I had Shakespeare under my belt and was now an official un-employed actor . With Unemployment insurance I didn't have to drive the cab anymore and it is a good thing, the job was starting to get to me.
Driving a cab, especially in New York City, gives you a perspective that I didn't have before. The very rich and the very poor view the working man with contempt. The rich in Manhattan don't look at a cab driver as a human being but as part of the cab. They talk to you like you are a servant.
Their true nature comes out when they ride a cab because they will never see you again and you cannot possibly do anything for them. The best riders were other working class people, who see you as a human being and not part of the steering wheel. If I saw 2 guys hailing a cab and one had a suite and briefcase and the other had a lunch pail, I would always pick up the guy with the lunch pail.
Anyway, I started going out with a struggling actress that I met in Jimmy Ray's. Her name was Erica and we got along great. She moved in with me in Queens as she couldn't afford Manhattan rents by herself, so with our 2 unemployment checks we stayed above water.
Erica graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in theater. She was very helpful to me in the business end of the business, basically it came down to kissing ass.I still had a athletes view of things. I figured if you hit the ball out of the park every time you get a shot, why do I need to market myself, they need me, or so I thought.
We decided, because our careers were slow to produce our own play.We picked 2 one act plays that just had 2 characters that were right for us, I got a director that I had worked with before, borrowed some money, put a deposit down on a theater, THE IRT Theater on west 27 street.
Just as we were ready to go into rehearsal, we received a letter from New Dramatist that they were pulling the rights to the play because the playwright had a film coming out and all his work was being pulled.
What were we to do? Take the loss, no ,we wouldn't do that.We had 5 weeks to open and no play.The three of us had a meeting and decided to write our own play. Our director had an idea for a story. So, we sat down for hours and constructed a simple love story about a cab driver and a up and coming advertising executive.
After we constructed the scenes, we got up on our feet and began improvising each scene with a tape recorder. We did that for 10 straight days until we came up with a full length play with just 2 characters.This method of writing can work if each actor has a firm objective and play off one another.
We taped each improve and edited the good parts. The great thing about working this way is that you can capture a wild jazzy bits of dialogue.
It turned out, writing a play from scratch was the easy part, now Erica and I had to produce it.Publicity, building the set, getting a small crew ,really put a strain on us but we opened and had a credible reaction from the small audience that came .
It was a good learning experience and I learned that producing is a full time job by itself and I don't want to do it ever again, but the method for writing we used to write the play, I would use years later in Hollywood.
Driving a cab, especially in New York City, gives you a perspective that I didn't have before. The very rich and the very poor view the working man with contempt. The rich in Manhattan don't look at a cab driver as a human being but as part of the cab. They talk to you like you are a servant.
Their true nature comes out when they ride a cab because they will never see you again and you cannot possibly do anything for them. The best riders were other working class people, who see you as a human being and not part of the steering wheel. If I saw 2 guys hailing a cab and one had a suite and briefcase and the other had a lunch pail, I would always pick up the guy with the lunch pail.
Anyway, I started going out with a struggling actress that I met in Jimmy Ray's. Her name was Erica and we got along great. She moved in with me in Queens as she couldn't afford Manhattan rents by herself, so with our 2 unemployment checks we stayed above water.
Erica graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in theater. She was very helpful to me in the business end of the business, basically it came down to kissing ass.I still had a athletes view of things. I figured if you hit the ball out of the park every time you get a shot, why do I need to market myself, they need me, or so I thought.
We decided, because our careers were slow to produce our own play.We picked 2 one act plays that just had 2 characters that were right for us, I got a director that I had worked with before, borrowed some money, put a deposit down on a theater, THE IRT Theater on west 27 street.
Just as we were ready to go into rehearsal, we received a letter from New Dramatist that they were pulling the rights to the play because the playwright had a film coming out and all his work was being pulled.
What were we to do? Take the loss, no ,we wouldn't do that.We had 5 weeks to open and no play.The three of us had a meeting and decided to write our own play. Our director had an idea for a story. So, we sat down for hours and constructed a simple love story about a cab driver and a up and coming advertising executive.
After we constructed the scenes, we got up on our feet and began improvising each scene with a tape recorder. We did that for 10 straight days until we came up with a full length play with just 2 characters.This method of writing can work if each actor has a firm objective and play off one another.
We taped each improve and edited the good parts. The great thing about working this way is that you can capture a wild jazzy bits of dialogue.
It turned out, writing a play from scratch was the easy part, now Erica and I had to produce it.Publicity, building the set, getting a small crew ,really put a strain on us but we opened and had a credible reaction from the small audience that came .
It was a good learning experience and I learned that producing is a full time job by itself and I don't want to do it ever again, but the method for writing we used to write the play, I would use years later in Hollywood.
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