Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michael Bauer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Michael , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
How do you get a job as an actor? Most people will tell you that you go to auditions, but after twelve years in NYC of trying to make it on broadway that wasn’t working so well for me. Sure, I had a few regional credits but it just didn’t seem like I was getting anywhere so I decided to take a risk and move to LA to get my graduate degree in acting at UCLA. That’ll get me where I need to be right? Wrong. I was walking out of my final thesis presentation on March 10th, 2020 ready to take on the entertainment industry world when I looked down to see a news alert on my phone telling me that the entertainment industry was essentially closing down for the next two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. No joke. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was time to take another risk. I was going to need to become an artist entrepreneur.
I was done waiting for opportunities to come to me and decided to make my own opportunities, and I was willing to gamble with my career to do it. So I started writing. If no one was casting me in their show, I decided to create my own show, and put myself in it. In order to do that I was willing to do the unthinkable for an actor: stop auditioning. If the best way to get cast in a show is to audition, it seems counterintuitive to stop auditioning, right? Well once the pandemic died down, and my friends began submitting self tapes, pitching agents, and querying managers, I decided to take all the time and energy that I would have spent doing that, and put it all into producing a kids TV show. My theory was that I could achieve the same goal if I took a less traveled path. If I was right, then I’d be a series regular on a show that I wrote, created and produced, but if I was wrong then I would have wasted years of effort on nothing.
Luckily my theory panned out and the result was “Space Lightning,” a kids TV show about a zany crew of space fleet cadets navigating their way through taco constellations and ice creme galaxies. We sewed the costumes, wrote the music and painted the sets and after a long process, “Space Lightning” was produced with YippeeTV and you can now stream season one on Amazon Prime.
There are lots of books and courses out there about the business of acting, but the only thing that works, is the thing that works. If there was one magic secret to success then everyone would be doing it. It doesn’t exist. There are celebrities out there of course who have struck it big, we can all name a few. But if that’s not you, in my experience the artists who are able to see their business as an extension of their creativity are the ones who not only achieve success, but derive a sense of purpose from their work.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Michael Bauer, and I am the creator, writer, and producer of the kids tv show “Space Lightning,” now streaming on YippeeTV and Amazon Prime. I have been described as a swiss-army-man, jack-of-all-trades type of guy because of my ability to figure out what needs to be done and fix the problem. The problem I was solving in 2022 coming out of the pandemic was how does one make a living from producing film and tv content? I had won numerous awards for short comedy films, but awards don’t always pay the bills.
That’s when I created “Space Lightning,” a zany new kids show that follows Intergalactic Influencer May Starshine as she documents the crazy adventures of the Star Ship Intellectus Crew. It’s “Lazytown” meets “Star Trek” in world made entirely out of cardboard, duck tape and neon paint. Each episode teaches leadership skills, positive morals, and how to navigate everyday social situations facing preteens today. I cast the series with actor friends from the program I just graduated from at UCLA, and since the show had an environmental conscious theme, scenic designer Kate Schott and I created the set entirely out of recycled cardboard. I play the supporting role of the Captain, an over the top braggart who runs at the first sign of trouble. We try to stick with the retro classic space aesthetic and not hide the fact that our props have strings attached to them. Instead we lean into the ridiculousness of the world, full tongue-in-cheek because if we’re having fun in front of the camera, the audience is bound to have fun in front of the screen.
I teamed up with Adam Mellema, head of content and producer at Yippee and the show took off from there. We ran our production like a summer stock company since thats what I knew and thats where I came from. When we needed costumes, I learned to sew, when we needed a puppeteer, actor Pablo Martinez pitched in, and when we needed sets painted, Kathryn Schott was ready with her brush. It was a very all-hands-on-deck experience. Apparently we did a decent job of it because Yippee brought many of us back to design costumes and sets for other Yippee productions, and perform in various acting roles as well. Good work begets good work, and it’s because of our amazing cast, crew, producers and development team that “Space Lightning” became the awesome show that it is today.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
In America we have this idea that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything you want. But I was working harder than anyone I knew in New York trying to get a part in a broadway musical, and after twelve years it just wasn’t happening for me. Most mornings I was up and on the subway by 5am to stand in pre-dawn audition lines in the January snow so I could sing my sixteen bars and still get to a tap class by 9:30, or my day job by 10. They tell you keep chipping away and you’ll reach that dream, but to be honest I wish I had let go of that dream long before the twelve year mark. Being a struggling actor became a part of my identity, it was a badge that I was proud to wear. It made me feel tough. But when all you have to show for your work is years of struggle, you start to question if you are working harder, not smarter.
Elizabeth Gilbert in her book “Big Magic” talks about the fact that there will always be struggles no matter what path you pick. She calls it the “shit sandwich” you are stuck with no matter where you go. The way to get around this is to do something with your time that comes easier to you but harder to others because of your innate talents. So the question is, what is fun for you, but work for most other people? Or as Tony Robbins puts it, what is a good life on your terms? Everyone wants to be the leader, the entrepreneur, or the broadway star, but what if your talents make you more suited to be the producer or the writer? It’s a big ego hit to say, “no, in fact I may not be entirely suited to hold the position that I thought was goal for most of my life.” But to swap the identity of someone who struggles against all odds, for the identity of someone who thrives at what they do, will always make for a more satisfying life experience. Real artists don’t starve. They figure out a way to apply their creativity to their own life path. Amateurs want to do what they love, professionals learn to love what it takes.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My last year of grad school I took a Business of Acting class with Wendy Kurtzman and one of the first questions she asked was a deceptively simple one: tell me about yourself. I, of course, started right in listing off all my professional roles, residencies, tours and career credits at full speed, falling right into the question’s trap. She had asked me to tell her about myself, not my career. It was then that I realized that beyond my breakneck quest for the next gig, I didn’t have much going on. In fact even my hobbies were resume talking points. I needed something for me, something unrelated to the business of entertainment.
That’s when I discovered rockhounding. Rockhounding is that act of going out to abandoned mines, volcanic fields, or gem-bearing hillsides to search for crystals, gemstones and minerals. It was a common hobby in the 1950’s, in fact anytime I mention it to someone new I always get the reply, “oh yeah my grandpa was really into that!” As it happened, I was discovering rockhounding at about the same time that TikTok began so I started a channel about my trips to the desert to find gems. People seemed to find it fascinating and now I have over 120 thousand followers on my social media channel dedicated to amateur geology. Not too shabby. I’m proud of the content I make, the things I’ve learned, and the people I’ve met along the way that I never would have met without this social media outlet.
The one piece of advice I would give to people who want to develop an influencer-worthy following is that your content has to somehow add value. Teach us something, entertain us somehow, add to the conversation, make us think. If your content doesn’t add value then it is, at best, unfocused or at worse, an advertisement. Today’s audiences can smell advertisements a mile away and will immediately scroll past. Figure out a way to add value.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.michaelchristopherbauer.com
- Instagram: @bauerpower9000
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-bauer-11aa1b8b/
- Twitter: @bauerpower9000
- Other: TikTok: @bauerpower9000