Molly Shannon Details the Hollywood Scam She Used to Score Her Role on 'Twin Peaks'

justjared.com:

Molly Shannon is looking back at her early days in Hollywood! In her new memoir Hello Molly!, which is set to be released on April 12, the actress revealed that long before her role on Saturday Night Live, she and her friend Eugene Pack used to pretend to work for playwright David Mamet in order to get roles. Click inside to read more… “We were trying to figure out how we were going to get in the door as actors,” Molly explained. “How were we gonna bust in?

It was too hard to just slip your picture under an agent’s door. A random headshot? No one was ever gonna call. “Then we hit on an idea. Eugene had studied with David Mamet.

He was (and is) this giant, hugely successful guy, very respected — a big-time playwright and screenwriter — but Eugene knew that he wasn’t a guy who was in Hollywood much.

He just liked staying in Vermont and New York,” she continued. The pair decided to call casting agents from under the guise they were working with David, relying on resources from the American Film Institute library to help them with research. “We went to the American Film Institute library and looked up managers and agents that we thought would be good for us in this big, thick agency book,” Molly said. “We also looked up actors who we thought were like us, found out who managed them, and decided to go after these people and try to get them to sign us by pretending to be representing Mamet.