Cliff Osmond on Acting

ON ACTING: Revealing Sub-Text

2012-01-24T22:56:00.000-08:00

The initial surface of an enacted character rarely reveals the truth. People lie...to themselves, to others. (And good writers, knowing that, write their dialogue and other actions accordingly).

How often in life (which drama must imitate) does one really know or understand the deepest emotional strands of their character?

Aristotle said the ultimate moment of life (and therefore of drama) is the character's moment of self-recognition and discovery. That means, if he is right, and I think he is, that all that all character-sought images prior to that final moment are like the character peering into foggy mirrors, distorting the true face of character from their own--and therefore the audience's--clear recognition.

The essential self of character is there from the beginning of the drama, but it has been obfuscated in the fog of self-denial and other-evasions.

It is only at the end of the learning process that the character (and the audience) discovers who and what the character REALLY is. Only--finally--does the true nature of the character--bubble (from the sub-text) to the surface (the text), only after the conflicts of life rub the character raw of self-evasions and lies.

So the good actor, when confronting the dialogue and other actions of the piece must realize that what he or she says and does prior to that ultimate self-revealing point is often only the glittering and beguiling surface of their character. They must accept that in their performance, while beneath those earlier lines and evasions of their character, must simultaneously swim the tortured currents of desire, longing, fears and denials--the truths--appropriate to the character's past...BUT IT MUST REMAIN HIDDEN.

A properly enacted character enters the scene like a fully-formed but-only-beheld-from-the-surface geological strata--layered sediments of emotion, set down by the storms and winds of everyday reality--only to be revealed finally, ultimately, layer by layer, by the jackhammer of events during the scene. To repeat: in the beginning of the scene only the surface of the character (like the earth) is apparent to the audience. Then the problems and vicissitudes of the character's story rubs him raw, obly finally and slowly revealing the sediments of character.

All great drama, and great acting, is a mystery, a series of hidden plots and some-half-but-mostly-hidden character truths (sub-texts) to be solved and revealed over the course of the story.

ON ACTING: Becoming "the Character."

2012-01-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

How do I, the actor, become the character?

ANSWER: You don't....you are always you. What you do in acting is you transform yourself--become (and live out) a side of yourself that best approximates your and the director's interpretation of the writing (dialogue and other 'info' about the "character") that the scriptwriter has given you.

The script is your interior and exterior map, a set of guidelines and actions so you yourself can transform yourself into (performing) living and acting onstage or onset in a manner that is logical to the writing as interpreted by you and the director, consistent to human nature as the audience knows it, and is entertaining and exciting.

"What side of myself does the script ask me to be?" That is the legitimate question an actor must ask when confronting a script What would be most logical for me to feel and do if the facts of the script were to happen to me? What would be my feelings and intentions that would guide me into saying "my character's dialogue" (and doing) in response to what other character's say to me (and do to me)?

Just as I must fit the costume given to me by the costumer, and wear the make-up painted on me by the make-up person, I fit and wear the dialogue and actions of the script to my chosen feelings when performing. The feelings and actions in performance are mine; I am them. During the three to five minutes of a scene, I am "the character," there is no separation between us. When the scene is over, the producers can take the costume back, rub the make-up off my face, place the script back up on the shelf, but when I was performing, they were all mine and I was them: my dialogue, my make-up, my costume.

That transubstantiation is the magic and madness and megalomania of a good actor's performance. Good acting technique is studying and learning and finding the process that best enables the actor to metamorphosis ("morph")--IN REALITY--into living as the interpreted "character."

Is it possible? Of course. We, actors and non-actors alike--do it everyday. The soccer Mom morphs into a high powered lawyer at work, the cutthroat executive morphs into the tender, feeling lover at night, the President of the US morphs into the absent-minded husband and concerned story-reading father on the weekend.

We all play--and are expected to play--many roles--IN REALITY--every day. Why not--if we are profession actors--learn to be able to play one more in a play or film?

MOVIE REVIEW: "My Week with Marilyn"

2012-01-13T16:48:00.000-08:00

I saw "My Week With Marilyn" last night. A sweet, sweet, fun film. See it.

Included is an exemplary performance by Michelle Williams, as Marilyn Monroe, the great 20th Century film star/sex goddess. Largely a bio pic (a slice of it anyway) about Monroe and her co-star, Lawrence Olivier, arguably the 20th Century's greatest classical actor in the English language, on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl.," a film they did together (with Olivier co-starring and also directing).

"My Week with Marilyn" is a great (albeit all too true) exploration of Monroe's emotional on-set chaos and Sir Olivier's frustrating experience trying to direct the hard -drinking, hard-drugging leading lady in the film.

But the film is more than a tragic/comedy of a star: it is also an endearing coming to age film about the narrator/leading young man, Colin Clark, who purportedly befriended Monroe during those difficult days; his part is played wonderfully by Eddie Redmayne.

Why does an actor drink, do drugs, add their personal emotional volatility to a beleaguered set? The film answers the question most emphatically: an actor's insecurity. Marilyn Monroe's oft-recorded personal and professional need for emotional balance and self-confidence was part of her sexual appeal: strong men wanted to protect her (while also being sexually turned on by her need for them). During her brief life (she died in her mid-thirties of a drug overdose) she married one of the greatest baseball players on hers or any era, Joe DiMaggio; married again, this time to probably the greatest American playwright of the 20th Century, Arthur Miller; and was subsequently mistress to a President (John F. Kennedy)' and maybe even his brother, Robert Kennedy, the US Attorney General. But probably even more telling to her popularity and enduring legend were her eye-riveting, mesmerizing screen performances, during which she became the imagined lover of millions and millions of male fans: in their fantasies they could play PRIMITIVE MAN while she curled up in their arms (and under them) as needy pussy cat.

She was not a great actress. She was a great star. Her appeal was beyond craft. It was pure serendipity. She knew it, and suffered under it.

She desperately wanted to be a serious, thinking actress, a professional who had a professionals understanding of what an how she worked. Even at the height of her career, she studied at the Actor's Studio in New York, with acting-teaching legend, Lee Strasberg; as well as under the personal tutelage of Paula Strasberg, his wife--who, as the film pointedly and comically notes, often accompanied Monroe as her personal acting coach to the set--much to this film's satiric delight.

It came too late in life. In spite of their teaching/instructing efforts, Monroe's inability to understand her great appeal as an actress, paralleled by her refusing to accept the fact that it was serendipitous and beyond her ability to replicate in any predictable fashion, led to her early insecurity-to-drug-escape demise.

All actors should see this film: (1) to see a wonderful, Award-worthy performance by Miss Williams; (2) to see a piece of Marilyn Monroe and her cinematic "stardom" history, and (3) to see themselves--their potential insecurities; and their need to fashion a craft to create a substantive floor of stability under their artistic efforts.

ON ACTING: Back from the Holidays with a Note of Sympathy to Regional Actors

2012-01-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

When you feel a lack of respect for your work and persona from New York and Los Angeles, I want you to know it is not a new thing.

In a Jan. 9, 2112 New Yorker article entitled "Rome and Us," the author quotes Cicero (a Roman Senator from the 1st Century BC) from one of his speeches in defense of his friend Plancius:

'They say you and a bunch of young men raped a mime in the town of Atina-but such an act is an old right when it comes to actors, especially out in the sticks.'

See, regional actors...you are not alone. It's been going on for thousands of years!

ON ACTING: Ruminations on Art and Amusement

2011-12-20T18:17:00.000-08:00

Amusement seeks to distract the viewer from her everyday life, to give them restful pause. It detaches the auditor from meaningful life, at least in any long-term, or deeply felt, way. It quiets the audience without pain; it heals by numbing.

Art on the other hand stirs passion up; it hurts before it heals. That is why art endures and amusement vanishes quickly. The latter, amusement, is a topical salve; the former, art, is eternal healing.

Art engages the audience; it forces them to consider their depth and breadth of their own inner and outer lives. It seeks to make the viewer ruminate inwardly on the relevance of the work of art to the fullness and follies of themselves.

It does so by first stirring (whether consciously or unconsciously...it doesn't matter) the audience's deepest emotions, by forcing them to confront in the work of art their self-image (once again, either consciously or unconsciously...the value accrues in either circumstance), to see closely who and what they are, what are the benefits and costs of their most personal beliefs, values and inner structure (sense of aesthetics).

In art, when the deepest passions have been thus stirred, thereby ratcheting up the viewer's inner demons and conflicts to almost unbearable and imbalanced portions, only then does the work allow the viewer to rest; and most often exhausted; or, as in John Milton's famous image (at the close of his dramatic poem, "Samson Agonistes"): "...with calm of mind, all passion spent."

Great art takes courage to behold; it is fully and tumultuously participatory. It fractures the viewer's certainty before putting it together again...and generally in a new way.

Amusement on the other hand can be...it is designed to be...held at arm's (and heart's and soul's) length. In amusement, when Humpty falls, he never fractures. He just gets a bump in the head.
In art, however: "...and all the King's horses and all the King's Men could never put Humpty-Dumpty together again"...except in the subliminal--and eternal-- ensuing political and personal lesson learned (even in a nursery rhyme!) by the audience young and old : when you fall from too high a (moral, ethical) wall, you may never recover your wholeness again.

Art reveals the complexities of life. Amusement renders them (purposely; too) simple.

ON ACTING: Job Requirements

2011-12-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

To act well, you have to learn to like your fundamental real self. (Because the real fundamental you is your acting instrument. No fakery allowed in good acting; it is boring.)

Then, to act well, you have to learn to like your fundamental self in front of other people.

Then you have to learn--as your real, fundamental self--to say the dialogue (Which some writer has asked you to say and move in the manner as some director has asked you to move...don't get inhibited by having some limitations/restrictions on your real verbal and physical behavior--make the words and actions "yours," as they say in acting),

Next, you have to learn how to be different aspects of yourself according to the script--that's what being a scripted "character" means: being your angry self, your sad self, your happy self--according to your and your director's interpretation of the dialogue in the offered script.)

And then, and penultimately, you have to learn to be deeply and complexly and varied and elegantly those different sides of yourself--within the limitations of the script and in front of the audience, so that you can be exciting and deeply interesting to watch...and legitimately be paid for your efforts lots of money (that is, of course, if you are more interesting to watch as that selected side of yourself than your acting competition is interesting to watch as that selected side of themselves).

Simple no? It is...if you, as a person, have courage, personal insight, developed self esteem and knowledge of human behavior and script analysis necessary for the job.

A professional actor is someone who is willing and able (and courageous enough) to live out certain selected emotional sides of themselves--fully and deeply and excitingly, on demand, within the limitations called for by the dialogue and actions in a script, in front of perhaps millions of people.

Ready...set...GO?

MOVIE REVIEW: "Young Adult"

2011-12-12T21:49:00.000-08:00

The recently released "Young Adults" is not a film. It is a psychiatric case study written in film. It is a portrait of a woman who moved from a small town to the big city (Minneapolis) in her Young Adult-hood. She went to the big city wanting it all--and found nothing...except ghostwriting for a now growing-less-popular-by-the-day young adult book series and a vacuous life of semi-hooked-up men.

Nothing really develops dramatically in the ensuing 1:28 minutes; she ends the film as she began; her story just "is," plot wise and character-wise.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, the central/character/'patient' under film analysis: a beautiful, neurotic, shallow, somewhat successful ghost writer of young adult books, who senses her sterile, urban lonely life is passing her by. She seeks a solution by fixating on returning to her small town and re-uniting with her high school boy friend (Patrick Wilson).

So progesses the story. She returns home, and begins her obsessive hunt. So what if he is married; so what if he and his wife have a seeming loving relationship; so what if he is a loving father of a tiny child? Old love (especially hot love that was aborted by a miscarriage with the child of the hot lover when she was twenty) conquers all, right?

Of course not. It certainly doesn't conquer audience (my) interest.

Not being 'old fashioned drama,' but rather a slice-of-life 'reality' film, no one learns any life-altering lessons during their travails; no redemption occurs at the end of the film. No one changes. Everyone remains as they were at the beginning...the characters remaining static symbols echoing off the film's thematic analysis of thwarted maturity. The most interesting story line (albeit a bit cliched--a re-run of beauty and the beast) is the secondary 'love story': upon retruning, Mavis meets in a bar scene an old crippled high school barely-remembered-upon-return acquaintance--crippled emotionally years ago by false high-school accusations of homosexuality, and a 'hate crime' that has left him cane-ridden for life--and he and the beautiful Charlize/Mavis create a new close-bound friendship during her visit.

His wise-cracking Horatio perfectly matches her tortured Hamlet, and they finally sleep together near the end of the film, when she is ultimately and finally rejected by her old lover in a bathetic (supposedly poignant) final night before she leaves town. (The beauty 'finally lets/asks the beast to mount her' scene is unfortunately richer in artistic concept than it is in filmed execution. 'Nuff said.)

The acting is fine throughout the film.

Charlize Theron is a fine, fine actress. Patrick Wilson is a fine, fine actor. Jason Reitman is a fine, fine director.

Diablo Cody is a fine writer...at least she was in "Juno." She is not, however, a fine writer in "Young Adult." The central static problem in the film is all hers...or whoever got her swept up with making the story a psychiatric case-study rather than a film, and thought it would be interesting to present a neurotic, shallow, self-centered, delusional narcissistic bitch for what she really is: a neurotic, shallow, self-centered and narcissistic delusional bitch. Unfortunately, constantly and consistently being all those things throughout the film, she also remains unsympathetic and not worth our tears...or even concern (except in the above-stated analytically descriptive way)...throughout.

Especially noteworthy in the film, however, is the performance/character of the cripple (physically challenged, I know...but crippled seems more appropriate to this film than physically challenged) played by Patton Oswalt. (Full disclosure: Mr. Oswalt was once an acting student of mine. I fight off any prejudice.) His performance is wonderfully in tune with the character's demands. He is properly wry and ironical as her imperfect physically but perfectly balanced foil/friend. Without his presence the thud sound the film made in my aesthetic consciousness would have been much louder.

Kudos to him. I hope he gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor in this year's Academy Awards.

MOVIE(S) REVIEW: Thoughts on "Margin Call" and "Ides of March"

2011-12-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

I saw two films the other day: "Ides of March," and "Margin Call." Both are well made; both star excellent actors: George Clooney in "Ides of March" and Kevin Spacey in "Margin Call." "Ides" bored me; "Margin Call" kept my interest throughout. Why?

"Ides" predigested its theme for me. The theme: 'All-politicians-and-their-political-operatives-are-corrupt." That's it. Over and out. Two hours of presenting it's theme. To illustrate the point (a bad thing for a filmmaker to do: I was taught by Billy Wilder--and still believe--that films should dramatize their theme, not illustrate) "Ides" showed a series of corrupt characters operating corruptly over and over again. It was a totally one-sided and cynical view of the American system, without any countervailing argument from the other (non-corrupt side) of the argument.

I know: that was the film's point of view: there is no other side. Perhaps so, but a good work of art should demonstrate its point-of-view by the functioning of the drama, not tell it to me as in a bad essay. "Ides" preached to the choir, and maybe...I'm not a member of the church. Or maybe, but I am... but that's not the point. I went to see a movie, not to attend a political rally and hear two-hours of propaganda.

