Long Ago and Far Away . . .

We're living in the early part of the 21st Century. Well . . .most of us are. There are parts of the world where they're still looking forward to 1600, but that's another story. Anyway - for those 21st Century actors reading this, please take a moment to contemplate a life in the 19th Century - say in the time of Dickens. Or in the late 16th Century in the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Those writers, indeed writers of every stripe in any century, wrote for their own audience. They weren't writing for posterity. At least I don't think they were. Imagine the look on Euripedes' mug if he knew that some 2,600 years after he wrote it, a University in Athens (Georgia)was going to produce Electra. Is it important, then, even if the director dresses his cast up like a womens basketball team for the company to know something about the playwrite and the time in which he lived?

The answer is yes. Even if the production strays far from the author's original intent. In order to sit on top of a ladder and drip paint onto a canvas, did Jackson Pollock have to know something about formal aspects of painting? Same answer. So in order to move away from the original play, it would behoove us to know where the original play came from.

But even if we're doing King Lear in spacesuits, odds are we'll be speaking Shakespeare's words, more or less as he wrote them. In order to do that convincingly, we have to understand every word, it's original context and how to pronounce it. The farther all that is from our own experience, the more work we have to do. It is, in fact, a translation issue. The actor has to translate archaic language into something that is easy and familiar

Recently, I coached an actress who had to shoot several scenes speaking Mandarin. She's oriental, but Canadian, and didn't speak Mandarin at all. She learned the Mandarin pronunciation and inflection and her father gave us the English translation. As we worked, she learned the beats, emotionally and physically, in English and then, by associating them with the Mandarin words, was finally able to play the scenes in Mandarin.

That's precisely what I'm suggesting you do with language that isn't your own. With Shakespeare, for example, put the text into your own words. Learn the beats by association, make sure everything is clear and well defined - then play the Shakespearean text. There are plenty of other things you have to do in order to play Shakespeare properly, but we'll save that for another day.

The Soloist. . .

Based on Steve Lopez' book about his relationship with former cello prodigy, Nathaniel Ayers, mentally ill and living in the Dickensian shadow world of Los Angeles' 90,000 homeless, The Soloist,while often moving - and filled with the glorious sounds of great music, comes up short.

What is of particular interest to actors, though, is how Jamie Foxx navigates his way through the tortured mind of a schizophrenic genius. To put it simply, an actor can't play a crazy person. It's impossible - in the same way as playing "God" or "The Devil" is impossible. Nor can you be "in limbo", as many writers suggest - unless you know the color of the rug and where the toilet is. But I digress.

The clear answer here is that when playing a mentally unbalanced person, as Leonardo DiCaprio did in Gilbert Grape,many years ago and Jamie Foxx does now in The Soloist, is to play each beat, accompanied by the appropriate emotional and physical support, string them together - and let the text create the impression of mental illness. In other words, dear actor, you simply organize the beats as you would with any other character and trust to the text and environment to do the rest of the work for you. The temptation is to generalize, to try and play a concept of crazy. It's a mistake.

Remember Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate or George Burns in Oh, God? These chaps went beat by beat doing horrible things and wonderful things in their respective movies and the circumstances prescribed by the writers and directors of these pictures made Pacino The Devil - and Burns a cigar smoking God with coke bottle eyeglasses. Just play the beats, trust the script to do the rest of the work for you.

Oh Dear . . .

I went to the theatre the other night and was disappointed. This isn't an unusual occurrence. From the perspective of the actors/acting it was a very mixed bag. The director misread the play. You've gathered by now I'm not going to tell you what show, where and who - because this isn't a review and those particulars are unimportant. What's important are the technique issues the production raised and what might have been done about them.

It is definitely an ensemble piece in which most of the actors contribute almost equally to the effect of the whole. But there is a central character who carries the core of the play. Discussing this with a couple of students last night and with the lady who accompanied me to the theatre, they were all equally at a loss as to who that character might be.

There are a couple of problems here. First of all, the director is, when all's said and done, the company leader. It's the director's job to build a vision for the play, and to guide the actors' performances so they all, as a unit, fulfill the writers intent. That didn't happen. And this is where the actors responsibility to himself comes in. In reading the play, one of the first things that needs to be done is to determine what your character arc is. In other words, how do you change from the beginning of the play to the end, what are the steps along the way and when do the changes occur. This just didn't happen. The actor might have been miscast, but that still doesn't excuse missing the critical business of finding the essence of the characters inner state. Both things, both bad, unfortunately happened: No character arc and no viable inner state of being.

