Dining Virtually with Geoffrey Gould
With apologies to my guests and readers: I had launched a series of informal interviews with artists for this blog last summer, but then I underwent two knee surgeries and my wife a third. I kept up reblogging, but I had to focus on other deadlines and physical therapy and rehab. I’m picking up with the two interviews I conducted last summer, starting with one of my favorite Twitter friends, actor and screenwriter Geoffrey Gold, who also appeared on Twitter as Detective Bob in my tweet novel Doublemint Gumshoe.
Think a writer’s life is hard? Try booking a flight from England to Hollywood and then to New York just to try out for roles they won’t even credit (for instance, Wigged Reception Guest or Balding Man). A quick glance at Geoff’s shows a lot of roles. A closer glance shows why he isn’t a household name. Yet. The bulk of his parts are uncredited, one-offs, or in shorts. He even appeared as a regular on the hit TV show “My Name Is Earl,” as a different character in every episode, none of them credited.
At one point Geoff conducted an online fundraising campaign to stay in his tiny apartment in London. Does this discourage him? You wouldn’t know it from the auditions he schedules, his paranormal podcasts, or the scripts he writes and performs with friends.
When we talked Geoff was back in Hollywood, having given up the London fog for the LA smog. I asked him where he wanted to meet, and he insisted it be in VR. I’ve never tried VR before, but I figured, “Why not?” I ordered Google Cardboard from Amazon, spent six hours working through the hacks to hook it up to my Macbook Pro (my iPad didn’t have the RAM for the site he suggested) and plugged in.
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Actor, writer and paranormal podcaster Geoffrey Gould (aka Detective Bob)
My first VR interview
We meet online at an abandoned warehouse, famous for it’s cyber ghosts. (Sorry, for the reader’s safety I can’t give the location. Without an expert trained in cybernetics, HTML5 and CSS and paranormal investigation, the visit could prove dangerous). I follow behind him as he runs his electromagnetic energy reader up and down corners and walls.
Because we’re in VR, his reader doubles as an mp3 player and it blasts out classical music, mostly Litzt and Pachelbel. I love classical music, but you can only listen to the Canon in D Minor so many times in your life before you fall asleep where you’re standing. My virtual iPhone, in protest, blares out Brian Eno’s Another Green World. This leads to dueling mp3s until both devices agree on a playlist that includes
I ask him how if he’s enjoying the transition to the West Coast.
It’s both a good location and my friends are animal lovers and licensed wildlife rehabilitators, so as a volunteer, I get to care for and raise young animals including but not limited to, baby raccoons, possums, skunks, as well as kittens and the occasional puppy.
The location and living arrangement suit him wll. I am close to public transit (on which I rely, not owning a car at the moment), which can pretty much get me to wherever I am needed to get to a location for a TV/movie shoot, as well as [healthy] walking distance to an actor/writer workshop group [WeMakeMovies.org] to which I belong.
We enter a room with windows boarded over, holes in the floor and snakes slithering from cracks in the walls. This feels like too much VR for me, but on of the dozens of devices dangling from Geoff’s toolbelt beeps and he dashes inside. I follow him around the room as he checks meters, gauges and graphs on his iPhone. I ask him if he hopes to encounter the ghost of a mentor.
During my tenure at the Studio Playhouse of Upper Montclair New Jersey, one of its members was Larry Brady, one of the most brilliant minds for comedy. Apart from being one of the most talented comic actors, he was also a talented writer. For productions on which he worked, he would write one-act parody versions of the productions, with references to in-jokes that took place throughout the rehearsal and performance process. One of my first script writing was a similar parody of a production of Ibsen’s An Ememy of the People in which I was a cast member.
When I was not involved in the cast of plays, including but not limited to their Magic Trunk Players children show productions, I would often design the sound and run tech. Larry often designed and ran lights. One of the playhouse members wrote numerous children play scripts, one of which was a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. It was an okay script, but the author occasionally tended to write at children as opposed to for them. The play ended with a lame “joke” of sorts, to which Larry would wince comically and posit if this was the level of children’s shows, he could write something far better.
With kidney issues which eventually would kill him, he would spend days in the hospital on dialysis, during one of which he wrote the children’s play Peter and the Pirates. Its alliterative title notwithstanding, it was not a variation on Peter Pan, but a boy named Peter who dreams (or does he?) of falling prey to a group of albeit rather comically inept pirates, and saving a princess who is their prisoner. Reading the script it was clear that the pirate captain would be the role Larry would have seen played by himself. As our comic styles were similar, I auditioned the way the role was written. Larry was on the casting committee that were in agreement my interpretation was the best, and so I created the role (meaning, I was the first ever to portray the role). At the cast wrap party, Larry told me I surpassed his expectations for the role.
