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| EMERGING TALENT: Hanson does photo shoots and runway shows. |
| Chris Callis |
MAGAZINES STRETCH ACROSS the coffee table. They’re filled with pictures of people trying to look alluring, puckering their lips or slinging jackets over their shoulders, throwing their heads back in laughter or shoving their hands into somebody else’s pockets. On the wall behind the magazines are more photographs. Head shots. These are the faces of the modeling agency’s clients. This is the goal.
Aspiring models wait in line before a desk at the front of the agency. It’s an open call. Anyone can come. The assistants behind the desk glance at the hopeful, then down at a photograph, then back. “Thank you,” they say. And it’s over.
You go home. You try again at another agency. Or you give up. Bill Hanson got a perfunctory “thank you” the first few times. But this day, he receives a different response.
“You look good, but I don’t think you’re ready for us,” the man behind the desk says.
“Why not?” asks Hanson, ’01. He’s tired of rejection.
“Well . . . ,” the man pauses, then relents. “Why don’t you go back there and meet with the agent?”
Hanson walks behind a partition. He pulls out self-portraits, taken just days ago when he went into his sister’s bathroom, took off his shirt and aimed a camera at the mirror. Photographs, though, aren’t enough.
“Take off your shirt,” the agent tells Hanson.
Hanson is prepared for this. The agent wants to see his build, especially his chest. A few years earlier, Hanson wouldn’t have gone through with it.
“Throughout adolescence and high school I wouldn’t take off my shirt,” he says. “I had body-image issues.”
He wouldn’t go to the beach near his San Diego home or swim in his backyard pool. He even quit his high school soccer team after the coach told half the team members to remove their jerseys for a shirts-and-skins scrimmage. Hanson was one of them. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he told the coach, running off the field and never coming back.
“Showing my body to others was hard partially because I kept my sexuality so private,” explains Hanson, who is gay. “But it was mostly hard because the body changes so much during adolescence.”
Eventually, he got over his anxiety. He started lifting weights and began to feel better about himself. The transformation set him on a path toward modeling in New York City.
Not that this was his plan. After graduating with a degree in English, Hanson moved into the New York loft of his sister, Barbara Forsyth, ’97, unsure of what he wanted to do next. He had performed in several plays and a musical at Stanford and thought he might try to break into acting. Winnie Yuan, a friend from Stanford, suggested modeling as a first step. If Hanson wanted to pursue his dream of being on the soap opera As the World Turns, Yuan told him, this might be a good way to start.
“It’s very easy to transition from model agents to talent agents,” explains Yuan, ’01, who bartends, models, acts and fronts a rock band in Chicago. “If you can find a modeling agency, you might as well do it. It will help you.”
Hanson decided to take Yuan’s advice. “I’ve always been kind of a dreamer,” he says. “I didn’t know very much about the industry [but thought] if I could get some success and exposure in this, I could hopefully cross over into acting.” Plus, he adds, “you don’t need connections. Modeling is the kind of thing you can do off the street. You can walk into an agency with pictures, and if they like you, which is very rare, they take you on right away.”
They liked Hanson.
His first agent took photographs of Hanson putting on and taking off clothing and taught him tricks of the trade, such as how to turn his head just the right way. In one shot, Hanson wore a button-down shirt and a jacket, a sophisticated look. In another, he had his shirt caught on his head, a tie around his waist and his chest exposed. It’s all about being able to display different styles, the agent explained—giving a range of options to the organization that needs the model. The agent helped Hanson assemble these photos into a portfolio, designed to show a model’s versatility when he goes to an audition. Then, he told Hanson to check in each day to find out whether he had any assignments.
“I was a little skeptical because it almost seemed too easy,” Hanson says. “But that’s kind of how it is, because it’s not really about anything but how you look.”
He was soon photographed for a clothing catalog called FHM Collections and later for Cosmopolitan. The magazine took Hanson and a few other models to a mansion in the Hamptons. Cosmo took photos of four men and four women in a half-dozen scenarios. Hanson was told to get in bed with one of the women and to kiss her. In between shots, he snacked on finger sandwiches and chicken satay from the nearby buffet or played tennis with the owner of the house on the mansion’s clay court.
“When they’re juggling lots of models, there can be lots of downtime,” Hanson says. And lots of getting-dressed time, too. “The stylist picks out what’s right for you, you try on lots of things, they take pictures. Some shoots are for specific designers or advertisers, so the outfit is very specific. Other times, like when it’s a fashion editorial [such as Cosmopolitan], they have a vast wardrobe and play around a lot. I’ve had shoots where I’ve worn eight outfits and I’ve had shoots where I’ve worn one or two. Sadly, I haven’t gotten to keep much of the stuff I’ve worn.”
Hanson now works with three different agencies, doing runway shows and photo shoots. The Cosmopolitan picture of him ran in December 2001, under the poll question, “If you had a chance to read your girlfriend’s journal, would you?” Next to the results was a small photograph of Hanson in a red sweater, journal in hand, looking up and smiling.
Hanson points out, however, that modeling is not always glamorous. He had to rebuff several sexual advances from one agent, and he knows other models who have had similar problems. Modeling agencies have been accused of fixing fees and charging excessive commissions—six California models filed a class-action lawsuit against eight top modeling agencies in late June—and Hanson has been surprised at how agency charges for sending out photos and setting up shoots have diminished his earnings. (His gross wages range from $150 a day to $250 an hour.)
But the biggest problem, Hanson says, is that the work is intermittent and unpredictable. Sometimes, he doesn’t know about a job until the day before. And jobs usually come once every few weeks and often last only an hour or two—which doesn’t amount to enough to pay the rent on the West Village apartment he sublet in September.
“There’s no such thing as having a career as a male model. I think it’s an oxymoron,” Hanson says. “It’s so unpredictable that almost everyone trying to do it has another job.”
For Hanson, that other job is teaching basic computer skills to adults at a public library in the Bronx. Modeling is a way to make additional money and perhaps a chance to make the jump into acting, but it is not something Hanson thinks he can do forever.
“When you’re at a shoot, they definitely treat you like a star, and when you see yourself in a magazine, I guess it’s cool,” he says. “But it’s all just a big scene, and very few people involved are actually making that much money. You have to be at the top of the game in order to really live a life of glamour. Otherwise, you just get tastes.”
Brian Eule, ’01, is a Bay Area writer.