"Margin Call," on the other hand, showed otherwise decent people in the drama of being corrupted. The characters in that film (Kevin Spacey character as a prime example) faced moral quandaries. I remained interested in the story to see which way they would fall: by the end of the film: would they "do the right thing" or be brought to their knees by their greed and need, and do the wrong thing: sell out their customers with financial chicanery to protect their own (and the company's) ass.

The characters contained both possibilities; so there was a resolution to be awaited. In "Margin Call," the characters ultimately did the cynical thing, true. They cynically 'sold out.' Faust finally made his pact with the devil. But when the film was finished, I also understood why he had sold out, and why their is a cynical perspective today on the financial world (the world of the film). I saw throughout--and learned from--the three-dimensioned human struggle between right versus wrong, and how easy it is for all of us--in the film and in the audience--to be tempted, and to fall to ultimately to temptation:"There but for the grace of God--and intestinal fortitude--go I."

Good, interesting characters, and good, interesting performances, do not decide in advance a character's rightness or wrongness, morality of immorality, corruptness or non-corruptness. That's why we watch the story unfold; to see what will happen. Good and evil, right versus wrong, war within them throughout the story. That is the audience-arresting internal character conflict that is caused in them by the external conflict of the plot. We watch to see which way they will fall...and can only do so because throughout the story they contain the possibility of falling either way: they are, being human, a combination of good versus evil, right versus wrong, corruption and moral rectitude. So: "will he or won't he, will she or won't she, will they or won't they?"

See "Margin Call," and refine your attitudes on the world at large (and the financial world in particular); avoid "Ides of March," unless you are only interested in confirming your prejudice...or only in knowing your political opposition.

ON ACTING: On Preparation

2011-12-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Every good actor-as-character prepares for the emotional demands of the scene as anticipated by his reading of the script.

If he expects (or the director asks him) to cry (more precisely, to be made to cry) at a particular point in the scene in the scene, he activates in himself, before the scene, in rehearsal, his deep personal potential for sadness, so that when--during the performance--other characters in his play or film say the cruel dialogue or do the cruel actions things to him written in the script, he will honestly and excitingly be made sad...and cry.

This process of pre-performance character emotional activation is often called emotional preparation. It can be seen as the pre-performance unbalancing of the actor's own emotional nature consistent with the feelings anticipated in the actor's interpretation of the script; a form of targeted and self-inflicted emotional torture, as one of my students so labelled the process.

One of the most celebrated forms of the self-torture, or emotional preparation for a scene, is recalling the past events in one's own everyday life, the past events which have made one feel in our prior everyday real life the anticipated scripted emotion(s)/requirement(s) of interpreted character.

In this process, or technique, or actor-exercise of emotional preparation, the actor seeks to chip away at the scars of his won past experience, thereby tenderizing the wounds of that own past experience, making old, healed over (or in another image, buried) emotional residue of the past highly sensitive again, barely contained by a new immediate healing, seeking in himself by this present preparation a present heightened potential for pain (and pleasure) that mirrors his interpreted emotional identification with the soon-to-be-performed character.

A warning on the label of this process, however: while the actor seeks to bring his own emotional nature applicable to character closer to the surface of his actual 'being,' the actor-as-character seeks to keep it in check during the reality of the scene. It is only because the conflictual events of the scene keep bumping into the now barely healed wounds of these past experiences that the emotion tumbles out in the dialogue and other actions of the character-in-performance, revealing the deep emotional nature of the actor-who-is-now-character.

Advice to actors: Feel deeply, express it economically and elegantly. Be an atomic bomb in the size of a pea.

2011-12-02T22:04:00.001-08:00

Since all good acting is life itself, all good acting obeys the laws of physics. That's what makes a performance logical to human emotional reality, and hence identifiable to the audience.

2011-12-02T22:00:00.001-08:00

ON ACTING: Elegance

2011-11-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

Why is physical and intellectual elegance valued in an actor's performance? Why is the standard "Less is more" chanted to an actor who is overacting? Why is understatement valued so highly in acting (as well as in most other human endeavors)?

Because the economy of effort increases the power of the task attempted: in other words, decrease the area of release (in acting terms, the release of the emotion felt through offered words, movement and gesture) and you increase the affect on the other characters and the viewing audience: less release = more power.

Release the same amount of hate by injecting a sharp needle into the eye of an opponent than hitting him over the head with a large piece of wood and I believe you make a more powerful statement on the audience, not to mention the recipient of the needle point.

Think of putting your finger over a portion of the head of a garden hose: you are able to send the same amount of water a further distance (and/or increase the power in the water spray) by reducing the area of water release.

ON ACTING: All Great Acting is Emotional Reality

2011-11-23T16:48:00.000-08:00

From "Acting is Living:"

"In the history of Western Civilization drama, from the Greeks to the Romans to the Renaissance to today, I would argue that the greatest acting has always been emotionally true to life; always been Shakespeare’s “mirror up to nature.” Great acting onstage or on screen has always been onstage real emotional life itself, regardless of the epoch, period, styles, restricted parameters, and/or the staged presentations of that life—and that includes all those epochs when the great actors lacked any psychological understanding of how they attained that real life onstage or onscreen."

For the audience to feel, the actor must feel; for the audience to believe, the actor must believe. Only emotional truth from one begets emotional truth for the other.

ON ACTING: The Inner Emotional Journey

2011-11-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

Acting is the discovery of--and journey into--oneself. There are as many cells in the body as there are stars in the universe.

Approaching a role, an actor must ask a series of questions: What do I and the character (at least as I interpret the character) have in common? Am I aware of that side of myself, the side that conforms to my character interpretation?

To play a killer, an incestuous father, or a saint requires that I understand the killer, incestuous father or saintly side of myself? Do I believe I have those sides of myself (emotional sides; because, remember, a performance requires that in order for the audience to feel, the actor must feel first)? And if I don't understand the character, is that because I don't understand that side of myself? And if I believe I have those emotional sides, do I have the courage and capability to feel and reveal those aspects of myself on demand, in front of people, excitingly and without interference generated by the requirement of speaking the instructed dialogue in the script and carrying out with exactitude the director's directed movements?

Actors often tire of playing a certain role. They get bored with the repetitive nature of doing the same character in a TV series for five years, for example. They want new; they want different. They want to explore a different aspect of themselves. They have in their career already chartered, mapped certain rivers of their emotional nature, and they want new discoveries. They are hungry explorers into the uncharted waters of themselves. They seek their own unknown; they want to experience new character (self) with full dimensions and digressions.

The hero seeks to play the heavy; the heavy seeks to play the lover; the man wants to explore his feminine, the woman want to swim flow freely in her stream of testosterone.

Who are we, the actor asks? What are unknown possibilities of our emotional life; or at least infrequently experienced selves? I want to hate beyond reason, to lust, to walk with death, to suffer the pangs of rejection and the joys of universal success. I want to be the courageous astronaut, the fearless fool daring to belittle the great King.

I want to act because the safety of the stage and the mask of the character permits me to be all that I can be.

The thrill, the seduction, the addiction of acting is wrapped up in just that: the infinite possibilities and challenges to actor's emotional courage.

At 85, Tony Bennett still sharpens the pipes

2011-11-16T05:12:00.000-08:00

From a New Yorker atticle on Tony Bennett:

"Tony Bennett was resting his voice while waiting to sing a duet with Lady Gaga. She was a half hour late. "I did my scales today," he said as he stepped down from the platform. Bennett practices scales from fifteen to twenty minutes everyday, singing along with a small tape recorder that he plays a cassette of exercises created by his longtime teacher Pietro D'Andrea, Once I heard Bennett say, 'The first day he doesn't do the scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows.'

At 85, still considered one of the great stars of the mellow tone, TB never lets the voice go unattended: he knows that you don't sit on your laurels and hope to maintain your edge. The path to longtime success is longtime constant effort. Genius never takes a holiday."

ON ACTING: TEN PREPARATION REQUIREMENTS OF A GOOD ACTOR: or, A FINAL CHECKLIST BEFORE PERFORMANCE

2011-11-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

Is my voice and body 'warmed up'? Do I know my lines? Have I set my blocking? (Audience Witnessing Requirements)

Am I ready to convince the other characters in the scene with me that "I'm right, they're wrong?" (Commitment to Objective.)

Do I realize I can only achieve my goals through convincing the other person (s) to agree with me? (Interdependent)

Will I try to make the achievement of my goal short and brief while at the same time paradoxically emotionally prepared for a long scene in the conflict so requires? (Honest)

Is my opponent (s) before me a real person, with eyes, nose, hair, voice, not just the 'character'? Am I willing to let that real person(s) to make me feel by really looking at and listening to them? (Real)

Is the scene, and the achievement of my goal, always important? (Intensity)

Am I prepared for a wide range of emotional responses and tactics as I emotionally, verbally and physically respond to others? (Variety)

Have I willing/prepared to live the scene at a profound level of emotional reactions? (Complexity)

Am I prepared to live the scene with 'beats and transitions', 'build' and 'character development' (personal change from beginning to end)? (Structure)

Am I prepared to be smooth and elegant, do only what is physically and verbally sufficient to the character's tasks of convincing the other characters, and not wasting unnecessary energy on dealing with my own actor's insecurity and desire to 'act'? (Elegance)

When the scene starts, have I forgotten all my personal acting tasks and desires, and am ready to confine myself to the action tasks of me as the-actor-as-character? (Kill the Actor)

Now: live/perform.

Fake (bad) acting is the refuge of emotional cowards.

2011-11-09T16:09:00.001-08:00

ON ACTING: Emotions and Energy

2011-11-08T15:39:00.000-08:00

The new student had given a wonderful performance. She said she had a breakthrough for her: she had never 'connected' so emotionally before in a performance. But, she said, she felt exhausted. And exhilarated. I was not surprised--nor should she be--by either effect.

To be deeply 'connected' emotionally to a role or performance takes the highly synergistic working of the inner body (often called emotions), of literally billions of inner neural connections and chemical flows within us passing to and fro. What we call 'feeling' is really the experiencing of inner physical conversations, if you will, between billions of molecules passing information back and forth to one another within us, indicating to multiple portions of our body a most complex and involving set of instructions how to act and react.

The exhilaration felt at the end of her emotionally draining performance is satisfaction: a job well done. It was, as Milton expressed it (at the end of his great tragedy, Samson Agonistes): "with calm of mind, all passion spent."

By being involved in a wonderful performance, the actor's body has been operating as a huge inner and outer machine, working furiously to attain our (the character's) human ends. Little wonder that at the culmination of a deeply emotional operation, the actor is exhausted. The actor has given a wonderful and deep emotional performance and has achieved a personal and public catharsis, a therapeutic release of his/her deep feeling. The actor has experienced deep human involvement (as in a psychiatric experience) in the safe setting of a staged or filmed context. How exhilarating...and exhausting. And needful of a vacation.

That's why actors have to be in physical shape. While we often think of emotions and outer physical expression as two separate entities, they are really one. A great performance is the inner and outer body engaged in an action of supreme physical (inner and outer) involvement. Good acting is a total physical experience.

ON ACTING: The Courage to Feel

2011-10-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

Why do actors sometimes find certain parts easier to understand and execute than others?

One answer is that certain scripts are written better than others--the age-old variant of: 'blame all performance difficulties on the writer and the dialogue.'

However, while I have found that the quality of the script is often an impediment to actors role understanding and execution, a more prevalent reason for actor problems is that the actor doesn't understand that part of his personality that is consistent with the character portrayal that is drawn by the script.

There is an old saying: "It takes one to know one." If an actor who is approaching a part does not have a keen and honest understanding of (and subsequently performance comfort with) the character/emotional side of themselves required by the script--for example, the killer side of themselves, the lover side of themselves, the sad side of themselves--they will have difficulty understanding and executing a character that is a killer, or a lover or very sad and weepy.

Actors are limited as much by their psychology as much as by their physiognomy. Actors are more often type-cast by their comfort-zone of feelings as much as by their body-types and height-weight-thickness.

If an actor wants to play a wide-ranging series of roles at the excellent level required by a top-notch successful career, they will have to demonstrate before a casting director a wide ranging understanding, acceptance and comfortableness with execution of wide ranging aspects of themselves.

They must (always consistent to script) understand, accept, and be willing to share before an audience the multiple side of their own emotional personalities. And realize that when they limit that range of understanding, acceptance and comfortableness in performance with his/her emotions, they are limiting the range of roles that they will asked/hired to perform.

The courage to feel--and the implications that that courage implies in the analysis, understanding and the willingness to reveal before an audience--is an essential (some would argue critical) aspect of an actor's craft and technique.

Black Bxx: Haunted

2011-10-23T06:06:00.000-07:00

I have been away from these pages for ten days directing an experimental web-based project called Black Bxx Haunted, a forty-eight hour interactive experience, an creative endeavor comprised of six determined actor-investigators committed to detect paranormal activity in an abandoned house. The anticipated are convinced the house is haunted, and and comprise a panel experts to live in the house alone, isolated, without contact with the outside world, to record and substantiate their claims of paranormal possession. (The actors have at present been locked in the mouldy, barren, abandoned home for thirty one and a half hours now, testing the bizarre happenings that have been occurring on their watch...and getting on each other's nerves.

The project, designed to create over well over 600 hours of live, real footage, captured in full detail by the sixteen cameras set-up in every room (I repeat, every room) of the house, that have been feeding footage from every corner of the house on the often tumultuous, often inmate, events and interrelationships that are being formed under the pressure of the paranormal sightings, sounds and surprises.

We will finish tomorrow, and I will be back at my regular log postings the next day.

The project is scheduled to be streamed online and available for audience interactive participation in January, 2012.

ON ACTING: Don't Put the Cart Before Horse

2011-10-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

Good camera technique proceeds from good acting technique. I have never met a good actor that had trouble with camera technique problems, just like I never met a good cook that had trouble putting food on plates (or setting the table). Trust me, the placing of the performance food before the potential eater (audience) is very easily learned if you're a good cook.

Good camera technique inevitably follows from good acting technique; and a smart actor never puts the camera cart before the performance horse: making the serving of the meal more important than the good cooking.

The good actor first make sure their acting performance is worth the audience seeing and hearing.

I have found invariably and actor's poor camera technique generally results from the actor's lack of confidence in their acting abilities. So when they act in front of the camera's, they freeze up.

When an actor has confidence in the acting abilities, on the other hand, has honed his or her good acting technique to the point that they know they will always be good, it doesn't matter when or how someone is watching them; and whether that 'watching' is in close-up. or two-shot or master shot, or from right profile or left profile.

First learn to cook the good acting meal; learning to serve it will be a breeze.

ON ACTING: Losing Control

2011-10-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

Actors are often worried about losing control...of the lines, of the story, and especially of their performance emotions.

