CREATIVE THOUGHT AT WORK
Shooting star keeps his feet on the ground
After graduation Micah Sloat ’04 pur- sued his dream of making it as an actor in Hollywood. He was supporting himself in LA as a guitarist, singer, and self-taught computer programmer when, browsing
craigslist.org one day, he found a casting call for a film that had no script and would be shot mostly in the dark. The audition was nearby, so he went—and got the part. Fast-forward three years. That shot-in- the-dark movie, Paranormal Activity, be- came a world-famous sleeper: made for just $11,000, astutely marketed on the Web, and now with the highest earnings- to-costs ratio in film history. It was also a critical success, scoring 91 percent among top critics on
rottentomatoes.com and nominated as the Film Independent Spirit Awards’ “Best First Feature” and the People’s Choice Awards’ “Best Independ- ent Feature.” “Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing,” observed Richard Corliss in Time, “what’s cool about PA is that it’s not just a fun thrill ride; it’s an instructive artistic experience.” For Sloat, the film brought instant stardom. Scan his Facebook page and here’s his appearance on Leno with co- star Katie Featherston; here’s a reference to People magazine’s naming him “one of the sexiest men alive”; here’s the satire of PA that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin performed at the Academy Awards. Sloat says, “I’ve moved from being another broke actor hoping to get a decent audi- tion somewhere, to being thrown into really big rooms with movie stars and
competing for lead roles in TV shows with people who have been doing guest- star roles for a decade. I’ve really had to step up my game.”
Though Sloat traces his interest in act- ing back to the lead he played in The Very Grouchy Ladybug in kindergarten, it was at Skidmore that he began to pursue it, tak- ing several theater courses and playing
Riff in West Side Story.
But he also studied guitar, helped found the a cappella group Drastic Measures, played baseball and polo, worked with SkidTV, and practiced martial arts. His aca- demic passion was phi- losophy, and he credits his study of Wittgen- stein with Prof. Mat - thew Ostrow for giving him the courage to pur sue his Hollywood dreams.
“I was obsessed with finding ‘the truth,’” he recalls, “and the more I studied, the more I re- alized there was no ex- ternal truth to validate what I wanted to do. The meaning of my life would have to come from me. It took me an entire summer of marinating in Witt - gen stein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus,
but I finally grasped
INDIE MOVIE STAR MICAH SLOAT ’04 USES HIS WITTGENSTEIN STUDIES TO KEEP HIS HEAD IN THE REAL GAME OF LIFE.
”WHEN YOU LISTEN TO WHO YOU
ARE AND WHAT YOUR BODY
WANTS TO DO, YOU GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY, AND YOUR PATH
BECOMES VERY CLEAR.”
what he meant when he observed that ‘the real discovery is the one which en- ables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to.’” Sloat de- cided that “success is just a byproduct of doing what you love, not the target itself.” That philosophy
still guides him. He sings with (and serves as the webmaster for) the LA-based West- minster Chorus, which was named 2009 “Choir of the World” and won the Pava - rotti Trophy at the International Musical Eistedd fod in Wales and which will com- pete this year for the coveted Barbershop Harmony Society gold medal. He also plays guitar and composes—in fact, PA
writer-director Oren Peli paid him $1 for the rights to two original compositions used in the film (listen carefully to the radio during the dinner scenes). And he still practices the martial arts, now focus- ing on Krav Maga, an electic approach developed in Israel.
Paramount is planning a sequel to
Paranormal Activity, but Sloat wasn’t yet sure if he’ll be a part of it. And that’s fine with him. “When you just listen to who you are and what your body wants to do, you get out of your own way, and your path becomes very clear. It’s all about opening up, being honest, and following your heart—though if I were still broke in Hollywood, maybe I wouldn’t say that,” he laughs. —DF
30 SCOPE SPRING 2010
ODETTE SUGERMAN, CELEBRITY PICTURES
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