Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business, or Not!: A 'How Not To' by The Counter Culture Diva

by Dolores DeLuce

  By 1980 I found a good commercial agent and right out of the gate booked my first national commercial. I was one of five principle actors in that Kodak spot. Wayne Knight (Newman on Seinfeld) and the others all went on to get jobs on long-running television series; all except me. I finally landed a guest-starring role on Superior Court with five pages of dialogue. I portrayed a poor wife whose skinflint husband was hiding millions from her while she waited tables at a truck stop for twenty-five years. My tightwad husband was played by a character actor whose claim to fame was that he played the baker who asked Marlon Brando for a favor in The Godfather on the day of his daughter’s wedding. I had one other film job in the early days of HBO. I was featured stark naked as a hardened criminal in a prison lineup. I stood in plain view alongside the lead, a demure Pamela Sue Martin of Dynasty, who got to keep her panties on. She was shot only from the waist up while the camera panned down to include all of me.

  Then in 1986 I almost became the winner of ‘Be Joan Rivers For a Day,’ a contest for her Fox talk show. I entered a five minute video of me as Lois Standards, a very lose interpretation of Joan as a Late Night Talk Hostess who hits Sunset Boulevard, to interview hookers when her guests don’t show up. I even got Viva who was sixteen then to play a teenage hooker. For my wardrobe I recycled the Divine style Pink Flamingos dress that won me the title of Miss Alternative LA. The same gown with the cut out hour glass front revealing my naked fleshy curves pressed like a prom corsage under see through vinyl. Joan loved me so much she wrote me a letter to invite me to the show and join the finalist when they announced the winner. She said I was her pick but the Fox censors would not allow her to play my video due to the frontal nudity. You can still see it on You Tube if you search ‘Lois Standards Late Night Talk Show.’

  At age sixty-eight, fortunately I still live in my rent-controlled apartment on Venice Beach with an ocean view. I’ve been there for over thirty-four years, and although I have no parking or laundry, I consider myself lucky since the stairs and the five-block walk to my parking lot keeps me active. But in the event my landlord croaks before I do, and his inheritress decides to sell, I have put myself on every waiting list for low income senior housing on the Westside of Los Angeles.

  In my four decades in show business, I’ve been directed by Clint Eastwood, Gary Marshall, Alex Cox, and Rob Zombie, but after what’s left on the editor’s floor, I am not much more than a featured extra or not seen at all in their movies. And if you don’t blink, you might see me in a vintage episode of the popular sitcom Soap, or in today’s programs like CSI NY, Weeds, Dexter, and True Blood. I was featured as a Spanish innkeeper to play opposite my favorite hot vampire Erik, in the final season of True Blood. It didn’t pay much, but I didn’t mind staying awake all night in Simi Valley for the chance of getting bitten by that gorgeous Alexander Skarsgard. You get a pay bump if they draw blood. Bite me, oh please bite me! The director wouldn’t let him bite me, but no matter, I was still glamorized by those deep blue eyes. These are the perks for an aging actress. Where else could I get attention from a super hot man half my age all night long and not have to pay for it?

  When I’m not going to and from the many doctors who monitor my age-related diseases, I still accept extra jobs in commercials that pay three times the SAG day rate and extra bit roles on my favorite shows. When I’m not doing extra work, I spend hours driving daily to and from commercial auditions in the ever increasing, interminably slow gridlock of Los Angeles traffic. As far as commercials go, it’s a numbers game and with my rate of successful auditions it means that I’m fabulous and yet I’m still not the winner. Like in many competitions, only the number one winner takes home the cash prize. I’m just like all the other gamblers/actors playing the odds. Each audition is like buying a lotto ticket and dreaming of the day when you will hit the jackpot.

  What I want to know is, “Where’s the beef?” I’m aware of the dangers that lurk in meat, like mad cow disease, or salmonella, or at the very least that cows are full of antibiotics and steroids and fed with GMO feed and then once slaughtered have their meat mixed with a slime byproduct, yet I would still run the risk of alienating my vegan friends, and welcome the opportunity to sell burgers on T.V. I’m ready for my meaty close up.

