Conversations with Jeff Bower

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeff Bower

Hi Jeff, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My first job out of high school was being a professional mascot for a minor league baseball team (and the beer guy in the stands) and my life only got more bizarre from there. I’ve been an educator, actor, and writer professionally for the last two decades, with two very different careers, one in South Florida and the other in Los Angeles.

After receiving a full scholarship (including tuition and living expenses) I earned my MFA in Theatre from FAU in Boca Raton, where I received death threats for performing in my thesis role. After one year with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (as an actor and Educational Tour Manager) I returned to Florida. During my time there, I appeared in countless theatrical productions (Down the Road, Cannibal The Musical, Nocturne), commercials, infomercials, and films, including a win at the Palm Beach International Film Festival for Best Actor (Pissed) and screenwriter (Driver Seat). I was the Artistic Director for Rude Mechanical Productions for five years.

As a teacher, I was a founding faculty member of G-Star School of the Arts and created the award winning theatre program/curriculum as the Department Chair. A “Jeff Bower Excellence in Theatre Award” is still presented to a graduating senior to this day, On top of that, I was an adjunct professor at FAU and Nova Southeastern for five years. I also co-developed the program, Children of Conflict, where my students at G-Star conversed with students from Rwanda and Kosovo which culminated in a full production at Florida Stage.

As a writer, I had a play published by Samuel French (now Concord Theatricals) and over a half dozen of my plays received full theatrical productions. Several went on to win major awards at the Florida State Thespian Festival (the largest in the nation).

After a successful career in Florida, my wife and I decided to relocate to Los Angeles. We sold everything we owned and packed ourselves and two disgruntled cats into our Kia Optima and made the 3K mile drive. We lived in Los Feliz for many, many years before moving closer to my wife’s work in Pasadena.

In Los Angeles, my career started over. But in a town where it’s all about “who you know” and I knew NO ONE, within in five years I was an Audible Approved audiobook narrator, a MainStage performer at iO West for improv, sketch, and writing, and pitching my original TV series to all the major networks (NBC, Showtime, HBO, Syfy, etc.) My pilot went into development with Kennedy Marshall for a year. I’ve also placed/won in over 100 screenplay competitions in the last four years, including winning top honors at ScreenCraft, PAGE, Outstanding, Filmatic, Nashville, and Dallas FF.

Recently my stage play, THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK OF TODAY, has garnered critical success and will be receiving a full professional premier this April in Boca Raton Florida at Theatre Lab, the professional company on the FAU campus.

And sometimes….I get some sleep. 🙂

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road is never smooth in the artistic field. You can receive the best news in the world in the morning (YAY, they loved your script and want to option it) and then check Twitter in the afternoon and discover that the staffing job you were up for went to someone else (and yes, that happened to me).

The best advice I can give is to never get too high and never get too low. You have to find the comfort of the middle in your emotions, otherwise, this industry will drive you insane. Celebrate your wins, but not too much. Mourn your losses, but not for too long. Always focus on what you can control. For me, that’s putting my butt in a chair (or standing at my counter) and punching keys and producing new scripts/pages.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m kind of a Jack of All Trades guy. I record tons of VO work every year. I write award winning scripts. And when it’s called upon, I act in my fellow creatives’ projects. I find that the more versatile you are, the longer your career will last. I make a lot of my money through VO, but I wouldn’t consider myself a VO actor. I have a degree in Acting, but acting isn’t my main focus. I love writing and creating new worlds and seeing those worlds come to life. But I’m not one thing and I think that’s good. In a world that is so hyper focused on being exclusively great at one thing, I find comfort in being able to bounce to another creative discipline whenever things aren’t going well in one area of my career.

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I feel like I’ve had a lot of bad luck, but that hard work can always overcome that. The strike, the pandemic…they have been horrible to almost every artist I know. A lot of people have left the industry and moved on. But I keep putting my head down and pushing forward. It’s all I know how to do,

Contact Info:

• Instagram: jeffrobowa
• Twitter: jeffbowerLA