Auditioning - Justin K. Rivers

Auditioning, Fall 2002

I auditioned for Shadows 1^st semester freshman year. Would've been Fall 2002. I read for the part of Jakob Resh. Around the same time I showed up for Bay State auditions as well, figuring if I couldn't get into Shadows then the soap opera would at least give me the chance to flex some acting muscles and learn how to act in front of a camera better.

The auditions were held in the BUTV studio – I forget what the name of it was...studio B maybe? It was pretty roughshod at the time, but scared little freshman Justin didn't notice the chipped paint and the scuffed floor, only the three big pedestal cameras and the control room with the mixing board and the banks of monitors.

The Bay State audition consisted of a cold read of a scene in which a lecherous RA harasses a student. My RA Amy Muething worked on the show and encouraged me to show up. It didn't go as planned. I mean, I knew how to do creepy pretty well, but I didn't get the part because (I found out from I think Arestia Rosenberg or someone like that) I had been too creepy. But the Shadows audition went better. Fewer people showed up, I think that helped. I recall Jeanne Haight (head writer), Melissa Carelli (producer), Liska Ostijic (director), and Matt Burns (co-star) being there. I can't remember who I read with but it must've been a scene from Episode 32. I imagine the DVCAM tape might still be around somewhere.

Being cast in Shadows was very exciting, it was part of the reason I decided to go to BU in the first place. The tour of COM the previous year had included a glimpse at the studio, and the show was always featured in their promotional material. What I didn't realize was that butv didn't actually exist – it was a group that made episodes and never aired them, because there was no cable station at the university at the time. Apparently, they had at one time aired their content on a local Boston cable channel – the 3/4” Umatic tapes of the original Shadows run included hilarious old commercials and PSAs for the National Guard.

In fact, no new episode of Shadows had been seen or completed in several years. Overexposed, the sketch comedy show, had gone dormant. So had Inside Boston, the newsmagazine. Only Bay State kept going, powered by its own momentum and the broad appeal of its content. A lot of people were involved with it, which attracted more people. The plot lines allowed for characters to enter and exist with the typical flow and turnover of a student population. It was easier to keep it going.

The students who worked on Shadows didn't seem to have the low-budget sci-fi background that I had. I thought it was odd, because it was a show that had a lot of potential, but nobody seemed to know how to kickstart the thing or how to fix what was wrong. Or even what was wrong to begin with. That was a subject Sam and I would discuss a lot in the following year.

Hawthorn University

The character of Jakob Resh was originally a freshman from Hawthorne University, the BU stand-in, which was run by an evil president (har-har, John Silber!). President Hawthorne was played by a very nice man named Kimbrough...I think Charles was his first name. Anyways, he was someone's dad from a while back and although he wasn't the greatest actor in the world he was very kind to us and continued to play his part long after his son had moved on. And he wasn't going to graduate on us.

The show was in an impossible position – the characters who had initiated the pilot storyline in 1995 were all gone, of course. And I'm not sure anybody can successfully trace the paths back to them. I think by that point the entire plot had run its course. Plus, with the multicam setup for shooting, we couldn't do more stylized visuals. We couldn't even build more than a few sets, because all we had were a few wall flats and some props and broken furniture. These things had to look like dorm rooms and offices, and all they really looked like were fake walls.

The first year I was really just an actor. But I showed up regularly and was there on time, which I think the rest of the crew appreciated. At the time, we shot one episode per semester. I'll have to go back and try to find the footage and scripts to recall what the story was. So, I was an actor in Episode 32 and 33, which would have been Fall 02 and Spring 03 respectively.

I'll have to defer to someone else about what was exactly going on with the production, but I think for various reasons the group that had got together, coalescing around the producer Melissa Carelli, was splitting up. Melissa was graduating. Liska was unavailable for the following year. We lost a few more actors. Jeanne, the head writer, offered to let me get involved in the writing for the next episode.

Which I did.