NOLA Film Scene with Tj & Plaideau
A podcast about acting, filmmaking, and the improv scene in New Orleans.
NOLA Film Scene with Tj & Plaideau
James DuMont: Blues Brothers, Broadway, and Studio 54
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Ever wonder how the vibrant Chicago film scene of the 80s shaped the careers of some of Hollywood's notable actors? Join us as we welcome James DuMont, an actor, producer, and self-tape audition specialist, who takes us on a nostalgic journey from his early days dancing in "Blues Brothers" to a pivotal role on Broadway. At just 15 years old James earned his SAG card in the iconic film The Blues Brothers. He came up in the film industry with actors like John Cusack and Jeremy Piven. James' stories from his high school years, where he balanced a love for acting and baseball, will transport you back to a time when the Chicago film industry was booming. This episode is a heartfelt tribute to the perseverance and passion that drive creative expression beyond the allure of fame and fortune.
Follow us on IG @nolafilmscene, @kodaksbykojack, and @tjsebastianofficial. Check out our 48 Hour Film Project short film Waiting for Gateaux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5pFvn4cd1U
I am James Dumont. I'm an actor, producer, a self-tape audition specialist how about that for a title? And happy and glad to be sharing any knowledge, information, experience on the NOLA film scene. Glad to be here and let's just see where we go.
Speaker 2:Welcome to.
Speaker 3:NOLA Film Scene with TJ and Plato.
Speaker 2:I'm TJ.
Speaker 3:And, as always, I'm Plato.
Speaker 2:We're back with another episode of NOLA Film Scene. We are here with my acting mentor and coach, James DeMont. James, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me. Excellent, excellent, excellent. James, it's great to meet you. Thank you for having me Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Speaker 3:James, it's great to meet you. You know we've had bearded guests, so many bearded guests on the episode, but you're joining me in the baldness.
Speaker 1:Just unshaven. I'm just unshaven. Today I could be a bearded guest, but I want to look like my pictures, you know. Yeah, like I don't want to sell them a bill of goods. I mean, if TJ has a headshot with a beard, he shows up all clean shaven like who the fuck is this guy? This is TJ's younger brother, what's it? Or Brian had a beard and now he doesn't. He's, you know. So it's all good.
Speaker 1:But we're both bald, we finally outnumber the bearded people, the balds, are taking over. Yes, bald is the new hair. I don't know if you didn't realize that. And they say this is what all bald guys are supposed to say. But there is some science that backs up that a man of a lot of testosterone doesn't have hair. So real men don't have hair.
Speaker 1:Not saying you're not real men. I'm just saying science says bald is it, baby. Less is more. Less is more is what I like to say grass doesn't grow on a busy street.
Speaker 3:Right, that's right that's right.
Speaker 1:And just because there's, you know, snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not fire down below. Ladies just want to let you know, there you go exactly.
Speaker 2:We tend to ask our guests what got them started. I know your history and I was looking back through your credits. I saw that your very first IMDb credit was you were around 15 years old and you were a kid dancing in the street. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for Blues Brothers. Yeah, it was a cool little thing. My uncle was the head of the Chicago Transit Authority and Blues Brothers came to town. I think Blues Brothers is the movie that kind of put Chicago on the map for films. I think later on Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for sure and then all the John Hughes films really kind of did the same thing in terms of putting the North Shore area on the radar.
Speaker 1:But, Blues Brothers, I think, was probably the one where just the entire city was used, and so my uncle was the head of the transit authority. It was his job to kind of organize the trains going back and forth on the thing. He knew I was an actor and I wanted to do stuff and I did commercials as a kid in Chicago. And he said no, there's an opportunity for some people dancing on the train platform while Ray Charles does this twist and shake, shake, shake, shake. And so I'm up on the train platform while Ray Charles does this twisting, shake, shake, shake, shake. And so I'm up on the train platform and it's going great and I'm trying to get my face in there and clap in and everything. And then all of a sudden it turns out a mom of a kid was like well, wait a minute, my son has a doctor's appointment. I didn't think this would go all day, he's got to go. And they're like what do you mean? He's got to go, he's established in the thing. And then they called up on a bullhorn Anybody know how to dance? And I was like I know how to dance. A few of us came down from the train platform, they showed us the dance move and I got it. I like picked it up right away and so, boom, I went from being on the train platform, you know, at the back of the thing, to like right in the bottom corner, because if you, when you watched the movie I think I have a still of it when you watch the movie there's another kid in the first part of it, but then it's me in the bottom right corner. So it was a cool. It's one of those kinds of things where you, you know, you feel like I've been discovered. You know, you hear stories like Marilyn Monroe went into, like you know, drug store in Hollywood and they discovered her and me. It's like I was discovered on the train platform.
