“Hey Laura. In what?”
“Oh sorry, in the web series thing.”
“Oh right! Cool babe, let’s do it.”
Porsche is a beautiful, stunning black model who I met on a shoot where neither of us had lines. We both played runway models. I didn’t know how well we worked together or whether she was a good writer or even a sane person! I did know that I didn’t want to audition anymore—I wanted to create.
I smiled. “Fuck yeah. Come over tomorrow and we’ll write it.”
The next day she came over to our apartment.
“I had this idea to write a web series about how absurd the modeling industry is. Laura, it’s so funny.”
Ideas just started flowing. Without moving from the couch, we wrote a pilot that day. We came up with this series called Hungry about two aging, struggling models who were incredibly underqualified to do anything else. They were figuratively and literally hungry. It was the first script I finished since getting sober, and it felt so good. We pitched the show to Russell Simmons’s production company, All Def Digital, and they greenlit it. They loved it!
Russell gave us our first show. I wrote, produced, and starred in the whole first season alongside Porsche. All of a sudden I was on the other side of the casting table. I was auditioning people, and I LIKED it. This was where I wanted to be, dude. I get to create the characters and write and act? I’m never doing that other bullshit again. I felt like a fish in water. We got King Bach to direct. At the time, he was this up-and-coming YouTuber with fifty thousand followers! (Now he has like twenty million.) After it was posted, we had an automatic reach to All Def’s one-hundred-thousand subscribers.
It was my first taste of making something and having it SEEN.
It was weird. I went from network TV to YouTube. It wasn’t glamorous and the money definitely wasn’t there, but I didn’t care. I was finally doing what I wanted to be doing. To make things better, it was received well. Before, I had wanted more than anything to be on the next Friends, but now . . . I was doing YouTube. And I felt so fulfilled.
My goals had shifted. I didn’t feel the need to be on a sitcom anymore. I just wanted to make as many people laugh as possible. THAT was my goal. I wanted to be creative and have my creativity bring other people joy.
I pulled out my laptop and the camera that Stephen bought me. My next project would be called “Product of a Sperm Donor.” The premise was this: A man had donated his sperm 173 times and he had 173 children all over the world. I wanted to interview them all. Each video was going to be an interview between me and one of the half siblings.
First of all, why 173? I chose a really high goal for my first project. It should have been thirty, tops. I think I made twelve and then I was like . . . okay, that’s enough. The twelve interviews were cool, though. Since they were half siblings, they could all look similar and I could play them all. But they could also be from different countries and I could try out a wide range of characters.
It was the first thing I ever posted online. And no one watched it. I think the one comment was from my mom: “Great job, honey!”
I kept posting videos . . . and then deleting them. I was afraid of putting myself out there. Sure I had acted a thousand times on TV and in commercials and I had done Hungry, which was seen by a hundred thousand people, but all of those things were under other people’s names. I had never spoken for myself before. I had never built my own brand. What if people hated it?
That morning I called my sponsor, Kristal.
“I’m really scared. I’m scared to build my own brand. What if people hate me? What if they hate what I have to say? Or worse, what if they don’t care?”
Kristal sighed. “Laura. You’re an artist. You make art. Stay in the action and out of the results.”
It just clicked for me when she said that. I needed to do what I believed to be my purpose on this earth. I needed to create. It wasn’t about the results. It was about the action!
I called my agents and told them to stop sending me out on auditions. I was done. They had been sending me out all the time for pilots, movies, and guest spots. It was taking too much energy from me, and 90% of the time I wouldn’t get anything. Why not take all that time and create content my own way? From there, I just shot and shot and shot. I kept posting new characters and new ideas. Who cared if no one was watching? I was walking through my fear—this fear that I carried with me for my entire life. Stephen started to get involved too. He was scoring Transformers AND my Instagram videos. I would ask him to be in my videos and he would. He was so supportive. He would get into character without fear and took direction so well. We would just shoot and laugh. I posted a video a day for a year. I was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.
This was the time when Vine and fifteen-second Instagram videos were the language of the internet. I kept posting and posting to build that muscle and figure out what people wanted to see and what worked. I just had an idea and posted it. I was obsessed, but thankfully at the time, Stephen’s career was taking off as well. He was making enough money that I could create without worrying about the next bill. I was so grateful for this freedom.
As I stopped worrying and started putting my true self online . . . people started to take notice, and my following grew a bit. Having a small following is like having a few trading cards in your pocket. I started to put myself around other content creators and collaborate with them. We would feature each other’s work or shoot with each other to expand our followings and get our names out there.
I noticed that all the creators at All Def were collabing with each other, so I inserted myself among them. It was so fun. Every day was just shooting videos and hanging out.
“I’ll shoot your video if you shoot mine!”
“I’ll shout you out if you shout me out.”
The best part of creating videos and film in general is that you truly can’t do it alone. You need other people to act and populate the world you’re creating. At the very least, you need someone to hold the camera and press record for you. Collabing helped us all build our followings.
At the end of my year of posting one video a day, things slowed down a little for me. My following stayed consistent, but it wasn’t growing anymore. Collabing started to be less effective because all the creators I knew were already in the same circles, sharing the same following.
Something needed to change. For some reason, I felt like the change had to come from within me.
I grew up with the mindset that there was never enough, life was hard, and you took what you could get. That mindset stayed with me, and I had been so negatively focused for a long time. I constantly thought about losing what I had. What ifs filled my mind. What if I lost my job? What if no one watched this video? What if I wasn’t funny? I’d had positive goals in the past, but they were so mundane: I hope that I can make rent this month. I hope that I can book at least a commercial this week. Whatever I focused on I could achieve, but I was consistently focusing on the bare minimum I needed to survive. What if I thought bigger?
I started getting into the Law of Attraction. All the aspects of the Law of Attraction are pretty far out there, but what I took from it is this: rather than focusing on what you don’t want, focus on what you do want. Don’t be afraid to dream as big as you want. What you are thinking, what you tell yourself, can manifest. The concept was so mind-blowing to me, I started saying affirmations to myself every morning: