The Product Fallacy
There’s a reason you hate explaining your ‘product’ in agent meetings.
There’s a reason you hate listing your high note on your resume.
There’s a reason you hate every pay-for-play with a casting director who said they, “Just didn’t get your packaging.”
Conventional strategy for actors has been driving with break-neck speed in recent years toward perfecting the product. The gatekeepers declare with an authoritative tone, “YOU ARE YOUR PRODUCT!” and you squirm and smile and pull out your moleskin to figure out how to lose 10 pounds or if it’s worth it to dye your hair red.
The problem with aggressively and earnestly trying to apply all the insights about the “business of show” is a classic: lack of fluency.
We’ve got an industry of artists throwing around words like ‘product’ as if we know what it means, as if it’s the only category of offering being exchanged for payment.
If we had cared to take the GMAT, pander to alumni, and endure the institutionalized alcoholism of the first year of business school, we would know that all industry is broken into two categories across all spheres: products and services.
A product IS. It can be improved, upgraded, used, transferred, thrown-out. It’s a thing. Put it in single-use plastic and watch the current model sit on a shelf until such a time as it is outdated and discounted with the prayer that it can still recoup some of its cost.
A service however, DOES. It is applied, adapted, customized, responsive, scalable. It releases no new models, rather it adds specializations and integrates new learning into its approach. It does not sit inactively in the hands of the customer but relates to the client and provides its expertise to solve the problem at hand.
Products are bought. Services are hired.
If you feel like a shallow, self-centered, worthless piece of Banana Republic sale rack because of how much this business makes you think about yourself, you intuitively know that a product-based approach puts far more focus on the self than could ever be healthy.
Honestly, your one acting teacher in college got it right. How are you a service? You work In service of the script. Right? You used to hear it all the time. In service of the script, in service of the story, in service of the character, in service of the vision of the director.
When you approach the work you do as a service, the entirety of your focus is on someone or something other than yourself. When you work to add notes to your range, it isn’t for the thing you are, it’s for the service you provide. It’s so you can more fully tell the story of a character who happens to be written with those notes. You work on hard skills while feeling generous, thoughtful, even… dare I say, humble.
How much better is that headspace and heartspace to walk around your daily life in? And how much better to go to work with?
Think first from the perspective of the director. She hires an actor who believes their assets are static and quantifiable. Looks X way, sings X notes, dances to X ability. If the vision for the show adapts in the slightest, as a creative process may want to do, she is left with the inflexibility of what she bought. But, if the same actor believed themselves to be offering a service, their skills remain relevant because they are not there to be- they are there to do. The fear of working outside their product description never enters their rehearsal process because they are seeking to understand and represent the character.
And what about the actor who walks unknowingly into a process with a director who only meant to buy their obvious traits and tricks? Welcome to the miserable world of line-readings, comparisons to cast albums, and casual comments about your appearance that, positive or negative, would be grounds for dismissal in any other field allegedly regulated by the U.S. Department of Labor. This is the room in which the worst thing you could do is have an idea. God help us, actors with ideas! Should our service-model actor find themselves with a director who has hired them as such however, what awaits is collaboration and increased richness of the human experience. If the director is interested in the actor’s point of view as a practiced and adept interpreter, we now have the opportunity to double the insights we consider and let the best ones make it to the stage under the director’s discretion.
Where is Megan Fox these days? Anyone? I have nothing negative to say about her as an actress. How could I? The roles she was given when she entered the American consciousness were so flat, so shallow, so blatantly about marketing her as a product, I have no idea how her intrinsic skills as an actor might serve a script.
What is Meryl Streep’s product? Tom Hanks’? Viola Davis’? You can’t place them neatly into the product box. Their work is famously adaptive. The humble attitude of working in service of their characters is all over their careers. This is worth journaling and vision boarding about.
Other benefits of agreeing that acting is a service industry? With the doing at the center rather than the being, value can shift to applied skills rather than aesthetics. How radical to suggest that the best actor to represent a character might be decided by what they do rather than their hotness or whiteness.
On that note, consider who makes the majority of decisions in the field. This is the unspoken ickiness of ‘product’ talk. Allow the womxn, people of color, and all others at the margins (all egregiously underrepresented in positions with hiring power), to be contracted for what they can do and not bought for ‘what they are’. This way lies the end of whitewashing and tokenism.
It’s the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution folks. Products are cheaper, flimsier, and more disposable than ever. Time shows them for what they typically are: waste.
Services benefit from the long-game. Lawyers and doctors provide legal and medical services. They have legal and medical practices. Time is on their side. You provide a service. You don’t expire when you have to change your age range on Actors Access. You are more practiced than ever. Time shows that to be true. You’re at this present moment, more adept than ever to be in service of a story, and don’t accept anything less than the respect that merits from your prospective clients.