And it wasn't just the main character. All of the performers played from the chest. Loud, technically laudable, but rarely did emotion drop down to the gut. Consequently, the performance had zero emotional effect. Maybe the company decided it wasn't meant to be emotionally engaging. Bertolt Brecht believed emotion took away from the audiences rational examination of the plays message and was astonished when he discovered he'd been oh so wrong for years. Audiences would dissolve in tears at the pain and passion of Helene Weigel's "Mother Courage", and our Bert didn't get it. Well, finally, he did - but that's another story.

I've come to believe that if you don't care about the emotional content of the play, if you aren't moved by the plight of the characters, the message, like the best Chinese meal you've ever eaten, will dissipate shortly after you leave the theatre, leaving you hungry once again. The message of a play is delivered through the struggles of the people personified in it. Actors take note. It's all about the feeling, not how loudly and/or competently you speak the words.

Fuhgedaboudit . . .

Why is it so hard to just let the performance go? To trust that if you come into the scene, prepared for the first moment - all you need do is let the play/film, the other actors, the environment draw the performance out of you, spool it out as smooth as a cast by a well tutored fly fisherman. Imagine what would happen to that poor bugger if he insisted on examining the line every 6 inches or so. Hook removal must hurt like hell!

So why do you, dear actor, insist on examining every line before you speak it? The chief reason is that you don't accept the environment of the script as real and you don't accept yourself as real playing within it. Self-consciousness or, rather, global consciousness of self is the villain here.

In the real world, where everything for response to the environment, other people, our own joy and/or angst is provided, free of charge, so to speak, our behavior is natural and spontaneous. In the world of the script, as I've told you many times before, none of those stimuli are real at first. Your job is to place them in the text, using the environment, all dialogue and your own (actually, your character's) state of being as a source for all your responses within a dramatic scene. You learn all of this in order to assimilate it and then forget it!! Forget it!!

Forget it. That's not easy. You've been trained since birth to use conscious thought in order to produce a good result. It's the way 99% of people in the world operate. And you can't. You simply cannot do it and succeed as an actor. Forget the fear factor. Don't worry about giving up control of your performance. You're not giving up anything. In fact, you're enabling the dramatic circumstances to become your reality - which is essential in order to enable the audience, for a while, to accept what you're up to as the real thing.

Think, for a moment, about the best performances you've ever seen. What every one of them has in common is that you can't tell where the actor ends and the character begins. It's a seamless blend and you accept it as real.

I can't, simply by writing about it, jolt you into giving up conscious control of your performance. Believe me, I'd do plenty of butt kicking, if I was there, in the moment with you. You'd give up thought as a performance tool in self defense. I promise you, it would be ugly!! You wouldn't need Joe Pesce coming after you with a baseball bat. You'd have me, yapping, "Fughedaboudit!!"

Short but Very Sweet . . .

In class today, I was observing a scene in which one of the actors was sitting off by herself - seemingly uninterested in what her fellow actor was saying. No reaction - zip, zilch. I stopped the scene and asked her what she was doing. "Well," she replied, "I'm ignoring her." Aha!. Thought it - didn't say it. Might have said "Eureka", if it'd occurred to me. But . . .

This was a case of the actor playing her objective - which was "To Ignore", without playing the obstacle which was "She Keeps on Talking!" The rule is simple. You can't ignore that to which you don't at first pay attention. And if the other party keeps going on, you find moments where you continue the pattern of "attention/ignore."

Remember. It's all about what you have to overcome in order to achieve your goal. Conflict is the essence of drama.

Remarkable . . .Part Deux

Although J.S. Bach's statement inexactly but still accurately quoted - ". . . you hit the right keys at the right time, and the instrument plays itself" - doesn't need further explanation, I will, like a dog with a very good bone, chew on it some more.

Stating the obvious, dear actor, you are the instrument. The keys to your performance have been studied and learned throughout rehearsal and diligent homework. You've assigned the right emotions to the proper lines. You have learned precisely when they must happen during performance and when to squeeze the trigger. Notes and keys all present and correct.

The beauty part of what 'ole JSB said - and, perhaps, not so obvious, is the "playing itself" part. Here's what it means and why it's so danged important for you to store it away, burn it into your brainbox and follow its rule absolutely, completely and forever.