When he next wrote The Magic Bottle a year or two later, I created the role of the genii, again deducing the role was “for” Larry. At the cast party as I went to mention it, Larry clarified he’d written the role specifically with me in mind to play it. The majority of the comedy I do, I honor Larry Brady.
Bacon flavored coffee in a bacon cup
We emerge at the far end warehouse, and those pesky cyber ghosts haven’t knocked loose a single line of code. Discouraged, we retire to the visitor’s food court across the street. This food court stands out because you can type your preferences into a keypad at the gate and change the trailers to any style and menu you wish.
We considered trailer trash food court with heart killing menus:
When it comes to food, I’m very much a steak and potatoes guy, and I very much enjoy “faster” food: Wendys, Fatburgers, McDonalds.
I’m not fooled. I know for a fact that Geoff loves bacon: thick, crispy bacon piled high on a plate and then piled higher until the strips tumble off the top and into your greasy hands. He tweets about bacon almost as much as pets. Without our having to order, the virtual waitress appears at our table in six-inch heels, a skirt so virtual we can see through it to her bunny panties, and, well…this isn’t that kind of interview so I’ll drop the description here.
She serves us bacon on a bacon plate with bacon flavored coffee in a bacon cup. Even the coffee spoon is bacon. Before we can take the first bite she completes our order with a tray stacked three feet high with bacon. Apple smoked bacon, maple smoked bacon, hickory smoked bacon. Beef bacon. Pork bacon. Thin strips, crispy strips, burnt-to-a-crisp sticks. None of them made from turkey. It’s a dream come true.
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Our virtual waitress served us bacon on a bacon plate and coffee in a bacon cup. I’m beginning to enjoy virtual interviews.
While we gorge on calory free bacon, Geoff admits he likes pancakes with his artery hardening breakfast. He tells me his father made the best pancakes and gives me the address for the recipe.
Given his fascination with the paranormal, I ask him to describe the afterife and how much tickets would sell for.
Based on my years of research, it varies. In one aspect there is an alternate dimension in which one’s consciousness joins with the collective consciousness of those who have passed before, either to exist eternally, and/or debrief on one’s time in the material plane with which to expand the individual’s existence, the Soul, if one will.
Another aspect, or theory, is that a traumatic end to one’s life either renders the individual fearful of that alternate dimension, a fear of judgement, “forcing” the individual’s incorporpeal to remain on our perceived material plane, as a “ghost” or Shadow Person, sometimes able to interact with the material plane.
Another concept is what people experience has Hauntings is actually an imprint on the material ether: an event so strong it replays like a recording. Such events would be perceived as an apparition walking down a hallway the same time every night, or on a specific anniversary date.
Geoff had no idea how to sell tickets or what to charge. I was sad to hear it, since, being raised a Baptist preacher’s kid, it seemed like all his associates were getting rich off the business.
I asked if anyone could profit from paranormal research.
Such research is free, though some locations do charge for investigations, such as the famously haunted Waverly Hills Sanitorium, etc.
I wondered if his fascination with the paranormal crept into his writing?
Most of my writing has been comedy. While I have written one horror film based on a vengeful spirit, most of my scripts have been comically character driven, with quirky [hopefully unexpected] twist/s.
We head back to the warehouse, our stomachs stuffed with bacon. The VR is amazing. This feels like I have a bellyful of real food. I even want to belch. I check Geoff before we head inside and notice he now wears a Proton Pack on his back and his left hand grips the nozzle.
The new room makes the first look like a five-star hotel lobby. Video monitors fill the right wall showing people banging against the inside of the screen to be let out. All are in various stages of decomposition, some with eyeballs dangling, a few with jaws dangling, and many with skulls collapsed into the rib cage. The left wall features zombie strippers. Each time they remove an article of clothing someone off camera tosses them a brain. Geoffrey assures me the white slime on the floor is ectoplasm, but I’m not sure. Every monitor on his belt is flashing.
I try to keep the conversation on topic. Has writing changed his appreciation of acting?
In high school I was an aspiring writer; in the early 1970s those taking typing classes were girls learning to become secretaries: I was the only male in the class, to everyone’s surprise, the teacher as well. I had no interest in learning shorthand, but I was keen to learn typing. When registering at temp agencies, one is tested on skilled; my typing has been clocked at 61 words per minute… and that is my speed copying from already written text. I have no idea to my typing speed writing straight from my head.
I would love to see any/all of my scripts produced; if done correctly, I feel they would be greatly enjoyed by film festival audiences.
