Just Be Yourself? On Camera, That’s Easier Said Than Done

Like most television viewers, I’d never given much thought to the talking heads I see on-screen--specifically, about how good, or at least how believable, they are--until I auditioned to become one myself. Then I realized that it takes a special kind of conviction to say the things they’re asked to say, hyping issues/products/programming they may not care about or even like. I decided that, as with movie stars, the best of them are good at playing themselves--which is a whole lot harder than it sounds.

A while ago, just about every entertainment journalist in New York was asked to audition as a host for an unnamed and undefined spinoff of cable’s American Movie Classics channel. The incentive, besides the thrill of seeing yourself on TV: a six-figure salary for one day of work a month. This seemed to me like a fantastic sum, though to dot-comers it may be trifling.

Of course, any prospective AMC-style host has to follow in the hallowed footsteps of Bob Dorian, who’s been there for years and still appears on prime time. This guy is Dad. He makes the sets he lounges around look like home, whether it’s a mock-up of the family den or an empty movie theater. His warm baritone, a perfect accompaniment to the largely anxiety-free films of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s (and the ‘60s and ‘70s throwbacks to these movies) that the channel specializes in. His introductions are breezy, offhand, dispensing tidbits without a whiff of film buffery. On occasion, he tweaks Hollywood egos and excesses, though he doesn’t make a big deal of it.

As good as he is, apparently there is an audience for something less chummy and avuncular, something hipper, something, well, younger. That’s a pretty broad mandate. There’s MTV younger--defined roughly as goateed, self-referential, in-your-face. There’s E!, which is slightly older (or appears older), more polished, as personified by “E! News Daily’s” Steve Kmetko. Then there’s CNN, whose on-screen talent has always struck me as a little odd, in the same way that regional anchors are odd.

It’s not clear what AMC wanted. I’m not sure they knew--although it’s easy to imagine what they didn’t want. The ideal candidate couldn’t look like a cretin or have a speech impediment. In other words, you had to be presentable, though of course the question remains, presentable to whom? You did have to know something about movies, since you were expected to write your own material. It turns out that I roughly fit these rather loose standards.

The casting people employed by AMC sent me a list of sample film introductions to choose from. I was supposed to familiarize myself with one of them and deliver it--reverently? winningly?--to a camera at a midtown Manhattan casting office. So I picked the most palatable of the intros, about the making of “Cleopatra,” and went over it repeatedly, to the point where I could look up from the text at regular intervals to engage the viewer. I test-drove it for my wife, who seemed to think I was credible, if a little dull. To compensate, I tried to dramatize certain lines, but I ended up sounding like someone who spoke English as a second language. So I gave up on theatricality and settled for lucidity.

The big day finally arrived. The casting office had the air of a doctor’s waiting room (will it hurt?) combined with that of an Off Track Betting parlor (maybe I’ll get lucky). There were two other people waiting. It was immediately clear that one of them, the one murmuring from a script and holding a black-and-white head shot, was an actor auditioning for a commercial. Just as clearly, the other guy was a competitor. He was unsettlingly appropriate. He had on a tweed olive jacket, an open-necked shirt and khaki pants. He was pleasantly regular looking, clean-shaven and immaculately barbered. The effect was writerly, smart, professional, but not professorial. Worse, he seemed confident. He reminded me of a film producer.

*

I was called first. I gave him a bleak glance, but he didn’t even look my way. At the door I was greeted by a friendly but businesslike young woman who took my particulars and seated me on a stool at the far end of what looked like a classroom. She stood at the other end behind a video camera on a tripod and trained the lens on me.

“Just relax,” she said. Then: “Whenever you’re ready.”

I went into my spiel. About midway through, like a figure skater who has successfully negotiated the most difficult jumps in the routine, I realized I was going to make it through without a mistake. Still, something was wrong. My recitation had all the pizazz of a stump speech by Al Gore. Though I was itemizing Elizabeth Taylor’s on- and off-set antics, her romance with Richard Burton, etc., it sounded as if I was talking about shoring up Social Security. I tried not to look anxiously at the woman when I was done, though I need not have bothered. She was busy fiddling with the equipment.

Fiddling done, she asked me to try it again, an exercise that made me realize how hard it is to stop doing what you’re doing. People go on about Gore and his woodenness and George W. and his smirk and Clinton and his lower lip biting. But they can’t help it. And if they can’t help it, despite the best consultants that money can buy and hours, not to say years, of practice, how can I be expected to right the ship on a second run-through?

In the end, the woman thanked me with one of those meaningless throw away lines--”We’ll be in touch.” They never got in touch, of course. Nor did they get in touch with anyone I know who’d auditioned, which gave me some satisfaction.

In fact, when I called the channel recently to find out what happened, no one there knew what I was talking about. A PR person speculated: Maybe I was being recruited for American Pop, which is devoted to viewing American popular culture through the prism of movies (though it has no hosts and has yet to be spun off from the channel). It could have been Romance Classics, another theme-related entity at AMC. But I don’t think so. I wasn’t asked to be a romantic lead. I wasn’t asked to be Byronic. I was asked to be natural, and that’s the toughest thing in the world.