The Journalist and Her Actor

Chapter 5

Auditions are nerve-wracking. They ask you to bare your soul while strangers watch and decide your fate. They take thirty seconds to analyze and decide if you are worthy. It's like the worlds worst talent show. 

And the worst part of it is that you could be cut for the dumbest reason, like being too short for a role, or too old at the age of twenty two to play a twenty two year old. It happens. 

If auditions have taught me anything, it's that the most talented do not always win. It's a combination of luck, look and likability. A mix of chemistry and a factor that no one has been able to name other than to call it "the IT factor." A magical thing that causes people to flock to famous people. 

In high school I had been in my fare share of musicals. And the audition process was brutal. If The Hunger Games had been a musical, it would have the same energy as the backstage atmosphere of theater life. 

I had gone through the audition process plenty of times. So as I walked past the girls waiting to audition for a movie— escorted by heartbreaker movie star Luke Walker who was calling my bluff— feeling dozens of nearly identical eyes on me, I stared down at the wrinkled script in my hands, trying to get my bearings so I would have some idea of what kind of scene I was about to be thrown into while strangers watched.

We moved inside the warehouse, Luke still guiding me by my arm, whispers chasing us until the metal door slammed shut behind us, blocking out the small audience we had gathered. 

A sound stage made up the largest portion of the space. Off to the right was a door. Luke walked past a man holding up a clipboard, ignoring this poor man's protest that there was an order to the auditions, and pulled me down a long hallway.

Weaving down the hall, we moved past rooms that were filled with people sitting around long tables, scribbling down notes, eyes jolting up to whiteboards on one side of the room, while others came bursting out of rooms carrying scripts, eyes glued to the pages, skittering from one room to another with wild panic in their eyes. 

The hall seemed to crackle with creativity as the writers working on several different shows, weaving worlds together. 

Then suddenly, I was in a room where an assistant was sweeping up the pieces of a shattered vase. Most likely the residue of Lavender's acting outburst from her recent audition. Along one wall sat a long table with three individuals behind it. The blond man who had stuck his head out the warehouse door after Lavender burst out of it, sat in the center. In front of him sat a name plate title with the word "Director," written on it. 

Next to him sat a girl with strawberry blond hair, her fingers shuffling through pages of a script, fingers smudged with black ink. Her other hand tugging absently at a strand of her hair. I didn't have to look at her nameplate to know who she was or her job title. It was Laliana Summers, the script writer for the movie. The girl I had written dozens of gossip articles about when she started dating her own bodyguard. 

A camera on a tripod sat next to the desk, the light already blinking red, showcasing that everything was being recorded from the moment I entered the room.

Great...

Luke sat down in the empty seat next to the Director, motioning for me to move in front of the desk. "She's next," he said gesturing to me. 

The Casting Director sat at the far end of the table, his wild curly brown hair falling in front of his face as he glanced from headshots, up towards me with a confused expression from behind his bottle cap glasses. I didn't blame him. My rainbow hair and overall introduction to the situation was weird. He knew I wasn't supposed to be there.