When they feel their spontaneous performance threatens to emotionally or physically careen out of control (their frightened view), they put on the brakes. They pass every feeling impulse through their brains...especially the cognitive part of their brains, their conscious awareness of all their lines, blocking and other activities in the scene, including the emotions being felt at every moment in the scene. They lack the courage of spontaneity.

A great actor, on the other hand, is a brave actor, a courageous one. He or she allow their spontaneously generated emotions to originate, dictate and guide their actions...without consciousness aforethought.

They let the events of the scene happen to them, rather than the other way around. They do not let consciousness (conscious will) dictate their every action, rather than allowing--as it happens in everyday life (especially exciting life)--their perfomance to occur impulsively and spontaneously.

They are unable to live freely within the scene, trusting their emotional/muscle memory, garnered in rehearsal, to guide their performance.

In everyday life, when deciding to the convenience store by foot (the objective in the scene), we don't CONSCIOUSLY think about staying on the sidewalk when walking down the street, or looking at traffic before we cross the street. We trust our muscle memory to control us; we rely on our prior experience (life's rehearsal) to navigate us through city streets safely to get to the store. Just so, an engaged actor trusts his prior learning--his rehearsal--to AUTOMATICALLY keep him on the sidewalk of the scene and navigate through traffic (the other characters/actors and their own emotions) when crossing the street--and all this without conscious control.

Let it go, actors. Let our trained (and rehearsed) autonomic system (and its learned inner impulse control) dictate and guide our performance actions. We don't need the conscious control of the voluntary system to guide us through our every action...unless, of course, we haven't learned our lines, are resisting the director's blocking, and are afraid someone in the audience might find out our real emotions!! Laziness and fear are the real origins of an actor's desire for conscious control of a performance.

Remember: good acting is not for the lazy and cowardly. It is for the hard-working...and brave.

ON ACTING: DOING!

2011-09-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

Acting is DOING!.

Acting is a noun, but it also is a verb; it comes the root concept"to act," to DO something.

Actors must remember that "Action", not "Emote!" or "Feel!", is the verbal command at the start of every filmed scene.

Feeling is as feeling does.

Drama is character revealed in action. A picture is worth a thousand words; a deed is often worth ten lines of dialogue.

Dialogue itself is an action, an active attempt to change someone else's mind. Language actively seeks confirmation, agreement, a change in someone else's behavior. By speaking, we are doing something, trying to actively alter the human landscape to our favor.

All human activity is active. A reminder to actors: don't just stand there (feeling), do something. Convert feelings into action.

Feelings themselves are inner actions; the inner body coming up with something to express with the outer body. Feelings are the origin of actions that eventually act on the world around you in such a way as to keep it the way it is if you are feeling happy; to change it if you are feeling sad, frustrated angry or morose.

Without actions, feelings are a static, dead pools of bad (unreal) acting...and the emoting, and thereby inactive actor (or character) is a dead actor. And will be buried far off stage...by audience yawns. (If they ever get the job in the first place.)

ON ACTING: Banishing Consciousness of Purpose

2011-09-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Some actors are very good about defining and "playing" their character's objective in a scene. They know that character objective properly underlays character energy, character economy and character actions.

But where these same actors often go wrong is having the character consciously aware of their objective during the playing of the scene.

Most people is life--which is what acting is attempting to emulate--do not know their purpose in most 'scenes' of their life. They often move through life unaware of ultimate goals. That's why they often create unproductive actions, why they often find themselves in the middle of comedy or tragedy. (In acting, in drama, of course, characters are ALWAYS by definition in the midst of comedy or tragedy!)

An actor who is consciously aware of his or her objective--the meaning of his/her actions--throughout the scene loses the possibility of wonderful moments of discovery, reversals of fortune, great emotional upheavals and surprises--all elements of an exciting performance. An all-knowing actor also invites the question: if the character was always so aware of his wants and needs during the scene, why did he or she get into the scene's dilemma in the first place. Consciously aware people most generally avoid unproductive situations.

I would argue that in the midst of drama or comedy most people--and interesting characters--lose awareness of their goals and actions. They are too caught up in life-saving denials. They are living 'moment-to-moment', their emotions too caught up in the present, their blood rushing to the heart and groin, and away from the brain.

I advise actors, in their scene analysis and preparation, to ferret out their character's objective in a scene, commit to it, be prepared to fight ferociously throughout the scene to attain it, but, once the scene commences, forget it, push knowledge of it away from their consciousness, bury it deeply in their unconscious muscle memory, so that it while it will energize their character's actions, there will be no residue of consciousness infecting the reality of their performance nor the innocence of their character.

Can an actor be knowing of their objective before the scene and unknowing during? Yes, of course. In life, as I mention above--it is called denial. It is part of a good actor's acting technique and craft...and training. Avoid it at peril.

ON ACTING: "I don't like the role!"

2011-09-24T04:21:00.000-07:00

Why do certain actor's either consciously or unconsciously resist certain scripts.

The answers are varied. (1) The script may be in truth a bad one. Period...and the actor is smart to avoid it. (2) The script may be good, but actor may have played that kind of character before in another script and finds the character/performance repetitiously unappealing. (3) Or...and this is my point in this mini-essay--sometimes the actor is threatened by the over-challenged emotional demands of a certain character, and blames the script for the undesirable (for him or her) character portrait. (We often do that in everyday life, don't we? Mischaracterize--negatively judge--a person who puts emotional demands on that we are uncomfortable in fulfilling?)

When an actor judges a character as unworthy of being acted--in effect, turning down the role-- I ask the actor the following question: is it possible you are uncomfortable with that particular aspect of your own character? Is the emotion demanded by the role one you generally do not wish to feel, onstage or off? Are you negatively and subjectively judging the emotion required in the characterization and projecting that onto your seeming "objective" analysis (and denigration) of the writing and character?

Good actors must be brave in their logical emotional evaluation of self. There is nothing wrong with avoiding a role one does not wish to play--or feel. We are free to decide what is good or preferable for our emotional comfortableness and/or needs. However, I think it is important for the actor to realize when they are turning down certain character demands--and worse through blaming the writer for a bad, unreal or "corny" script and rejecting it--and hence limiting the range of roles available to them; in most instances they are rationalizing away their fear rather than honestly admitting a limitation.

When the latter reason--fear of the emotional demands of the role--for rejecting a role occurs in class I try to cajole actors into trying the role anyway, trying to expand their emotional range into previously avoided places. As encouragement I offer them FDR's statement: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself;" class is a safe place, and what one initial fear becomes, with hard work, less frightening--and perhaps, hopefully, eventually, exciting to deal with; like turning one's fear of heights into the exciting thrill of mountain climbing. The fear remains; but it has been transformed into the joy and excitment of testing and overcoming that particlar arena of fear,

Ironically, more often than not, on those wonderful occasions when a previously frightened actor ventures into the emotion that they had up to then avoided, and taps into that aspect of themselves, they sometimes find a performance treasure.

Are not diamonds carbon transformed by pressure? Similarly, when an emotional arena of oneself has been kept under severe 'wraps' or pressure (repression) within oneself for years (eons, in an individual's experienciong of repressed everyday life), and is finally dug up and experienced and revealed in performance, one more often than not finds that that repressed emotion has become the actor's field of diamonds--to be gathered and formed into the new core of one's performance excellence.

FYI: San Francisco Workshop; Sat/Sun, October 15/16. For details, go to http://www.cliffosmond.com/html/san_francisco.html.

2011-09-17T19:16:00.000-07:00

ON ACTING: A "Corny" Script

2011-09-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

From class:

She: "I don't like the scene you asked me to do."
Me: "What's wrong with it?"
She: "I find it corny."
Me: "What does that mean?"

She pondered a bit. We agreed it meant cliche, transparent, sentimental and obvious. (I've always felt the word derived from an Eastern-born attitude--bias-- against the Midwest, the "Cornfield States", the land of simple people and simplistic--or so Easterners thought--ideas, values and lifestyles.)

I said I agreed with her estimate of the writing. The scene--about a call-girl-mother and long-lost daughter conflict--was not in and of itself a great writing example of subtlety, complexity and profundity. But...it was about a mother-daughter, which always had the potential of being profound, dependent on the involvement of the "players" (translate: actors). After all, all daughters derive from mothers; all mothers obtain evolutionary immortality through daughters. Very basic stuff, that!

Moreover, I said, a professional actor's job is to enact a character that could be in lesser actor's, hands a mediocre, banal endeavor, and turn it into a thing of deep beauty. After, we can't get Shakespeare or Moliere or Arther Miller or Neil Simon to write all our scripts.

And speaking of Shakespeare: what is considered his greatest play, "Hamlet", is on the plot level a really a melodramatic story--one might even say, "corny." After an opening scene, a college kid named Hamlet come home on vacation and is confronted by a ghost! The ghost says he is the kid's recently expired father who tells the kid his mother had been sleeping with his uncle for a while and together they had killed the father by pouring poison in his ear!. And the father wants the kid to execute revenge on the mother and uncle.

A bit obvious and melodramatic, no? One could even say, "corny?" In lesser writer hands, of course, the resulting script could sound like a horror flick, the Elizabethan "Blair Witch Project"...but in Shakespeare's hands, it become probably the greatest play in the English canon.

So I argued to the student that performance profundity--like Shakespeare's Hamlet--can result from the execution of a seemingly corny character by a great actor. The great actor is great because he/she has the ability to turn even corn into a gourmet delicacy, lead into gold, shit (pardon the crudity) into Swiss chocolate. That's precisely why great actors get paid so much. They are great chefs, and alchemists, and taste-bud enhancers.

Postscript: Being class, a place for experimentation, the student, being a brave and good student, decided to overcome her attitude toward the corny script and accept the challenge: to create a performance that rises above--or penetrates below--the surface obviousness and possible banality of the material to become a profound, complex and subtle performance of one of life's basic relationships, and tensions.

ON ACTING: The Irish Government is Wrong

2011-09-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

The Irish government give tax breaks to their writers...but not to their actors. The rationale is that writers are creative, whereas actors are "interpretive" artists (not "creative": they do not create original material, but merely interpret the creative material of others: namely, writers).

The Irish government is wrong,

Writers and actors are both creators, if we mean by that the establishment of something tangibly new, something that had not gone before. Both sets of artists take experience--in the case of writers, the experience of their lives and educations, in the case of actors, the experience of the written piece presented to them to perform (as well as their life and education), and filter this experiential material through their own individual imaginations, through their own emotional sensibilities, creating a new emotional imaginative form and narrative (writers through subsequent story and words/dialogue, actors through their subsequent physical being in performance, their voices--the sound of the dialogue--and their other physical actions or gesture and movement). Both mold raw material into something not seen or heard before.

Both actors and writers, if you want, re-interpret, their experience into something new. They both absorb tangible material set before their senses, giving it a new creative form. Only God Himself created out of nothing (or...perhaps he had molecules left over from creating another universe?)

Putting theology aside, the Irish government should tax them all, or tax them none (of course taxing God is at best a moot question; somebody in the Irish tax collectors office has to find Him first in order to collect any tax lien.)

Actors, remember these two things: pay your taxes, and...you are creative.

Only bad (false) actors listen to the Irish government and limit themselves to mere interpretation of the writer's script. The writer's material is just a beginning of the actor's creative process. The writer's dialogue is simply an initial visual (albeit de-limiting and defining, but subsequently, when you speak the words and create the movement, a full personal physical experience) that aids you, stimulates you in your creatively unique (and once and forever; each time you do it, it is never exactly the same) acting performance.

Writers don't interpret dialogue in the sense of dialogue being solely a creation of the writer (which is, after all, nothing but black straight and squiggly lines on a white piece of paper to begin with. The actor's understanding of them is a joint act bewteen writer and actor) The actors IN PERFORMANCE create with their voices, their body, their emotions--dare I say soul): their full human to make manifest the meaning of the dialogue TO THEM.

It is said of Shakespeare that "he didn't write his thoughts; he thought with his pen." Actors don't just act the dialogue; the dialogue arises through their experience. They are both creative acts...deserving of equal respect...if not of tax breaks.

ON ACTING: The Danger of Doubts

2011-09-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

I offer insecure actors--those who don't follow up on networking, refuse to work hard on a difficult part, or turn down a new and potentially more productive agent to remain with more comfortable but disinterested one--a valuable quote from Shakespeare:

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing the attempt."
.....from "Measure to Measure"

ON ACTING: About Short Scenes and Good Acting

2011-09-06T14:10:00.000-07:00

Only actors want long, difficult scenes. People--which is what actors are generally asked to play--want short scenes; they want short paths to achieving their goals.

Emotional difficulty in a scene is forced on their character by the tenacity of the other character(s) in a scene.

The paradigm of a well acted long scene: character(s) enter the scene wanting quick, easy success, and are unexpectedly thwarted in their desires. The writer has created conflict for the characters--a conflict that the characters are committed to winning--and because of the writer's conflictual narrative construct, the characters are forced to ante up a long series of dialogue exchanges, sometimes lasting five to six pages, forced to come up with the emotional energy that underscores their verbal outpouring.

However, and this is the key point necessary for the actor to achieve good acting: throughout the scene, he or she expects every line of dialogue to be his or her last line in the scene; expecting their most recent logical outpouring of dialogue to the other character(s) in the scene to be correct and convincing, worthy of causing the other character(s)' capitulation immediately in the conflict.

Like tennis players who don't want long matches, neither do good actors. In a great tennis match, the ball always surprisingly comes back over the net...forcing another volley return...and another. Like good tennis players, good actors while preparing for a long scene, entering scene with deep emotional and physical reservoirs, try to win (and expect to win) each and every point as easily and quickly as possible.

Enter the scene expecting a short scene to occur; and let the scene--and the tenacity and skill of the opponent--dictate the subsequent length.

ON ACTING: The Craziness of it All

2011-09-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

He (to me): When acting. even when we are most into the scene, aren't we still a little aware we are living a fiction?
Me (to him): Ideally, no.
He: You mean, we really believe we are living onstage in reality, that the other characters in a scene are our real wives, real bosses, real lovers, that we are not on a set?
Me: When acting, yes.
He: Then all actors acting are a little bit crazy, thinking that a performance is reality.
Me: Crazy as opposed to...?
He: Living in everyday reality.
Me: Everyday reality is just as crazy. We believe lies all the time, accept non-facts as facts: that our wives and girlfriends are faithful when they are not, that our fathers hate us when they love us dearly, that we are untalented when we really are talented...and act accordingly.

As I have said many times in this blog in the past, acting onstage is inherently nothing different than what we do in life off stage. Only actors do onstage life, on demand, in front of people, withing very narrow parameters of words and deeds...and excitingly. Craziness--believing in what we imagine is true but may turn out not to be when the curtain descends or the director yells "Cut!"--is not confined to acting. Welcome to life...and what the poet and critic Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." He said audiences practice it--crying over, or laughing at and being scared by fictional lives portrayed on stage or on screen. If audiences can suspend their disbelief and accept (by their real emotional involvement) onstage and onscreen fiction as fact, why can't actors? In fact, for actors to do anything else would be crazy of them, no?

