Rewrite

my sole credit

You know those get-to-know-you games – the icebreakers and fun-fact circles where someone inevitably says, “Tell us one surprising thing about yourself”? Well, I’ve got a couple. And they both come with receipts.

The one I’ll share today is clickably verifiable: I have an IMDb page.

For the uninitiated, IMDb – the Internet Movie Database – is Hollywood’s digital Rolodex. It catalogs films, television, video games, and everyone who works on them, from Oscar winners to boom mic operators. Somehow, in the early 2000s, I got a listing. There’s even a headshot – maybe the best photo I’ve ever taken – and a wildly inaccurate mini-bio (my birth name and birthplace are wrong, and I honestly have no idea how they got the info in the first place). Still, there it is. Over twenty years and counting.

I moved to Los Angeles after college, thinking maybe I’d try acting. I didn’t book much. A few print gigs. A hair salon commercial that as far as I know never aired. But I loved acting class. That stage, that rush. I studied with working actors you’d recognize – and heard more than once that I “had something.” One of those classes led to a short film called Rewrite, where I played “Waiter.” The female lead was a young actress named Adrianne Palicki, in what is listed as her first screen credit (same here!). She went on to star in TV’s Friday Night Lights and many other things.

I may have had something, but ultimately, I didn’t have the one thing I really needed to make it as an actor. The desire ran out. Truth is, I didn’t want it badly enough. Not the way you have to. The audition grind wore me down. Acting on camera didn’t feel like art – it felt like scrutiny. But I found what I was chasing: the creative process. Scriptwriting, editing, producing, and now writing – the view from behind the camera suited me better.

The film Rewrite was about a guy named Frank who could revise reality like it was a screenplay. In my scene, he’s on a date with his girlfriend (Adrianne), and she flirts with me. So Frank rewrites the moment – and suddenly I’m less charming, less attractive, and (in a not so subtle way) not straight. Not exactly prestige cinema, but hey – it earned me an IMDb credit. Paid for (I assume) by Frank himself. So thank you, Tom Lisowski, wherever you are.

If you’re curious about the other fun fact, here it is – Leeanne and I once won $10,000 on a game show called Cram. It aired on the Game Show Network when that was still a thing. A buddy taped it for us on VHS. It’s a pretty great little time capsule of us – young, dating, sleep-deprived yet still sharp as tacks.

Still waiting on that credit.