Speaker 1:That was my first and because I had done there was a thing where Taft Hartley, if you had enough vouchers, you had to become a must join at a certain point. And I had done commercials and stopped and started because I played baseball and was trying to be an actor but I wanted to play bass. So I kind of back and forth between those kinds of passions and then I was a must join At the time that I did Blues Brothers. I had to join SAG, so I got my SAG card on Blues Brothers and I kept auditioning for things and up for some cool stuff. And then right around my senior year in high school and I'd done lots of plays, I'd done musicals and I did Peter Pan and I did Wizard of Oz musicals and theater in high school and then my senior year I did Anne Frank in high school and then they were auditioning for the movie Class. It was Rob Lowe, andrew McCarthy, jacqueline Bissett.
Speaker 1:I remember that movie and the Andrew McCarthy role was open. Everybody wanted that lead role and so all the Chicago actors auditioned John Cusack, jeremy Piven, who was mostly an athlete at that point in time, but it was like Alan Ruck from Succession, casey Simotko. All of us local Chicago actors were fighting for that role that Andrew McCarthy got and then they liked all the actors. So Cusack got a role, alan Ruck got a role Casey did. I did.
Speaker 1:My first speaking part was in the movie class. I had this part of Mr Simons and we got all called into the principal's office because we had cheated on the SATs or something like that. That's pretty much what it was. They called me into the office and that scene got cut. But it gave me my first kind of speaking and I'm all throughout the movie. I have all these little bits. I'm a group of these guys that are all in the same kind of private school and then at that point in time Cusack had really already kind of hit. Like you know, he not in say anything hit, he had done a couple of John Hughes movies and so. But at that point in time John really kind of took off, you know, and was straddling between Chicago and Hollywood. And then there was a group of his friends that went to Hollywood after graduation because he was a year younger than me, and so him, jeremy Piven, lelai, demos, there was a whole group of guys that went to LA and then I went to New York to do theater and then I went off to school.
Speaker 1:I went to Boston University for a couple of years, did some plays in Boston, some student film stuff, auditioned for ironically, spencer for Hire. Later on I didn't realize that I'd do the movie Spencer Confidential, and so that was kind of cool to kind of come full circle from auditioning for the TV show and then being in the movie for three months. So I went to BU for a couple of years. Then I went to New York and I was renting an apartment from Frances Conroy, who was on American Horror Story a lot, and she was in LA. I was taking care of her apartment and the guy that was my roommate at the time decided to do 10 hits of acid. So he was declared legally insane and was put into a facility and I just moved to New York.
Speaker 1:So I was in an apartment with another guy that I didn't know and my friend was in rehab. And there I was in New York with like 200 bucks and I called up my dad. I was like, look, I've never asked for money from you, ever. I want to stay in New York, but I just have this month's rent and that's it. And I was like, look, I'm waiting tables at these two places. I do catering, I'm DJing a little bit, I just need some floaters. And he loaned me some cash and then a little bit after that he passed away. Then I kind of like left New York for a little bit, settled his estate in Texas and then went back home to Chicago, buried him it was with my family for Christmas and New Year's and then went back to New York and started all over again.
Speaker 1:And because I had that apartment, the public theater would call asking about Francis Conroy and I was like, oh, do they have auditions? Or another company, ensemble Studio Theater would call and say we'd like for her to do a reading of something. I said, oh, she's in LA. I said, do you need any young actors? So I'm pitching myself. They're trying to reach her and they're like, yeah, come down. So I met a woman who was, like you know, part of that theater company. I got involved with Ensemble Studio Theater, did everything there I cleaned toilets, I ushered, I was a reader for auditions and there were classes that I could take there. And the artistic director of the theater company really kind of took a liking to me, although in the beginning he's like, looking at my college recommendations, he's like I don't know who the fuck these people are.