ON ACTING: An Old Friend...'Objectives'

2011-08-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

No matter what aspect of acting we might discuss; emotion, listening, style, text, and on and on, the smart actor never forgets to return to objectives...or aims, intentions, needs, goals, purposes.

Objectives create the energy fuel necessary in an exciting performance. The most we want something, the more the bodily system is energized to achieving that goal. The greater our needs, the more susceptible to emotion we become: the happier emotions, joy, relief, happiness follow the achievement of our goals; the troubling emotions, sadness, anger, frustration, despair, arise from our failure.

Actor requirements such as real listening occur because the other characters contain the possibility of our success; what they say to us is important to us, their words becoming the logical playing field through which we must foray to achieve our goals.

Likewise we must really see the other characters' faces and bodies. We look carefully at them to see hints of whether they are aiding our goals, or impeding them. Likewise we 'read' their non-verbal reactions: can we discern whether we are we winning or losing? Others reactions contains the hints that give birth to our reactions...which are our subsequent subtle actions aimed toward achieving our goals.

Tied in to objectives, the text becomes emotional/verbal aspects of our thought/word processes all aimed toward convincing others to give us what we want (need) from them...to satisfy our emotions in pursuit of our goals. Moreover, because of objectives, we achieve acting style or elegance, a good actor's economy of effort, because in the long run a lack of energy is really unattractive profligacy, waste.

A performance without goals is like random pearls absent a necklace, doomed to roll around unfocused, shapeless, and ultimately de-energizing. The good actor knows that by stringing the beads of a performance together with purposeful activity--creating a unifying of actions by seeking a central goal--is the primary and unifying task of am interesting actor.

Good actors remember that all human life is organized around the central purpose of survival. A good acting performance should do no less.

ON ACTING: The 'Exciting' Reality

2011-08-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

The actor's first task is to create in performance a feeling reality, emotional truth, a living experience.

The actor's job does not stop there, however. The second task is to create on stage or on screen an exciting emotional reality; a reality that contains emotional intensity, variety and complexity, as well as disciplined structure and elegance.

That excitement factor is what separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls...the working professionals from the not-quite.

Being an actor who creates reality will get you the audition; but it is the ability to consistently create an exciting reality, in the terms spelled out above, is what gets you the callback and the part...and leads to a fulsome, 'pay-the-bills' career.

FILM REVIEW: "Sarah's Key"

2011-08-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

Exquisite! The film (in French with English sub-titles) is beautiful. profound, complex and startlingly true. Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and a beautiful child actress who still haunts my memory. It is the story of wartime (WWII) brutality, national betrayal, family, family secrets and the healing power of love and truth. It is complex, with shifting time perspectives and points-of-view, but clearly told. Ah, the French. The land of the novel. They understand the difference between complex and confusing, profound and profane, simple and simplistic. ""Sarah's Key" is all you would want in a nature, grown-up film. I kept thanking God an American hadn't made it for an American audience. Be prepared, however: the truth inherent in the film is unrelenting. It will test you, and it will tire you...but ultimately it will uplift you. Tragedy cleanses. I've always wondered why the French always look tired and drawn...perhaps, like this film, they see too clearly into the truth, the harsh meaninglessness of much of life. Yet they drink, they eat well, they make love obsessively...they consistently find meaning in the harshest of life's dilemmas. No, they don't find meaning...they impose it. Engage! Engage. Spit in death's face; smile in the void. Let laughter and love fill the universe's emptiness. The making of this film is a testament to that philosophical stance. See it. See it. See it.

A Month Later

2011-08-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

Where did the month go? You don't want to know. I don't want to know. But I am back...with more consistency. I hope.

For starters, let me brag on a couple of LA students of mine: Byron Yee and Josh Kelling. They are co-executive producers on a new film opening in various cities this week, LA and Chicago included,: "Bellflower." It is counter-culture, youth oriented film, low budget, wildly imaginative, with love, rejection, alienation and special effects at its core. It was an official selection at this year's Sundance festival.

Remember the title: "Bellflower." Please see it. Byron and Josh deserve the success.

The Heart, the Head, the Mouth...in that Order.

2011-07-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

In class a few weeks ago, I accused the actress of worrying too much about the dialogue, bothering too much about thinking, and not enough about feeling the feelings that should in the performed moment give rise to her dialogue.

The words are there, I told her, in the script. They have given to her by a paid wordsmith, the writer. The story and the intellectual meaning have been well mulled over and moulded by you, the writer (and the producer and the director soon to be shaped by the film editor). What is not explicitly given on the printed page, and what you should be primarily concerned with, are the specific and complex human feelings that move any human head to activate the brain to choose the words that you as the character speaks. That is the primary task of the actor: to have activated within her the emotions that motivate the brain to choose the words to say to the other characters.

The heart--emotion--is the domain of the actor.

Acting is an experiential activity, not analytical. "Think before you act; think after you act; but when acting, just live." The actor who does not allow his or her real feelings to fuel her verbal and intellectual fire is a cold actor, a dead actor, a non-actor.

The actor's task is to experience--in truth, to re-experience, to re-live--those emotional experiences that have been unique to the actor in the actor's past; and, once allowed to be re-lived on stage or on set, regardless of the particular script, become the universal emotional embodiment of human truth that underlay all human experience...scripted or otherwise.

In acting, it is the emotion felt by the actor thinking the thoughts and saying the words that moves audiences, not the thoughts and words themselves.

ON ACTING: A Brief Definition

2011-06-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

How do you explain the process and craft of acting briefly to a group of non-actors? I found myself in that situation a week ago. The group was not discussing acting, or theater, or film. The topic of the moment was totally unrelated. But when someone in the the group mentioned to another member of the group that I was an acting coach and longtime actor--probably in support or explanation of my previous views on the group topic--I found myself parenthetically explaining to the group that acting was not, as many people believe, "lying," or "pretending," but actually the opposite: "acting was living truthfully within fictitious circumstances." I did not wait for a response from the group, whether they understood me or not, believed me or not, but in short order moved my ensuing remarks back to the topic at hand. I don't know if my definition on acting was understandable to them, or whether they agreed with me or not, or were confused, or. moreover, whether my being an acting coach that viewed his craft in such a manner refuted or supported my general views on the unrelated subject matter at hand. But I do know that I now--as I did then--feel pleasantly content with my brief definition/explanation of acting as "living truthfully within fictitious circumstances." Case closed.

Of Apatow and Wilder

2011-06-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

I recently saw again Judd Apatow's "Funny People"...two movies in one: the first half is darker, the humor subtler, sharper; the other half is sweet, simple, predictable. Unfortunately, I went expecting and wanting to see one movie, not a double bill.

I'm discovering that a central artictic dilemma occurs in all Judd Apatow's movies: he can't decide in any one film whether God or the Devil controls his soul; or in other terms, whether his art or his commerce rules his artistic visions. So he chooses not to decide; to give you both...unblended. (The great film genius, Billy Wilder, knew how to create a smooth admixture of both, sweet and sour. But that's why he is considered a genius.)

The first part of "Funny People" is the stand-up comic charcter war time; ironic, mean and funny at the same time, a competitive world of funny guys--where bawdy humor standing in for fists, and intermural fights draw blood with a thousand pin-pricks of personal truth.

The other part of "Funny People" is a sweet domestic comedy: "Will the boy get the girl?" The dramatic thrust is: after a twelve year absence, will the beautiful girl stay with her more boring husband and clever two daughters, or will she return to the comedian-leading man? Is bachelor an addction or a choice? Can good sex conquer family, duty, and responsibility?

Tune in, soap fans. Judd Apatow is a wonderful filmmaker. He's just not a genius...yet.

Me and Animation

2011-06-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

A confession: Animation was great when I was a kid. I still think "Bambi" is one of my all time favorite films. (Interestly, it is about animals, not humans.) But, as an adult, I find animations of humankind like botoxed women, augmented breasts, face-lifts, or plastic sex-dolls: clever, often well-designed. sometimes beautiful (SEE: "Up in the Air,") but ultimately a cheat and unfulfilling. When dealing with humans, I say: give me the real thing everytime.

ON ACTING: Comedy and Excess

2011-06-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

Comedy is reason gone awry.

We all care for money; a funny character has sex with his money pouch on.

We all like sex; a funny character genuinely believes he will die is he misses a day.

We all have doubts; a funny character doubts his doubts.

We all are jealous; a funny character attaches a tracking devise to his girlfriend's boots as a wedding present.

...and on and on...

Comedy takes a normal feeling which the audience can easily identify with and expands it to unreasonable excess.

Sorry I haven't posted in two weeks. I have been teaching/travelling. I am returning to blog duty today!

2011-06-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

ON ACTING: "Playing' Emotions

2011-05-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Actors often seek to 'play' an emotion: They say "I'll play anger here; or sadness here, or laughter there;" all emotions assumed to be generated by the actor at particular points in the scene. Nothing wrong with those "choices" of character emotions. They may be as good as any other 'emotional' choices in the scene. My quibbling with 'playing' emotional choices has less to do with the emotions chosen than with the fundamental dynamics of how emotions--any emotions--arise logically, real-ly, properly in the scene.

Human beings--the template on which all emotional choices of character are based--do not initiate emotional experiences on their own. A humans emotional experience is derivative, it is a secondary happening. Of primary category is the actor/character's prior state of emotional potentiality; pre-existing pools--neural circuits, really--of potential emotions. The process is: A character enters a scene, like all human beings, with the potential for feeling, the possibility of feeling...and then the events of the scene, the stimuli from those events bombard the character, and that bombardment activate specific emotions--neural circuits--from the actors all-too-human potentiality to feel.

The actor-as-character feels anger at that moment because the events of the scene touched her anger circuits at that moment above all others. Or she felt sad there, because the events of the scene activated her neural circuits of sadness at that moment above all others. Or her she laughed there because the events of the scene touched her "funny bone," her neural circuits of laughter at that moment.

So when an actor decides to 'play' any emotion at a particular point in a scene, what the good actor is really saying is: at this point in the scene, I will allow the events of the scene to activate my potential for anger; or at this pint of the scene I will allow the events of the scene to stimulate my human capability for sadness. Or at this point of the scene I will allow what the other say or do to me make me laugh; they will have struck my funny bone.

Emotional preparation pre-dispose us; events dispose us. No one gets up in the morning and wants to get angry. Life--or in the actor's case, preparation exercises--heighten our potential for certain feelings in tha actor-as-character; and then other events, other people, actuate their actual, specific manifestation in us. So when an actor says "I will play that emotion here," what he is really saying is: "At this particular point in the scene I will be prepared to allow myself to feel my chosen feeling (anger, or sadness, or laughter) based on what others specifically say and do to me." THEY make me feel those emotions at any particular point in the scene, and cause them to dominate over all others feelings I have in me at that chosen point of time."

That's why good actors look and listen to others in the scene. They know that other's words and deeds are what causes emotions to arise in us. We are "played" by others. We do not play ourselves.

ON ACTING: Some Comic Advice

2011-05-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

Actors often practice in minute and precise detail their planned response to another characters actions. For example, they say “I will pause here for three seconds after she says 'I love you,' or “As soon as they stop talking I will respond immediately to what he says…” Or they will decide in advance how they are going feel about what another character says or does to them: "When she says that I will feel angry," or, "When she touches me I will feel sexually aroused." When an actor attempts these specific controls on their subsequent reactive behavior, they are predicting not only when and exactly how another character is going to act toward them, but also they are predicting in advance how their own complex emotional system is going to respond toward any stimulus from the other character. This attempt at predicting the exaxt specifics of an actor-as-character’s performance future is a monumental task; one that I would offer is impossible even for the greatest actor. Better the heeds Mel Brooks’ advice about acting: “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to [definitively] eat it.”

ON ACTING: Preparation and Performance

2011-05-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

Allow me to make a clear and most important distinction between the two stages of an actor’s endeavors: preparation and performance.

To differentiate them most simply, chronology is most useful: Preparation is all that the actor does prior to performance (pre-performance); while all that the actor (as character) does onstage or--after the actor has been transformed (by preparation) from the actor into the character--can be seen as the actor's performance.

Rehearsal and preparation comprises the actor’s pre-performance activity, all that occurs in anticipation of performance: learning lines, finding the right costume, analyzing character, rehearsal, etc. (A warning-on-the-label: An actor cannot rehearse a future performance; all s/he can do is to rehearse for a performance. Preparation pre-pares us for something that has yet to happen in reality. I often use the sports analogy: you can’t practice a game itself; you can only practice for a game. The game has yet to happen. )
Granted, in rehearsal, tendencies of the opponent—what I would call expectant reality--can be prepared for: character anticipated leanings, inclinations, predispositions can be anticipated, but in reality the future (of the other performances as well as yours) can never be fully known.

The final upcoming onstage or onscreen performance is fundamentally unknowable. It will (and must) flow freely in the performance itself: albeit within the narrowest confines of its actor and director pre-designed (pre-anticipated) banks.

A performance is fundamentally improvisatory. Therefore, the need for true reality requires, nay demands an actor’s anticipated flexibility when anticipating or preparing for any subsequent performance. Humans/actors must accept they—life--are not machines; their precise actions in the future cannot be anticipated and replicated in performance from even after the most assiduously prepared design. The banks of any future performance river can be precisely molded; but the actual running of the river, the flow of human emotions, is deep, complex and ultimately unknowable, and will ultimately flow as they will. An actor’s attempt to do otherwise will fail. The rule: Prepare minutely and thoroughly; then perform freely. They are two distinct stages, two different realities...but...preparation may lead to performance, but preparation never equates with performance.

ON ACTING: Right Choices

2011-05-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

Actors agonize about making the right emotional choice in a scene. Is there a right choice? What is the right choice at any particular moment of a character's life? Am I making the right choice for the moment?

There are some major criteria (or at least considerations) that I offer for making a right choice at any moment in a performance:

(1) Is the moment you choose logical to life? (Remember, in acting, your are creating something that the audience must, at some level of their awareness, finds identifiable to themselves. Otherwise they wont be moved by your performance. If the moment you create is beyond the realm of human possibility (the logic of life), the audience will be repelled rather than drawn in.

SO...if the choice the actor makes is logical to life, can it be "righter"?!

(2) Is the moment chosen not only consistent to life, but also consistent to the to character's life? This is, is the emotional and behavioral choices of the actor consistent with the kinds of feelings and actions such a person as drwn in the script would be likely to feel. For example, if you are playimg a nun, would your choice of feeling and outer behavior be consistent with the widest range of logical possibilities of "nun-like" behavior, at least as that nun is drawn in the actions and dialogue of the script? If it is not, if the choice is outside the boundaries of feeling and behavioral possibilities of the scripted "nun-like" behavior, the audience will reject the performance as "illogical" to context and character, and hence, unidentifiable.

(3) Is the actor's choice of feeling and behavior, while always logical to life and character as scripted, the actor must next ask: are the choices--even within those logical parameters--also intense, varied and complex; i.e., are the choices exciting? And be exciting, I mean revealing of the deepest, most engaging and perhaps even unexpected, aspects of possible "nun-like" behavior...while still logical to life and character within the script?

