Headlining is a faux gpsl. We were established in order to have a creative community full of dedicated members, all of whom want to collaborate and invest in the stories each of us are telling.

Faux can often be a place of judgment, particularly around credits, and we are vehemently against that. While we have some structure around how credits can be put together, we champion and believe our members should feel confident in creating the character they feel works best for their credits. We are committed to this and if you cannot accept the choices someone else has made, this may not be the place for you.

We ask everyone treat each other with respect. The IC and OOC boundary should be maintained. The type of updates you can do within the faux environment are limitless and we want everyone to feel comfortable writing their characters. Please do not take the IC behavior of someone as an OOC issue; however, if you are concerned, we are always available via the dropbox to help. We also ask if you do not like the update someone does or question their choices, you keep this to yourself.

Prior to application check the following:

• Your username is "in character" (a first or last name).
• You have an ooc/screened post with your credits/claim visible. We do not require bios, but we do expect some facts to be listed. This can be privated only after your credits have been added to the directory.
• You have a f/o post available for members to comment.
• You have examples for us. We require two writing samples, which can be narratives, scene replies or a mix of both.
• You have an invite from a current member whom you've planned a substantial storyline with. We also require an additional substantial storyline with a separate current member. These storylines can range from family, best friends, important exes, costars, etc. Please call attention to these storylines in your character's info.

If your application is deleted, you have been rejected. We are hopeful we do not need to do this often. In most cases, applications will be rejected because of a failure to meet these requirements. However, we may also reject someone if we feel the character is not a good fit for the community.

In order to give our gpsl something different to other comms, we have chosen to implement the following activities:

• WEEKLY ffas, alternating between ic and ooc in order for people to get to know each other and invest in each other's characters;
• WEEKLY roundups: we encourage members to submit "one-liner" ontd style headlines about their character, such as "jennifer lawrence to star in new film xxx xxxx xxxx" for our ontd style updates. the purpose of these will be to have ic ffas around information that might not warrant a full update and to share interesting things going on in your character's lives;
• BIWEEKLY gossip: we will be running a biweekly gossip story based on interactions in the ffas, fp or submitted. you can opt out of this and we're happy to delete something, but the fun of a celebrity is you never know what the headlines are going to be. we will never post something negative without prior approval (or by your own submission), nor insinuate anything beyond friendship;
• MONTHLY narrative prompts: we will offer 3 ideas for narratives on the 1st of each month;
• MONTHLY update pairing: the idea is to put two people together and allow you to go wild. this could be things like doing stan instagram posts for one another, person a conducting an interview of person b, emails between person a and person b about a collaboration/project, etc.

None of these are mandatory to participate in, but we hope it will help freshen up the landscape of faux and give you things to react to, get involved with and take and run with.

After being in multiple faux communities, we have noticed one of the more tricky things in faux is integrating "real" celebrities with our faux ones. While we are happy for you to say you have a good relationship with a director, musician or actor, we are not comfortable saying you have had a romantic or close relationship with a real life person or including conversations/emails/texts with real people in your updates.

Why?

Multiple people in the comm may have worked with someone. For example, Leonardo DiCaprio, and using him as a prop for your character may not be fair to someone else.

We are incredibly enthusiastic for you to create NPCs, particularly those who make up your team (agent, manager, etc) and to share information for them. You are welcome to say your character has an ex from a specific project, but please do not name who it is.

If you wanted to be the child of a Hollywood legend/scion please do feel free to say an actor like or a director like.

We expect your NPCs, like your agent, manager, etc, to be made up.

Further to this, just because you have the credits of someone does not mean your character should be like them. Someone with Britney Spears credits is not expected to have had the same mental health issues she has had, nor do we expect a Selena Gomez to have lupus.

However, do take into consideration where things have influenced in someone and the work they do. What we mean by this is, for example, Eminem donated a lot of money to Detroit and the film about his life is set there, so if you wanted to have Eminem credits, you should consider him being from Detroit. Where someone is from does not need to necessarily affect their credits, but it is something to consider. We love to see how people subvert and change these things!

We do not allow whitewashing. Period. If a character is taking the roles or credits held by a POC, we expect your character to be a POC. This goes for musicians, authors, actors & directors. Very often the upbringing of someone influences the way they create and we do not want to see this kind of erasure here. With regards to race/gender-bending, where you'd take male credits and make them female or give a poc a role played by a white person, we are predominantly okay with it. However, where it would impact the roles of other people or significantly alter pop culture (e.g. giving Spielsberg credits to a woman, where Kathryn Bigelow's win was historic), we have to ask you come to us first to ask.

All roles should be within 5 years to your character's age. Please also apply sense to this. If you have someone who has been consistently playing older, they are not likely going to shift down to play a role 5 years younger than them.

In order for a filming project to be claimed/added to your credits, it must be an official project as listed by imdb. For a musical project to be claimed/added to your credits, it must be an official release. That said, we are supportive of youtube channels, podcasts, charity releases or small shorts, and they require no permission. Where it would be receiving a label or studio release or distribution, we would kindly ask you to not do. Please do ask if you have questions.

Musicians, directors, athletes, writers, producers and models must claim the entire portfolio of their credit. As a sub point to this, you cannot "separate" the role of someone in a project so if someone is writer/director, they would have both those roles and you couldn't just claim the director portion.

Roughly speaking, actors shouldn't have more than 5 projects filmed in a year and it should be a mix of supporting and starring. For upcoming productions, we are amenable to having more so long as you are willing to remove based on scheduling conflicts once they move into production. That said, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, James Franco have all had years dominated with projects. We're not here to police it and if you feel they could have done one year of working themselves to the bone for more projects, go for it, but please don't do it year after year.

While things like production schedules, hair color, eye color, accent, etc can be altered, we would ask people to be considerate when choosing their roles. Please do not take someone's entire filmography, nor take roles from everyone in your character's age bracket. Consider acting style and nationality specifications (e.g the Harry Potter cast was specifically all British and should remain so).

We also ask people be mindful of how often people work together. While there are pairings like Scorsese and Di Caprio and O. Russell and Lawrence, we want to be careful about constant pairing between directors and actors/actresses unless otherwise pre-arranged with a director/actor or actress combination. This is in order to give other people a chance to have also worked with someone like Del Toro or Chazelle. As a contrast to this, you are not required to maintain these pairings - someone using Jennifer Lawrence's roles in O. Russell's films WOULD NOT need to use all her credits.

The general spirit of our credits is to be fair. We want to give everyone a chance to play the character they want.

We don't have activity updates in the form of required updates. So long as you check in during our check ins, update your friendslist and interact on the fp, either in the ffas or in other posts, we are happy. We believe interaction is more important than an instagram post. We will be having monthly check-ins and weekly ffas in order to encourage this.

We do not require introductions. You are welcome to post lyrics, wait for a ffa, update immediately or jump into customs. We encourage members to reach out to new people and say hello in their f/o posts.

One of the best parts of faux is the absolutely limitless number of updates you can do. From gossip blogs to tumblr fan posts and everything in between, you can share reviews of their projects, showcase their public and private personas in instagram and reveal the inner workings of their team. We love creativity and hope you will feel comfortable here to go in as deep as you want.

That said, there are subjects which can be triggering for some people, so we'd kindly ask if you are writing about something that can be difficult for others to put a warning on it. This is particularly important for any kind of abuse.

There are no rules on what you can update with otherwise, so please go wild.