Speaker 1:It's like who gives you shit? You know, I just want to know if you can act. And I was like, well, these people think I can. He's like, yeah, well, they're in college, they're university professors, because they're not out in the swearing and cussing his name. I'm like that fuck, fuck that guy, fuck that place, I don't want to, you know. Like he just disrespected me and then, like my beeper goes off because it's old school, my beeper goes off. I got some change in my pocket. I go to a pay phone these are very old days. I find out that, like I have a message from him that I got into the lab. He just wanted to. I fought back and I was like, look, you don't know these people on the thing. I was like I don't even know who the fuck you are. Like I just I want to be in your workshop because everybody says this is the one to do. It's like you don't know me and I don't know you. But you know we got to give each other a shot. So he put me through all that bullshit only to just put me in his workshop.
Speaker 1:And then, from I built the relationship with some amazing actors a guy named Jude Ciccolella, another actor named Frank Gerdue, and we ended up doing Oktoberfest where you could kind of pick people or you could find material to produce for yourself and you could pick stuff, and we ended up doing a couple of scenes, three scenes from American Buffalo, and little did I know that, like David, mamet was a member of that theater company, so was another playwright, another upcoming playwright named John Patrick Shanley. So was this guy, craig Lucas, richard Greenberg. It was kind of like the who's who of the great writers of that time who then later on end up working a lot in major films and television shows. And so for me I got this great opportunity to be part of a playwright-driven theater company where the idea was that you were supposed to go find and create your own stuff, produce your own things. And so early on it gave me an opportunity. I did about 200 plays when I was in New York. Wow, I mean it was not unheard of for me to be doing I mean mostly readings, but it was not unheard of for me, minimum three nights a week, be doing readings of different plays throughout the city. So I would build relationships with other actors, with theater companies, with theater spaces. I ended up working at all these different places and I built up relationships with people and during this time, you know, the way in which I kind of survived was I used to be a DJ.
Speaker 1:When I was a kid, the house music started in Chicago and when I was about 10 years old I learned how to play the turntables with a vinyl from a guy named Larry Levan who played at the warehouse, and that's where house music came from. I learned from the guy who started house music and at 10, you know, fifth grade I started this little thing called Teen Disco, where our bouncer was the coolest guy in the world, a guy named Theo who later became Mr T. Wow, he was discovered in a bouncer contest and all of a sudden he's in Rocky. You know what I mean. And there's my guy. Watching people kind of go from being the bouncer to being Mr T was an amazing thing. And so those early days of hustling and skills, I learned of playing music and realizing that music could be a way in to affect people at a time when disco was like super, super hot. So when I got to New York I reconnected with Larry. He was DJing at some of the big clubs Limelight, palladium, danceteria. I pulled records for him. I basically pulled records and then he would go take a break and pick some dude up and go do some blow and I'd keep the turntables, you know, spinning going.
Speaker 1:And I DJed at the last summer of Studio 54 when I was I had to be like 17, something like that, 16, 17. My dad let me go, and I almost lost my virginity to Margaret Trudeau who was the prime minister's wife. She was like a big club person but like that last summer Andy Warhol's in there, halston, I mean Brooke Shields was a model and she was younger. Even Drew Barrymore was there. So the point was I had this like skill and some relationships. So ways in which that I survived were doing the club scene, which was very difficult to have auditions in the morning. When you DJ till four in the morning and then you get an audition for a Burger King commercial, you know 10 in the morning and you're supposed to be all fresh, and so you know I had some really incredible times in New York. I was part of the big club scene that was there. Then the club scene got a little played out.
Speaker 1:It was very difficult to kind of be an actor. I ended up doing some easier gigs where I would do for catering companies that I catered with. I did cater, waiting another way to make money. And in my time of working the theater scene there I built up relationships with other actors and playwrights. People were writing things for me, which was great. I did some early John Patrick Shanley's one acts that later became published and stuff like that, and I still have a nice relationship to this day.
Speaker 1:And there was an actor that I built a relationship named David Eigenberg. Later on he was in a play called Six Degrees of Separation where he was fully nude. He was like full frontal nude. He played the hustler and then he got a gig where he needed somebody to fill in for two weeks because we had done back and forth plays with each other and originated different roles. He's like you should see James Dumont for this thing. So I was doing a student film down in Brooklyn and there was a whole bunch of track, fires and police actions and like I went through hell just to get to the audition and they were just about packing up. I was late. It was like the last person and I was so frustrated and angry from all these things I just jumped in and did the scene I fucking, and they're like, okay, that's great, thank you very much. So that gig was like a two-week gig when the show was off Broadway and then it moved up to the Broadway house the next year and David really wanted to move on to another play and do other things and he ended up going on to do Sex and the City. He's now been on Chicago Fire since the beginning, played his character, has been on all the Chicago shows and he's moved back to Chicago. But David's an amazing dude. He was a great friend and had he not recommended me, that kind of changed the course of my life and career and where I went.
Speaker 1:Because from there the show ran for two and a half years I got to understudy other roles, I wore socks, I was full frontal, eight shows a week on a Broadway show. And then there was a national tour that was going to start in Los Angeles. I had gone to Los Angeles a couple of times for TV pilots and that never went anywhere. My cousin had lived there, so I tried to get the LA thing going. It never really quite happened. And so with me coming to LA, performing in LA for two, three months or so, and then we were going to be on the road for another nine months. I had 12 months of guaranteed employment and my girlfriend at the time, which is my wife of 27 years. We moved to LA. We packed up a friend of ours, david Rashi, who's on a succession. He needed his Subaru brought from New York to California. We loaded up all our stuff and we drove cross country and got an apartment in West Hollywood. We spent the next 20 years in Los Angeles get married and she went to law school, raised a couple of kids. I was in Los Angeles for about 20 years, in Los Angeles, get married and she went to law school, raised a couple of kids.
Speaker 1:I was in Los Angeles for about 20 years and then, just towards the last 12 years or so, I started venturing into Louisiana. My wife is from Baton Rouge and a friend of mine, louis Hertham, was from Baton Rouge and I ran into him when I came home for Christmas one time with my wife and he said, yeah, louisiana has got some great tax credits. It's like 2006,. Right after Katrina he said there's just a lot of work here. I booked 14 movies, but I can only do 12. I'm like excuse me, I was like you're talking about a movie a month, and so from there I pretty much I said I got to meet your agent that's the same agent I've had this whole time my agent Brenda Netsberger at Open Range Management and I started working in Louisiana.
Speaker 1:I booked a Popeyes commercial right out of the gate and then I went on a tear. Then I booked like 60 movies and that TV shows, movies that I got recurred on Treme opposite Melissa Leo from the Wire, from Homicide, and then at a certain point it was becoming more and more difficult to just work in both places and so I booked the movie Deepwater Horizon. I had 12 weeks of work guaranteed, from start to finish, first day of shooting to the last day, and that afforded me enough money to go. Let me see if our kids can live in New Orleans during the summertime. My daughter got into NOCA, my son got into Stuart Hall School for Boys and we've been in Louisiana for the last eight years. Wow, I gave you a long winded, but it's the trajectory there, because there's many questions and things you could ask in that journey and process.
Speaker 3:It's wonderful. I totally appreciate that. It sounded like at a young age. I don't know if you knew what you want to be, but it was like I want to go do that, and then it just led you down the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because for me I there was a company that came to New Orleans in 1980, 81, and they turned out to be a con and my mom had paid money. I was going to be in a movie like dancing, like the old uh, forties and fifties movies.
Speaker 1:The old John Robert powers where you get pulled into the old John Robert powers scam. Probably I don't even know what the scam is. Yeah, it's one of those things. It's like the you know kids, discovery and the acting classes and you pay $1,200 and the headshots and I don't know if, if the acting classes were involved, what is it?
Speaker 3:you want to be in our movie? Give us some money, your kid's going to be in it. And that night on the news, right as I got the role, we found out it was a scam. It crushed any thought of ever being an actor. Right, but not really like oh, I can't. It just subconsciously.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so then fell into some movies, did some background, started taking classes and then went from just feeling like a student to feeling like an actor, to there are times I can say I'm an artist, especially in improv, but feeling that growth. So if we go back to right before the Blues Brothers, was there a time when it for you, internally, it started? When did you go from feeling like hey, I'm just a guy doing this, to this is my life, this is my career?
