Acting

What does a movie producer do, anyway? According to Richard Corliss, one of the editors of Time magazine: This is the Hollywood equivalent of Freud’s “What does a woman want?” The most popular misconception I run into is that a producer is someone who funds your movie. If that were true, we wouldn’t need the term “investor”. It may be that a producer attracts money to a project but that is only a part of his or her job of attracting anything and everything a project needs to be viable and ge...

I’m not like most actors that you hear about or read about. I wasn’t born with the burning desire to perform. I have no stories of sitting in the dark theater, being hit by some divine lightning bolt that told me that this was my purpose, etc. For me, it just didn’t happen that way. I grew up on Long Island in New York, and although my parents were great supporters of the arts, there was never a moment that they thought I would choose that as a profession. Sure, they encouraged me to take vi...

Hello Stage 32ers!   We have now posted the video of On Stage With RB-May 2014, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Richard "RB" Botto.   We opened 1,000 spots for this exclusive Stage 32 Next Level Webinar and we were humbled when all 1,000 spots were filled! We had Stage 32 members from 82 countries in attendance. A huge thanks to all who showed up and asked such great questions.   All in all, RB spoke for 2-1/2 hours including a 20 minute tutorial on how to best utilize the Stage 3...

I caught the travel bug early in life and have been blessed with the number of places on this planet I have visited. It’s more than a lust for vacation, but it is a desire to see the world, learn from the people, and tally up some great stories. I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who have the same desire to hike Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat and photograph the penguin colonies in Antarctica. But there is always something that stands in the way, the lack of travel funds and the fact that I...

I’ve just watched the director’s cut of Amadeus. I must have watched it close to sixty times over the years. To me, if there is such thing as perfection in films, then Amadeus is it. I must admit to have had a special connection to Mozart’s music since I was very young. My father belonged to the generation of people who listened to the radio well after traditional evening family conversations were replaced by the fascination with TV. He played radio before going to work in the morning so as...

Hello all.   We have now posted the video of last week's first ever On Stage With RB, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Richard "RB" Botto.   We opened 1,000 spots for this exclusive Stage 32 Next Level Webinar.  At the peak, 989 Stage 32 members from 77 countries were in attendance!  Thanks to all who showed up and asked such amazing questions.   All in all, RB spoke for 2 hours including a 20 minute tutorial on how to best utilize Stage 32 to create meaningful contacts, find work, post projec...

In the winter of 2009, I drove down a desolate freeway in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and watched the sun slowly rise above the golden hills in the distance. I was overwhelmed with emotion. It had been over three years since my first audition in Hollywood, and I had just finished shooting my first feature film. I made $100 a day to play a jerk/jock who gets brutally slaughtered in the funhouse of a carnival…and it was one of the best experiences of my life…hands down. And as I drove awa...

I'm thrilled that so many of you found my first blog Making It worthwhile. Today I bring you some Building Blocks of Success for the Theatre Scene. You can use these whether you’re based in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, London, Ireland, Australia….anywhere in the world. Now get out and make things happen! 1)The agent/manager dilemmas? First, I'm more of a believer of an agent or manager coming to you at the right time; whether it be through a friend, them seeing you in a sho...

My job has always begun in front of the camera at “action” and ended with my director’s call of “cut,” but I was nudged out of my comfortable actor’s niche when I stumbled into the big, broad world of film production. I’ll back up a little. My modeling career began at age one-and-a-half, by age six I had moved on to Ford Models and the NYC stage in off Broadway musicals, and experiencing my first opportunity for the big screen in Mr. Nanny with Hulk Hogan. In 2010, the year I graduated c...

The call came in. Got the part.  Playing a character named Jerry Catone.  Wow. Weeks of auditioning – improvisation at the first audition, going on vacation, and then giving it my all in my call back in front of Jennifer Peri - and it all comes down to the call.  Got the part. Then the flurry of phone calls came in from every department.  Hair and makeup called.  They wanted me to grow my sideburns long because it’s a timepiece from the 1970’s.  Even before I knew I landed the ro...