This Week's Guest: Randy West
Last week's guest was Jeffery Self, a relatively young actor and writer who's broken into the entertainment industry often on his own terms. This week, I'm speaking with Randy West, an industry veteran whose experience was vastly different. From sweet-talking his way onto sets to chasing big breaks with a single-minded determination, Randy learned to play the game at a time when the rules were very unforgiving.
This Week's Recommendation: The Music Man
Thanks again to Randy for joining me. And although he said that he considers a lot of his career faking it, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing -- in fact, there's a nobility in making it up as you go along. For this week's recommendation, check out the movie The Music Man, starring Robert Preston (who played gay in Victor Victoria) and Shirley Jones, the mom from the Partridge Family who off-camera had a remarkably wild sex life.
Her character in The Music Man is comparatively prim. It's the story of a con man who lands in a small Iowa town, planning to cheat the residents out of their money before vanishing. But fate has other plans, and as so often happens in a musical he finds himself falling in love with the wrong woman -- in this case, the prim town librarian who accidentally makes an honest man out of him even while he's doing his best to be a swindler.
Minor spoiler warning -- the story ends happily, with the con man becoming a hero to the town despite never really being the musician he claims to be. He's just faking it -- but here's the thing: so is everybody. We're all just making it up as we go, in constant terror we'll be caught. And just because you're not sure what you're doing doesn't mean you might not create a thing of beauty along the way.
Clips of Stuff We Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/