As with Larry Brady’s writing, several of my scripts are written with characters loosely based on myself (not all of them, but most). My full given name is Geoffrey Lawrence, hence the name Larry, though it could also be considered an homage to Larry Brady, who had a passing resemblance to a tall Steve Buscemi.
I step in a particularly sticky puddle of “ectoplasm.” My biohazard boot remains stuck, exposing my bare foot. I know this is VR, but I have to curse the sick minds who dreamed up this one. To Geoff: “I noticed you have several tours of American shows. Do you do stops in LA for series spots?”
While I’m a bit of an anglophile, I was born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey before moving to California, so acting work has always been just… local. I worked on the indie feature film Everything http://everythingfilm.co a couple of scenes of which being set in England, to which we flew for a few days for location shots.
Working on Modern Family was a single day, when they saw my thin hair, they thought a wig would be funny. On set they arranged it to be far more comically askew than one would let one’s wig be.
I knew he was renting a flat in a friend’s London guest house, and desperate for funds so he could stay. He even launched a campaign on gofundme. I asked how his the search for funds to stay coming?
No; with now close to fourteen thousand Twitter Followers, if even a tiny fraction of that number were to donate five or more dollars each, it would absolutely save me from homelessness, but while I occasionally add to a Hashtag Game the link to the gofundme.com/saverealbadger campaign (and a few have faved and/or retweeted the information), very few have actually helped at a financial level. As GoFundMe does not store received funds, but sends them as received, even that already sent has gone to day to day (or rather, month to month) expenses. Ironically fund raising experts want up front payment to help with fund raising, so it’s analogous to the old joke that a bank will only approve a loan if you can prove the you don’t need the loan.
By this time, Geoff has so many notes to enter from all of his (admittedly illusory) gadgets, that I sense he’s losing interest in the interview. Considering what they modeled the ectoplasm from, I have no desire to see the ghosts the programmers plan to serve up. I ask what kinds of jobs actors work between acting gigs? “I know table waiting is the stereotype, but are there other gigs? Do actors have a referral system to get each other work?”
I wish there was such a referral system. As it is, I use a calling service to submit me to background work gigs that I do not find on my own, as well as a temp agency I hound to acquire occasional clearly temp work. One of the best I had was to be for a few days, and I was working there for over four years, until they moved locations, and I was retained as long as they could, even letting go permanent workers before the move. I was their hardcopy files curator, and after their move they managed to finally get to digitizing their files, so while they very much liked me, the company itself has no place with which to use me. A shame really: the original building in which we were working was quite, quite haunted…
“Do actors make money from community theater and stand-up (solo) performances?”
No from community theatre; I’ve no idea as to stand-up, though, as my brother had done some stand-up back east, I would posit his appearances have been “for exposure,” as opposed to pay, similar to as an actor I performing in film maker student films for copy and credit.
The desire to leave this haunted museum makes my mind wander to travel “Do actors have to travel often for community theater?”
Depends on the location of the theatre group. In New Jersey I belonged to the Studio Playhouse http://studioplayhouse.org as well as the nearby Livingston Community Players, while my brother occasionally worked with a group down in Basking Ridge. Los Angeles has no such similar community theater groups. What groups they have are monthly dues based, as well as favouritism and seniority, their attitudes seemingly being new members paying sixty or more dollars a month and after seven months or so maybe being allowed to do props. My back-east experience with groups was to audition for a “lesser” role in one show so we get to know each other, then take on “better” roles after that. For Livingston Community Players I first played the IRS agent in a production of You Can’t Take It With You (I also designed and ran sound for the production). After that I auditioned as the lead role of Barbaby in the original full Victor Herbert operetta Babes in Toyland. Their casting committee concurred no one other than I could do the fun, dark role the same justice I would do for it.
One of the screens switches from a wailing ghost to a Doctor Who rerun. One of the Tom Baker episodes. So I ask him how the BBC differs from American TV.
From what I understand they’re not affiliated with SAG over here, so I’d have to acquire all sorts of waivers to do amy BBC production (as much as I would love to work on Doctor Who), though I believe they do not pay royalties aka residuals.
I’m rapidly running out of intelligent questions. Fortunately, Jon Pertwee pops up in the Baker episode, dressed in his most flamboyant foppery. (I could tolerate Pertwee as the Doctor, but I still liked him better than Colin Baker.) “How much truth is there to the bohemian lifestyle? Or are most really just as normal as the rest of us?”
Los Angeles isn’t exactly New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1970s. Many of the writers I know are also writers, though I do know some “only” writers, and I doubt I would classify any as Bohemian.
“How exciting does it get when actors hang out together?”
Finally, Geoff opens up again.
