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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/24/2013 : 22:49:10
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Elsewhere in this section I've tried to interject a focus on the process of acting for both camera and stage. This thread fulfils my promise to clarify my remarks on a more general level.
WHAT THE FUCK QUALIFIES ME TO PONTIFICATE
I write as a show-biz professional of over 40 years experience, with a body of work well documented in the public domain. My professional debut was at the age of twelve. My expertise in practice and assessment reflects my paid engagements in the following categories:
Performance - stage, radio, film, television, music videos, music recordings, commercials, dubbing, voice overs. I've acted with a handful of directors who both understood and respected an actor's creative contribution, and with many more who couldn't make themselves believe that an actor's role is both creative and interpretive. I've also worked with male directors who couldn't make themselves accept that actresses had intellects, let alone were capable of making a creative contribution. And with some male directors who equated big tits with no brain. I've acted with directors who've completely devolved their choice of actors to a casting director, and chosen people purely on the basis of their looks or height or eye color - or, in a few cases, on the basis of their wives' favorite, or their own personal sexual liaisons. I've worked with directors, well one in particular, who didn't trust actors to read the script apart from their own scenes - though I've heard he may have stopped doing that these days.
Directing - stage
Producing - stage, film, television, voice demo tapes
Screenplay assessment - Television script editor on numerous drama series and one-off tele-plays both on contract for independent production companies, and for the BBC; development executive for BBC-TV Drama Series Department
Guest Lecturing - university level; lecture series for trade association of barristers on the difference between facts and the truth
International Work-shopping and course deviser for professional performers & at post-grad level - Acting for Dancers, Communication between Actors & Film Directors, Acting in Musicals, Alternative Approaches to Production, Experimental Theatre Techniques
Film & Theatre Critic - freelance stringer on major national UK newspapers; as London Editor for ten years of an international trade journal for cinema
Some of my early mentors included the great Helen Mencken, the much lauded Vera Mowbry, Raymond St Jacques, Morris Carnovsky, and the incomparable John Houseman. Even before all the formal training, I grew up with a father who'd studied at the famed Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow, and who I had the great privilege to be directed by in a production of Ibsen.
As part of my degree at university level I also studied Modern Dance, Literary Criticism, Playwriting, English Literature, and The History of Drama.
As both a professional critic and a Lifetime BAFTA member, as well as in my private life, I estimate I've seen some 15,000 films give or take a reel.
I have never had a bad review. Here are a couple of good ones: Le Monde in Paris said I was "a genius, the word is not too strong." Tom Prideux of Life Magazine said "she teaches me something just by being there." The London Times voted me Actress of the Year. I was a member of a NYC theatre company presented with an award for services to the theatre.
All the above has rendered me completely au fait with the professional process of acting, both during the various stages of preparation and at the moment of performance.
MY APPROACH TO ASSESSING FILM AND THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES
Show business has never been my hobby. My professional life in all aspects of show business defines a large part of who I am and what's important to me. To have that facet of myself insulted and patronised, as has sometimes been the case here on fwfr, is silly and unnecessary. I sincerely hope I've never done the same to anyone.
I've only enjoyed two experiences of the professional expertise of my fellow fwfrers - both left me in speechless admiration for their wonderfully generous help. One is a truly brilliant editor, the other a lawyer. That's my opinion, of course, since I don't begin to understand all the nuances of their professional processes.
I categorically state that whatever opinions anyone may express about whether they like or don't like the performance of an actor is fine by me. But that has nothing to do with an assessment of their process.
I admire the passion for films shown by people who are film buffs or film fans. I'm sure I couldn't best such devotion. Occasionally, though, I do contribute to discussions on the 4UM based on my professional knowledge. I'm pretty confident that I bring all my intellectual rigor to such assessments - as well as to my opinions. It's quite insulting to read that I'm not capable of understanding what a film is about.
Sometimes I too offer opinions about actors and acting. Always, though, they are formed from my professional understanding of a process. I can offer opinions of disciplines I've less understanding of, but those will remain personally informed opinions. I have tried my hand at splicing on a Steenbeck, but I'd never say I understand the process of film editing. That's very different from saying I can define what an editor does.
It's a difference beautifully illustrated by Charles Dickens' creation Wackford Squeers defining a horse.
Performances in any medium requiring actors to fulfil the creative demands of the discipline are generally seen once, possibly a few more times. At no point of watching can anyone simply arrive at the process that an actor has employed.
There are too many unknowable factors. There have never been a lot of true auteurs in any of the creative arts. It is my professional opinion that the best of these as directors include all the contributing members of their [generally hand-picked] teams and casts and crews.
Directors who are so insecure they feel they must prove their authority by excluding the actor's contribution, seem not to employ that approach with their camera crew, or their costume designer, or indeed any other creative team on the production. I find that grossly insulting to actors.
Actors generally love what they do. There's a lot of camaraderie among a cast - some of whom won't have met before and may not ever meet again. Sure, they talk about lots of stuff, but the most bonding conversations are about the acting process. I've been privileged to have participated in hundreds of them.
If you don't understand the process of acting, you do not know what acting is. You may indeed have an opinion about any particular performance. That is perfectly valid and your right. But it is not the same thing.
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lemmycaution
"Long mired in film"
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Posted - 11/26/2013 : 17:30:01
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Some interesting comments about acting and directing from a TCM article on Red River:
The part of Tom Dunson seemed a natural for John Wayne, even if it was a darker character for him than usual, one whose motives are not always crystal clear or even admirable. But many people have expressed more surprise at Hawks' casting of Montgomery Clift in the part of Matt Garth, Dunson's son-figure and rival. Hawks had seen Clift in a Broadway production of the Lillian Hellman play The Searching Wind and offered him the part. Clift accepted, even though it made him extremely nervous. He was familiar with how to ride a horse, but only military-school style. And the script called for the thin, 5' 10" Clift to engage in a rousing climactic fistfight with powerfully built, 6' 5" Wayne. But Hawks believed in his ability; the young actor rewarded his faith by working hard every day to learn to ride and handle a gun expertly and turn in a performance Hawks was very pleased with. Of course, he had considerable help from the director, who showed him how to underplay Wayne. "Don't try to get hard because you'll just be nothing compared to Wayne," he told him. After one of their first scenes together, the skeptical Wayne told Hawks, "He's gonna be okay." Off screen, however, Clift never really warmed to Wayne or Hawks. In Montgomery Clift by Patricia Bosworth, the actor stated that he occasionally joined them for nightly poker games where "they laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn't go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary."
Red River marked the first time Hawks and John Wayne worked together (four more pictures followed). Wayne had done a number of films with John Ford, who made him a star with Stagecoach (1939). Then Hawks cast Wayne in Red River. The actor was reluctant at first to play an older man but Hawks later said he told the 40-year-old Wayne, "Duke, you're going to be one pretty soon, why don't you get some practice?" In Shooting Star by Maurice Zolotow, Wayne recalled, "[Walter] Brennan showed me his idea of an old man walkin' and talkin'. His idea of it was kinda shufflin' and totterin'. And mumblin'. I was supposed to be tough and hard and walk like that? Hell, I was thinkin' about those old cattle guys I knew when I was a kid around Lancaster and there wasn't one of them that didn't stand tall. I played Tom Dunson my own way, standin' tall. Oh yeah, Hawks and I had a few fights along the way, but he accepted me as an expert, which I was, and we did not have any more trouble." Wayne ended up turning in a compelling performance, and Ford - always a bit abusive and condescending to Wayne despite the actor's devotion to him; was reported to have said, "I didn't know the big son of a bitch could act." Following this role, Ford cast Wayne in increasingly more complex roles in such films as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956) so it could be said that Red River brought a new richness to Wayne's acting as he moved from playing gung-ho men of bravery to characters driven by obsessions or a need to maintain control at all costs.
http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/12472%7C0/Red-River.html
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Observations on the Acting Process
