We recently connected with Macee Binns and have shared our conversation below.
Macee, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?
Before answering this question, I went back and read an old blog post that I wrote in 2016, while I was working a “regular job” at a film school in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that I physically needed this desk job in order to buy boxed Kraft Mac and Cheese and survive, I was apparently willing to risk my livelihood just to share with the world some creative ways I came up with to kill time at work and prevent me from stabbing myself with a ballpoint pen out of sheer boredom.
The post goes as follows: “This is a story for those of you who, like me, did not grow up thinking, dear God, please let me spend 40 hours a week trapped at a snooze of a desk job where I am underpaid and rarely appreciated. If you are a fellow office dweller, then you probably already know firsthand that the curse that goes along with working said desk job is EXTREME BOREDOM. When you’re stuck at the office for hours on end, you often find yourself with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs as you wait for the clock to strike head-home-time and you’re forced to find unique ways to entertain yourself in order to maintain some small semblance of sanity.” The post then goes on to list various stupid time sucking activities I utilized, some of which include: “#2 Change the desktop background to a collage of Sam Elliot in a speedo to surprise your coworkers. #8 Register your friends for random online dating sites without their knowledge. #11 Look for inspirational quotes to remind yourself that you hopefully won’t be trapped behind a desk for the rest of your life. #20 Take pictures of unsuspecting coworkers and turn them into movie posters complete with tag lines.#22 Shoot yourself and coworkers with a water gun every time one of you complains.” I know, I’m clearly the poster child of professionalism and maturity! But reading this old post reminded me of how immensely happy I am now that I own my own business.
Looking back I never fit into the typical mold, just as a person in general, and I often felt like an outsider that was different from my peers in the regular job market. So it didn’t take long to realize that a typical 9-to-5 wasn’t for me. Sitting at a desk day in and day out made me uncomfortable and I routinely had to find ways of passing the time to make the job feel less confining. But who wants to spend their life just wasting time while you wait for your superiors to hopefully recognize your potential, despite the aforementioned distractions I participated in while on the clock.
Knowing all of this, I can confidently say that starting my own business was the right move for me and I’ve found happiness in my independent career. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this journey has also been coupled with long sleepless nights, days where I wanted to pull my hair out and countless times that I felt like I was just screaming into the void!
When I decided to start my own freelance business, I had so many doubts and I spent hours just aimlessly running on the treadmill thinking, “What am I doing here? What if I fail? If I don’t pull this off…there’s no safety net to catch me.” Especially since as a freelance Writer, Casting Director and Producer my business consists of selling my own personal skill set as a service, as opposed to an actual product. So in regards to the question, “Do you sometimes wish that you had a regular job?” The answer is both yes and no, depending on the day.
Do I often worry about my future as a self-employed person? Yes. Do I wish that I had chosen a career path that includes full benefits and a retirement plan? Sure. I’m fully aware that down the road, life may be harder for me than my friends who’ve worked traditional jobs that provide them with a level of security which I may never know. These thoughts have become increasingly present in my mind, after my business took a hit during covid. Then, just as I was finding my footing again after the lockdown ended, the WGA strike happened and now the SAG-AFTRA strike is in effect. Because of these unforeseen circumstances, I’ve recently had to pivot and come up with new ways to keep my business afloat during these unexpected slow times. But ultimately, I’m confident that I made the right decision by betting on myself and starting my own company, as much of a gamble as it may be. Especially when I’m able to look back and reflect on a time where I felt so trapped by working a traditional job. Everyone has a different path and regular jobs are right for some people, but in the end, I did what’s best for me and I will continue to navigate the ups and downs of my decision to strike out on my own, even if it means screaming into the void on occasion.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am passionate about writing unique and untold stories, turning those written stories into visual content that audiences can easily relate to and casting deserving, talented people to play the parts in those projects. In terms of my business, I’m basically a jack of all trades, but all within the entertainment and advertising world. I currently work for myself as a freelance writer, casting director and producer in a variety of different mediums such as film, scripted and reality television, documentaries, commercials, reporting for entertainment news outlets and writing content for magazines. Breaking into the industry wasn’t a clear, linear path for me at all. It was like putting a thousand piece puzzle together and only once the full picture finally came into focus did it evolve into me launching my own business.
