Spencer Livingston's actor's life blog

My last post was some of the details of working on "Jonah Hex". Read that first, if you have not. One paragraph therein is a joking comparison of that  movie to another I did two years ago. But it made me think. It seems that there are recurring themes developing in my film roles and scripts.

Shoot in a graveyard: 5 movies.

Vampires: 4 movies

Kill people: six movies, probably about 40 or 50 people killed by me total.

Die: six movies.

Drunk and crazy: four movies.

In  prison: four movies and a tv commercial.

Coroner:  two movies and five episodes of "K-Ville". on Fox.

wife beater: four movies.

Now, the funny thing about this pattern is that I see myself as a romantic lead. I am being miscast, clearly. (just joking. I would have been a romantic lead if I had done this work years ago. I am doing what I am good at).

Just finished two overnight shoots on "Jonah Hex", scenes with Josh Brolin, who plays Jonah. After living large on "Dead of Night" it was back to drudge work. The film is set in the American west just after the civil war, and as the assistant director told us, "Jonah wanders between the real and the spirit worlds." The first night I played a homeless man who sleeps in a graveyard (Lafayette # 1, where I have filmed before. It's the main New Orleans movie shoot cemetery. When I was dropped off by the van in front of Commander's Palace, I had brief hopes that that was where we'd be having dinner). I was dressed in period rags and had a very dirty face. Everyone in the movie has a dirty face, even the well-dressed upperclass. I was not told why.

The scene was an eerie parallel to my scene in "Perfect Day" with Rob Lowe. Both were filmed in New Orleans in very hot weather. In both I was a homeless man in many layers of very hot clothes, sitting by a fire pretending to be cold when I was actually suffering from the heat. In both I had a very...

A few days after my big SAG gig on "Dead of Night" I went to a wardrobe fitting for "Jonah Hex", which they are calling a "supernatural western". It's another vampire movie, set in the American west just after the civil war. My favorite wardrobe girls in the world, Dana and Julie, were working on the film, and dressed me in my old west outfit. And while I was at the production office getting fitted, a lot of people recognized me from my Sclavi role in "Dead of Night". A stunt man who had been on the DON set was there to be fitted for an old west outfit over his stunt harness that would pull him out of a train explosion, and he complimented me on my Sclavi work. And after a bunch of people recognizing me as Sclavi, a woman came up to me and said "You're Spencer Livingston."

"Yes. Have we met?"

"No. But I wrote the script to "Girls Gone Gangsta".

It was a very attetion-laden week for a nobody.

My "Dead of Night" shoot was last week, and everyone on the project was very nice. It was my first time getting the star treatment. Well, I've gotten the star treatment on little movies with no budgets to do any star-type stuff, but this is a big movie. I checked in at 7 am and was assigned a P.A. whose job it was to walk me around everywhere. She took me to my trailer first thing to get me settled there. That's right, MY trailer. With my name on the door. And not one of those cubicle trailers that I've been in before, where there are three or four units in the trailer. The whole trailer was mine. Dresser with makeup mirror, bathroom with shower, wallpaper, air conditioner already running, TV and DVD player, sofa/sleeper with nice throw pillows, the works. Just like a hotel suite. After I hung out there a bit, my P. A. escorted me to wardrobe where the women who had dressed me the week before greeted me and got my costume together. Then my P. A. took me to makeup, where I spent two hours getting my face reconstructed with latex. Martin, the effects makeup...

Today I went to my costume fitting for the role of Sclavi, the oldest surviving vampire on earth, in "Dead of Night".  The set I'll be filming on when we shoot my scene in two days is constructed in the same former Winn-Dixie warehouse where I did my last vampire film, "Cirque du Freak".  Wardrobe is interesting. I have, on this occasion, the wardrobe mistress, one of her assistants, and the seamstress all pulling off my clothes, wrapping their arms around me, pressing their bodies against me, staring at me intently, so close I can feel their breath; while I act like I'm waiting for the bus at the corner of Canal and Tchoupitoulas.  It's all very businesslike and routine, but when I step back from the situation in my mind and watch it, it's pretty funny. Like three women making out with a mannequin.

 So I got a nice tailcoat, with black-and-grey striped tuxedo pants, double-breasted vest, white shirt with French cuffs, stud-it-on shirt collar, and three tie possibilities that will be considered by the director sometime tonight at the production meeting when he looks over the photos Wardrobe took of me wearing them. As I am a principal...

