Today, while trolling the Los Angeles Central Library for classical CD’s to check out and up load to my iTunes, a pretentious new addiction of mine primarily created to make me feel cultured while I procrastinate, I got a text message from my little brother informing me that I had at some point over the last 72 hours reached a kind of show business milestone. The text read, “You’re on IMDb! My famous sister!” He had typed it correctly, that is, big i, big m, big d, small b. I immediately texted back the words, “I am?” to which I received a resounding, all caps, “YOU ARE!” How very sweet of him. And while I find it slightly odd that my brother Googles me with the frequency of a casual stalker, I was happy enough to get the news. So happy in fact, that I checked out my CD’s without bothering to take the time to go the long way through the DVD section and flash my Schubert and Saint-Saens at the guy renting National Treasure and Season 2 of One Tree Hill. I didn’t need the rush of his shame. I already felt good in a sort of warm, fuzzy, triumphant way.
Now snigger if you will, I am well aware that most people in the business have IMDb pages and that it’s nothing to get all damp in the panties about. But allow me to add that if you enter my name into the Internet Movie Database, you will find the lone credit that got me there under the heading of “writer” and it is for this reason that I am most proud.
You see, I have had the opportunity to be on IMDb before. As an actor. My past is fraught with lost credits. If I spent the time to track down random producers, and harass the e-mail inboxes of former directors and maybe lie, just a little, I could have seen my mug up there years ago, but the victory wouldn’t have been nearly as sweet. In a way it leads me to why I quit acting in the first place--which ironically enough, is the same reason I got fired from my retail job--lack of enthusiasm.
My first unclaimed credit was for a short film called “Being Scott Lochmus.” It was the late 90’s and the concept of making a short comic parody of a successful movie was, while not terribly original, not quite as gag worthy as it would be today. The fact that they shot it on film and had a craft services table complete with doughnuts, Sanka, Lipton teabags and raw sugar cubes made it seem downright professional. My friend Giselle was cast as the lead (the Katherine Keener part) and called to ask me if I wanted to take on the role of “Bored Dominatrix” in one of the scenes. I was put off at first. It wasn’t that I had a problem dressing up in leather and prancing around, in fact, it was and still is a favorite hobby of mine; it was the fact that they were going to get it on film. What if someone saw it? What if I came off sluttish? They might not let me play Luisa in “The Fantasticks” if they found out. Not that I was up for the role of Louisa in “The Fantasticks” or any other role truth be told, but I figured it was only a matter of time and I had a reputation to protect. So I called my mother. She went on a rant about Sal Salerno, my high school drama teacher and the time he made me take my top off in our schools production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody.”
“That’s why you get type cast as whores, Adria. Sal ruined you. He let you smoke in that other play too, what’s the one? And that’s why you smoke now. Don’t blame me. I loved you, but that man dressed you like a whore and gave you cigarettes.”
My mother, though a raving lunatic, had kind of a point. I did smoke after doing ensemble work in a production of “Fiorello!” but I can’t remember if it was because the script called for it, or if it was to satiate a bit of the raw torture one feels doing ensemble work in a production of “Fiorello!” For those of you who don’t know it’s the one and only musical ever written for the stout former mayor of NY, Fiorello La Guardia, and his struggles to stamp out vice and corruption while juggling a very un-PC romance with his personal secretary, Maria. I don’t know if I smoked because it was required of me, or if perhaps I lit up out of something more akin to necessity after having to sing and dance in such rousing musical numbers as “Unfair” and “I Love a Cop.”
In the end I decided that I had been over thinking the whole thing, and that I would do it, I would simply wear a lot of make-up and reserve the right to use an assumed name if I felt at all compromised. The big day came and I was instructed to get in line with a bunch of other misfits waiting to be Scott Lochmus while the camera panned the length of us. At one point I was given a line, “Hey what’s the hold up?” and directed to threaten the other actors with my riding crop. After three long hours of this, I was finished and the short was wrapped. I cried into my Sanka for wasting an afternoon and promptly forgot about the whole dirty experience.
For a while the theatre took over my life. I did Shakespeare. I did Jarry. During that time, I also fulfilled my mother’s worst nightmares and became a burlesque dancer. I didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just that I was a very lazy actor. I had a problem getting up before noon and hated going to non-equity auditions because I’d developed an allergy to Aqua Net, and Christians in tap shoes. I began to hate acting. Well, not all acting, I wouldn’t have turned down a spot at the Old Vic, or a shot on Broadway, but the nickel and dime, jazz hands crap made me want to puke. I began to hate actors, too. What a stupid excuse for a career. What a selfish endeavor. I was a showgirl, a vaudevillian, and a caniveaux. Also, I was spoiled, bourgeois, and lazy. I was reading far too much poetry and working on my alcohol tolerance, a genetic gift from my father that I didn’t want to squander in case it was the only one. Once I started dating rock musicians I knew secretly that it was all over. Sure I’d get drunk occasionally and cry while watching a behind the scenes look at “The Producers” on PBS, my confused boyfriends holding back my hair while I puked to the tune of “There’s no Business Like Show Business.” For years I thought I was a failure. So I decided to have some fun. Burlesque was great. Very liberating. Not A GIANT WASTE OF TIME at all… It got me my next film job.
“In Search of Ted Demme” was a great idea. The director, John Walter, got together a bunch of friends of the late Demme and organized a kind of docu-tribute based upon the premise that each of them, from Kevin Spacey, to Joel Silver, to Jerry Bruckheimer and Ellen Degeneres, take Demme’s ashes out for a day to relive some of the “good times” they had with old Ted before he died of a massive cocaine overdose. In John’s script, the “ashes” get sold to a Columbian drug cartel--I mean, they get lost on a drunken night out with Johnny Depp and it’s up to Dennis Leary to find them and put the world to rights. Long story short, he loses them in a strip joint. I was asked to play the bartender in said strip joint, and could I play it as sort of a… you know, a dominatrix type? I guess that’s what Teddy would have wanted.
I didn’t call my mom this time. I was doing a scene with Dennis Leary. An improvised scene that involved real acting and I was the only one of my burlesque friends who could pull it off because I was an actor. I had done Shakespeare and Jarry. My failure was the fault of the cruel fates, and had nothing to do with my failure to work. Dennis Leary was about to eat his heart out.
The morning of the shoot was pure magic. They had a craft services table with fruit and bagels and real coffee, not Sanka, they had Danishes, all kinds, almond and cheese. It was the real deal and I had the speaking role. The shoot went off without a hitch. John was happy with my work and Dennis was kind, introducing himself, shaking my hand and checking out my cleavage in the subtle manner befitting a movie star. We did about three takes and that was it. Dennis went off to verbally kick the shit out of whoever was on the other end of his cell phone and I went home to await my fame and riches.
The film was set to premier at Tribeca. I had cut out the little blurb that the Times published a month or so before the festival and hung it proudly on my fridge. I was inches away from making a tee shirt that read: I’m in a movie with Johnny Depp and you’re not. I was annoying my friends to a superfluous extreme. I was a nightmare--an excited nightmare.
When the day drew near, I decide to ring up John Walter and see if I could get myself a free ticket to the event that was destined to change my life forever.
John sounded kind of deflated when he got on the phone. For a minute I wondered if maybe they edited part of my scene out of the film and felt bad about it. John kind of groaned. “We had to pull the film,” he said. I didn’t understand. What did that mean, pull the film? Was it a technical term involving taffy and Umpa-lumpas? “What do you mean, John?” He groaned again. “I just found out this morning. Amanda hated the cut. She won’t let us show it.”
After a series of embarrassing questions that no doubt made me sound like a slightly slow, first year studio intern, I discovered that “Amanda” was Ted Demme’s widow, that “the cut” was another way of saying “the film,” and that “it’s pulled” means it will never see the light of day and my film career was over, shot in the neck by a grieving widow who for reasons I fully understand but do not accept, didn’t want her husband’s memory soiled by a movie that culminated with his urn being grinded upon by the sweaty breasts and ass cheeks of half-naked burlesque dancers. I was thwarted yet again.
For a while I even toyed with the idea of becoming a dominatrix. The moneys good, and I kept getting cast as them, maybe the world was trying to tell me something. But I couldn’t. The spaced out ramblings of my mother would always win, and no, ma, your baby’s no sex worker. What she is, is a lazy, nocturnal, self-inflated, drinking, smoking, jealous, nostalgic, romantic, prancing show-off, saddled with a healthy amount of self-loathing, brains, and an id so rock hard that you could cut a diamond on it. It took a while, but soon the career path cleared and widened, and as is the way with puzzles, once the pieces start to fit you no longer need the hacksaw. Because I’ll tell ya kids, there is only one career in the whole of the stinking world that encourages, nay, requires you to be all of those horrible things.
I played a dominatrix recently for the third time in my friend Liam’s (a.k.a. Kelly’s) music video. I got to crack a whip and wear a corset. I am credited in that. Adria Lang: Dominatrix. But it’s for the Internet so I don’t think I have to worry about it showing up on my pristine IMDb page, a place where I’m known only as writer.
Adria Lang
December 2007
