'A View From the Middle' by Larkin Campbell
Unless you’re a Hollywood insider, you’ll never have heard of Larkin Campbell, but chances are you’ve seen him. He was the murder victim in an episode of “CSI: New York,” the grieving dad in an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” a “background actor” in scenes from “Seinfeld” and “NYPD Blue.” He even played H.R. Haldeman in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. You get the picture—never the star but a face on many crowded sets.
Campbell has written an autobiography focused on his quarter-century in Hollywood. In A View from the Middle: How an Unknown Actor Managed to Stay that Way, Campbell arrives in LA in 1991 with a headful of dreams. His drama teachers told him he had talent and maybe he did, but he was also aware that persistence, and that intangible element of luck, are essential.
Of course, luck is often the product of persistence. Campbell met his wife, Maria, who worked in the crew of some big films, by hanging around and enduring her initial lack of interest. He got lucky and has had a good marriage. Otherwise, in his first 10 years in Hollywood, three were spent as a runner for various productions. He fetched morning tea for Cameron Diaz on The Last Supper—a far more pleasant gig that being PA for Roseanne Barr (he turned that horror show into his only article for the National Enquirer). Four years went by before his first audition as “Guy in the Bar” in a short-lived series, “Live Shot.” Joining the Screen Actors Guild was like initiation into the Illuminati.
From the get-go, Campbell realized that who you know is important (he just never knew many of the most important players), as is being there when a job opens. His life at the glamorous end of the gig economy led to moments of screentime with Mel Gibson and Steve Carrel and weeks of waiting around without a paycheck in sight.
Campbell’s self-deprecating narrative will be interesting to anyone who ever wondered about all those people on screen—the nurses without speaking roles in the ER, the passers-by at the crime scene, the corpse. In the end, Campbell chucks it and becomes a house husband, playing the greatest role of his life as dad.
