Recently there was an audition posting for a short film and initially it sounded like it was a very action oriented piece. Afterwards, they decided to change it to something more suspenseful and the character in the film would have to pretend to smoke a pipe. The thing is, smoking and cigarettes is one of those things in film that I will not do and I had to unfortunately tell them that I didn’t feel I was right for the role and wouldn’t be auditioning for it.

I guess a big reason is that I don’t smoke personally and actually dislike it very much. Some people say it is just acting, but my other thought is that I feel I would kind of be promoting the idea that smoking is good if people saw me do it on screen and I wouldn’t want that to happen.

I know a lot of actors have their thing in terms of what they wouldn’t do as well. Thinking about the long term too, I wouldn’t ever want to do a role where the person is like a chimney and so this will help to remain consistent in terms of the type of work I do and what I want to portray when it comes to professional film work.

So myself and some other actors are seriously contemplating about creating some kind of simple web series that we would create mostly for fun with the hopes that we can make something great out of it. As mentioned, in the group it seems like there are three of us that are dead serious about making things happen.

This might be interesting too as I am personally very comfortable and knowledgeable about publishing on the Internet which will come in handy. At this point the main idea that was thrown around is similar to a past idea where since we are all actors we would film our journey’s on like a weekly basis and the public can follow us.

Other than that, we were thinking of a semi reality and scripted story of some sort which all revolved around something comedic. Needs more time in the think tank though as we want to do something that is within our capabilities from a production point of view too.

Recently my background agent sent a few of us details about upgrading our statuses to become a union background member. From what I read, one needs to work 24 days in a year to be able to apply as a UBCP background extra. To my understanding this is different from being a union actor who happens to be doing background work.

I have heard mixed thoughts about this as a lot of people say it is not worth joining the union simply as a background extra member as you have to pay extra fees as well you will now not be able to do non union work. As well, you only getting treated differently if there is not enough regular Union members to cover the requirements of a film set as you are simply a “next in line” type of person.

In some ways I was thinking it might be worth it for me though as I do background work mostly for fun and experience and increasing my odds to get upgraded might be better than worrying about not being able to do non union extra work. I only need to do about 5 more days to be eligible for this, but for now I am still debating about it.

Godspell (1970) is a powerful musical, though it is somewhat overshadowed, I think, by the more controversial (but excellent) Jesus Christ Superstar which open in New York City the year before.

It started as a college project performed by students at Carnegie Mellon University and moved to La Mama in Greenwich Village. It was then re-scored for an off-Broadway production that open in the Cherry Lane Theatre (New York City's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway theater). Godspell moved from the Cherry Lane Theater to the larger Promenade Theater on August 10, 1971, where it became one of the longest-running off-Broadway musicals, before moving to Broadway in June 1976, where it ended its run in September 1977 after an additional 527 performances, for a total of more than 2,600.

Starting a sequence of powerful and moving scenes that continue until the end of the film, Katie Hanley does a simply wonderful job throughout the film, and in this scene, she ("Katie") comes to Jesus with love and strength at the start of his darkest hour, when he see what's going to happen to him: