Al Franken And My Showbiz Career

This week’s ruling that comedian and former SNL personality Al Franken was the winner of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, eight months after the actual election, should have me thinking about things like filibuster-proof majorities and how it affects the prospects for health care reform. Instead, it has me thinking about my career as an actor, and the role Franken played in it.

First of all, please understand that each time I use the word “actor,” I’m actually taking my hands off the computer keyboard to make derisive air quotes. I’m a horrible actor. It’s strange, because you would think being on camera for at least an hour every day doing live TV would be perfect training to be a thespian. But it’s not. News anchors make terrible actors, and actors make terrible news anchors. I’m not sure why this is.

Having said that, larger market TV anchors do get the opportunity sometimes to appear on the big screen, and on fiction television programs, almost always playing…. wait for it…. TV NEWS ANCHORS! I knew Franken a little bit since I worked at WNBC at the time; he was doing a sitcom called “LateLine,” and recruited me to play the usual role of the anonymous news anchor, appearing on a television within the television show, to advance off-screen elements of the plot. I shot them right in the Channel 4 studio. It was easy.

But then he asked me to audition for an actual speaking role, as a character! I remember going to an office at 30 Rock, where Franken and his producers were doing the auditions. There was a lovely actress (whose name escapes me at the moment, but she gets lots of work and is currently in a CBS sitcom) whom I did my “scene” with. I had my lines memorized, I did what they asked me, the actress was as nice and helpful as could be…. and I totally sucked. But Mr. Franken and his colleagues were very kind, gave me the old “we’ll give you a call” line, and off I went back to doing nonfiction work. “LateLine” had a short run and was cancelled. Serves ‘em right.

Thank goodness I still had my film career. A couple years after I’d moved over to PIX, Kaity and I were asked to play fictional news anchors in a movie called “Marci X,” directed by Richard Benjamin and starring Lisa Kudrow and Damon Wayans. Did you see it? Of course, you didn’t. Nobody did. I was hearing it was a stinker right up to its release, so I was glad no one would see it, and see me IN it. What I hadn’t counted on was the trailer for Marci X—a trailer in which I appear-- running right before one of the blockbuster “Spiderman” movies that summer. That trailer, EVERYBODY saw. Here it is, via youtube: (I come up at about :14. I tell you that, because I don’t think you want to watch the entire trailer any more than you do the movie).

I pretty much retired from acting after that. Now I’m thinking about going into politics. I hear there’s a U.S. Senate race in New York this year.