  January marks the beginning of awards season in Hollywood, and in 2014 I spent a total of five hours watching two hours of the red carpet lead into the three-hour Golden Globe award show. My favorite joke of the night was when Tina Fey said, “George Clooney would rather have his oxygen cut off and drift out to space and die before he spent any more time with a woman over 40.” I laughed, I cried then wondered what Sandra Bullock, his co-star and nominee for best actress in Gravity, was thinking as she laughed at Tina’s joke. And I thought, what would George do to get away from a woman who has seen the effects of gravity for 68 years?

  Although I have had my countless brushes with fame, I have never been included in the glittering A-list, and yet I love to watch our American royalty, the talented and beautiful people of film and television being honored. And, oh, how I love the fashion; and what about that Joan Rivers, the captain of the Fashion Police? Now there’s an old girl still dishing it out! She’s over 80 and has not let gravity slow her down. Self-deprecating still makes me LOL over her vulgar vagina dragging jokes and her one too many plastic surgeries.

  This year Jacqueline Bisset was announced as best supporting actress in a TV show, miniseries, or movie. The poor woman seemed lost as she took her sweet time making it up to the stage. It didn’t help that they sat her all the way in the back of the house. Then she delivered the longest awkward pause as she appeared to be choking back tears, and lapsed into a rambling, cringe-inducing speech that was punctuated by more interminable pauses tinged with bitterness. So much time had lapsed that she hardly got her halting speech started before the band began to “play her off.” Then she wrapped up by rambling something about forgiveness being a beauty treatment before mercifully removing herself from the stage. It’s moments like that when I feel glad that I’m home safe on my couch and not on the red carpet. It’s hard out there for an aging actress, even for the winners.

  Still there are other golden girls that inspire me. What about that Betty White at ninety-two or Dame Judi Dench at seventy-nine and June Squibb at eighty-four, both Judi and June nominated for Oscars this year? And of course the magnificent Maggie Smith, for playing the dowager mother on Downton Abbey? These are brave women to face the cameras with every nook and cranny on their faces up close; no Botox, fillers, or cosmetic lifts for these heroines. They give me hope. And that spunky June Squibb— got to love her. When she flashed her pussy to the tombstone of a dead ex-unrequited love, I knew she was a gal after my own heart. And Diane Keaton, another actress whose process and non-work I’ve admired recently wrote in her memoir, It Aint Pretty, "For those of us separated from reality by fame, being old is a great leveling experience." She says she doesn't mind being taken down a peg or two. But what about old broads like me who never had their fame or their money? Taken down a peg or two can put me six feet under.

  Even in my youth, I was never cast as the ingénue; never considered a real beauty by American white bread standards. Now, older and fatter, it works in my favor. I am still fertile. That is, mentally fertile. You won’t see me featured anytime soon on the 11 o’clock news as the oldest woman to ever give birth.

  And then there is always Italy. This year Great Beauty, the Italian film that won the Globe and the Oscar proved that beauty in Italy comes in so many shapes, sizes, tastes, and colors. Every lead character in it was past middle to old age, and physically and emotionally flawed, so I think I would fit right into the Italian talent pool. My naked beauty killed in Roma in 1998, so perhaps I can spend my twilight years in Italy.

  “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

  Chapter 12

  Witches, Bitches, and Naked Zombies

  Surviving in the arts has never been easy, and in this current econom
y, “forget about it!” I have always believed that living on the edge came with the territory. It’s a fact that only 5% of the Screen Actors Guild membership actually makes a living from acting, and most of them are men. So it’s no surprise that I not only teeter on the edge, I have even slid down the cliff, like so many houses in the rainy season of Los Angeles. I have calluses on my ass to prove it.