Speaker 1:I have to give a little props to my mom, because there was a contest when I was a baby where if you submitted a photograph of your baby, you could win to be on the bottles of the Gerber baby food. Oh right, well, I won. I got it. Like it was a national search. They liked my face and I was on it and they did a sketch. I've lost the sketch since, which kind of breaks my heart. There's another story to that, but at that time Sesame Street had just started and I remember watching Sesame Street and the whole idea that there were kids that looked like me, that were on television. I turned to my. I was like I want to do that, that's the thing I want to do. I saw it. I was like that's what I want to do. I want to do that, that's the thing I want to do. I saw it. I was like that's what I want to do. I want to be in this box. I want to hang out with this big yellow bird. I want to dance with these kids, learn the alphabet. This is going to be awesome. This is what I want to do.
Speaker 1:I always ask that same kind of question what was the first moment you discovered that you wanted to be an actor? I always ask that question when I start out when I'm doing my interviews of people, and it's always an interesting kind of story what got the bug? What made you do this? What was the start of it? But I know for me that's what it was is the idea that I could see kids that looked like me, that were city kids, that were on this TV show. They were in this box and they were on the show and I was like now that's something I want to do. I always ask that question of did you pick it or did it pick you? It's usually a combination of both. You get they call it the bug Once you kind of like okay, this is like I can't not do this. And I feel for me that was the earlier, that was the precursor. I think I wasn't really cognizant of the whole Gerber thing till later, but I did recognize that that was me and that kind of cool thing happened. So I thought that was neat.
Speaker 1:But I feel like pretty much from then on and my parents got divorced and that was super, super difficult. My sisters went with my mom, I went with my dad. My dad was a traveling salesman. So I went to like I don't know 30 grammar schools from kindergarten to eighth grade. I just was everywhere. I lived in New York, new Jersey, we lived in Boston for a while, a lot of places in Chicago. So it was like kind of a nomad kind of existence. But I think for me it was like I loved baseball and I loved being an actor and at a certain point I was just like I'm going to be an actor because there was conflicts.
Speaker 1:I got into Whitney Young High School in Chicago which, by the way, is where Michelle Obama went, so that's kind of cool and you auditioned to get in. I wanted to play baseball and there were conflicts between the rehearsals of the plays and baseball practice and baseball. I got a scholarship to go there. They gave me a bus pass. I like had free lunch. I mean it was great to go there.
Speaker 1:At a certain point I just kind of had to make a decision of what I was going to want to do. To this day, my son and I, and my wife too, we're just all baseball fans, fanatics. We love it. Chicago Cubs, of course. My son grew up on the Dodgers, which who now has Shohei? Oh my God, $800 million. Like that's incredible. You just kind of figure out this is what you want.
Speaker 1:And I still have friends from grammar school that are on my Facebook page and they're just like, dude, you did it. We all talked about the dream. Like you're, you have 150 movies and TV shows, like you're doing this, and I was like yeah, and then I kind of go like why didn't you think I would? Like? You know, like you don't get it. We all like I want to be a fireman or I want to be an astronaut or I want to be. You know, you don't end up doing that for me. This is why I'm here. It's a lot bigger than just, you know, money and fame, because I don't have either of those things. It's a calling and it's something.
Speaker 1:And I also think there was an interesting thing that happened when my parents got divorced and I realized that when I was DJing, playing music, like because I wrote this one man show called my Life as a DJ, and now I got to get back to it, now that my kids, my kid, my young adults are kind of grown and taking care of themselves, is that I can kind of start brushing that thing off. But there was a thing where I realized I could play this pieces of music or I could say something or do something that would affect people, that would have an impact on someone, and because my parents had been so contentious with each other and trying to destroy each other and using us kids as pawns to hurt each other, there was this constant sense of wanting to have love and acceptance and be needed and be part of something and attention. I was just starving for attention. When you find the acting tribe, it's like a family and sometimes it's a much healthier family than the family you had, and sometimes they love and accept you for being a fucking weirdo. You know, it's like we used to call the theater geeks. It's like we knew every Monty Python scene verbatim. We were just outcasts, geeks, weirdos. We weren't going to be doctors or lawyers, we just weren't. You know, we were storytellers. We wanted to perform. We couldn't not do it, and so I feel like what's interesting is from the germ of this of wanting need, love and attention, which is again now a new cycle of.
