Fur Chakras, Hugs, and Paying to Self-Tape
Nappoholics Anonymous is a weekly column featuring twelve random thoughts by actor Tony Nappo. Some are funny, some are poignant, some bother him, and some make him weep from sadness while others make him weep for joy. Here are his thoughts: unfiltered, uncensored, and only occasionally unsafe for work.
1. Quick reality check: if your biggest problem after the last year and a half is that you’ve missed being hugged, you don’t actually have any fucking problems.
2. Proposal of the Week:
3. Was recently talking to a friend who was excited about her new car. She said it “really fired up her first chakra,” and she made a kind of hand gesture that I thought might have implied her crotch. Even though I thought I understood what she meant, I wanted to be sure, so I asked, “what’s a fur chakra?” We had a big laugh over my cluelessness and concluded, in the end, that “fur chakra” and first chakra, very generally speaking, are KINDA the same thing.
4. Fuck Yeah of the Week:
5. I am a huge, lifelong Prince fan. Purple Rain was the first concert I ever saw. I was also lucky enough to see his second-to-last show ever at the Sony Centre (with Jim Milan). All this to say: I was recently listening to the first posthumous release from his vaults, Welcome 2 America, and, in all honesty, this collection of music makes what Geraldo Rivera found in Al Capone’s vault in the 80s seem valuable and interesting.
6. Memorial of the Week:
7. Laundromat Conversation of the Week:
8. 61.2 per cent of the people over 12 in this country have been fully vaccinated. I believe those who have had one shot only is in the high 70 percentile. Cases are down. Deaths are down. Restaurants and gyms are open. Where are all the stories about the negative side effects and bad experiences caused by the vaccine (beyond a few days of feeling shit here and there)?
If you’re still proudly identifying as an anti-vaxxer, you’re making Leaf fans look smart.
9. Guest Post the Week:
10. Follow up to the audition piece in Nappoholics #204:
Part of the self-tape dilemma is that now, with everything being done by self-tape, it doesn’t cost the producers or casting folks a cent more to audition as many folks as they want from anywhere in the world. In the old days, they’d have to book a space, and they only had so much time and money to see a certain number of actors. Just “getting into the room” to audition was the thing you needed to work towards. You needed a good agent and a strong and consistent audition game to ensure you even got an audition slot so maybe ten, fifteen, thirty guys (my category) – maybe even fifty – would be called in for parts, depending on the project. And for callbacks, it would be narrowed down to anywhere from three to five to ten. But these days, they can see thousands of actors, in theory, and then call every one of them back if they want to. That would take forever, time-wise, but it wouldn’t cost them anything more. In fact, now, it often costs the actors money to make these self-tapes, anywhere from fifty to a hundred bucks.
Actors are FUCKING PAYING MONEY TO AUDITION!
Not me, personally. I just do them on my phone in my kitchen. But I’m old, and most people in casting in this country know me pretty well. Sometimes I even tape without a reader or the reader’s lines at all, but I’m doing my best not to do that anymore because casting folks aren’t crazy about it. So, now, actors have to arrange a place to record, a reader, and to coordinate the recording, and to edit and submit all the material to casting ourselves. All the stuff that casting folks used to do. It’s a fuckin’ lot, on top of learning the audition, compared to just showing up and doing it and going home and forgetting about it.
It doesn’t seem like this trend is going to end anytime soon, so I’m letting you know now that a proposal I’ve come up with is that, at a certain point, actors be paid for self-tapes. I don’t know how much. Thirty to fifty dollars, I would guess. That would make actors feel better about having to do all this extra work, and would encourage casting folks to accept fewer tapes. To cull the pack, as they did when bringing people into the rooms. And if the casting folks choose not to, which I definitely think they should be able to have as an option, they can do that by simply bringing people back into the rooms again, like they did in the old days. Everyone would need proof of a double vaccination, of course. But every actor should have that, anyway. If they don’t, no other actors, crew, director, reader, camera operator, etc, should have to be exposed to them. I’m not saying this should happen immediately. But once all the restrictions have been lifted, and we’re living in a mask free world again, I feel pretty strongly that this should be the new way of doing things, rather than this old new way that looks like we may be stuck with for a long, long time.
