Hey Guys,

I am a big, big fan of the extreme self publicity antics of some wanna-be actors. You know the kind...Angelene's billboards throughout Hollywood, Tommy Wisseau's never ending 4 walled movie, Dennis Woodruff's crazy car...

These are the really famous ones. And they sort of worked. SORT OF. Probably not to warrent the money spent, but they ended up famous in their own way. Angelene was in "Earth Girls are Easy" as a result of her infamy. Tommy Wisseau has garnered a weird and rabid cult following. Dennis Woodruff? Well...as far as I know still just drives around in his crappy car hoping somebody notices...

As far as my experience, I am guilty of this kind of thing. On a smaller scale of course. One or two have actually worked pretty well for me. Probably what worked best for me was a slight devation from the norm...just enough to get attention and not something completely absurd. A weird reel I made worked very well...got me almost every role I had until that reel eventually went out of date.

There have been a few famous people to have done severly weird publicity antics to make themselves known. In fact, Andy Milonakis researched a bunch of actor advice webboards simmilar to this one, did everything they said NOT to for his webpage, and then posted a link for his page with, "Hey guys, I'm a beginning actor...what do you think of my page?" and of course, they went nuts. You have seen similar critiques...but his was very baited. Everyone looked at it to see what everyone was talking about...

I can think of a few others as well, but most date back to the 60s and 70s...when I think people in general (especially CDs) were a little more freewheeling. But it strikes me as ripe time for a comeback. With YouTube, MySpace, tec. making some excentrics into household names, the time has come to pull out the breaks and show the world how crazy you truly are!!

So, do you have any favorites? Guilty of anything similar yourself? Any stories of now famous people doing stuff like this early in their career?

I for one really enjoy this type of stuff...and its a great anti-dote to those guys you see taking themselves really, really seriously at auditions!

--John

I can't remember where I read this or who said it, but I think it's wise--it's easy to become famous. What's hard is building a career. If you just want fame you can play a guitar naked in central park while throwing money at people...you'll probably get noticed!
My current famous favorite is Chris Crocker--the youtube 'leave brittany alone' guy...

Phoebe Price is interesting. She must be loaded to be able to afford a publicist who gets her on all those red carpets. Plus, she always wears a different dress. I've read that her family is loaded (former car dealership owners). Its weird that she didn't try a put together some short films for herself to build up her resume first, before getting all that publicity.