With regards to my job as a writer, spending hours in-front of my computer with nothing but my own words to guide me brings me so much joy and I am thankful that I’ve been able to turn my love of writing into a successful career, where I can monetize on something that I love. The types of writing services that I offer through my freelance business include: writing copy for articles, blogs, branded content, advertisements, plays, novels and screenplays. Thanks to the notoriety that some of my scripts have recently gained at film festivals, I was asked to judge the 2023 SYS’s Six-Figure Screenplay Contest, and I now also provide feedback and coverage for screenplays and tv pilots that other screenwriters are in the process of developing.
The story of how I got my start in casting and film production is quite different from my writing career. My journey into the world of casting and producing began on the day that I met my friend, Fernanda, during her very first day working with me at my previously mentioned film school survival job, almost a decade ago now. I wasn’t expecting to train anyone new that day, when I showed up to work looking like a hot mess with a coconut oil rejuvenating mask still soaking into my hair. As I showed Fern the ropes of her joyless new position, we instantly hit it off and quickly became best friends, greasy hair and all. A couple of years later, Fernanda rescued me from our hellacious dead-end work situation, when she brought me with her into a career in casting. She patiently showed me the ropes within this new field that she started working in a few months prior, just as I had previously done for her, only Fernanda did it with clean, perfectly styled hair. And as they say the rest is history!
Thanks to her helping me get my foot in the door with casting director Tiffany Persons at Tiffany Company Casting; I was able to work my way up from the role of Casting Coordinator, to Casting Producer and I eventually became a full-fledged Casting Director that has worked on over 300 commercial spots for top brands such as Nike, Facebook, Google, H&M, Starbucks, Disney and Verizon. I’ve now had the privilege of casting countless commercials, films, reality tv shows, music videos, documentaries and print campaigns for TCC that I’m so unbelievably proud of and I was able to make a name for myself within the industry, which afforded me the opportunity to start my own freelance business on the side.
One of the proudest moments in my casting career was helping to find a group of amazing kids with limb differences to appear in a Super Bowl spot for the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller, which won Tiffany Company Casting the Cannes Lion Advertising Award in 2019. Although I’ve worked on several other spots that have also received prestigious awards, including an advertising Emmy, meeting those kids and helping to make their dreams come true is an experience that only comes around once in a lifetime and I’ll never forget the lessons that I learned as a green casting director working on that project.
When it comes to my personal casting and producing business, I feel passionately about providing adequate representation for under-represented groups in the entertainment industry and have been blessed to see the many small ways that the projects I’ve worked on have served to provide a more inclusive future for us all.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
My writing career began in my early 20’s, when I took a job creating daily content for various magazines and news outlets as a side hustle after college. If you’ve ever clicked on one of those tabloid articles on your news feed listing things like, “The 15 Most Hated Hollywood Couples” there’s a good chance that back in the day, it was written by yours truly. While working as an entertainment news writer, I randomly decided to turn some of the film scripts that I wrote during grad school into stage plays to see if I could get them published, since I didn’t have the funds or the production experience, at the time, to produce the films myself.
To my surprise several different theater publishing companies quickly picked up my plays, which led to me being a published playwright whose works have been produced at various theaters worldwide. Thanks to this spur of the moment endeavor, I now have multiple plays and one-acts published and I was asked to contribute several monologues to the Smith & Kraus annual anthology book series, “The Best Women’s Stage Monologues,” which is sold in most name brand bookstores around the globe. Seeing my written words take shape on stages across the country with actors and audiences feeling a connection to the material that I wrote gave me the confidence I needed to try my hand at screenwriting in a more serious way.
