Thomas Michael Mulligan, Part 1 – Actor and Producer

Thom Michael Mulligan is a successful actor and producer. His latest short film, "The Witching Hour," recently won Best Period Short at Silver Docs! In This Episode * 00:21 - Cirina introduces Thomas Michael Mulligan, a successful actor, and producer. His latest short film, “The Witching Hour,” recently won Best Period Short at Silver Docs!* 07:11 - Thomas shares some tips on how to do self-taped auditions with a cellphone.* 15:07 - Thomas tells an interesting story on how he started writing his first play, “Just Dirty Laundry.”* 22:22 - Thomas talks about his film company, Film Dreams Entertainment, that he started with Lizet Benray.* 27:58 - Follow Thomas Michael Mulligan on his social media accounts, and visit his website thommichaelmulligan.com to learn more about him. Jump to Links and Resources Transcript This is Cirina Catania with OWC Radio. I have Thomas Michael Mulligan on the line. And he is a fascinating person that I met recently. He's an actor, producer, writer, who's been working in the industry for a long time, has a company called Film Dreams Entertainment, and we're going to go more into the details of all of this. And that's going to be part one, and stay tuned very briefly for part two, which will be about the New Hope Film Festival, which he co-founded. And we want to find out, obviously, much more about festivals. So here we are, Thomas, welcome. How are you today? Oh, I'm doing great. And thank you so very much for having me on your show. Really appreciate it. I appreciate it. Because you're sitting in your car talking on your cell phone. I'm talking into my dashboard, so that's good. There you go. So for those listening, I pulled him over out of traffic so that he's not talking while he's driving, but he is in his car. So we really appreciate you doing this. So let's start off by talking about what you do. You're a hyphenate. What does that mean in our business? Well, number one, I'm an actor. That's the thing I love doing most is acting. But back in 2007, I met a guy named Joey Lanai, and I had the script called Callous. And it was a feature film script based on a true story of his life, of child abuse and family dysfunction. And I read the script and loved it. It was very raw and real. And it took a couple of years, we finally produced the film, and it did really well in the Film Festival Circuit, and so that's the first time I produced something. My very first film was a feature film. And I'd say very successful; we won a lot of awards. And then it got distributed, it is on cable, a video on demand. And so for a first film, we did pretty well with it. So that got me into producing. And I used to read a lot of plays back east, but then I started writing these short films here in California with Lizet Benray, who I met at Halo Cinematic Acting Class. Let's back up and talk about you. You weren't raised in LA, where were you raised?  I was born and raised in New York City in Hell's Kitchen, on the west side of New York.  Wow. And my father was a dock worker, and my mom worked as a waitress. So those were the early years growing up on the west side there. There's good food on the west side though in New Y...