(4) Is the actor up to the task: can the actor execute that choice in performance with emotional honesty and behavioral ease (i.e., not let the "acting" show)?

(5) Is the actor willing, in performance, to allow the choices to be altered by the unavoidable spontaneity that a powerful and audience-identifiable performance creates. "You can prepare for a game (make choices), but the reality of the game will ultimately determine your final performance."

So...a right choice is (1) logical to life, (2) logical to the character's scripted life, (3) logical to the desire/demand for performance excitingness, (4) within the actor's capability to execute with honesty and truth, and ultimately (5) allowed to be spontaneaously generated in performance.

To explore oneself through the writings of others is the joy of acting.

2011-05-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

ON ACTING: And Sex and Sports

2011-05-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

I have often been accused in my teaching career of using too many sexual images in my meditations on acting. Why? A dirty young man? A dirty old man? Perhaps both. But I still find sexual analogies oh-so-apt when trying to explain acting. To begin with, both efforts involve similar concepts and language: acting and sex involves interrelating, conflict (people banging into one another, pun intended), deep emotional involvement, passion, build, and climax. Also, both acting and sex shared the same divine origins (at least in Western Civilization)...they were favored by the same Greek God: Dionysus (who also was connected strongly with wine).

Good acting has always been to me like good sex. The less you fake it, the more satisfying it will be; and the more the passion arises in conjunction with the other person, the more both of you will be served by performance success and gratification.

There are differences between acting and sex of course: for one thing the dialogue in sex seem to be less important than in acting. (The Dionysian rites--part of early Greek religion--were at their core dance efforts. The introduction of dialogue--scripts--oarticipants talking while moving and feeling, came later. NOTE: when the dialogue if acting or sex is introduced and does transcend banalities, however, both efforts are served. A good script --sculpted language--is always welcome, in bed or on stage.)

I must confess I use sexual images less now in teaching...they say it is unseemly at my age. My wife recently criticized me for writing sexual banter in a scene I was creating...it had to do with two people in the seventies recalling a distant time of love: "I don't think it's realistic for people of their age to talk so openly about sex like that. It doesn't seem real," she said. I just sighed, and moved on.

(Full disclosure: I now use sports analogies less as well; but that diminishing of usage may have to do with gender appropriateness rather than age-appropriateness. Women relate less to sports: they often sit boringly unresponsive when I talk about sports in terms of emotion, spontaneity, conflict and...yes, I must admit, banging around within a proscribed field of endeavor.)

They say each effort, whether in analogy or in teaching, has its own time and effectiveness. So goodbye to sexual analogies; goodbye to sports analogies. And hello to...old age, death and eternity analogies?!...forget it.

Acting will always be, with or without sexual and sports analogies for me a celebration of life, not a meditation on it. Acting is a joyous effort to create life, and celebrate characters involvement in it. As a teacher I may be forced by aging appropriateness to use sexual (and sports) analogies less...but I encourage other teachers to use them more. They are true. They are effective. They are pertinent. Acting is Living. Sex creates Life. Sports celebrates Life. All efforts are gloriously different sides of the same Living coin.

ON ACTING: The Central Acting Formulation

2011-04-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

Emotion is the central ingredient in the theatrical experience.

The actor in performance must really feel emotion (that is, s/he is made to feel it by the interaction with the other characters); then s/he must be willing to reveal it deeply in public (but in the way that most people reveal deep emotions in life: reluctantly and generally only after lies and denials have failed to contain it).

The audience, perceiving the actor's emotion, empathizes with those emotions, and thereby are made themselves to feel...which is why they paid to be in the presence of actor's in the first place.

Actors transport audiences beyond their own hesitancy.

The formulation is simple: actor's feel; audience's feel...and money changes hand. Simple, no? But...to be remembered: achieving brilliance in the acting craft is a difficult task. Acting itself may be easy, but excellence demands the 'trifecta' of hard work, experience and courage. And it is at that point where the big bucks really come in.

ON ACTING: The Pleasure of it All

2011-04-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

To act is not simply to carry out mechanically a pre-designed formulation. Life--which is required to attract and move an audience--doesn't happen that way. True, in any performance, the words are given, the blocking is given, the props may be given and the camera angles set...but within those designated limits, I am free to live, spontaneously and unexpectedly.

Perhaps my character is required to say according to the script "I love you," and the director asks me while saying it to touch the other character's cheek with my right hand, all the while reaching for a gift to proffer them.

All that may be set...BUT...how I feel when I say that, the subtle and unexpected variations in possible tone and pitch when I say it, the feel of the silken gift I am picking up with my other hand, the way it modulates in unexpected ways my feelings of love for the other person, the radiance (or fear or tenderness, etc.) in their eyes when I touch them, the unexpected longing they may suddenly feel for me, and I, in turn for them...all before, during and immediately after I say my line, touch the face and give the gift, that, my friend, is my actor's world. That is why I act; to be me--in this case, the full, complex unexpected and spontaneous loving me--within whatever parameters and limitations the script and the director asks.

Boundries do not inhibit me; they free me.

They enable me to love you in a single bed. on the grassy slope of a mountain, in a rainstorm or a desert windstorm. None of it matters...only that I will be free to feel--each time if many times are required--my enormous love for you while I touch your face, say "I love you," and hand you the silken gift.

ON ACTING: The Value of Integrity

2011-04-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

I just wrote to an actor (who had disappointed me):

"Maintain [personal and artistic] integrity in your life, my young friend...it alone engenders self-respect; and without self-respect, life becomes a series of mounting lies, a cold, dark and endless path filled with increasing isolation."

ON ACTING: Dialogue...and Actor's Confidence

2011-04-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

The following is a note to those of you who are inhibited by the scripted text:

If dialogue were the critical component in a performance, they would have hired the writer to enact the part. S/he knows the words better than anyone.

Words are less important than the person who says them.

Think of it another way. The dress is only as important as the person who wears it to the party. Do you take the dress to the party or the girl who wears it?

Date a dull wearer of a beautiful dress; the dress soon loses it's luster.

Remember: Nobody's ever rushed to bed eager to put on clothes; in fact, they are generally the first thing removed. Same with words: don't let them get in the way!

Think of it like cooking vegetables: Most vegetables are alike (all right; some vegetables are grown better than others...but...) but the key to a good meal is the cooking. Great vegetables in the hands of a lousy cook taste unappetizing; average vegetables prepared by a great cook taste scrumptious. Do you go to an expensive restaurant because of the ingredients? Or do you go because of the way they are cooked...and served?

A great script in the hands (and mouth) of a lousy actor is a lousy performance.
An average script and dialogue in the hands of a great actor sometimes is uo for awards.

They pay great actors large amounts of money because they know how to make even the dullest (scripted) party seem like fun.

What kind of performance party would you like to be invited to: a fancy party attended by all dull people? Or a party thrown at a simple, small suburban home in the dull desert by the ten most exciting people in your town?!

Don't be intimidated by scripts. They are just the vegetables, furniture, dresses of performance: factoids there hoping to cooked, or sat on, or worn by exciting people.

Scripts need us actors more than actors need scripts. If reality TV has done nothing else, it's proven that!! Notice there's no TV show or film that simply lets the script scroll by without actors involved!!!

So, actors:...Don't be intimidated by scripted words. They should be grateful to have confident actors saying them! The reality: you be exciting; the words'll be exciting. You be dull; the greatest words in the world are not going to help you.

ON ACTING: The Path to the Top

2011-04-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

The stage, film and TV business is a very, very precarious business. A lot of ambitious people are competing energetically for often very high rewards. Success in tat business is a very, very tall mountain, with a mountaintop (immense respect, popularity and money) hidden high up in the clouds.

The path to the top of that mountain is very, very narrow. Logically enough anyone already on it, at whatever level, is afraid of being knocked off their present perch. Thus anyone in this business who hired you to join them as an actor at their level will be very, very careful that you are not such a clumsy talent that you will do something that will knock them off their perch.

Success seeks demonstrable success; excellence seeks demonstrable excellence; talent seeks demonstrable talent.

ON ACTING: Another Simple Definition of Acting

2011-04-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

"Acting is a term actors use when their real emotional life occurs (1) within very narrowly defined parameters of words, movement, and prop-handling (2) on demand, (3) in front of an audience, and (3) with a variety, intensity, pace, and profundity of emotion and elegance of style uncommon in the everyday world."

...from "Acting is Living"

On ACTING: A Simple Definition

2011-04-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

"What is primary in acting--what the best actors and actresses have in abundance--is the extraordinary courage and insight to live fully, honestly and intensely in public: (1) to face and accept the deepest truths about themselves and, by extension, of humankind in general, and (2)) be willing to really live out, withing the demands of the script, those truths in a real, exciting manner before an audience."

...from "Acting is Living"

ON ACTING: To Audition

2011-03-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

In Webster's Third Unabridged Dictionary, "audition" is defined as "a trial performance to appraise an entertainer's merits."

The root word of audition is "to audit," which the same dictionary defines as "to examine and verify"; with the word "verify" is defined as "to serve as conclusive proof."

Therefore the actor must see an audition as a form of final performance where the auditor (the prospective employer, or his surrogate, the casting director) examines the actor's work to discover conclusive proof that the actor can do the job. Thus, the actor in an audition cannot just promise to be good in the role, or imply that she will be a good actor when hired, but to substantiate fully that she is good. Her audition must be conclusive proof.

ON ACTING: Yourself as Textbook

2011-03-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

Actors are severely limited in their understanding and acceptance of a character’s objectives in a scene when they are unable to understand and accept their own objectives in everyday life.
To address this possible self-knowledge gap, I recommend actors ponder some recently completed events in their life, and ask themselves: “What did I fundamentally want from that person I was just speaking to? What basic purpose made me do what I did with that other person? What was the intention behind my basic words and actions? What aim did I have that made me feel good or bad when I did or did not achieve it?”
When actors can understand and their basic everyday life goals more fully, they will be much more able to understand and accept their characters goals and actions in a performance endeavor.

ON ACTING: Craft and Art

2011-03-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

The craft of acting involves the actor being emotionally honest in living out the conflict of the scene; to really look and listen to the other actors-as-characters in the scene, and to express one's honest feelings in the scene in the words and movements given to the actor by the writer and director.

But to relay on craft alone in a performance is to be "crafty"--with all the hints of dishonesty implied in that term.

Exciting acting is an art as well as a craft. Craft emphasises the practical efforts involved in a task; art involves the end result of such craft.

The art of acting is the intensity, variety and complexity of feeling that an actor's performance exhibits. The craft of acting is simply (and nobly) the means used to achieve and package such a performance

Craft without art is shallow and incomplete. Art without craft, however, is impossible. They are twin efforts, symbiotically entwined in any great performance.

ON ACTING: Monologues

2011-03-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

There are three essential questions to be asked (and answered) when approaching a monologue:

(1) Who (in specific) are you talking to?
(2) What are you trying to convince them to agree with you about (whether directly or indirectly)?
(3) Why are you talking to them in the first place?...what is the emotional discomfort (feeling) that is causing you to talk to them (sub-text; emotional motivation, etc) which, if they agree with your point of view, will be ameliorated (lessened)?

Who, what, why...we talk, we tell a story, we argue a point, to convince someone in particular to identify and agree with us so our pain or pleasure can be addressed in a more positive, purposeful manner.

ON ACTING: Born and Made

2011-02-22T16:29:00.000-08:00

It is often said an actor is born, not made. The same is often said of an athlete, or a mathematician--or a politician. While it is true all human beings are born with certain propensities, certain capabilities when compared to others, it is also true, as a corallary, even the best are born with certain deficiencies and disabilities. Equality does not mean identical construction. Hard wiring differs from person to person. A level playing field does not mean one team may not be better positioned to win than another team on any given day. We are all equal; but we not the same; we are all equally free to pursue, but not necessarily destined to achieve.

But what is true (dare I say equally true) for all of us is that without effort our individual potential is any professional pursuit will remain unrealized. A child may be born, but it takes effort to grow into a full and wonderful human being. To be born to be an actor (or any other profession) does not free us from the obligation to work hard to perfect that potential. "Don't cheat the gift," it is said. Those that have due to natural endowment a head start in any field of endeavor will only stay ahead if they work at least as hard as those who are naturally less gifted. It is the oild story of the tortoise and the hare.

Actors are both born AND made. The greatest actor may start with certain capabilities; those capabilities are hopefully recognized early...but then begins the work. You can get better in acting if you work at it. The greatest high school athlete can't just walk on a professional field and star. Potential stardom may be soon recognized; but then begins the hard work.

That's why athletes train and practice. Tiger Woods is still practicing his swing; Kobe Bryant is still developing new moves; Kim Clijsters is still working and traveling with her coach.

Good, better, best...you may be born with, but you have to be developed and perfected.

A great actor is born AND made.

On Acting: The Value of Acting

2011-01-25T16:19:00.000-08:00

Question: What is the value added (to society) by an acting performance? What tangible value do actors give to an audience that the collective members of the audience spend billion of dollars every year on actors' services (which of course includes the services pf writers, directors, lighting personnel, etc.--all those others that aid in the transmission of acting performances to audiences.)

Answer: To learn about themselves, audiences need experience, which engenders emotion, which engenders intellectual analysis and self-knowledge. To learn is to translate personal experience into universal truth.

Real, everyday experience can be costly, however; especially deep emotional experience such as the kind that results when one experiences death, murder, intense sexuality, war.

On the other hand, theater, film and video allows an audience to experience intense life onstage or onscreen in a safe, less physically consequential way. No one--neither actor nor audience has to actually die, murder, have perhaps unsafe sex or go to war to have the EMOTIONAL experience of such events. All the actor has to do is have to really, honestly and excitingly have the EMOTIONAL experience of intense 'life-in-performance' first. And, thereby, by enabling a much safer audience experiencing--by the audience's process of audience identification and empathy with the performed characters s' life before them, theatrical, film and video acting allows the audience to get into deep empathetic emotional contact with themselves...and learn.

This valuable learning experience, offered to audiences at an audience's very low everyday existential costs (and at a time and place of theie own choosing as well) creates great profit for the audience---the monetized profit of which they readily share with the audience.

How much is a Broadway ticket cost now: $150; $10 or more a ticket at the movie theater? How much do some film stars make now: twenty million dollars a movie? Well worth it...for two collective hours of emotional experiencing, learning and growing...while having a coke and a box of popcorn, too. Such a deal.

Bad boy!!!! I took another vacation!!! But it was fun and I'm back.

2011-01-25T16:18:00.001-08:00

And So It Begins

2011-01-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

"Why do you want to act?" I asked the young man sitting across the table from me sipping coffee.
"Fame," he said flippantly. "I want to be known."
"There are many ways of being known. Successful politicians; professional athletes; even local news reporters. They are all known. Why do you want to seek fame through acting?"
There was a pause in the conversation.
"Because it's easy." It was more a statement from me than a question.
He looked at me sheepishly, as if I had read his mind.
"Yea. I walk, I talk, I feel. I can do that," he said, "...act."
"You did it," he said. "Why can't I?" Touche.
Defensively I said: "No reason. In fact, there's more reason for you to succeed the way you look (a handsome young man) than the way I looked at your age."
"But," I challenged him," are you prepared not only to look good--walk and talk--but also to feel in such an exciting way that 5 million people in the audience, will stop in their tracks, cease in their daily activity, just to watch you? And watch you specifically as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of other would-be actors living in NY, LA and around the nation?"
"Yea. I'm willing to work at it."
Bingo.
That was the answer I was hoping for.
I paid for the coffee, patted him on the back and wished him well.
I smiled with confidence. A carrer was born.