And we do have the power to do this. In fact, we have all the power. I find this entire industry, from the actor’s standpoint, starting with our union, seems to operate from a base of fear. Actors fear losing work. They fear being blacklisted by casting – but what if all the actors were to blacklist a casting director? They’d be the one out of a job, wouldn’t they?
Did I mention I’ll be running for the union council soon?
11. Book of the Week: by Sean Dixon
12. One HUGE question I’ve been thinking on in regards to the residential school issue is: why does everyone, all of a sudden, seem so shocked and outraged at something we’ve known about for decades? Some would obviously say the discovery of the remains of children who attended these schools is the answer, the confirmation of what we already knew. But we knew all of this from the first hand accounts of survivors of the system already. We didn’t actually need the evidence. My theory is that we just ignored it, not because we didn’t believe it, but because, on a psychological level, we didn’t want it to be true. That we consciously chose to ignore it in hopes that it would just go away. That’s harsh, but I think it’s the truth. We ignored it. And here is why: because IF we are truly objective about it, our lives, as descendants of colonizers and settlers and even immigrants who came here later, have ALL only benefitted from every single crime committed against the Indigenous People of this country. Canada itself is the result of those crimes. We are born of a genocidal ethnic cleansing, and have it to thank for all of our freedoms and liberties. That’s a hard truth to make peace with, as more and more graves containing the remains of murdered children continue to be unearthed, but it’s fuck all compared to having to have had experienced even one single moment of any of it, either first hand, or as part of the generational trauma that followed. So try your hardest to stop ignoring it now. And try to do something about it, whatever that something may be. As a token of remorse. As a token of gratitude. A sign of respect. An acknowledgement of the crimes of this country’s forefathers. Whatever you want to call it. We owe the people who came before us not only for taking their land and children away from them, but for the quality of lives that we get to live here that they lost pretty much the moment we arrived.
#cleandrinkingwaterforfucksake
Tony Nappo
Tony is Italian, he’s from Scarborough, he’s an actor, he’s a father, he’s a really good house painter, and he doesn’t believe that most things matter, ultimately, at all.
LEARN MORE
Paintings, Pornos, and Broken Countries
Every single fucking time there is a mass shooting, we all give the speeches, and we all share the memes (to each other, who are all mostly already in agreement), but nothing changes.
Gottfried, Strays, and Easter Eggs
Dogs rarely have a hidden agenda when they meet people or other dogs: they're either wagging that shit or they aren’t.
Slapping People, ACTRA Meetings, and Dog Shit
At one point, I was sleeping with so many actresses that they used to just hold ACTRA meetings in my bedroom.
Birthdays, Cranes, and Judd Apatow
If the Freedom Convoy has answered one question for every Canadian, I think it's this: whatever happened to that dumb kid in my class?
Scorsese, Dentists, and Dying Alone
If waving a Fuck Trudeau flag is a legit way to get a meeting with him, I’m gonna start waving my Fuck Scorsese flag wherever I go and keep my fingers crossed.
Truckers, Porndle, and Bad Boys
In these newly woke times in the entertainment industry, it’s slightly amazing to me that nobody has protested the fact that Denzel Washington isn’t actually Scottish yet.
Paintings, Pornos, and Broken Countries
Every single fucking time there is a mass shooting, we all give the speeches, and we all share the memes (to each other, who are all mostly already in agreement), but nothing changes.
Gottfried, Strays, and Easter Eggs
Dogs rarely have a hidden agenda when they meet people or other dogs: they're either wagging that shit or they aren’t.
Slapping People, ACTRA Meetings, and Dog Shit
At one point, I was sleeping with so many actresses that they used to just hold ACTRA meetings in my bedroom.
Birthdays, Cranes, and Judd Apatow
If the Freedom Convoy has answered one question for every Canadian, I think it's this: whatever happened to that dumb kid in my class?
Scorsese, Dentists, and Dying Alone
If waving a Fuck Trudeau flag is a legit way to get a meeting with him, I’m gonna start waving my Fuck Scorsese flag wherever I go and keep my fingers crossed.
Truckers, Porndle, and Bad Boys
In these newly woke times in the entertainment industry, it’s slightly amazing to me that nobody has protested the fact that Denzel Washington isn’t actually Scottish yet.
Comments