Perfecting the Hollywood headshot

By David Willis Los Angeles

Journalist David Willis is taking six months off from the BBC to try to make it as an actor in Hollywood. In his latest diary entry, he prepares for his first auditions.

Will David's cherubic features find him a job?

"Do you look British?" asked Ken, the owner of Headshots Only, when I rang to make an appointment to have my photograph taken.

What, I wondered, was he expecting - an aged colonel with a monocle and a cravat, or possibly a man in cotton flannels and a pith helmet?

I described myself as a sort of middle-aged Hugh Grant and Ken seemed satisfied with that.

Getting headshots done was the first step towards getting an agent and getting auditions.

The glossy eight by 10 inch pictures are de rigueur for any actor undergoing an audition - aside, of course, from talent, they will be the only thing a busy agent or casting director has to remember you by.

Ken told me he normally shot two different looks - a moody and aloof one for film and TV "character" auditions, and a fresh-faced, wholesome, toothy look for commercials.

He was himself a struggling actor, he told me, who had taken to snapping fellow struggling actors in an effort to get by.

Amusement

Ken was the cheapest headshot man I had come across, and better still he only lived around the corner.

He advised me to watch a lot of TV shows and look out for roles I could play.

"Hollywood doesn't cast people - Hollywood casts characters," he said, as we finally brought the conversation to a close.

We made an appointment to meet two days later and I resisted the urge to bid him "pip-pip toodle-loo".

Ken's "studio" turned out to be a busy main road, his "darkroom" the bedroom of a cluttered apartment he shared with two ginger tom cats.

Like many people in Hollywood, Ken was one of those people who constantly had a variety of different projects under way.

As well as shooting other people's headshots and going to auditions, he told me he was also working on a screenplay and a documentary.

Ken took me out to some trees by the main road and started snapping away. Yelling to make himself heard above the busy traffic, he variously urged me to look moody, mean and mysterious.

Getting a good headshot helps actors find an agent

For nearly an hour I postured, grinned and grimaced for the camera, to the amusement of passing motorists, some of whom yelled things which thankfully I couldn't hear.

The results, I have to say, were a little disappointing. Not because of Ken's lack of expertise - he was a whizz with the Nikon - but because of me.

The purpose of a headshot - Ken had told me earlier - was to help a casting director see an actor as a particular character.

My cherubic visage somehow managed to convey neither mystery nor menace, villainy nor virtue.

True, only a casting director who had recently taken leave of his senses would have offered me the part of a brooding lothario, or a dark and dangerous assassin.

More worrying was the fact that my image was equally lacking the sort of quirky characteristics so beloved by audiences of soaps and comedy series - the endearingly crooked nose or quizzically raised eyebrow.

There was no real "character" to the pictures. The sad truth was they just looked like me.

Famous people

A far greater challenge was to find someone who would get the snaps into the right hands - preferably those of an agent.

After some verbal arm-wrestling with his over-protective PA, I was eventually put through to Michael Rizzo, a mover and shaker at one of the biggest Hollywood talent agencies - International Creative Management, otherwise known as ICM.

Their Beverly Hills office commands an entire block, directly opposite the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, the body which has awarded so many of ICM's clients their ultimate accolade, an Oscar.

The great man snapped up the line with a "time is money" tone and listened patiently enough as I introduced myself as a new actor, seeking an agent.

"There's just one problem," Michael Rizzo told me, with the air of a man explaining a simple puzzle to a small child. "Here at ICM we represent famous people - and I've never heard of you."