I'm happily back from vacation.

2011-01-04T14:37:00.001-08:00

MOVIE REVIEW: "Black Swan"

2011-01-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

I saw "Black Swan" over the holidays. Although an (overly) well-thought-out, beautifully mounted film, I grew strangely unattached emotionally as I watched it. In fact, rather than being mesmerized by the story and characters, I took notes during most of the film. Perhaps it was a feeling that the film was made to appreciate its art and artistry, its brilliant insights and industry, more than being an attempt to sweep an audience away emotionally. Perhaps it was my initial and early rejection of storytelling 'cleverness'--I could see what was coming plot-wise and character-wise from the very beginning; or perhaps it was because I felt I was being 'intellectualized' to death; or perhaps after a lifetime of immersion, practically and theoretically in the art and craft of acting, and with all due modesty, functioning albeit intermittently as an "artist", I rebelled at being TOLD what my artist's art was. I'm old fashioned. I heed a lesson Billy Wilder gave me on screenwriting: "Don't illustrate; dramatize." I like my thematic/artistic truth revealed in story and drama, not having it somewhat gratuitously illustrated for me as if in a pictorial essay.

Whatever the reason--or for all the above reasons--I took notes. I share them with you now in the sporadic form I wrote them down.

"Overwrought..." "Pretentious..." "Hyper meaningful..."
"Basic question: Why is the main character so driven (and please don't let it turn out to be that 'Mommy made her do it')...
"Too many close-ups..."
"A psychiatric case study in illness..."
"A study in masochism and obsession..."
"A fascination with sickness..."
"How a young girl lost her virginity and found the joy of sex!..."
"SEX equals DESTRUCTION..."
"A tone poem of neuroses..." "A clinical study of artistic obsession..."
"The lesson of the film: Mamas: Don't send your daughters to ballet school!!!..."
"A real harsh case of opening-night jitters..." "A Freudian case study in opening night jitters..."
"How to 'lose yourself' into destruction..."
"Sex = sickness..."
"TITLE OF FILM: "An essay on the destructive possibilities of creativity; OR 'It's All Mama's Fault; OR 'The Life of Mickey Roarke on Point-Toe'..."
"Creativity is self-destruction without any nobler purpose..,OR The Story of Good Friday without Easter; OR Mel Gibson's 'The Passion' all over again..."
"Sex, Drugs and Tchaikovsky..."
"Creativity is self-mutilation..."
"The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe..."
The Romantic vision of art (Verlaine, Rimbaud, etc.)..."
"Talk about narcissism: making love to (or killing) another woman turns out to be making love to (or killing) yourself..." What a disappointment...Interesting thought: I'm afraid I just don't like myself enough to do either one (at least to myself)!"

The acting was fine. The photography was fine. The editing was fine. The music was phenomenal. A predictable, obvious movie done very well. A film done by a precocious film grad student with an open-ended budget.

MOVIE REVIEW: "Ghost Writer"

2010-12-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

The film is a thinly veiled (oh so thinly) critical attack on Tony Blair, former prime minister of Great Britain, and his corroberation with the American CIA. The accusation is an old contention: Iraqui war torture. The script suffers a bit from unchallenged self-righteousness and bald-faced anti-Americanism--but Roman Pulanski ("Chinatown;" "Roesmary's Baby;". "The Pianist") is a great director, and is a master at creating suspense even when there is little intrnsic story-reason for it. The ending is rather abrupt and unfulfilling; but there is wonderful acting throughout, and wonderful locations. It's always worth seeing a directorial master at work. It swept Europeam Fims Awards for 2010.

ON ACTING: Fatherhood

2010-12-18T14:51:00.000-08:00

The student told me he was having trouble playing a father. He said he has never been a father, doubts he ever will become one...and in general finds emotionally identifying with fathers difficult.

But he was now of the age when he was going to be offered father-parts to play. What to do?

So I said we should try to find a common denominator: Is there a universal emotional element in fatherhood that fathers and non-fathers (like him and maybe half the audience) can warm to? What does being a father mean? Is there a synonym for "fatherhood," I asked?

After an unresponsive, silent pause: "Responsibility," I offered. "Once that child's life enters the world, you are responsible...for it's food, it's emotional contentment and and spiritual nourishment." I asked the student if he ever felt responsible for something? "Of course," he said.

Well, I said, with a new-born child that responsibility never ends. "Jesus, Dad, enough already. Stop with the advice!"

"Never. At any age. Not until you are totally happy. Is your life perfect? Well, as long as the answer is no, I'm going to be in your life. As a father, I am responsible."

Irrational? Yes. Maddening? Yes. Inevitable? I hope so.

Love...paternal, maternal, spousal, or filial...is responsibility towards an other's existence. You are charged with being tethered to the other's life, to their needs, wants, desires and yearnings. Your life is no longer defined by just your life, but by theirs as well. (That's why you have every right to tell them what to do!) Your happiness is their happiness; and visa-versa. You will die, for them, with them, because of them...or you would kill for them. You no longer have an independent existence. You are they; they are you.

Responsibility. Love. Fatherhood. Endless. Eternal. Maybe that's what rigor mortis is: the dead body still trying to fulfill it's responsibility toward its children. Nothing more ecstatic. And exhausting. Fatherhood, along with motherhood: it makes the world, and the species, go round and round.

ON ACTING: Fantasy Life

2010-12-08T16:11:00.000-08:00

It seems our fantasy life, whether in acting writing or dreams, is the same thing. It obeys the same source, the same needs and the same structural imperatives when communicating it (successfully) to someone else. I guess that's why the deepest studies of all academic disciplines end up at the same place: a PhD; many faces of the same structured prism looking at one thing: human nature.

ON ACTING: The Self

2010-12-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

To must act exceedingly well, you must know yourself, like yourself, enjoy being yourself and want to share yourself. In good acting self-centered-ness is a a positive, creative and generous effort; "Here I am. May I be the author's conduit to your (the audience's) and my mirror?"

ON ACTING: Preparation; and Countering Avoidance

2010-12-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

For those of you who use images, drawn up from either your imagination or in reality from the past, to stir up your personal pool of emotions prior to entering scene, I issue a warning: your personal survival system will fight you every steps of the way!

Let's say you conjure up a certain image, let's say of an old boy friend or girl friend who rejected you some time past, to fire up your emotional vulnerability to potential rejection in an upcoming love scene. Let's say the image begins to work. You are feeling personal sadness or loss, and suddenly your mind switches to another thought. Or you will say to yourself: "Great...now I'm all prepared;" or "That's not the best image I can find. Maybe I'll try to remember someone else;" or "I'm over that person. It's in the past," or...or....or...or.

Beware all the string of 'ors'! They are tools of avoidance, forms of actor self-deception. Your everyday mind is trying the help you escape the intensity of the preparation. Great for a modulated life; bad for intensely exciting acting.

Stay with the initial image. Use the 'avoidance' stimulus'/occurrence as a warning sign! Avoidance came to you because the image was a powerful part of your real or imaginative experience...and it has frightened you.

Counter it. Get even more intensely specific about the image you were trying to avoid. What was the sound of the voice of the past person who rejected you? Do you remember the day he/she dumped you? Do you remember how it felt? What particular part of the body was effected first? Second? What did you do? Say?

The emotion will become stronger...AND you will try to runaway again. Your mind with move on to other thoughts again. You will feel you have done enough. You will think of another experience.

Resist. Counter the avoidance once. And again and again.

And only when you are comfortable being deeply and uncomfortably sad or filled with loss; and, ironically, when you want stay with the image forever and continue to provide deeper and deeper feelings and details about the image...at that point your preparation is ended.

At that point fear of feeling the particular emotion you are preparing for will have been banished...and the preparation is truly over...and fully effective.

Enter the scene.

(NOTE: But enter the scene as the character...who will, like in everyday life, be trying like hell to win the scene and not be forced to feel the prepared emotion! But be confident that your desired emotion--the feeling of sadness and loss in this case--will be activated, in spite of your character's best efforts because you have prepared; that is, you have heightened your susceptibility to being made sad by the other person(s)!)

ON ACTING: The Timing of Comedy Dialogue

2010-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

On stage, the actor says the line. The audience erupts in laughter. The actor has a quandary: when does he or she say the next line? Does she ignore the laughter and say the next line in the rhythm of the character inter-exchange? Or wait until the audience ceases all laughter (the actor maintaining character reality by being engaged in other activity) before speaking again?

Most all actors are instructed (properly) to "ride the wave of laughter": that is, wait until the explosion laughter of the audience peaks...then wait even further until the laughter begins to diminish (I would argue at an accelerating pace), and then...and only at that moment...before the laughter has fully played out...say the next line.

Comedy (the joke, the funny line...the funny action or reaction) is a release of tension. And if the actor waits too long for ALL the laughter to be released, the tension in the piece, the energy of the performance not to mention the whole piece, will dissipate, disappear, like a wave crashing to a foamy but basically un-energized frothy puddle.

Comedy (for that matter, good drama too) requires sustained tension. That tension can be relieved, modulated, played with during a performance by the good actor ...but it should never disappear. When it disappears, the audience 's involvement disappears.

Let the audience have their laughter/release, but never let them off the tension hook. May their sides hurt from laughing too much, getting no relief, than cease laughing entirely (all tension released) and be bored.

The great comedy writer/director Billy Wilder when responding to a similar question concerning whether he was not leaving enough time in his editing of The Apartment (it may have been Some Like It Hot) for the audience to laugh before he moved on to the next line (the questioner said "they may not hear the next line because they were still laughing..."). "Great," Wilder interjected. "I hope they laugh after the first joke and never hear any of the remaining film dialogue for the next two hours. It would be a great success."

ON ACTING: A Tip on Line Memorization

2010-11-27T19:05:00.000-08:00

A practical pointer for learning lines: practice learning your lines from the middle of a scene (or for that matter, from the middle of the whole play) at least as many times as you start learning them from the beginning.

As an actor, if you are anything like I am, you generally recite memorized lines intil you make a mistake, and then go back to the beginning and start over.

Do you see what that does? It automatically makes you repeat the early part of the scene many more times than you repeat the latter sections...making the early part of the scene more ingrained more deeply in your brain's muscle memory that the latter lines in the scene (or, as I say, in the whole play).

This compounds the memory dilemma because the latter part of a scene (or, once again, of a whole play) generally requires greater emotional involvement on the part of the actor...which more often than not makes memory more faulty; lines are more likely to be "dropped" in more emotionally engaging parts of an actor's performance; at the end of a scene of whole play than the beginning.

So let us expand our practical pointer to read: for every time you repeat your lines from the beginning of a scene or play, repeat your lines staring in the middle TWICE as much from the middle (to the end); once for pure equity in repetition, and, the additional time to prepare for the latter half of the scene's (or play's) demands on line memorization.

ON ACTING: On a Personal Note

2010-11-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

The following email was sent by an auditor in one of my classes. I post it on this web site because (1) It pleases me personally. (2) It pleases me and I want to share it. (3) It pleases me and I want to share it because the writer has the right attitude toward perfecting their acting: to become excellent in anything it takes hard word, the willingness to confront one's mistakes, and the confidence to be pleasant and forthright when dealing with that reality.

I hope and pray for nothing but success for this actor.

"Dear Cliff,
I just wanted to thank you for letting my crash your class last Wednesday. I really enjoyed the time you took not only to focus on me as a visitor but the way you handle actors in general. I love that you neither baby nor destroy the actor. I really appreciate your honesty with my work, and that you stopped me every time I strayed. I found myself trying to "act" like the character instead of being the character. It's been a while since I've had a wake up call like that, so thank you for the mini ass kicking.

"I also wanted to apologize for not telling you this as soon as the class let out. I work a lot of morning shifts at ______, and I was very tired by the end of class. However, this had nothing to do with how interesting I found your class. I later couldn't stop talking about everything you taught. My mind was reeling with words from the article you gave us, and left me contemplating how I approach being apart of a story.

"Thank you so much for the time you give to actors, especially us poor ones who would love to take your class had it not been for financial struggles. I really respect your passion for the arts, it seems so rare to find people who are actually passionate in Hollywood. I hope that I'll be able to come back and work with you again, because I can always use a good actor ass kicking!

"Sincerely,
K......."

She added, as an addendum: "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."

Thank you, K; thank you from an old teacher's heart and mind.

In order to touch many hearts, the actor must first touch his own.

2010-11-20T16:32:00.001-08:00

ON ACTING: The Opinionated Actor

2010-11-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

Every line of dialogue we speak (dare I say dialogue in life as well as in acting) is an opinion. Nobody know the truth. Talk (dialogue) is a hypothesis (not irrefutable fact) that we want others to believe (as truth). We seek concurrence in our opinions in order to facilitate the achievement of our goals through those others. If others believe what we believe, they will be more willing to give us what we want.

But...because all opinions by definition fall short of absolute truth, that should be no reason for the speaker to feel uncertain; or worse, feel that they should apologize for those opinions (words of dialogue).

NOBODY knows the truth...so, since nobody knows the truth, since you don't know the truth any better than I, my opinion is as good as yours; unless and until you convince me of the opposite,

So in terms of acting, a well acted, interesting scene is a fair, open and honest battle of opinions (dialogue). No more, no less. And good actors regale in giving as good as they get.

Bad actors, on the other hand, often seem angry, frustrated, moan-y or whiny when forced to give an opinion in order to secure the victory, or concurrence. Perhaps they act in those ways because they don't believe in their inherent right to be right, to their own opinion. They therefore don't find any joy in the tactical struggle of their logic vis-a-vis the other character.

Almost unfailingly the attitude of the uncomfortable-actor-in-conflict, as manifested in body and voice, betrays their dislike of the logical give-and-take. Those manifestation(s) of their discomfort makes the audience uncomfortable...which causes the audience (and similarly casting directors who often witness such performances) to find such actors exhibiting those traits off-putting and unappealing.

To such unappealing actors, those who find conflict and the battle of opinions lacking in pleasure and delight, I offer this suggestion. Learn to play the game ping pong; and learn to play the game human/dialogue ping-pong from it. Because that is what the dialogue in a scene is: a game of verbal ping-pong. The actors are the paddles in the scene, and their respective thought, as it is expressed in the dialogue, is the ping-pong ball, to be hit back and forth in a wide array of shots, some twisting, some hard, some with lots of spin, some tantalizing soft, perhaps even with backward spin, some not hit as a winning shot, but as a set-up for the following winning shot.