After all the work you've done to prepare for performance, TRUST YOURSELF. Play your moment before for every scene - that critical, necessary moment that prepares you for the first instant we see you - and then LET THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE SCENE draw out the performance stored inside you without constraint. You are the instrument. The instrument plays itself. It is really so simple. Trust is the hard part.

Remarkable . . .

"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

-- Johann Sebastian Bach


How's that for a Friday afternoon in April, 2009. Think about it!

Taking Stock . . .A Personal Inventory

By the time you're 15 - maybe younger - you've felt the full gamut of human emotion. You probably haven't done anything about most of them at that tender age - but you've experienced the impulse. In your early 20s, there's a lot of "been there, done that" introspection going on, emotionally speaking. And in fact, before you hit the age beyond which no one trusts you - metaphorically speaking, you've done it all.

"Craziness!", you cry. "Never!" I beg to differ and I'm allowed to. My blog. My way. For example. Here's a wake-up call for all you lethal non-killers out there. Tree Huggers and Earth Worm devotees - those of you who swear that cooking broccoli sends you into paroxysms of grief. Lobsters - yeah I get that one. Inhuman, actually. But I digress.

Alright. You're camping. Pay attention. At 3 A.M. there's an infernal buzzing around your head. You swat at it. It stops for a second, only to return with fiendish vigor. You swat again - this time to no avail. The high-pitched drone seems endless. Sleep eludes you. Suddenly, maniacally, you leap out of the sleeping bag, find a shirt, a flashlight, a toothbrush - whatever comes to hand - and you go after that sunovabitching "droner" like one possessed. And you get it! Squish it up against the wall of the tent (which may or may not remain upright) or against the body part of a companion who also may or may not remain upright. But, oooh! The satisfaction. Tell me about it killer!

So there you have it. You've felt the need to "end" something and you've done it. So that emotional hook is there and it's accessible. I'm not nuts and I'm not trying to equate doing a mosquito with blowing away a person. So this isn't quantitative. But it is qualitative.

Using this model, mixed with a little imagination, you can locate any emotion within yourself and apply it to a given moment in the text. You get into trouble when you read the text in despair because -"I've never done that!" Sure you have and if you look inside yourself, you'll find the emotion that propels the action you need. I've just proved it to you. This probably needs further explanation -which, I promise - will be forthcoming.

Listen Up . . . Part II

I've had sessions with several students this week, all of whom have the same problem. They now, at least, understand the importance of listening to the other actor so that response can be based on what's being said, implied or questioned. But all these new actors, listen globally and not specifically.

Let's say, for example, a passage of dialogue contains a half a dozen sentences. If you examine those lines, you might find 5 commas, a colon and 6 periods - give or take. The actor listening to that dialogue should understand his/her overall emotional response to the lines, of course. But the punctuation marks are a clue to shifts in the dialogue and should be examined as a stimulus for a shift in response.

Inexperienced actors, worrying about getting their own lines in on time, will respond with a lick and a promise at every other period - but they ignore the battalion of shifts available to them, as indicated by the shifts in their partner's dialogue.

What's interesting about this is that if actors listen and respond to every phrase, every nuance coming at them in the dialogue, they'll never have to worry about their own lines. They'll naturally slide into the pattern of the scene as nice as you please.

It's a fail-safe way to make sure you're in the moment and not in your head. After all, if you're focused outside yourself, on the words and behavior of someone else - you can't be thinking about yourself, can ya? That's what listening's about!

Body and Soul . . .

An old song, to be sure. They don't make 'em like that anymore. Actors, take note. What the audience relates to: You. All of you, body and soul. Too many actors, especially young ones, don't realize we need the whole enchilada. Inner Life, Voice and Physical Being. All three elements are brought to bear on every spoken moment. Acting conservatories, the good ones, anyway, insist that their students be trained to move and speak as well as to feel. Too often, these academies fail to connect the dots for their students - but that's a subject for another day.

So. If the text is a structure, then it stands to reason that in order to meet that structure, we apply all of our resources to it. Stanislavski, the great Russian theorist and teacher, proclaimed: "Chance is the enemy of art." He was right. The problem for the actor, then, is this. How can movement, gesture, voice and inner life all be brought to bear on the moment and not stifle it? Can we build the performance in such detail and then leave the hammer and drill at home when we perform? The answer is yes!

