Chubbuck, Stanislavski. Boleslavsky, etc.

Stanislavsky said we shouldn't slavishly follow his system, but should create our own.
Boleslavsky, a student of Stanislavsky, brought his teacher's ideas to America.

Ivana Chubbuck claims that if you go to her school, and/or follow her advice, you will be a winning or successful actor. On the other hand, Boleslavsky claims in his book, Acting; The First Six Lessons, "Art cannot be taught. To posses an art means to possess talent' and he adds "Talent can be developed, but cannot be created" Chubbuck insists one must always do or not do this or that. In other words, she makes hard and fast rules N actora must follow to "win" whereas BOESLAVKY writes:"The only real rules in art are the rules that we discover for ourselves."

I believe Chubbuck occasionally gives the acting student good advice , and she is certainly well informed from her years of experience looking at films, TV serials, and stage plays. In my last post I implied that, by and large, film and video were less concerned with art than live theatre. Perhaps I was overlooking the value of the media which Boleslavsky reminds us can be viewed and re-viewed, and leave lasting records of great performances by actors like Lawrence Olivier, Irene Worth, James Dean, Barbara Stanwyck, Meryl Streep, Humphrey Bogart, etc. Other arts, architecture, sculpture, painting, writing, by there nature, have means to preserve the great works, but the performing arts, music, dance, theatre, had left no permanent traces before Edison and others created recordings and movies. We haveno idea what the performances of music and acting, and dance of 5th century BC Athens. When the "talkies" came along, we now have the means of making records of actor's and director's art. And some of these movies are most certainly works of art.The literary creatons of the great playwrights from Euripides and Sophocles to O'Neill and Albee have a permanence that performing artists lacked before recent times.

Acting for movies and television is very different than acting before a live audience. Scenes are broken up and are rarely filmed in the order they will finally appear. Even short scenes are frequently interrupted. I have had bit parts in a few films. I was a Boston cop in a film called Mission Hill. My very small role was to visit the next of kin of a young man who was killed during a high speed car chase. After bringing the bad news to his mother and sister, my partner and I were filmed leaving a Boston tripple-decker and driving off in the police car. In that scene I had no lines to speak, but we had to repeat the scene five times. Several times I drove the car around the block to return where the director and cine-photographer were, and each tme was told to do it again. No other directions. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. The fifth time there was cheering when we returned to the scene, and for some reason it was "a wrap." What was different in the final attempt was the changing light as the sun was setting. The blinking left signal light gave the effect the director wanted in the dimming light. Was this acting? Would I have done it better had I more acting lessons? Other experiences in film were similar. I died in an HBO film about the Coconut Grove nightclub fire. In a film about the woman's Suffrage movement called Under This Sky,I was a Kansas farmer one snowy day in Rhode Island. In the fire I died several times, and I listened to Irene Worth's short talk about why women ought to have the vote from early morning to late afternoon. Had I read Chubbuck and taken her advice before filming Under This Sky, I would have tried to make Ms Worth "want to like me" so that I would be asked to play a larger part in subsequent scenes. As it was, I did get to have lunch with her. Lunch is a major part of the movie making tradition. Bit playrs are not paid very much. T he guy in the "Kansas" scene got 6 times as much as I because he had a mule to tend. In the final edited movie, that scene would have lasted less than 5 minutes.

Another difference between movies and live theatre is in the writing. Plays are copyrighted. You cannot produce a play that is still under copyright without permission and agreeing to pay the royalty for the use of its "intellectual property." Screenplays are not regarded as art and art and not usually copyrighted. You can download screenplays of even recent movies. Some screenplays are written by committees, and unless you are Robert Reford or a Paul Neumanm yu have to follow a precise formula. Your screenplay has to have tree acts, be typewritten (or at least use Courier fonts so that they look like they were typewritten) and the pages have to be fastened together with those old fashioned brass clips inserted into three hole punched pages. The scripts have to be 120 pages long, as they estimate that one page of a script equals one minute of film, and movies are supposed to last two hours, unless they are comedies,which can be one and a half hours long. Screenplays are often reworked from day to day and not followed word for word as the movies evolve in the editing rooms.

Even so, some great scripts ave been written, not all of them abiding to the usual formula. The film script for Casablanca was written one day at a time while the movie was been filmed. Actors had no idea what their lines would be until they showed up for the filming. But then, not every screenwriter had Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart to write lines for! You can download the Casablanca script of free on line. Where else can you get a great work of art for nothing?