(piano jazz music)
- Guess I'll give you a little backstory.
I actually started out as an actor.
I went to proper theater school in England.
I went to Goldsmith's College in England
and I studied performance and playwriting,
but I studies playwriting in that I read
and dissected plays,
I didn't study how to become a playwright,
but I wrote a bunch of plays, really for myself,
because I didn't see females reflected in theater
the way I felt females should be portrayed.
Then when I moved to Los Angeles
something interesting happened.
I fought the fight of sending out mailers
and doing showcases
and I ended up getting an agent.
Whenever I got a call to go and audition,
the auditions were really stereotyped.
It was gang bangers girlfriend, gang bangers sister,
maybe a prostitute, if I got lucky.
Those were really all of the auditions
that were available to me,
and this is a decade ago, 15 years ago,
so I became really, really frustrated
and I would go and I would sit in the waiting rooms with,
if you're an actor, any audition is like
cuter and less cute versions of you,
and you're like, "Oh here we are, we all pretty cute.
"Here we are doing this thing," and we're all talking
but then we have to go in there and do a voice and an accent
and it just was soul crushing
and I thought, certainly there must be somebody
who is casting a young teacher or lawyer or doctor
and that stuff started to happen,
that stuff was starting to happen.
There would be a few here and there,
but very few and far between,
so I'm very impatient as a person
and I think that my deep desire
and my lack of control as an actor made me realize
that as a writer, every day I could write.
Every day I couldn't act,
but every day I could write.
I had control over that,
so I was gonna write material for myself.
So really it started as a way for me to soothe my own wounds
from having gone out there
and not been represented in any way,
so I decided to get a theater in Hollywood,
the Hudson Theater, it's still there.
They have three stages.
We got the main stage theater.
I found out that Wednesdays were their cheapest night.
They had another set in there for their weekend show
but they were dark on Wednesdays
and so I could get the theater for a couple hundred bucks,
and I just used whatever set was in there.
I wrote material.
I casted myself.
I directed it.
I rewrote it and I put it on
and I found out that backstage west and LA Weekly,
back then anyway, would only review you
if you had a six week run,
so I booked a theater for six weeks on Wednesday nights,
Wednesday for six weeks
so that they'd come in the first two weeks
so that I would get some quotes in the paper
and we could be in there and be reviewed.
And I started putting up my own shows.
And doing that really changed the game for me.
It was something I had control over.
As I was putting these plays up,
as I was directing and producing
and making programs and re-writing,
I learned so much.
I basically showed me how to be a show runner, really,
with no money, right, like how can I in a black box
or in sometimes it's a hospital set,
sometimes it's a restaurant set.
Put the light on my character,
or put the light on my two characters
and have a scene that would transport the audience.
It didn't matter what the set looked like
because the words and the acting was gonna be enough
to transport them to wherever I wanted them to go.
So that became an essential part of my journey
and I really put those on twice a year for a little while
and then once a year
and then I eventually started doing them for charity
and once One Day at a Time got picked up,
I had to stop doing it because I was too busy.
For me that's also how I got my agent and my manager,
because they came and saw that show,
so the hustle is real.
This was before things like YouTube existed,
so now you can shoot stuff with your phone,
you can put up blogs, you can,
there's so many resources now
that I didn't have at the time,
so I just went with what I knew, which was theater.
I knew that I could put up a play.
I knew I could cast it and direct it and write it
and be in it and by doing that, everything changed for me.
For me I really wanted to represent what it was like
to be a female and a Latina right now in America.
That was what I wanted to talk about and in doing so,
I met so many incredible actors and directors and producers
and it was a game changing event for me.
Thank you so much watching.
It's not over here you guys.
You can still tweet me @everythingloria.
I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter,
I'm still available to you
so keep asking those questions, keep doing the work.
Make sure to watch all of the other Hollywood 101 videos
on Pero Like's YouTube channel.
This is Gloria Calderon Kellett, good luck.