N.Y. Actors Say ‘Survival Jobs’ Now Hard to Find

The jokey cliche that your waiter also is an actor has acquired an unfunny edge since Sept. 11.

The decline in major sectors of New York’s economy since the terrorist attacks means that performers, who always struggle for theatrical work, now are scrambling for traditional “survival jobs” as well.

Actor Marco Kujovic, for example, lost his waiting job at the Grill Room in the World Financial Center, a popular dining spot that closed after the World Trade Center disaster next door.

He still has part-time work at another restaurant but has needed help from a city relief agency and the Red Cross to make ends meet.

Lee Feldman’s skills as an office manager and executive assistant used to provide a reliable backup to her acting and modeling career, but the sour economy and the Sept. 11 devastation of the financial district have made such jobs much harder to find.

“You call temporary agencies and they don’t even want to see you,” said Feldman, who spent several hours on the Internet recently filing 100 job applications through online employment services.

At Weist-Barron, a venerable acting school on the edge of the Broadway theater district, students are canceling classes, even skipping “industry nights” with agents and casting directors, for fear of losing their backup jobs, program director Valerie Adami said.

“‘I can’t come in tonight,’ they’ll say. ‘They gave me an extra shift at my restaurant. I’m behind on my rent. I can’t afford to lose this job,”’ Adami said.

For the vast majority of professionals, the entertainment industry--in Hollywood as well as New York--always has been a hand-to-mouth business.

In a typical week, 85% of New York’s 15,400 stage actors are unemployed as actors. The average actor gets about eight weeks of acting work a year and earns $8,400, according to Actors Equity, the union representing actors in everything from Broadway extravaganzas to tiny experimental productions in downtown lofts.

Backup jobs, therefore, are a must, particularly for stage actors, who generally earn less for a day’s work than their counterparts in film, TV or commercials.

Actors Are Honing Skills for Work Outside Craft

There are as yet no official figures for the number of New York jobs lost as a result of the World Trade Center attacks, but the Fiscal Policy Institute, a Manhattan-based economic-research group, estimates that as many as 15,000 restaurant jobs--10% of the acting industry’s employment base--have been lost at least temporarily.

Hotel occupancy has risen since Sept. 11 but is still only about 65% in Manhattan--20 percentage points below pre-attack levels, said Dan Murphy, president of the New York State Hospitality and Tourism Assn. Hotel bookings, of course, have a strong impact on restaurants.

Temporary office work, another mainstay for actors, musicians and other performers, also has been decimated by the attacks.

Such jobs cut across all white-collar industries, but there was a great concentration in Wall Street brokerages and law firms, which were badly disrupted by the attacks.

Securities firms began cutting staff jobs by the thousands well before Sept. 11, and temporary office workers often are the first to go in a retrenchment.

On the hunt for office-manager work after a slow summer in acting and print modeling, Feldman phoned a friend at a temporary-services agency.

“Lee, I’ve got 8,000 people looking for work and no jobs,” the friend replied.

Feldman’s hopes for a television pilot that was filmed last spring have been set back, at least temporarily, because the attacks disrupted a festival where the show was competing for a prize.

In the pilot, a comedy called “Hey Paisan,” Feldman has a lead role as a member of a dysfunctional Italian American family.

Getting the show picked up by a broadcast or cable television network would be a big professional and financial coup for Feldman, but in the meantime, she keeps looking.

“Acting by nature does not provide stability in employment, so [performers] have to look for it somewhere else,” said Kathy Schrier, managing director of the Actors Work Program in New York.

The program, a service of the Actors Fund of America, helps actors, musicians, writers and other creative artists develop skills to land sustainable work outside the theater.

The program’s Monday afternoon orientation sessions, which a year ago attracted 15 to 20 people, are drawing twice that number since the terrorist attacks, Schrier said.

Lack of Industry Work Boosts Need for Side Jobs

Attending a recent session was John Pellicoro, who five or six years ago could make a good living almost exclusively as a background actor, or extra, in TV commercials. But the work has been increasingly hard to get, with the last two years the slowest ever, he said.

Many commercials have been filmed in Canada, Australia and other countries in recent years, drawn by favorable exchange rates, cheaper labor and government subsidies, said Matt Miller, president of the Assn. of Independent Commercial Producers, a leading industry trade group.

Such “runaway production” also has been a longtime source of concern in the Hollywood film and TV business.

Last year’s six-month commercial strike by the Screen Actors Guild also gave ad agencies and production companies time to find other places to shoot and, in some cases, veer away from live action and move into animated ads, experts said.

For Pellicoro, it adds up to long stretches without regular commercial work. He had been thinking for some time about getting training to sharpen his skills in computer graphics, and the terrorist attacks gave him an extra push.

But the Fiscal Policy Institute estimated that the attacks cost 2,300 technology jobs, intensifying the competition in an already tight job market.

Oddly, as soon as Pellicoro attended the orientation session, his phone started ringing again with potential commercial jobs.

“I got three calls inside two weeks,” Pellicoro said, adding that it could be a sign that the major ad agencies were serious when they signed a recent pledge to aid the city’s recovery by trying to film commercials in New York.

Kujovic, who has worked as an actor, singer and dancer, lately has been trying to get some of his own plays produced.

But his more immediate need--and the reason he, too, showed up at the orientation session--is to develop a side job more dependable than the restaurant business.

The loss of his job at the Grill Room was a big setback because it came near the beginning of the holiday season, with its lucrative parties and corporate functions.

“The tips were pretty much guaranteed,” Kujovic said. “It was a good time because it tended to tide you over into the next year,” providing a cushion of savings that let him devote more time to writing, auditions and other aspects of his craft.

Kujovic still has a job at another restaurant, but his workweek has been reduced from eight shifts to four.

“I went to a few other places [looking for waiting jobs], but nobody’s hiring,” he said.