So during the lockdown of 2020, I used my newfound free time to focus on my screenwriting career and I began the process of writing my most notable feature screenplay to date, “Hand Twins.” Writing this script was a difficult and painful journey into my past that forced me to explore the loss of several close family members in a new, profound way. I was nervous to put the completed work out into the world, especially considering the personal aspect of the script’s content. But to my surprise, “Hand Twins” ended up winning over 15 awards for Best Feature Screenplay at different film festivals during the 2021-2022 season. Now that I have ample on-set production experience, thanks to my career in casting, and some clout behind the script, I am currently in the process of moving “Hand Twins” into the pre-production phase in hopes of having enough funding secured to produce the film next year. The success that I experienced with “Hand Twins” inspired me to dive deeper into screenwriting and I’m currently working on a new thriller script that I am so excited to share with the world! This new screenplay is an all-female ensemble revenge flick with great box office appeal that is designed to empower women across the globe in a unique and unexpected way. I’m hoping to have this new screenplay completed and in development by the fall of 2023, if all goes as planned. Writing is my greatest passion and my hope is that through the power of my unique voice, I can help give women more of a presence in this still male-dominated industry and pave the way for future female screenwriters to come.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I think that most women, and especially women in the entertainment industry, suffer from some form of imposter syndrome. With imposter syndrome, a person doesn’t feel fully confident in their skillset, regardless of the accomplishments they have achieved. This is something that I have personally grappled with on a regular basis throughout my career.
I believe that fears of inadequacy are literally bred into most of us from childhood. It can stem from something as simple as your 4th grade classmate telling you that you’re not good at something or your ex-boyfriend kicking your confidence down a notch during a breakup. I mean ex’s are ex’s for a reason, am I right? But we carry these fears with us into adulthood and let them impact our careers and achievements in a negative way. I know that I sure have!
From an early age we are taught that there is a right and a wrong way to go about developing our career and that above all else we must stay in our lane and uphold a level of professionalism that was created decades ago and doesn’t necessarily apply to the world that we are currently living in today. We are taught that in order to be successful, we absolutely must have a comprehensive education in a particular field. We have to take every class, attend every seminar and slowly work our way up from the bottom before we are qualified enough to actually have the career that we want. But what is enough? At what point do you finally feel knowledgeable and prepared enough to take the leap? It took the better part of my 20’s to learn that the answer to that question, at least for me, is never. I always feel like I still need to do x, y and z before I am fully qualified for a particular career advancement so I don’t feel like an imposter who’s just faking that I deserve the role.
In order to overcome this mindset, the main thing I had to unlearn is that the lessons that you’re taught your whole life about their being a set process or correct way to start out in the real world, is a lie. When I first arrived in LA, I took all of the lessons that I learned in school about what to do, and more importantly, what not to do, as an absolute truth. I thought that if I could just copy the step by step process that others before me had followed, then suddenly my career path would just magically be paved for me, but that wasn’t the case. I had to learn to take risks and do things in my own unconventional way, and only then, was I able to start navigating the industry and achieve success within it. I had to overcome the feelings I was constantly fighting of not being good enough, or not having enough experience, and most importantly, I had to learn that no one ever feels fully ready or completely prepared to tackle all that’s required of them in a particular job market. But the truth is that most of the time, you are ready long before you think that you are. It’s just your inner perfectionist and control freak mindset telling you that you’re not. Or in my case, often both.
The one thing that I’ve learned during my process of overcoming these fears is that even though I might not know everything, there isn’t much that I can’t teach myself on the fly, if push comes to shove. So my advice to anyone who experiences those same kinds of self doubts is that you’ve just gotta start somewhere and fully commit to putting yourself out there in a raw and exposed way. Let yourself be imperfect and don’t give into an all-or-nothing mindset. As we are liberated from our own fears and our own insecurities, our presence automatically liberates others to do the same and that is such a powerful lesson to learn. Playing small and waiting until you feel fully ready does not serve the world and we’re all meant to shine. Just trust that you’ve got your own back and that will carry you through. You’ll be surprised at what all you can accomplish when you just let go and trust in yourself above all else. Yes, you might fall along the way, but then again, what if you fly?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.maceebinns.com
- Instagram: @maceebinns
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/macee.binns?mibextid=LQQJ4d
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/macee-binns
- Other: Macee Binns Professional Writing Portfolio: https://maceebinns.journoportfolio.com/ Tiffany Company Casting Website: https://www.tiffanycompanycasting.com/ Email: [email protected]
Image Credits
Image Credits for all of the headshots are David Muller. None of the other images have credits.