Creating specific, focused detail is fine - as long as we learn it, absorb it and then forget it. What we learned will stay with us, guaranteed.

I was talking to a student about this today and showed her Abbot and Costello's hilarious "Who's on First" routine. It's as wonderful today as it was 60 years ago. Every second of it - every nuance, every gesture had to be worked to a fare-thee-well - and yet when you watch it, it appears as spontaneous as if they were performing it for the first time. The economy of movement is fantastic, vocal emphasis is perfect and the inner process flawless. If you haven't seen this classic turn recently, It might be worthwhile to revisit it. Right now!

More Words . . .

Actors, au fond,(showin' off again!)are communicators. In an age where young folk are losing the ability to write a coherent sentence, the actor remains, willing or unwilling, an agent for the glory of words. Language. Until telepathy becomes further advanced - we have to depend on expressing ourselves the old-fashioned way. Is it only me who shudders when I hear/read something along these lines: "Well . . .like he went, that's sick." Then she like . . .goes . . ."You wish! ROTFLMFAO." That's shorthand. Talk to a teenager. Anyway, the language of The Bard deserves better, and the actor had better deliver

What some actors don't know - and which many have forgotten - is that words are the verbal expression of the inner beat. If a character feels strongly about something and the writer has captured the emotion accurately, then the words should accurately communicate the feeling. This really needs to be demonstrated, not explained - but I'll do my impoverished best

Let's say we've defined the inner beat as "prideful anger/vengeful fury." The lines are:

"Well my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th' legitmate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards."

(King Lear, Edmund - Act I,ii

Without going into the rules for speaking Shakespeare, it's abundantly clear that words like "letter", "speed", "invention", "thrive" and so on, are filled with lots of juice. The actor playing Edmund has to squeeze every drop out of them, propelled, of course, by emotional truth. If the words are flat, emotion remains hidden, meaning falters, the drama is diluted and the play fails. Not a happy outcome.

All dramatic text is expressed through words that carry emotion. The actor has to locate their meaning, express emotion through them - thus keeping audiences engaged in the play or film. It's been said, truthfully, I think - audiences don't go to the theatre to merely hear the words. They can buy the script and read the words themselves. They go to the theatre to experience feelings that support the words. It's human process, created by the actor, that makes for vibrant drama.

Words, Worlds and what we do about them . . .

I’m continually amazed by what young actors don’t know. Maybe it’s the world we live in. Something about the air we breathe that suffocates intellectual curiosity. Whatever it is, and this isn’t a research paper into the fatal flaws inherent in modern life, young actors display a fearsome lack of knowledge about the world of the script they’re about to populate.

I’ve stated in an earlier post, several earlier posts, actually, that one of the actors jobs is to make the dramatic text his/her own reality during the visit, no matter what the duration, into the world of the play or screenplay.

When I first encountered Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”, I was struck by the curious reaction of the guests at Irina’s Name Day party, corresponding to what we would call her 21st birthday celebration, when Dr. Chebutykin presented her with a silver samovar. All the guests were thunderstruck, embarrassed. There were rivers of tears. Anton Chekhov, great writer that he was, one of the greatest in the history of theatre literature, saw no reason to explain this phenomenon. Why would he? The audience he wrote for would know instantly what the problem was.

I, not being Chekhov’s contemporary, despite having been called a museum piece on more than one occasion, didn’t know very much about life in pre-revolutionary Russia at the turn of the 20th Century.

So, without the benefit of google and the resources of the world-wide web (see – I am a museum piece!) I researched the bejesus out of it all and found my answers. Not just to the samovar issue, but to life for that class of people in that part of the world at that time in their history.

So if you’re waiting for me to slake your thirst and provide the answer. . . Or if you don’t know what a samovar is in the first place, well friend, may I refer you to Google, Wikipedia and all the other fabulous tools available to you today on the Internet. It’s called due diligence. And finding the answers, my actor friend, is your responsibility.

I could have produced “The Three Sisters” in a state of shining ignorance, but that would have created a hole in the fabric of the reality we were trying to create. A half-real world is no world at all, in my opinion. And in this forum, that’s the opinion that counts. You make a single mistake in the consistency of the world you’re creating, and that mistake can easily lead to another and so on – until the whole thing comes a cropper.

