Stars In Your Eyes...Feet on the Ground: A Practical Guide for Teenage Actors

by Annie Jay

Teen actress Annie Jay offers her peers guidance about how to make a career in show business, and not just in New York or L.A., but in places like Peoria, Illinois, or West Chester, Pennsylvania. She provides information on handling auditions and rejection, getting the attention of an agent, joining the entertainment unions, and avoiding scams. This book will also help parents achieve a realistic understanding of what is entailed in their child's pursuit of stardom.

150 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1999

Reviews

[Paul Bustion · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not read the whole book. I read one chapter, the tenth chapter which was about the topic of college. I only bought it because when I read the review of it on amazon I saw that it discussed the author's reasons for rejecting college. I spent 6 years in college and I was expelled so it ended up being a waste of time, and I'm currently debating my parents who think it was a good decision for me to go, whereas I think it was a mistake. So I read the part of the book related to the topic of college, which was the tenth chapter. I thought Annie Jay gave good arguments for why college can be a mistake for many people. She pointed out that it creates massive student loan debt, which requires a person who suffers from it to work at specific jobs and thus severely limits his choice of career. She also pointed out that colleges lie or at least mislead people they are trying to recruit as students by exaggerating how much beneficial effect they have on careers. Another interesting point she made was that colleges in the case of female actors take up 4 of their under 30 years of life, and female actors are considered "over the hill" after age 30, so it is generally a waste of time for female actors. I think that could be applied to both sexes in many professions actually. The police, firefighters, emergency medical services, restaurants, and bookstores generally do not like to hire people after 30 of either sex because of the "over the hill" issue and also because of salary issues and declining motor skills issues. I wish I had read what she wrote before I went to college, I think I would not have gone if I had. Perhaps the most interesting part of her chapter about college was when the author discussed how colleges try to mislead students about their merit for acting careers. She wrote on pages 100-101,
"A school's promotional materials often list well-known alumni. What these materials do not say is how much the schools contributed to the success of these actors and how much these actors did on their own." I agree with her point that colleges mislead people about their merits in order to get them to go. When I went to college I suggested to the teachers that perhaps I should not be going to college due to the fact that I suffer from dyscalculia, which means a mental disability making arithmetical/mathematical calculations difficult for a person, and the fact that most of the college majors with many career options such as accounting, biology, engineering, etc. involve a fair amount of arithmetic/mathematics, and the college teachers told me a history major had as many career options as an accounting major, that's just not true, that was an example of misleading facts being given by the college. Annie Jay's statement about how colleges mislead people into thinking they have more merit than they actually have reminded me of a statement Hans Eysenck made in "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" where he complained about Freud and his followers misleading people into thinking that he as a scientist and his movement and his ideas had more merit than they actually had. The similarity between her statement and Hans Eysenck's was very interesting to me.