Panel brings alternative careers into focus
By Daily Bruin Staff
Oct. 28, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 ALICE LAM Brooke Burke of E!, Ed
Kowalczyk of Live, and actor Jay Mohr
(l-r) discuss how they got into the entertainment business.
By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It’s not every day that a bunch of UCLA students get to
hang out with actors, musicians, a director, a comedian and the
most famous skateboarder in the world.
That’s just what the audience in Ackerman Grand Ballroom
got to do on Friday at the “What’s Your Focus”
festival, hosted by actor/comedian Jay Mohr.
The other speakers at the event included Brooke Burke, the host
of the E! show “Wild On;” Tony Hawk, a professional
skateboarder; Ed Kowalczyk, the lead singer from Live; and Poe, a
singer/songwriter.
Majandra Delfino, an actor in “Roswell,” and Steve
Carr, the director of “Dr. Dolittle 2,” replaced the
previously scheduled Darren Aronofsky, the director of
“Requiem for a Dream,” and Chyler Leigh, an actor in
the upcoming “Not Another Teen Movie.” Aronofsky and
Leigh were unable to attend.
 ALICE LAM Pro skater Tony Hawk signs a
skateboard at the "What’s Your Focus Festival."
Mohr started off the event by urging everyone to move their
chairs forward, filling up the gap in front of the stage. After the
orderly rows turned into a chaotic mass of folding chairs, Mohr was
informed that it was a security hazard. He let everyone stay where
they were anyway, and promised that if there was a problem he would
jump on top of it.
“Everyone was 30 feet away and I just thought, if this is
a roundtable discussion, we should all be sitting around
together,” Mohr said after the event.
After an opening monologue where Mohr related his experience
working with Christopher Walken on 1997’s “Suicide
Kings,” complete with a dead-on impression of the actor, he
introduced the panel of speakers.
“There was a format that they had in mind that they were
trying to follow, and it pretty much went out the window when Jay
(Mohr) started talking,” Hawk said after the event.
Each of the celebrity guests spoke frankly about their
experiences with their “alternative” career.
“There are a lot of music lovers in the music
industry,” Poe said during the roundtable discussion.
“There are a lot of scumbags too, but there are a lot of
music lovers.”
All the guests described how they broke into their business and
encouraged the students to follow their dreams.
“Build your life around your creative dream. If you can do
what you love, it’s the biggest payoff in the world,”
Poe said after the event, summing up her advice to college students
interested in non-traditional jobs.
Burke told about her first assignment as a host for “Wild
On,” during which she was asked to go into the middle of a
riotous tomato festival in Spain, where the attendees threw
tomatoes at each other.
“If they ask you to do something scary and you don’t
know if you can do it, you’ve got to try,” Burke
said.
The piece she did on the festival landed her a three
year-contract with the cable channel E!
The other panelists offered similar words of encouragement.
“It was intimate. It was cool … I liked how they all got
their message across,” said third-year political science
student Will Hawkes.
Although the audience was made up of UCLA students, some of the
guests, including Mohr, Kowalczyk and Hawk, never attended
college.
“I was totally headed to college. I was really excited to
go, and then I decided at the last minute to defer for a year, and
then that became 10,” said Kowalczyk, who decided after high
school to concentrate on his band Live.
Amid the advice and storytelling, the presence of sponsor Ford
was always felt. To a great extent, the “What’s Your
Focus Festival” was a promotional tool for the Ford Focus
car, the name of which was jokingly used as a keyword by the panel
and the audience alike.
“The people at Ford are nice enough to have us here and I
just want to say, “˜Stay focused,'” Mohr said
during the discussion.
This message, along with “Make smart choices,” were
recurring themes during the two hour career day event.
Even with these pre-fabricated mottos, Mohr and the other guests
kept a personal and interactive tone during the discussion and
stayed onstage to sign autographs for a few minutes after it ended.
Afterwards, Mohr said that he enjoys talking to crowds.
“I love it. I’m on the road a lot and there’s
no better way to see if people are on your wavelength then to talk
to them more,” Mohr said. “But if they weren’t on
my wavelength I would have put the seats back in the original
formation.”