Here’s a question for you. If you came across the word “samovar” in a script you were reading the next day at a first rehearsal, and you didn’t know what the word meant, would you go to a dictionary to find out its’ meaning before the rehearsal? Be honest now. In my experience, most young actors would let it slip, try to throw it up in the air at rehearsal and see where it lands. I’m sorry to have to tell you that at best, that attitude is slipshod and at worst irresponsible. If you don't know what you're saying, there's a 90% chance the beat you play will be incorrect.

In this day and age there is also no excuse for saying or mispronouncing any word appearing in a dramatic text – unless that word is truly arcane and impossible to get your tongue around. Even then –know what it means and do your best to say it.

Every mistake we make in creating the world implied by the text – including the words spoken in that world, makes a hole in its unity and breaks the audience out of the illusion of reality we’re trying to project. Much more on that coming up.

The Myth . . .

Ever since I began teaching acting to boys and girls looking at the “sport” with stars in their eyes, I’ve been assailed by an unassailable truth. The myth. Here’s the myth. Film acting must be real. That in itself is absolutely true. So what’s the myth?, you ask. Ah ha. I’ll get to it I promise, but it requires noodling around a bit.

Reality is relative. As I’ve said many times before – there’s your every day eat breakfast, go to work, be bored, go on a date, be bored reality and there’s Leo DiCaprio’s reality in “The Departed” or “Blood Diamond.” Different kettles of flounder, wouldn’t ya say? So why do beginning actors (and failed older actors) substitute reality number one for reality number two?

The myth. At last. The myth tells the unwise that in order to be viable for film, you have to dumb down for the camera. Back off, be smaller than you are on stage. Vibrant emotional attack on text is movie actings Ebola. The virus’ll kill you dead. Well, how silly is that? I wanted to say “stupid”, but that’s inflammatory. So – wanting to be Hollywoods next best, biggest thing, the hopeful Wattses and LaBoeufses reduce text to a dish as boring as scrambled eggs without the yolks. Young actors doing an elderly care facility version of, say, “Fargo” just isn’t on! “Oh. Let’s throw Buscemi into the wood chipper, but lets not get too excited about it. “ Balderdash.

Okay. Let’s get real, so to speak. The camera is a magnifying glass. It puts certain constraints on the size of what you can do in the frame. There’s a microphone 8 inches or less from your pie hole – which puts additional constraints on your vocal output. But that’s no license to kill via eye drooping boredom. It is your absolute responsibility to forget your own less than scintillating reality and bring yourself up to the emotional demands of the dramatic text. It’s simply not negotiable.

The camera, that ‘ole magnifier, wants to see every twist and turn in your inner process – as many shifts as the text allows. Without resorting to the 7 year itch, the more shifts, the more interesting the performance. The camera wants to see the fire boiling in your belly and shooting out of your EYES. The eyes, if you didn’t realize it before – you better get it now, are the primary tool for generating and focusing the heat and importance of the emotional beat.

En fin. I ain’t just a pretty face. Erudition, friends, erudition. You compress the physical attributes of your performance to fit the frame. You compress the emotional vibrancy of the performance to fit the frame. But you dare not go in with an empty tank, thinking that a bare recital of the words will carry you through. For those of you still in doubt, revisit DiCaprio in “The Departed.”

24/7. . .The Camera Never Sleeps!

For on-camera actors, the whole business of needing, craving, demanding response from others takes on an added dimension. You have to assume the camera’s always on. On you! The editor/director, of course, decides when to come to you for reaction, but you better have something for them to come to.

I’ve been told, and I’ve no reason to doubt it, that many casting directors are more interested in how you respond to the (dumb) reader than how you deliver lines. That may be an exaggeration, but how you respond to the reader is unquestionably very important.

When an actor asks me to coach her (guys too, of course!) for an audition, one of the first things we do is go through the other actors lines in order to determine how and when to respond to the stimuli contained in the text. Usually, you have no more than 48 hours to prepare for an audition, so quick work and quick decisions are absolutely necessary.

You know the reader’s probably gonna be a dud, but you have to respond as though you were working with Depp or Streep. One of the pitfalls of on-camera. I said in an earlier post, and I’m not drumming up business here – if you can afford the relatively modest fee – and it’s an important audition, go to a coach. That outside, objective eye can make all the difference.

Bottom line. You may be able to get away with the occasional lapse on stage – although I don’t encourage it – but film is utterly unforgiving. The camera is like a magnifying glass and it will pick up on interior emptiness – which you absolutely cannot afford.

