Where the Talk Is of Acting, Not Grosses

Ethan Hawke deliberately cruises the aisles of the Tishman Auditorium in his suede jacket and goatee as 500 eager audience members, George Plimpton among them, take their seats. Tonight this New School theater is more than a seminar classroom for its School of Dramatic Arts. Young professionals, suburbanites, small-time celebrities and mega-stars alike have come out to see what the publicity-shy Jessica Lange has to say for herself.

It is a rare event when the six-time Academy Award nominee exposes herself to the kind of personal questions interviewer (and dean of the acting school) James Lipton will ask her over the course of a lengthy interview--questions about the death of her father, her relationships with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sam Shepard, and the inspiration for her acting.

It is rarer still that she is allowing her soul-searching analysis of her own life and work (and an appearance by her youngest daughter, Hannah) to be aired on television for public consumption.

“Inside the Actors Studio,” a decidedly non-flashy series that brings an edited version of Lipton’s interviews to the small screen, has unexpectedly attracted the biggest actors, writers and directors of the day. A one-hour version of Lange’s intimate and probing conversation with Lipton (which at times verges on a fascinating therapy session) premieres Wednesday at 7 p.m. on cable’s Bravo channel.

When Lipton conceived the bi-weekly interviews to coincide with the first year of the new acting school, television had no place in his vision. But with acting legends (mostly Studio members) such as Paul Newman, Sally Field, Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway stopping by for lengthy, intensely personal chats about their lives and acting process, Lipton saw other possibilities.

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“We realized no one wanted this to vanish into thin air,” says Lipton, a member of the Actors Studio and the man who suggested the partnership between the highly private studio (made famous by the late Lee Strasberg) and the school. He approached Bravo with an eye toward recording the interviews for posterity--and a prime-time audience.

Jonathan Sehring, Bravo’s senior vice president of programming and production, jumped at the idea of producing the interviews as the network’s first piece of solo original programming. The first season was such a success the network coughed up additional funds to improve the look of the show, which was truly bare-bones when it premiered in 1994.

“Whenever you see celebrities on TV, they’re promoting their latest project, but over the years we found viewers are as interested in what goes on behind the scenes as in the performers themselves,” Sehring says. “For example, the interview with Christopher Walken--people think of him as such a wacko from his films. But he’s a delightful guy--you never get to see that side of him. He even does a little tap-dance at the end of the show.”

Lipton, however, thinks the series is more than just good TV. “Our feeling now is that we’re creating a unique archive. Something no one’s ever done before--or ever will again,” he says, adding that he hopes to create interactive CD-ROMs with the three hours of tape he’s cut from each interview, which includes an hourlong question-and-answer period with the students. “There’s something tempting about being able to make a definitive statement on your craft that people will be watching, I believe, 100 years from now.”

Gina Angelone, one of the two producers brought on board for the show’s second season, says that the simple set--a couple of chrome armchairs and glass-topped tables for water--is all the prettying-up the show needs.

“The content is so engaging, no one cared what it looked like the first year,” says Angelone, who has put most of the increased budget into spicing up the edited version with film clips and still photos (often supplied by the interviewees). “They rushed into the first year with so little money, but they had Paul Newman and Dennis Hopper, and I’ll tell you, it’s an amazing thing, no one cared what it looked like. Even though it looked really bad, the show was still nominated for a CableAce Award.”

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Lipton--an actor, writer, director and producer who did a stint on the soap opera “The Guiding Light” and produced network TV programs, including several Bob Hope specials--may not be famous, but he has been around.

“I’ve dealt with all these people before,” he says, explaining how he got his first guests on the show. “I started right out of my Rolodex with people at the studio, like Newman--he wanted to do it--and Alec Baldwin. The seminar is less like an interview than a conversation. Usually we know each other anyway, and I try to do it approximately the way we’d speak to each other if we were at the studio over coffee or in my home.”

Of course, the conversation isn’t completely spontaneous. Lipton spends a full two weeks preparing for the interviews by watching films made by the actor or director. He also reads everything he can get his hands on about them. He then proceeds to write out questions on 100 to 200 green notecards, which he assiduously shuffles through on stage.

