into huge debt to finance an artistic education if you’re only going to fall back on something else. Fall back now and be happy before you rack up the debts and convince yourself you can make a go of this.

Given the easy option, most people will take the path of least resistance. I’ve sadly discovered this of myself of late, although I could see it in others a long time ago, it deeply upsets me that I’ve seen it in myself.

When a gifted person prepares a fall back, they are wasting their gift, but you know what? There are THOUSANDS of gifted people, they can’t all work. So let’s make a pact, will the Back Fallers, please Fall BACK right now, and please leave us to get on with the job of acting. Or don’t fall back, and get to work and go out there and be a success to yourself and the doubters. And let their best comment on the whole thing be ‘How Do You Remember ALL THOSE LINES?’.

Thanks Sarah, I bet you wish you hadn’t asked now :o)