  As the Knitter to the Stars, I used to supplement my acting income by earning most of my yearly income selling hand-knit sweaters during the last quarter of the year. The operative words here are “I used to.” Those three little words, “I used to” bring to mind a call I made to the utilities company to complain about an increase in my gas bill last month. As I bitched about my dwindling earnings compounded by the rise in natural gas, I could just picture the gum-chomping gal on the other end of the phone filing her long fingernails. When I told her that my bill “used to be …” she cut me off abruptly and said, “Yes, girl, and I used to be a size 7.” I got the point. No use in complaining. Cost of living going up, up, up, and income going down, down, down!

  So last Sunday after a rained-out craft show, I returned to my couch and watched ten hours of Breaking Bad in between long naps, or nods, as the druggies call it. I guess you can say I was depressed. These Art and Craft Boutiques that “I used to” find profitable not only have put me in the red, but drain every ounce of my dwindling life force as I careen past the age of a much needed retirement from schlepping.

  Like many of those dumb asses you see interviewed on the 6 o’clock news after their houses slide off the cliff in an L.A. downpour, I stand over the rubble and ruins with my hopes and dreams under mud and talk about how I will rebuild on the same spot. Optimism is not always the best healing balm, but on Monday morning I picked myself up and brushed myself off, because I had a commercial audition; a ray of hope.

  For the past year or so, I have had my fair share of commercial auditions for an aging character actress who now goes up for all the Hispanic or ethnically ambiguous grandmother rolls. I get about a 90% callback rate, and out of 69% of my callbacks, I have been put “on avail”, meaning “on hold”, for the job. I say 69% because “on avail” is just another word for taking a licking and getting fucked is usually the outcome. In spite of the fact that my auditions make the clients break their stone faces with laughter and the directors hug me at the end of the takes, and the casting directors keep calling me back and my agents keep working hard for me, I have not booked one good paying commercial in over three years. On some weeks I put in more than 40 hours traveling to and from, not to mention the rising costs of fuel, but hey, what do they say? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yes, I know I am certifiably INSANE, but isn’t 68 years old too late for a career change? But I digress again into complaining. Forgive me.

  So on Monday while inside the casting studio, an eager meter maid gave me a big fat parking ticket. I had failed to read the street sign properly. Chalk that up to the side effect of too much Breaking Bad, sugar, and napping. You would have thought the ticket would have sobered me up, but NO, the Universe decided I needed one more bitch slap. In heavy Hollywood traffic, I made a quick maneuver into the left hand turn lane and lightly nicked a brand new Lexus. As the old adage goes, when it rains it pours, especially in L.A.

  The driver behind the wheel of the shiny new Lexus rolled down his window and began screaming at me to pull over. For a split second I entertained the idea of pulling away but considering my past karmic debt, I did the right thing and pulled into the Ralph’s supermarket parking lot on the corner of La Brea and Third Street so that I could give the driver the necessary documents to appease his anger.

  He and his wife, a middle-aged, ethnically ambiguous couple jumped out and took turns screaming at me and calling me several names for stupid. As I inspected the injured car, it was clear that I hadn’t even made a dent, but only a light scuffmark caused by my rubber bumper. When I pointed this out to the couple, the wife yelled at me, “Shut up, how dare you say this damage is minor?” As she cast dirty looks at my beat-up Honda, she added, “Our car is brand new and now we are going to have to replace the entire bumper. And on top of that, you have greatly inconvenienced us.” She continued her rant, “I’m already late for my chemo treatment.”

  The way she went at me, you would have thought I was the cause of her cancer. What can you say when someone pulls out the cancer card. I kept apologizing and after the husband inspected my documents and realized I was not an illegal without auto insurance, they both calmed down somewhat. If you believe that bad news comes in threes, I had reached my quota for the week. As I drove away, wiping the dog shit from the Universe off my aura, I contemplated that it could have been worse, much worse. I could have been the one on my way for chemo treatments.

  Gratefully back home on planet couch, I picked up my phone messages from the reclining position and heard the voice of a casting director informing me that I had been selected to be a special featured extra on a movie. There it was the first ray of sunshine breaking through the dark, cloudy day. The casting director went on to explain that this was not any ordinary extra role, but a job that paid $400 for eight hours, four times the SAG day rate because there was some nudity involved. I had been a nude artist model in the 80s and the decade before that, I had been a nude go-go dancer, so it was a no-brainer. I would accept the job. After all, it was a SAG production and the director was Rob Zombie, a famous cult director in the horror genre of film-making.