Actors: learn to enjoy the game of life; to have fun batting it back and forth. Remember, it is a game; a game of wits and wants and "believe me and agree with me or I'll keep battling with you forever." There is nothing about the game to get necessarily angry, or frustrated, or moan-y or whiny about. Conflictual tactics is life. We all are destined to play it. The only choice to be made is whether to play it gleefully or with chagrin. "It is not whether we win or lose, but how well we play the game; as in life, it is not the ecstasy of the victory or the agony of defeat, but the joy of the struggle." Such is life; such is good acting.

MOVIE REVIEW: "City Island"

2010-11-09T14:42:00.000-08:00

I saw a lovely, buoyantly happy film last night on DVD. It was written and directed by Raymond D. Felitta) and stars Andy Garcia (who also produced): "City Island." I must admit I--along with most moviegoers--missed it when it opened (the box office take was horrible) back in Spring when it was released in theaters.

It is one of those all-too-often sad tales of a 'small' Hollywood film that gets overlooked. It is a charming, well acted, and well envisioned. Its story made a promise in the opening minutes, and it fulfilled that promise. Such a rarity in most of today's films! It stars Andy Garcia, Julainna Margulies, Steven Strait, Alan Arkin and Emily Mortimer. They are all very good, and create very audience appealing character-performances.

Andy Garcia is more than good...he is excellent. I have never been a huge fan of Mr. Garcia's distinguished career--respectful but reserved in my enthusiasm for his work. But in this work he is superb. I am a fan now.

The film is and should be particularly joyous for actors and acting students to watch. Mr. Garcia's character is a prison guard by day; a closet acting student by night (he lies to his wife about his secret passion...he says he is going to poker games.) When he is given an acting exercise in class to tell the truth, he is encouraged by a fellow acting student (Ms. Mortimer) to spring on his family his deeper personal truth: the young man he brought home earlier in the film to live with his family as a rehabilitating ex-prisoner, is really his son from a long ago teenage romance. Not even the ex-con/small-time-thief son knows that truth.

Set on a small suburban island in the midst of New York City, the film setting becomes both real and surreally fantastic at the same time. The story events and scenes are filled with whimsy, humor, pathos and familial truth. Each character's personaly stories constantly intersect--and you participate in a dysfunctional family's deconstruction you love to love.

It is not a sophisticated film. And it doesn't pretend to be...thank God. Rent the DVD and watch it. It was recommended to me as a "Sunday afternoon film." I watched it on a Saturday night, late and dark, but it made the sun shine.

ON ACTING: Achieving Greatness

2010-11-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

Greatness cannot simply be wished for; it must be worked on. Effort is the method by which one gets the key to the actor's executive washroom.

Luck is a factor in human life, as it lightning; however, both strike with about the same frequency. Just as one must prepare to avoid the grounding possibilities of a lightning strike; one must equally work to create the conditions to attract luck to strike...and hold.

Perhaps one should one simply pray to the Gods for greatness? But that, too entails work: Which Gods? Which prayers? Do the most giving Gods simply want language and song, or do they require tithing and good deeds? Is attendance at church required? Must I embrace other religions as well? Or focus on one? Moreover, if I find greatness along that path, is achievement by Gods or Luck permanent? Or will good luck just hand around a while and then turn to bad? Are the Gods fickle? Will they love me forever?

Perhaps I should turn to hard work after all. It seems the most sensible path to my dreams. I hear sweat cleanses the body of toxins; hard work develops muscles, and effort leaves one with a pleasing sense of personal control. Even after failure, one can say: "I did all I could." "What more could anyone ask?" "We were the architects of our own design, rough-hew them how we will." Efforts banishes regrets. "We don't regret the things we haven't done; we regret the things we didn't try to do."

I have decided: I will work hard. I will follow the dictum that success is the child of blood, sweat and tears; achievement will more readily follow effort than Gods, luck or lightening.

Moreover, I've heard that to respect oneself first by one's commitment to work is to prepare the ground for other's working respect. And other's working respect is a great factor is achieving greatness. It is the bedrock on which other's self-respect is built; a synonym for perceived greatness.

I'm off to work: the gym, the computer, books, classes. I feel better already.

ON ACTING: From an Old Student: "Learning Lines, Being Prepared and Other Things"

2010-11-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

An email just came in that came in that made me smile and be happy:

"Hi Cliff,

I wanted to let you know that I just purchased your book! Congrats on its
release. I look forward to seeing your wise words in print that I heard for so
many years. I often quote you to young actors. I tell them your stories on sets,
your thoughts about comedy and tragedy, and your mantra about being prepared for
anything.

I'm now in a theatre company in SF as well as doing the
commercial/voiceover/industrial side of the business. Tomorrow I will be doing a
Visa corporate video, and I'm in the process of knowing my lines better than the
director. I learned that from you.

Thank you for giving me such a great foundation to begin my acting life. Take
care Cliff and I wish you continued success!

LR"

ON: "ACTING is LIVING"

2010-10-31T09:21:00.000-07:00

May I Share:

"Vernon Reeves Jr.,
October 29, 2010 at 10:12am
Subject: "Acting is Living"

Hi Cliff,
I just completed Chapter 1 of your book "Acting is Living". I don't know if you consider me one of the 20,000 [students that you learned from] or not but I would just like to say reading it , about being an actor, is like learning to play chess on 3 levels instead of one! It's awsome Cliff !! I am so glad you wrote this! I just wanted you to know!
Vernon"

Thanks.

ON ACTING: Quitters versus Losers

2010-10-31T08:02:00.000-07:00

There may be ‘losers’ in drama, but never quitters. Quitters, by definition, are characters who have withdrawn their active energy and intent from the scene, have absconded from the fight, who have withdrawn from the fray, who have quit. They should not even be considered characters or actors in the scene in the first place actors since they attempt nothing actively in the scene.

Irrespective of the probability of successful outcome, the 'loser’ in drama, as in life, are characters who keeps saying trying to win (by engaging in positive activities). Often in the face of seeming inevitable defeat, they continue to express in words and deeds: “I’ll find a way to win!” Losers by definition are compulsively positive people who try over and over again to win...thereby setting themselves up for inevitable defeat.

It is that 'never-give-up-quality' that makes ‘loser-characters' so dramatically appealing'--audience favorites (SEE Charlie Chaplin): they keep trying to win in the face of monstrous and constant defeat and rejection! They become paradigms of courage, icons of identifiable humanity. In literature and drama, they often become the constant companions of generals and Kings, the dispensers of wisdom: the most lovable, loyal and brave of all the King's horsemen and companions.

ON ACTING: The Truth Within

2010-10-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Concealment lies at the heart of acting. We are, we humans, and therefore our characters, initially deniers of truth. We wish to obfuscate our character's truth beneath our lies. We feel, and we must deal. But we fervently want success at minimum emotional cost. The pockets of our emotional lives are always filled with the riches of our personalities; but we are cheapskates when asked to pony-up as price for our goal-seeking rewards.

The most exciting characters are coupon-clippers; seeking a discount for otherwise high-priced items. They initially try mightily to avoid paying "full-price." It is only the construct of the scene and the other characters' equally strong negotiating stances that force our character to pay. And the operative word is 'forced'. The other person cuts a better deal, and we reluctantly obey: the price of our success is increasingly the fullest measure of our agony, ecstasy, pain, and pleasure. Thus the pockets of our emotions are finally, at scene's end, turned inside out, and we are "emptied" upon in the stage...and the audience revels in the fullness of our reluctantly revealed inner truths.

ON ACTING: Modify Your Behavior!

2010-10-24T03:04:00.000-07:00

A young man or woman seeking to be an actor has been preparing a character or narrow range of characteristics all their lives. What we call their everyday character is the common personality behaviour; often referred to as "who they really are", their predictable and expected behavioural patterns under the exigencies of the everyday. It has become their predictable personalities when placed in a particular context of, say, home, work, dance floor or at a sporting event.

The pressures and pleasures of all those everyday venues give seemingly automatic rise to their fundamental characteristics.

However, the venue suddenly changes; the actor is plucked from the everyday and is now placed in the artistically created context called story. However, all too often, their initial tendency from reading a script is to see that life through the prism of their own lives; to chose to behave according to the character traits or personality characteristics that they themselves would exhibit or imagine they would exhibit in such circumstances.

However, sometimes, the director or the scripts calls for uncommon (at least uncommon for the actor) reactions to the events of the script circumstances. The script calls for the actor to be happy at home when in truth, in his everyday life he reacts abysmally to domestic constraints. Or, at his scripted work, she is expected to be confounded and inhibited by her work demands, when in her everyday role, she is precise, aware and extremely capable no matter the task. Similarly, in the scripted world of a dance film: she is expected to move licentiously and bawdily, when most or her life she has danced the staid fox trot and waltz; and at a sporting event he is expected to cheer mightily and wager on every goal, when is his everyday life he finds sports a bore and gambling a sin.

What to do then in such a acting quandary? Turn down the role? Defy the director; play the character according to one's own artistic and interpretive lights?

Or does one try to strecth one's response to such behavioral demands to a form and substance outside of our everyday experience? Becoming, at smooth self-dictate, a now on stage happy husband, a clunk head worker, a vamping dancer and a sports nut?

Is it that easy; that an actor could alter one's lifetime everyday behaviour that precisely, that starkly and that brilliantly, and at a moment's notice...throw off the captive shackles of our own life histories of pride, prejudices and personalities...and become pliable, mold able Gumby's of human shape and substance?

Maybe for you; but for me it sounds like a lifelong course in behaviour modification is called for; a lesson in character chameleon-ism.

Behavior modification...that is the true business of most of us actors. In training and practice, we must learn to modify our chosen and often preferred and comfprtable everyday behaviour (rather willy-nilly, to be perfectly candid, or at least with very quick fluidity) to the demands of the new script, the new character shape, the new emotions, and new demand for composite character excitingness.

Emotional and mental flexibility (and their proper fuel, a life of courage) lies at the heart--and in the talent--of every great actor who seeks a variety of roles. Rigidity of thought, emotion, conception, values and attitudes is the toxin that poisons that quest for variety.

You are as an actor-as-character what you choose to be; what you allow yourself to be. Personal propriety, ethics, morality and political correctness are no longer part of the acting model; only consistency (to script), emotional reality and excitement are relevent.

It must be why they call acting work.

Passion without structure is indulgence; structure without passion is sterility.

2010-10-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

ON ACTING: Creating a Fully Dimensioned Character

2010-10-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

When you define your character’s objective, you must simultaneously find the character’s soft underbelly. It is the opposite side of your character's human coin. It is your character's inner sensitivity, the vulnerability, the susceptibility to defeat beneath your harsh shell of objective seeking.

It is the side of you the other characters are eager to probe and reveal. It could be the need for love; the desire for power; a flawed intelligence; the love of a child; sexual excitability: sides of you that can lead to defeat and disaster if not protected.

Because you want always to create a three-dimensional character, one that the audience follows in the drama's plot unfolding because your character can either win or lose, because your character has objectives and inner vulnerabilities simultaneously co-existent, you must, in your character preparation, do double duty: define your character's hard objective while at the same time activating your character's soft inner sensitivity; the well-rounded human being, hard and soft at the same time.

ON ACTING: To Disturb to Find a Greater Peace

2010-10-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

According to the New Yorker magazine, it was a cardinal belief of the great music composer Arnold Schoenberg that "music should exercise a critical function, disturbing rather than comforting the listener."

Could the same be said of acting?

Yes. And no.

An actor's performance should disturb an audience...deeply, intensely and with troubling complexity, but only to comfort them at the end of the drama; churn up the muddy waters of emotional experience so that it may settle more placidly and solidly in the long run. Throughout the performance, the actor-as-character should be so 'disturbed' by the events of the ongoing drama that the audience, in identifying with the actor-as-character throughout the piece, has its own 'peace' disturbed. However, and here Schoenberg and I might disagree, the drama--and the actor-as-character--should return the audience to a greater peace by the drama's resolution. Think of engaging in a military 'disturbance' to attain a greater peace; or to visit a psychiatrist, to revisit old wounds to attain a greater healing.

My hearing of Schoenberg has always been that he would perhaps argue for perpetual warfare, or, in musical terms, dissonance.

ON ACTING: Default Modes

2010-10-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

Every actor--and most everyday people, for that matter--have a "default mode". That means that under pressure, they resort to a comfortable and automatically adjusting behavioral "setting", a way of operating that is both habitual, comfortable and irresistible.

A default mode is generally created, sustained and practiced early in the actor's life because it worked; it got the actor/child the goodies.

The problem with default modes in an actor can be three-fold: (1) while practical and attractive to the actor, they often may be unattractive and therefore unappealing to an audience (whining is one such mode; another is emotional withdrawal); (2) they may be erroneous to character (for example, whining is not consistent with heroic action; emotional withdrawal is not consistent with a long scene) and (3) as a product of the past, they may be illogical to most if not all present circumstances: like paying for home owner insurance when you no longer own a home and/or the mortgage has already been paid in full.

Actor's (perhaps every day people, too) should check out their behavioral default modes. It would be like checking out your addictions. Do you control them or do they control you? Do they drive your likes and dislikes even when you don't want them to? Are they illogical, irrelevant or unappealing to circumstance?

Default modes should not be allowed to make you default in your career (or lives. for that matter). Actors should try mightily to dig into their personal computers, to deprogram their default modes, so they can change their unproductive settings at will and allow for a variety of possibly more appealing modes: like a sense of humor, steadfastness in the face of adversity, listening to and looking at others, and emotional bravery.

Is acting training a form of behavioral modification, then? Sometimes. To improve as an actor often requires us to improve (that is, to become more appealing) as a human being. What a radical concept!! Why don't we all commit to it. Two for the price of one: A better actor becomes a more appealing human being--at least on stage; and vice versa. The cost of such behavioral modification: the courage to change old safe, survival modes, ones that we have probably been operating under since our youth, and find new ones that both work for our survival needs and are appealing.

ON ACTING: Storytelling

2010-10-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

While emotion must dances its heartfelt dance within the actor's performance, storytelling must always engage the actor's performance focus. The actor may feel, but the feelings must be purposefully driven. His/her feelings must arise from the interplay of the actor-as-character's emotional self as it pursues storytelling action.

True, there are seemingly inactive stories, where the events are not propelled by the characters; where characters seem only to suffer inactively "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet's phrase), never seeming to shoot their own arrows, as it were, into the face of their own fate. They primary action seems only to survive. They are like leaves bobbing in a rapid filled river, the destiny dictated not by desire to swim to shore, but merely to stay afloat. That is their action. (And one might argue, the often post-modern condition.)

However, both swimming to shore and/or trying desperately to remain afloat take the same energy. They are but opposite sides of the same coin.

The one thing the good actor must never do is to allow themselves to drown into the de-energizing waters of their own emotion..,.to allow feelings to be the be-all and end-all of their total performance. They must either swim to shore or fight desperately to stay afloat. Anything else is performance suicide.

ON ACTING: More on Funny

2010-09-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

For the writer, actor and/or director, the task in comedy is to make the incredible credible, the outlandish possible and the buffoonish all-too-human.