While talking with Lange, he allowed himself the spotlight for a moment (most of the interlude is cut from the final edit) to tell his own anecdotes about their mutual friend, Bob Fosse. It’s exactly those moments, Lipton says, that put his guest at ease.

“I first met Jessica when she was Bobby’s friend,” he explains. “I had planned to do a tribute to Bobby, and when I began to speak about him, I saw her--something happened. We were trading stories about him and I think after that she just opened up.”

“Bobby used to tell people how he was going to woo me,” Lange confides with a smile and a faraway look. “He said he knew the way to get to me was to dance for me, so I could appreciate his extraordinary talent. He asked me who I was going out with, and at the time I was already going out with Baryshnikov, so. . . .” The whole room laughs with her.

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It might seem odd that the best actors of our day are banging down Jim Lipton’s door to do an interview--for free--on a relatively obscure cable channel. Unless you realize their time is a gift to their alma mater.

“Going to the Actors Studio is almost like going to seminary,” says Gene Wilder, whose interview will air this fall. “It’s not by accident the studio was in a church on 44th Street--the devotion, the passion, the almost religious drive to learn how to express yourself through the medium devours your life. So yes, I wanted to share what I learned, but it was also time to address young people coming up who have only heard of Lee Strasberg. I wasn’t interested in doing an interview to come on a show and talk about acting--I’ve never done it. But if you say let’s do an interview to really talk about the craft of acting--surrounded by the Actors Studio--all right.”

In the audience that night, thanks to Lipton, were specially invited guests, including Wilder’s first director, Arthur Penn; Stanley Donen, who directed Wilder in “The Little Prince”; and his good friend Leonard Nimoy.

For Carol Burnett’s interview, which premieres on June 19, the students, in unison, serenade the emotional 12-time People’s Choice Award winner with “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” the weekly sign-off from her 11-season variety show.

On the final chorus, Burnett, unable to hold back any longer, joins in with a final “so long” and a trademark tug on her left ear.

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But Wilder, looking past the nostalgia to the bottom line, says that the program has helped the Actors Studio in a very tangible way. “It finally helps solve the financial problems it’s had since I joined. It’s an annuity so the studio doesn’t have to constantly throw fund-raisers three times a year.”

Lipton calls the economic partnership between the school and studio a “complicated arrangement” whereby the Actors Studio receives a portion of the master of fine arts program’s revenues, $60,000 of which comes every semester from non-drama student subscriptions to the seminar.

“The people at the studio provide the curriculum and faculty--they organize it--so they obviously benefit from it or else the studio wouldn’t have done it.”

Lee Strasberg’s son, John, an Actors Studio member since 1963 and a teacher at the New School’s program, saw the joint venture as the studio’s savior.

“The studio was ailing after my father died in 1982. It needed leadership, purpose and money,” says Strasberg, who suggested starting a school in 1983. “The studio went through an era where it lost its cachet to an extent. This is part of what everyone hopes will be a renaissance.”

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One of the main lures of Lipton’s cerebral and even lofty interviews is that he promises to avoid the snappy, gossipy style of “Entertainment Tonight” and “Hard Copy.”

Case in point is the obscure and esoteric questionnaire he borrows from France’s Bernard Pivot with which he concludes his interviews. The questions include: What are your favorite and least favorite words, what turns you on and off, what is your favorite curse word, and if heaven exists, what do you want to hear God say when you arrive?

“It wasn’t like doing ‘The Tonight Show,’ where you have to deliver so quickly and be so punchy,” Matthew Broderick says. “You see so much reporting on television about what people’s salaries are, or what the budget of this is. There’s very little opportunity to hear people talk about what it’s like to act in something. Jim asked me about my father dying, but I didn’t feel it was out of line at all. You can’t not talk about your personal life at all because it overlaps with parts of your acting life.”

Perhaps Martin Landau, another of Lipton’s upcoming interviewees, best understands why the networks will never jump on the Bravo bandwagon. “What we do is work,” he says. “When you actually get into talking about the process, the discipline, it automatically takes the glamour out of it.”

* “Inside the Actors Studio” airs Wednesdays and Sundays on Bravo.