By Mary-Justine Lanyon
They are actors, casting directors, producers, directors, teachers. And now Chuck Marra and Megan Foley are authors.
How To Trash Your Career
Their book, How To Trash Your Career, is a tongue-in-cheek “comedic guide to the actor’s journey,” according to the book’s subtitle.
In one of their classes, Marra said, one of the students was badmouthing his own accomplishments. “I said that’s Chapter 1 of my book, which is in my head.”
His advice to that student: “Don’t talk bad about your career.”
Marra wrote the book and Foley, his wife and business partner, refined it. “My job was to tell him he couldn’t say that,” she joked.”
They have both collected stories over the span of their careers and have included many in the book. There are just as many they left out so there could well be another book down the road.
“We talk about a lot of people we know,” they admitted.
They begin the book with this admonition: “Anyone can make mistakes in their career but to Trash Your Career requires commitment, patience and a vision.
“Trashing your career, stunting its growth, utterly stalling it in its tracks, THAT takes something more. You CAN learn to do it and I can teach you.”
The message of Chapter 1 is, as Marra told the student, to not speak badly of your career. However, the advice they give is the opposite of what anyone should do. For example: “Since belief in yourself is essential to making it in this business, or any other, you must cut that healthy self-worth stuff off at the pass, nip it in the bud and drive a stake in its heart while it is sleeping.”
Chapter 2 is all about “vaunting” – boasting excessively about your career, blowing up the smallest thing in your life so as to make others feel like they are going nowhere in life, compared to you.
“Don’t oversell it,” is Marra’s true advice. “At the end of the day, when you’re lying in bed, if you’re lying about your career, you’ll feel like crud.
“You’re the engine – the power source of your career,” he added. “Everyone tells you what you should be doing. No one says what not to do. That is equally important.”
Marra noted that the examples he gives in the book are all things he’s seen successful actors do. “These are classic stories of people who were working fine, got a little work and then more work. Suddenly they don’t look like a human being.”
A lot of actors, Marra said, avoid doing the work. “They have an agent or a manager so they sit back and relax. Or they don’t work on getting an agent and think they’ll get discovered. They have to be out there doing self-promotion, doing the work.”
Marra and Foley pointed to their friend, actor Chris McDonald, as someone who is a great networker. “He told us that every 15 minutes he does something for his career. He writes an email, calls his agent. Now his daughter Rosie is doing the same thing.”
When Marra moved to Los Angeles from New York, his friends gave him six months to make it. “I made sure I did everything I could – student films, plays, I met people all the time. Some friends told me they don’t do that – they wouldn’t work for free. They would come up with stupid excuses as to why they weren’t successful.”
If it were easy, Marra and Foley agree, everyone would be successful. “If you do the work, it is that easy,” Marra said.
Some actors appear to think they know everything. “They have no enthusiasm, no spark. They are jaded,” he said.
“I did all this – it’s tried and true, professionally tested!”
Foley said one big problem she sees is actors giving up when they are on the cusp of success. “They are so close, it scares them,” she said. She pointed to a young woman who had studied with them for three years. She was in a lot of their movies but suddenly announced she was going to go to school and become a nutritionist. “She had never mentioned being interested in that.”
“There are a lot of ways people trash their careers,” Marra said, “and that’s one. They quit at the finish line.
“If you knew not to be bitter, not to be a diva, to let yourself age gracefully, you stand a better chance,” he said. “You have one job: To create enthusiasm in you and everyone else. In you is where it starts. That’s what hires you.”
As a casting director, he added, he is drawn to the person who is enthusiastic.
Through their studio, Marra and Foley teach classes, then cast their students in short films which they produce and direct. Many of those films are now making their way through the festival circuit – and are doing well.
Currently their classes are offered online at www.thefoleymarrastudios.com. Their hope is to once again rent space on the mountain and offer both classes and live theater up here. Some of their most rewarding and satisfying work, they agreed, was when they were working on the mountain with the Lake Arrowhead Repertory Theatre Company.
Marra plans to record an audio version of the book in which listeners will hear the sarcasm in his voice. “There is serious advice hidden in the humor,” he said.
Foley sees how the advice in their book can be applied to other professions. “It works for lawyers, real estate agents – anything where you can shoot yourself in the foot.”
How To Trash Your Career is available on Amazon.
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