So the message is: Work on the environment, the other characters dialogue and everything else, as hard as you work on your own lines. That allows you to know how, when and why to respond. That nasty ole’ camera is on you 24/7

Answer . . .please. . .

A man walked into a bar . . . No. Sorry. You’re in a bar with a pal, burbling away – or shouting away – depending on the ambience and, as usually happens, nothing of importance is transmitted in either direction. So it’s not a matter of life and death if your pal ignores your question and responds with an equally unimportant question of her own. It’s a bar for chrissake and you’ve done this thousands of times and this is the 6th time you’ve seen each other today, so chill! Fair enough.

But, as I’ve mentioned many times before, dramatic text ain’t real life. Each situation, every scene is fraught. That’s right, fraught. There’s something at issue, something that needs to be accomplished, a conflict, people working at cross-purposes. Fraught. The text is structured that way. Otherwise, folks, we wouldn’t be interested in watching it play out.

So for every question asked in a scene, be it from from a play or movie, the answer to the question is important to forwarding the action. Moving it along. Unfortunately, many actors don’t ask questions to which they really want the answer. Or they fail to check to see if a point they’ve just made has hit home. Instead, they make declarative statements which don’t demand a response from other characters in a scene. This is unnatural and, therefore, not real. It’s also unfortunate.

If you don’t invite response from others, or are not interested in how they react to important things you’ve offered up, you cut off communication. Cut off communication, the audience loses the thread. Lose the audience, game over. Another example of what we do naturally in a real life situation that’s fraught (becoming my favorite word) that we often fail to do in a fantasy scenario that’s equally fraught. And they all are. Simple enough. “You get it? Answer me . . .please.”

Listen Up . . .

New actors (and some old ones, too!) listen up, for the sake of your personal saviour! This isn’t sophistry or cleverness (well . . .I like being clever) – but, rather, an essential part of your responsibility as an actor.

In the last week, 4 –count ‘em – 4 clients have proven, once again, that the art of what I call “full body listening” continues to elude them. Full body listening. Right. What is it? It’s simply being attuned to everything in the dramatic circumstances that provide you with a stimulus for response.

Essentially, we can break the pack down into the following categores: First, what’s happening in the prescribed environment. Like cold or heat or a gunshot wound, or boiling an egg, or suffering from a hangover, or looking for your cat. And so forth. Second, your own emotional state – how you feel, your train of thought (careful now!), the tactics you’re employing to get what you want. And so forth.

Most importantly – and I’m continually amazed at how many actors ignore this one – What the other people in the scene actually say to you. Their dialogue. How many of you realize that it’s as important to study other characters dialogue as it is your own? Bunches of stimuli come from what the other actors do, say, perpetrate in your presence.

New actors, I’m afraid tend to get their words out and wait for the next opportunity to speak WITHOUT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE STIMULUS THAT COMES FROM THEIR FELLOW ACTORS – WHICH OFTEN GOVERNS THE NATURE AND QUALITY OF THE RESPONSE!!! This is not rocket science. But actors fail miserably at this essential task time after time.

In the real world all the natural stimuli affect us, bad and good, without our having to do anything about them. But in the world of play, we MUST create our response to the available stimuli if we hope to successfully make the dramatic situation real to our audience. Not optional, ladies and gents, not optional. Much more about this in future posts.

The Coach . . .

Vince Lombardi. The quintessential coach. . .he made the Green Bay Packers into something special. But that's football. Acting's not so different in that respect (in many respects, actually - but that's a story for another day). The Acting coach is a particularly valuable asset to the film actor. In two ways, maybe more.

First, there's the audition. Here's how it goes. The actor gets the sides, if he's lucky, 48 hours before the audition - often less. With time so short - and especially if the audition is for something major - the actor really needs another helpful eye. The coach looks at the scene, does an analysis - and helps the actor find a variety of emotional shifts in the text - to insure that the audition is going to be interesting.

Remember. Time is always of the essence and the actor never has enough of it The coach assists in making sure the actor's caught all the stimuli available in a scene that has to be learned in just a few hours. So the coach helps sort it out, flesh it out - gives the actor a leg up in trying to secure a call-back. Get the call-back first. Then get the part.

That's what I tell 'em. I also tell 'em - that if they don't catch the interest of the auditioner in the first 20 seconds or so, they've blown it. So the opening salvo has to be captivating. And we work on that, believe me.