Without comedy's ties to the emotionally real, comedy spins off into comment, superiority and an unsuccessful poke-in-the ribs. As anyone knows who has tried to tell a successful joke, the audience laughs less if the joke teller is telling the audience--either before or during the telling of the joke--that the joke is going to be a laugh-filled riot. Audiences will generally laugh more if the teller (or writer, director and/or actor) is having the joke happen by surprise.

A general rule: the less funny and more seriously or outlandishly real the situation and/or the joke is to the teller (or writer, director and/or actor), the funnier it will be to the audience.

ON ACTING: Funny is What Funny Does

2010-09-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

When you are preparing a character which you think is inherently funny, don't overlook the inherent part of that viewpoint. Inherent implies potential; that is, a character is potentially funny. They have the inherent capacity to be funny; but they are funny best IF AND WHEN...and this is the important part...the character is realized by their reaction to a situation. REACTIONS... reacting whether emotionally, facially or in dialogue "characteristically" to a situation (or to other people) is what makes characters truly and lastingly funny.

ON ACTING: Really Listening and Looking

2010-09-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

An audience can tell the difference when an actor is really looking at and listening and not just aiming his eyes and face at the other actor(s) in a scene. They can hear it in the actor’s voice: it is richer, fuller when being activated by specifically stimulated emotion; and see it in the actor’s eyes: they are focused when the actor is really looking.

Eyes are called the “windows to the soul” for good reason. They are an infinitely complex and startling composite of millions of cells. When they engage in specific visual perception, there occurs real and discernible changes in eye composition. And these cellular changes in composition cannot be controlled by an actor’s voluntary nervous system; an actor cannot pretend to be looking; he cannot choose to make them appear like he is seeing when he is not.

Therefore, a good actor, to ensure audience belief through enacted reality, must really look and listen to the other actors, must really read the newspaper on the table, truly scan photograph in their hands. When an actor does not, the actor’s eyes will have that glazed look, that ‘inner focus’ look; and the voice that comes from an actor not really listening and looking and therefore not emotionally stimulated by reality; it will lack complexity and resonance.

The audience may not have the courage to live life on stage according to the precise demands of acting, but they know life. They live it every day, and can recognize real life when it happens. And will be only fully stimulated and moved when that real life occurs.

ON ACTING: Martinet (Controlling) Directors

2010-09-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

A martinet director who demands precise exact, pre-determined performance actions should be treated respectfully in the following manner: the actor should nod sweetly to the misguided director, tell the director they will do exactly as the director asked; then, after the line is said or movement is done in performance by the actor according to the actor’s sense of reality and not the director’s martinet requirements, if the director is left unsatisfied and feels forced to re-iterate the demand in another performance--the actor should reply: “Didn’t I do it the way you wanted?! Let me try again.”

Martinet directors wear out sooner or later.

ON ACTING: Imagining the Unimaginable

2010-09-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

In order for an actor to be exciting, and therefore wildly popular (that is, after all, what we all want), they must take the audience on an emotional trip beyond the everyday. Just as audiences enjoy outer space movies, they also demand inner space movies.

Great performances demand actors take themselves beyond the conventional explorations of their own inner emotions, to travel beyond the known universe of feelings, beyond the superficial and conventional, to universal feelings they (both the actor and audience) have rarely experienced.

They say there are as many molecules in the human form as there are stars in the universe. Well, exciting actors take the audience beyond the know inner stars, beyond the known inner solar system, to far unimagined inner places.

To prepare for that exciting emotional journey, the actor must prepare herself: by first imagining the personal unimaginable; the sudden death of a favorite child, the murdering of a colleague, the death of oneself. To play Oedipus, who slept with his mother, killed his father and tore his own eyes out, the actor must first imagine such seeming unimaginable deeds, and be prepared to feel the deep. complex emotions which precipitate such actions.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? No. Must it be done? Most certainly. In order to deeply touch many hearts, one must first deeply touch one's own.

ON ACTING: Exciting Reality

2010-09-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

The student-actor had made an "choice" how to play a moment in the scene. I watched him, later said I didn't think it was a very good choice. The actor haughtily said to me "It's the way I'd do it in my everyday real life." I said "Maybe; but I doubted I'd be willing to for a $10.50 a ticket (or a $100 on Broadway) to see you in your everyday life. What I'd like to see are the choices you'd make if you were brave and exciting in your everyday life."

Sometimes a teacher has to be cruel to be kind!

A good actor knows that any acting choice must not only be real (i.e., logical to life) but must also be exciting. That's what training and experience are for: to teach and encourage actors not only to seek for reality in their performances, but to bravely seek moments of exciting reality.

"The person that pays the piper calls the tune." The paying audiences knows "real"; they experience it everyday life in their lives. They come to the theater to experience--and they often pay highly for--"exciting" reality. The actor's obligation is to provide it. Period.

ON ACTING: For the Love of It

2010-09-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

Do you know that the root work of amateur is "love of"? It comes from the Latin amo, amas, amat...to love. It suggests that actors, both professional and amateur, think of acting as "for the love of it", a chance to be intimately and intensely involved with another human being (and/or set of human beings) in a safe environment.

To act is to be able to the throw away life's fears and constraints, and to safely and deeply engage other human beings; to love, to hate, to be made sad by and to be made joyful with, other people without the danger of any long-term consequences: The scene'll only hurt--or confuse you or turn you on--for a little while. Then it's "Cut," or curtain close, and off to the dressing room and home.
What a wonderful life...if you willingly, actively and bravely love it.

ON ACTING: Whose Theme Are We Playing?

2010-08-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

In writing a play or screenplay, the writer is trying to create a vision of the world that makes a statement; usually the writer's statement. Sometimes, in film, however, especially when writer's are paid up front for their writing efforts, that intent is that of the producers. The old adage applies: "The man pays the piper calls the tune."

Sometimes the theme is that of the director, especially one who is more famous than the producer. Other times it is the the star's theme, especially one who is "bank-able" (that is, a bank is willing to put up the money for the film because the star attached has the draw to put so many ticket-buying bottoms in the seats of theaters). In that case, the writer writes the script according to theme and point of view of of the star; $$$$ always calls the tune, remember.

The work-a-day actor (unless in the exceptional case of the demanding star) has nothing to do with manifesting directly the vision of the overall piece. Hired-in actors are mercenaries. The individual hired actor's job is to carry out the vision of the character; even if it is contradictory to the overall theme. In fact, often, in our playing of that very contradiction, the overall theme is often best served. For example: as the heavy in the piece, I am not hired to carry directly the banner of goodness, honor and decency; which are, let's say, the overall themes of the piece. My job is to carry the banner of evil, dishonor and indecency...with an exciting totality and vengeance, I might add. It is only when I am killed or otherwise defeated (which I, as the character, in no way want), the goodhearted theme of the piece is best moved forward in spite of me and my character's beliefs.

What I am getting to here is to warn actors not to openly and absolutely advocate in the performance-as-character the overall intent of the piece. Play the intent of the character, which, as I reiterate, may, or may not, align itself with the intent of the piece.

Sometimes our character's beliefs and themes will be in alignment with the piece's theme; sometimes they will not be. It is not our humble actor's lot to decide. Our lot is to be true to character... that is, of course, until the day we write our own screenplay or play; or produce one; or become a star! Then, all aligns itself according to our stars!

ON ACTING: Instincts

2010-08-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Actors are often instructed: "Follow your instincts." "Don't let your head get in the way of your instincts." "She's an instinctive actor." "In your instinctive behavior lies the truth."

All of these statements in support of an actor's instinct are valid...with one slight alteration: "Follow your honed instincts." "She's a honed instinctive actor."Don't let your head get in the way of your honed instinctive acting."

Athletes are often admonished and praised in a similar manner. But no one would suggest that a professional athlete walk out of a field and act instinctively without ever having played the game a long time and without the coach having had the team run through their game plan. Instincts serve a professional athlete at game time because their instincts have been honed through a thousand repetitions before the game and in a career of amateur and professional ball-playing.

A great surgeon follows their instincts in every individual operation--every operation is different because a different individual is involved--but you sure as hell want that doctor's instincts to be unhoned though prior classroom work, internship and residency...and quite a few similar operations in the near past,

Instinctual behavior is fine...in acting or any other endeavor...as long as it has been honed through years of training and practice.

I remember working many years ago as a new actor on an episode of Dr. Kildare opposite the great actor Lee Marvin. Lee was one of the greats actors of his time; eventually to win an Academy Award. Purportedly earlier in his career Lee had his onscreen time cut down in "The Wild One" because he was overshadowing Marlon Brando, whom the producers wanted to feature in the film.

Between every take, I notice Lee jotting something down in his script. I was more than curious. It was during the first year of my Hollywood career and I was hungry for information and growth as an actor.

Lee had been very open to me duribg the first few days of shooting (we had the same agent). So one day, I asked him what he was writing in his script. He handed me the script and said generously, "Here. Look for yourself," and went off to the bathroom. I sat in my chair and looked. Much to my surprise there was little Lee had written down; except, at the heading of every scene, in bold handwriting, Lee had notated his character's objective. I was aghast. That simple? My script was full of my notations on how to approach and play every line of my scenes; yet Lee's was "I've got to get out of the hospital," or "I want her to love me," "I've got to comvince him to get well."

That was it.

No great emotional designations, or line reading hints? How could that be? When I had watched Lee work in his scenes, his performances were filled with interesting and varied moments of great emotion and character turns.

It took me years to figure it out why Lee could be instinctively brilliant.

Lee didn't need a plethora or self instruction and hints to performance written down in his script. All he had to do was aim toward a goal in a scene, listen to the other actor's dialogue...and instinctively he would respond in a most interesting and varied manner. How? Simple; yet not so simple. His acting "instincts" had been honed by years of study and practice.

In every scene Lee may have performed by the instinctive seat of his pants, but those instinctive pants had been designed, cut and sewn by decades of practice and work.

Perform with your instincts, but work endlessly honing those instincts.

Teachers teach in order to learn.

2010-08-21T22:12:00.001-07:00

ON ACTING: Teachers

2010-08-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

The root word of education is the Latin word ‘educare,’ meaning to draw forth. Teachers are guides in the discovery and organizing of yourself. Teachers pass onto you nothing new; they enable you to discover the old that already resides in you. All truths, knowledge and wisdom are evolving symbolic magnets of human ideas and experiences to attract to your consciousness possibilities already within you.

For that matter. there is nothing new; there is only the old too be discovered and re-fashioned in each person over and over again. The universe outside and inside you is already there, waiting to swim to the surface of each individual's consciousness as a tool. Teachers don't teach anyone anything; they help each individual move out of their protective, self-imposed, fearful darkness of innocence and step into the light of their own wisdom.

Know yourself, and you will know everything.

ON ACTING: Bad Acting Habits

2010-08-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

All bad acting stems from a similar source: the bad actors' lack of confidence or refusal to stand in their own light. By that I mean, such actors refuse to fully be themselves (the aspects of themselves called for by the script) and perform with freedom and fullness. Such actor timidity in the face of performance demands results in filling the performance void by false acting; which has many guises, masks and forms: for example not really listening to the other actors in the scene, or a refusal to be really, emotionally and personally affected by the events encountered in the scene (including the other character's dialogue), or a constant consciousness of one's own performance rather than a focus on the events of the scene, most especially the other characters/actors in the scene. Other bad acting habits include the actors' auto-stimulating of emotions rather than, as in real life and in good performing, having emotions activated by the external events of the scene; or emotionally and reactively anticipating the events in a scene before the events actually occur; and/or highlighting one's actions in a scene for the audience consumption rather than in conformance to the inner logic in the playing of the scene.

As I say, all bad acting habits result from a lack of confidence, often heightened by a lack of understanding of, or appreciation of, the power of personal emotional truth and performance reality; sometimes exacerbated by bad instruction (teaching) or direction. A good actor therefore needs practice, experience, and proper instruction; and all that eventually melds into a free flowing and powerful performance ease. An auditioner can tell a good actor when they walk into the room, The good actor exhibits confidence in their self and craft and it manifests itself in what they call "presence"; presence simply meaning the actor's willingness to confidently state (without words): "Hi. I'm present. What do you need?"

ON ACTING: Auditioning and the Script

2010-08-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

The auditioning actor should never worry about their dialogue delivery when she/he has a script in hand.

Dialogue is just another “thing” in the actor's hands, to gently offer, share or if angry, throw at someone during a negotiation (i.e., between characters in the scene). The character's next line on a page is a simple utensil, a pliable instrument available on a tray before us and available to pick up and use at any time when we engage someone who has just said something to us.

Dialogue is the actor/warrior's gift from the writer; on the printed page it is just just below our eye level; all it takes is a fleeting casual look to easily discover it, and then gently (or mightily or sadly or however we feel) aim it at the opposing character.

The writers send us into battle. But before they do, they arm us with a page or two or three of verbal tools; language. mere weapons that are nothing more than pillows stacked on a chair before us, or sandwiches on a plate, or pebbles on a beach, ever-ready for us to pick up to toss at someone at our pleasure and leisure. The actor shouldn't panic or freeze when a scene’s conflict requires a verbal retort selected from the page of the auditioning script. Rather the actor should maintain emotional--if not always visual--contact with the opposing adversary, glance quickly and casually away from them and down at the page in their hands, pick the idea off the page and hurl it at the other character.

It is as simple as that. After all, who among us worry--or even thinks long--about the simple act of picking up a coke, sandwich or hammer and tossing it as someone? If w feel like tossing...we toss. We leave it up to our feelings to decide and dictate our actions, those generally totally unconscious and perfectly natural (albeit dramatic) activities.

So that is exactly how we should behave when someone says something to us in an auditioning scene: we pick up a responsive piece of dialogue off our page to heave something back at them. “There. Take that. So what do you have to say about that? That statement (word, idea) should finally prove to you I’m right and you are wrong…and I deserve to get out of this relationship what I want.”

End of moment.

After a series of such moments (some of them even most tender and confusing throw-backs): End of scene.

End of actor worry about delivering a piece of dialogue in an audition while holding a script in their hand. Words, pillows, sandwiches…what, me worry?...I can pick them up and toss them at someone as I do in everyday life…with ease, elegance and often gentleness and love. ‘No sweat’.

Next audition.

ON ACTING: Character 'Arc'

2010-08-13T12:31:00.001-07:00

Character 'arc', or character development--its twin acting phrase--is an important demand in good acting. It is the idea that there should be a progression to the character revelation in the story: whereof what we know about the character in the beginning of the play, or scene, is not what we know about her at the end of the play or scene. Her character develops. In a sense, as the scene progresses, her character denial--to self and others--is being transformed into experienced and revealed character truth.

An arc is the beginning, middle and end progression of character or inner emotional change.

A well acted scene is like an inner detective story: as ‘the case’, the plot, moves toward resolution, the audience (and often inadvertently, the character) discovers the emotional content of the character’s inner ‘story’. Personal emotional truth is increasingly revealed. The character’s inner emotional ‘plot’ unfolds in a manner that mirrors the unfolding of the character’s outer factual plot.

Thus, in every good scene, unfolding inner and outer truth arcs has, by the end of the scene, melded into one revealing culminating climax.