Cable : Bravo’s Acting Lessons

Since its inception 48 years ago, the Actors Studio has admitted only 800 members, including Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Stephen Sondheim, Dustin Hoffman and Martin Landau. More than 150 of those members have won the Tony, the Oscar or the Emmy.

But what actually goes on behind the closed doors of the Studio has always been private. Until now.

“Inside the Actors Studio,” a new series premiering Wednesday on Bravo, flings open the portals of the legendary workshops. Each one-hour program presents a Studio member in an intensive interview about acting in front of an audience at the New School in New York City, as well as in a class with 87 students enrolled in the Studio’s new three-year master’s program.

Paul Newman, who served as president of the Studio from 1982 to 1994, is the first guest. Other members featured on subsequent programs include Sally Field, Dennis Hopper, Alec Baldwin, Sidney Lumet and Sondheim.

James Lipton, the host of “Inside the Actors Studio,” is a lifetime member of the Studio and chairman of the master of fine arts program. Founded in 1947, the Studio brought in Lee Strasberg and the “Method” style of acting two years later. The Method was derived from Konstantin Stanislavski’s system of acting, which permitted actors to find the emotion within themselves and gave them the tools to deliver those emotions in a play night after night.

“He set out to codify not what you do in the play but how you do it,” Lipton says. “The purpose of it is not to press the actor into a mold, it is to break the mold and free the talent. It was also (meant) to break the rhetorical mode of posing and declaiming and to replace it with a technique that would free talent.”

The actors who have come out of the Studio, he says, have dominated Hollywood. “Where the process of acting is disrupted repeatedly by the technical demands of film, by the demands of repeated takes, you need an actor who can summon what’s needed quickly, who knows how to find within himself or herself the necessary moment, called ‘being in the moment.’ ”

Lipton came up with the idea for the Studio’s masters program, which began last fall. “It started when I looked around and said, ‘Here’s a private institution, probably one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.’ The Studio’s standards were always very high and once (actors) got in, they vanished while they are inside. One day I turned to my colleagues and said, ‘What the hell would happen if we tapped into this resource? The National Theater of Great Britain and the Moscow Art Theater doesn’t have a permanent roster of actors and directors and playwrights remotely like this one. So if we tapped this resource, would the Studio respond?’ ”

It did. So did the New School, which had been the home of Erwin Piscator’s famous Dramatic Workshop in the 1940s; Strasberg and Stella Adler taught there pre-Actors Studio. For a year, an executive committee of members met and created the curriculum for the three-year program.. More than 2,000 people applied; 87 were accepted.

“It has had a great success because the Studio members have cooperated beyond anybody’s wildest dreams,” Lipton says.

The seminars, which are open to the public, are for members who can only give the program one day. “When Paul Newman, Alec Baldwin, Steve Sondheim and Sidney Lumet, Shelley Winters and Sally Field responded, we realized that we had to preserve these. Bravo said they would like to broadcast it.”

The participants are relaxed, funny, passionate and open with Lipton. “It’s not really as much an interview as a conversation,” Lipton says. “It is only about the craft and they know that. It is as if Paul and I or Sidney Lumet and I were at the Studio talking. We say the same thing as we would say in our living rooms with each other or at the Studio. The difference is, and the secret of this program is, the public is there to see it and hear it.”

Lipton researches each subject for two weeks before the interview. “I just vanish from the world and focus on it. I read every word written about these people. I review every film they have ever made and when we sit down to talk, I can follow them anywhere and lead them anywhere. At one point in the Sally Field interview, she turns to me and says, ‘Have you been reading my diary?’ They know they are safe, that I am not going to ask them about their love affairs or any nonsense. But things come up. With Dennis Hopper, we got deeply into his life because his life is so much a part of his art. And even with Sally, because Sally has made the journey from ‘Gidget” to ‘The Flying Nun’ to ‘Norma Rae.’ She has had tremendous arc in her career.”

The real highlight of the shows, Lipton says, is the sequence in which the guest teaches the class. In the first episode, Newman improvises a scene with a young, definitely flustered female student. “She was walking into walls for weeks (afterward),” Lipton says, laughing. “She improvised with Paul Newman!”

“Inside the Actors Studio” premieres Wednesday at 7 p.m. on Bravo; it repeats Sunday at 5 p.m.

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THE ‘STUDIO’ LINEUP

Wednesday: Paul Newman

May 3: Sally Field

May 10: Dennis Hopper

May 17: Shelley Winters

May 24: Alec Baldwin

May 31: Sidney Lumet

June 7: Stephen Sondheim