  Being an extra is not much fun for an actor. For the most part, you are nothing more than set dressing, but after my losses that week all I was thinking about was the money. I was looking forward to the two days ahead being a naked lady in the next cult classic titled The Lords of Salem.

  My call time was for 3:45 p.m. the next day, which meant the shoot would go to midnight, three hours past my bedtime. I even hoped it would go into overtime, since that meant time and a half, and double-time if we went over 12 hours. When I showed up at 3:30 p.m., the friendly extra wrangler greeted me with a sunny good morning and offered me breakfast at the food wagon. These are the perks of being an extra, all the food you can eat, and you don’t have to learn any lines. I was soon guided to the holding tank, a large room in the basement of an old classic downtown movie theatre built in the 1920s, where I met the other thirty women who were cast as special nude extras. I marked my territory with my bags of wardrobe on two plastic folding chairs. It’s funny to be requested to bring at least three wardrobe options for a nude scene, but, hey, I wasn’t going to complain. Then I sat myself on another chair in between all my stuff. At our table there was a performance artist, a yoga teacher, and a Shakespearean actress, all who appeared to be in their 40s or early 50s, and for the most part the conversation was interesting for the first hour or so.

  After sitting around for two more hours, the second AD, a friendly kid, came in to our holding area to give us some information about our parts in the film. He went on to explain that The Lords of Salem was the story of a young woman named Heidi that works as a DJ at a radio station in Salem, Massachusetts. One day a wooden box arrives at the radio station containing vinyl records. Heidi plays the records on her radio show in order to promote the supposed rock band that wrote the music.

  Unbeknownst to Heidi or anyone in Salem, a coven of ancient witches was seeking vengeance against the people of Salem because of the Witch Trials that occurred there in 1692. Their plan was very simple; create vinyl records with provocative music to lull the townspeople in to a sense of extreme curiosity. Little do the townspeople know the true horror that is about strike Salem with extreme ferocity. When the time of the gig arrives, the rock spectacle turns into a blood bath beyond all human comprehension. And that’s where we extras came into the story.

  In our first scene we are lured to the theater like zombies, and begin to strip. Eventually we will end up naked and dead in a pyramid pile on the stage.r />
  I thought it odd that the townspeople being lured for this revenge were all females in this story, and wanting to be a good actress looking for my motivation, I asked the second AD about this omission in the script. He told me it was best not to try to make any logical sense out of the story and I took note.

  After many more hours of sitting on the plastic chairs in the holding tank we were escorted into the big, cold cavernous theatre upstairs and given places to sit. It was long before I started to notice that some of the extras were using the method technique to capture their characters and it soon became apparent who was a witch and who was a bitch. There were bad acoustics in the large theatre, and an echo made it difficult to hear the assistant director’s instruction. When I missed a few words I turned to the woman in the seat next to me and asked her to clarify what had just been said. From out of nowhere this actress, and I use the term loosely, reprimanded me. “You should have been listening,” she snapped.

  “I was listening,” I defensively proclaimed.

  To which she replied, “If you were listening you would have heard him then.”

  I could not believe this trailer trash biker harlot with stringy fried blond hair was talking to me like that. Where was the sisterly love? Not on this set with this bitch. I restrained myself from saying what I really wanted to, and said, “Never mind, I wouldn’t want you to tax yourself,” and turned away. I made a point to hate and avoid her for the rest of the night.

  We were six hours into the shoot and everyone still had their clothes on when they broke us for lunch at 9:45pm. The meal consisted of three protein options, five starches, several overcooked vegetable dishes, and a salad bar and dessert bar to follow. We filled our plates and sat outside in the dark at long tables on plastic chairs to enjoy our lunch. I was fully bloated at lunch’s end when they finally called us back into the theatre for the first scene where we would begin to shed our dignity.