Speaker 1:If you look at, there's people that are influencers or people that are tick tockers. They're not creating to have really an impact on the world. They're creating for ego and they're creating for attention. That's different. I don't believe those influences have any influence other than selling product. They don't have influence over the war. They don't have influence on the division that's in our country of people pointing out how different when we are, when we all have the exact same chemical molecules in our body. We have the same heart, lung. We're all the same. There's only one race human race. It's other people that point out all these differences. So for me I feel like creating being a storyteller it is the most incredible thing there is because we all stem from storytellers.
Speaker 1:Before there were words, there were grunts, there were rocks on walls telling stories about the floods that came, the people that were here, the animals, the plague. Words weren't even spoken. So I always say to people don't ever let anybody disrespect you as a storyteller, because it's the most original form of communication between human beings. Human beings wouldn't exist if they didn't know there were people before them. If you look at it from a bigger, more responsible place and more exciting place, that we are the storytellers of this generation, of this time in our lives and the kind of stories we tell are important, and maybe we tell stories about people that we don't agree with or people that look at things in a different way. Don't ever let anybody disrespect you as a creative, as a storyteller, because billionaires didn't exist, scientists didn't exist, lawyers, doctors, politicians none of those people exist or had any power at all. It was the common man who told the story of the other common men or women that were before them.
Speaker 1:And so when you look at it in those terms, you start to go well, what's my story? What do I want to tell? And as each audition comes in, there's an opportunity for you to tell a story of a human being that comes from another human being that comes from billions of years ago. You know what I mean Hundreds of billions of years ago. So if you look at it in those terms and you keep it super, super simple, my teacher, tim Phillips, would say you know, the only reason to do the audition is who do I get a chance to be? You're just doing, you're just playing a role, just like you did as a kid. You know, oh, I'm going to be the pirate and come in and I'm going to save you. You're just going back to play time. And if you keep it in those simple terms of my responsibility is to tell the story of these human beings.
Speaker 1:Money, fame they're never a motivator and if you wanted to do that, do something else, because this is not for you, because you'll put your heart and soul into. I put my heart and soul at every self-tape I do. I may be doing 50, 100 of those a year. I get one, I get three, I get five. I'm still telling the story and I did my job. Once I've done with the self-tape, I'm like I'm in the acting business, I'm in the human being creation storytelling business. So if I just stick with that and rather not just trying to get attention, or I'm just trying to make money, or I just want to be loved or accepted, or I'm putting the focus on outside of myself Buddhist of 35 years, and I always just say you should never put your happiness or success outside of yourself. It's all right here.
Speaker 1:So I feel like oftentimes some people are going into this for the wrong reasons and I can tell you that I think early on. For me, I think trying to get love and attention in a non dysfunctiondysfunctional family was probably not the best reason to go into this. However, I found teachers that go. There are some natural skills and ability that you have that we can transform from wanting need, love and attention to really finding a way in which to communicate your existence and to create a story Even things like you with improv existence and to create a story Even things like you with improv, even creating stories on your own. And so at a certain point you find some natural skills and then you have to find a technique, a way of working that's not just winging it and you're not just you all the time. It's the ability to be able to replicate that story and do that over and over again and find different ways to express yourself. So those are long-winded ways of how I kind of go about, why I do what I do, but I can't do anything else. I can't not do this.
Speaker 1:My sisters multi-millionaires. I would have easily joined their businesses and done well. I just never had a love or a passion for it and I just never felt like. That's why I was here. But I get to tell these stories. I found a way to be an actor and put my kid through Ivy League education without any debt. My other kid makes his living as an actor, like me, on the same TV show. So I don't know. I think I'm doing all right. Everyone has a different mark of happiness or success. I try to keep mine as very simple and as less complicated as possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for that answer. Sorry, folks, we're out of time. We'll come back next week and James will dive deep into his acting technique and what it means to be an actor. See you then.
