Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Doing Something

Doritos has a contest for the Super Bowl where normal people can make a commercial and submit it, and the winner gets a million dollars and their ad shown during the game. My buddy Scott decided to enter this year. He spent about 2 grand making a commercial and sent it in. He was selected as a top ten finalist, and lucky enough, everyone in the top ten gets to go to the Super Bowl and sit in the Doritos box.

None of the ten knows who won until they show the commercial during the game. And wouldn’t you know it, during the first quarter, I see a commercial for Doritos. And it’s Scott’s commercial! He fucking won. A million dollars. Insane.

And then today, I saw another friend of mine get some good news. He got cast as a regular in a new sitcom, which reminded me of a story about him.

I was on the set of “Selfie” for the filming of the first episode I wrote. We had cast this goofy, funny guy as Henry’s (John Cho) assistant. I was hanging out by the monitors during some down time, and on set, there’s a ton of down time. And this Henry assistant guy was talking about something, and he mentioned that he was in the upcoming Jurassic Park sequel (which also had a big commercial during the Super Bowl).

Well, as soon as I hear information like that, I start asking a ton of questions. One of which was: how’d you get that gig?

The answer: he wrote the director a letter.

He sat down in his apartment and wrote a letter to the director of Jurassic Park telling him how much he admired his movies and that he’s an actor and he’d love to be in it. And the director wrote back! And now he’s in motherfucking Jurassic Park!

But that’s not at all. Apparently (APPARENTLY!), he writes 5 letters a week. To directors and producers of things. All with the same theme: I like your work and I’d like to be involved. And this often works.

First of all, who writes letters anymore? Second, there are a billion actors in Hollywood, how could this possibly work?! Maybe because no one writes letters anymore! Anyway, this letter writing campaign also got him a part in the next Coen brothers movie. Insane, again.

So today, Deadline reported that he has scored a role for a sitcom that Shaq is doing. And I can’t help but wonder if a strongly worded letter was involved…