The actor/writer/film maker collective We Make Movies I’ve mentioned earlier has weekly free evnts Wednesday nights at Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of Vine. Twice or thrice a month, they have table-read nights where four to five short scripts (or up to 15 page chunks of a feature screenplay) are “cold read,” after which the author is given feedback from the audience of actors, fellow writers, etc. The readers get the script Monday so they can be familiar with the material.
After the evening, which roughtly concludes around 10:30pm’ish, many hang out/network at the nearby Three of Clubs on Vine, just north of Santa Monica Boulevard. As that venue is considerably too loud not only for my tastes but counterproductive to actually networking, I do not always attend that aspect of the evening. The other Wednesdays are either theater games, or screening segments of a project, the visual version of the table-read night.
(In my treatment, the actor spends his time with a group of indie writers who gravitate around one writer who makes her living selling “writing for writers” books. The group gravitates to her garden: an actor who writes screen plays, a horror writer with two books, a romance writer with a string of failed romances, and an ex-patriate American who doesn’t really need the money. He sells a few copies but gets better reviews than any of them, which drives them crazy, and they don’t know how to get rid of him. It especially galls their hostess, who just had her benefits cut by the British government and has to triple her output to make up for the loss, including some ghost writing. The actor wants to write a fictionalized memoir about an actor turned film producer—“Very meta”—even though every one tells him indie buyers want blood, murder and sex. How much of that makes it into the assignment is up in the air.)
Blimey…
Geoff doesn’t see it, but Beethoven’s ghost rises from the far corner of the room and approaches us. I know it’s Beethoven because of the wild hair and scowl that was carved into a plaster-of-paris Beethoven statuette my grandmother gave me, thinking I would appreciate culture more than a Red Ryder B-B-Gun. My mother made me keep the statuette on the nightstand, where the image terrified me every time I woke with the night light on.
I ask him to provide us with links to short or easily accessible works of the artists or actors who influenced you? They don’t have to be in your field or genre, (but readers would really appreciate links to artists they aren’t likely to know already.)
I greatly enjoyed the works of the late Robert Bloch and not only because he and I were friends the last fifteen or so years of his life.
Bob was a “failed” stand-up comedian, but while his written works were best known as horror (he was part of HP Lovecraft’s Inner Circle, and was a major contributor to the Cthulhu Mythos, including but limited to the book De Vermis Mysteriis . Bob’s own works’ include a version of the Necronomicon, sometimes cited in other works (such as Stephen King), and even in movies such as Hellboy; Bob is also best known for writing the novella Psycho which Alfred Hitchcock made into the famous film.
Bob’s horror often had a dry sense of humour to make of his less Lovecraftian tales, often generating suspense, “only” to end the story with a word play or pun, not only to be funny, but be horrific in context with the story as well.
Beethoven’s ghost grabs me from behind and pulls me into the ectoplasm. As my eyes pass through the floor level I notice I was right, this isn’t ectoplasm. I ask Geoff, “What’s going on?” I hear his voice from the floor above:
How the hell should I know?
But it isn’t. It’s Geoff’s. Or is it?
The circle of ghosts on the next floor closes in upon me. I hear Geoff’s voice laughing:
What made you think we’re in VR?
Carol’s addendum:
We haven’t seen Phillip since he logged into VR. I left the room to make coffee and when I returned I only found his Google cardboard next to his Macbook Pro. Geoff claims he emailed the interview in a Word document and never went online with Phillip. But we’re still looking.
If you’re interested, you can find more of Geoff’s performing and writing at:
I solo-voiced a short film that won 2015 Slamdance Film Festival Jury Award for Best Animated Short Film, The Pride of Strathmoor, which attracted a lot of attention, and while sadly not crediting me (at least the film does), the short has been displayed (or linked therefrom) on several sites including FilmShortage, and Digg.com.
Years ago a circle of friends pummelled out about twenty shorts for a “film festival” which turned out to be more of a scam; a new website trying to acquire free video content. I submitted five, two being parody commercials for fictional products based on emails I’d sent a friend. It was suggested I create a narrative for the products, and while there’s a hint of the commercial at the start of Man-Away, the rest involves where one can get these strange items.
The director of photography, went to ground, refusing to provide any copy of the footage for us to edit ourselves. We also could not submit it elsewhere as we had no release on our “actress” (a former friend who claims to have been classically trained at Cambridge in England, despite a complete inability to do any aspect of a British accent), whose mind later broke from grief over the death of her elderly dog.
One of my other scripts, Daddy’s Girl, was also shot, but despite my playing the male role, the “director” insisted I change a word from formal to watering down the line. We also used the same “actress,” so with those two aspects, Daddy’s Girl and Man-Away each really need to be remade. I wrote about the sad history of the films on my site.
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This is a still clip from Geoffrey’s short “Daddy’s Girl.”
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