If the auditions submitted by ePitch (electronically via email)I'll go with the actor to the studio where the audition's being shot, work with the actor, even go as far as to be the reader(the person reading the other character in the scene - often the worst dweebs in the universe in actual Audition World) to make sure he/she's dotting all the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. Done this twice in the last week - and it definitely provides the actor with an extra level of comfort.

If the actor does get the call-back, then we get back to work and see what else we can find, incorporating feedback received from the audition itself. Useful stuff like "faster." Kidding.

And there're other kinds of coaching. We work with kids seeking post-secondary training in actor training programs, helping them tune up the monologues required for possible admittance to the hallowed halls. Got 3 of those at the moment.

And then there's on set coaching. Some Hollywood stars won't go on set without their coach, again, looking for that objective eye that helps them flesh out their performance. And as I've mentioned elsewhere, many film directors admit they don't know much about what actors do and hire an acting coach to work on set with all the actors in the picture hoping to maximize their performances.

So - actors. Be smart. Use a coach. The key is finding someone who's on the same wavelength, who has insight and communicates, gets with you like butter on bread. Spread the joy. A coach. Don't leave home without one!

Structure and the Movies . . .

Okay. So you're in a movie and you have an actual part. With lines. And more than 6 scenes. God, you are good!

As I've mentioned before, the shooting out of sequence issue can present problems for the actor. It's essential that the character arc, scene to scene, be absolutely clear in the actors' mind. If your 4th scene is shot before you've done 3, but after you've done 5 . . .well you begin to see the problem.

So, you've done 5 and you have to be sure that what you do in 4 will match up with what's already been shot.
On a modern set, you'll have the opportunity to watch what's already been laid down on a TV monitor, so matching is somewhat easier than it was in the days when we all scurried into an overheated room to watch the dailies. Anybody older than 40 knows what I mean.

Now we've shot 3 and just finished 5 - which leaves 1,2 and 6. So . .I think you might have a notion as to how you deal with the problem. Head'em out, match 'em up.

A more pressing problem with film acting, perhaps, is the built-in rehearsal issue. For stage, the actor usually has sufficient time to map the work over a span of several weeks with daily feedback from the director. If you're lucky enough to work with a director who walks, talks and communicates well with actors, this input helps with the careful building of structure. But in film:
A: The director expects you to do all the work.
B: The director doesn't know how to talk to actors-other than to say: faster, softer, cuter.
C: The director is only interested in "the shot" and "special effects." "That's why we've got an acting coach on set, fer chrissake!"
D: Rehearsal consisted of 2 table reads and a bit of staging while the grips were setting up for the next shot.
E: Everything else under the damned sun!

So in effect, ladies and gents, you're on your own. Which is why the care with which you build the structure of your performance, the skill with which you generate your moment before and the natural, emotionally vibrant delivery of the text are what make you movie friendly. In theatre, the actor has more sense of immediate communication actor to actor and the benefit of an ongoing process. In film, the actor must be able to work without a lot of outside input and learn to work fast.

Which is where COACHING rears its handsome head!

Structure. Build it. . .and they will give you work!

The dramatic text is a structure that has a beginning, a middle and an end (we can only hope). If the writers’ fingers are an extension of his emotional connection to the material, who knows – the text may even be worthwhile. The responsibility of the production team – be it for film or stage – is to recognize the texts’ structure and build the product so that it both illuminates and enhances the writers intent.

The actors part in this is to figure out what part of the writers design is carried by her/his performance. So. Create your own structure, scene by scene. Look at how the character grows, diminishes, changes from point A to the end. Have a clear idea of what you need to accomplish in every scene and of the things that stand in the way of your getting there.

The surest way to drive yourself crazy is to try and do it all at once. Like eating the whole pie in a single gulp. Yum. Rhubarb. Indigestion. Take it a bit at a time. Digest it slowly and let the flavors mingle as you go. You’ll be amazed to find that lines, emotional beats, physicality all come together and are absorbed until everything feels organic. Free range acting.

Creating the structure for your performance involves thinking about what’s required emotionally, physically and vocally. It’s like creating a road map which you follow the first few times you drive from, say, Minsk to Pinsk. After several trips – the car practically drives itself and you bravely stow the road map in the Lada’s glove box. As long as the latch works. Same with the structure for a performance. Stow it. Forget it. Let the circumstances of the event pull the cork so that your work flows like good wine, without you having to think about it. Movies?, you ask. Somewhat different. More on that later.