My last post was about the first half of the day on my "Leonie" shoot. As I noted, I had arrived at 4:30 AM, and had not done a scene by lunch, at 2 PM. But I was enjoying the day, talking to my friends in the business and enjoying all of the cool 100-year-old dresses the women were wearing. So finally I was supposed to be in the third scene shot that day, but not as the newsstand guy. My nice looking newsstand, with replica 1904 New York newspapers and 7 cent bags of peanuts and gumdrops, was still sitting with the lighting gear. I was to walk by the carriage bringing the Japanese poet to New York, along with a lot of other people who would walk by. I was far back in the line of walk bys, however, and every take, before I was cued to walk by, the AD would yell "cut!". So I never got to walk by.

The director of this film, who also wrote the script, and the producer, and the director of photography, are Japanese. And the lead actor, of course, who plays the Japanese poet that Leonie markets. I have mixed feelings...

Today was my shoot day for "Leonie", filming now in New Orleans, and I had a call time of 4:30 AM to be on set. I don't like such early calls, because I usually go to sleep around 3 AM. So I had to go to bed extra early, 2:30, and get up at 3:30.  Parking was in a lot in the French Quarter, and as I was approaching the lot at 4:15 AM, the traffic was dense and people were all over the streets and the clubs were hopping. From the night before.

So, I did a typical shoot chase of finding the parking lot, dragging my stuff out of my car, finding the spot where a shuttle van will pick me up, getting hauled to a hotel, finding the hallway to check in and get a payroll voucher, finding the ballroom upstairs that has been set up as Wardrobe, getting into one of my two costumes (put together last week at my fitting), getting led a few blocks to a different hotel and put into another ballroom that will be holding (where we hang out), having the breakfast that catering has laid out, and taking a nap for...

A busy week of movie work,  just nothing in front of the camera. The other stuff. I had to do some more ADR for "Girls Gone Gangsta", and it was very hard on my voice. Not much dialogue to record; mostly fight noises: grunts, huhs, and other vocalizations like in a Hong Kong martial arts movie dub. That stuff hurts your throat. So I spent the afternoon in a sound booth watching myself fight on a monitor, and watching a cursor on the screen move along a voiceprint graphic of the scene, and making the appropriate sounds on cue.

The next day I had an audition, which I thought went well, but we'll see. There were no sides to learn; I was videotaped improvising answers to questions in character as the part I was reading for. I actually had something prepared, because I accurately guessed what they were going to ask us to do, so it wasn't really improvised.

Then yesterday I had my doctor's appointments for my role as Sclavi the vampire in "Dead of Night". The movie is based on a series of graphic novels about a character named Dylan Dog, a private detective who specializes in cases...

So, as you know, I've lately been on this run of playing killers and prisoners and lumpen types. Today I had a bit of a break from that pattern. I played a priest in the film I worked in today. (And no, not a pedophile priest, just a regular priest). It was refreshing.

 The movie is "The Chameleon", and it's shooting now up north in Baton Rouge. Ellen Barkin is supposedly in it, but I have not seen her. Got up at 5 AM this morning and drove to work for my 7 AM call time in BR, went to wardrobe for my priest's collar, went to the makeup trailer, and was driven to the set, a cemetary where we were doing a funeral scene. Besides the hearse driver who never gets out of the hearse and can't really be seen, there are three people in the scene: me, the priest; Famke Janssen, the FBI agent; and a young actress whose name I will leave for you to discover when you see the film, who is the only mourner at the funeral.

The director of the film is Jean-Paul Salome; I know this because I read the back of his...

That's right, I have just received my very first nomination for a Screen Actors Guild Award. (Or, as we say in the movie business, my first "nod"). I know that you all think I appear only in bad movies, and that is for the most part true, but I have done really good work in those bad movies, and good work in a few good movies.

 I have appeared in an Oscar-nominated film before, of course, ("Ray"), which won, but I did not get a "nod" myself for that film. But the SAG "nod" is very exciting. I and the rest of the cast of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" have been nominated ( gotten a "nod") for the SAG Award for "Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture".  So be sure to watch Sunday night!  We have not yet decided whether I or Brad Pitt will actually do the acceptance speech when the cast gets on stage, but I'm inclined to let him handle it. That is, of course, if we win, which is not a foregone conclusion.

 But I don't really care that much. For me, just getting my first "nod" is honor enough.