Hardly the most minor of gifts
Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time....
-- “Hamlet,” Act 2, Scene 2
Like Hamlet, I would like to say a good word for actors. This might seem needless, given the amount of ink and airtime and gurgling reflexive praise the profession generates -- or rather, the inordinate amount of ink and airtime and praise allotted to a relatively few of its practitioners -- and given an international obsession with celebrity, especially American movie stars, which makes them possibly the most elevated, privileged caste in the world. It takes something on the scale of a tidal wave to generate the worldwide interest of the Academy Awards, or even as patently phony a commotion as the Golden Globes, rolling down fast upon us.
Yet they get no respect. They take more flak more often than any professional group outside of taxi drivers or politicians. Truman Capote famously declared, “The better the actor, the more stupid he is,” while Alfred Hitchcock denied his reported remark that “All actors are cattle” by saying, “I never said all actors are cattle -- what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.” Trey Parker and Matt Stone have claimed they made the film “Team America: World Police” with marionettes because they hate actors -- which the film, with its violently dispatched puppets of Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, gleefully bears out.
An entire branch of quasi-journalism exists to exploit their misfortunes, weaknesses and mortality. These instruments of celebrity schadenfreude confirm us in the belief that stardom, which produces no tangible goods -- “it’s a worthless, pointless job,” Ricky Gervais, the creator and star of “The Office,” has said -- is not actually deserved; the death-knell covers of the supermarket tabloids make for a sort of so-there-take-that memento mori: “I am going to die, but so are you, Elizabeth Taylor.” We are suspicious as well of their capacity for rejection -- which we know, funnily enough, because they have reenacted it so regularly on stage and screen -- their submission to an audition process that can read as simple masochism to anyone not driven to act. (Forgetting, of course, that every other world of work also requires swallowed pride.) And there are the tales of the casting couch (founded, surely) that make every aspiring actress potentially a prostitute.
In films and on television, they are more often than not portrayed as vain, predatory, dimwitted, self-absorbed, shallow and/or crazy, like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard” or Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Young actresses are vamps or tramps; actors are dumb and pretty, like Matt LeBlanc on “Joey,” or puffed up like Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian. The biographical dramas and the dramatic biographies, meanwhile, which pretend to retell the lives of the successful, are mostly concerned with pop psychology and personal matters that would not much interest you at all in the life of, say, your plumber, but become incredibly fascinating when connected to Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland or James Dean. Early trauma will suffice to explain an entire career. (They never got enough love.) The common notion that actors often become actors because they are empty inside was made the central theme of HBO’s recent splashy biopic “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,” but the film did not tell you why he was good at the job.
A different case altogether is “Unscripted,” a 10-part, true-to-life “fictional series” premiering tonight, also on HBO. It stars actors Krista Allen, Bryan Greenberg and Jennifer Hall as actors named Krista Allen, Bryan Greenberg and Jennifer Hall, and Frank Langella as an acting teacher not named Frank Langella. Produced by George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Grant Heslov, and largely directed by Clooney, it looks at the local community of players primarily from the standpoint of training and work -- the struggle to develop an instrument and the struggle to find a place to use it -- and from the first scenes of Hall running lines for class while doing yoga in her apartment, it is marvelously convincing. All of the dialogue is improvised, without rehearsal or retakes -- which right away says something about Capote’s inverse relation of acting ability and intelligence -- and much of what happens is based on the participants’ experiences and filmographies. Allen, for instance, is in life and in character the former star of a series of soft-porn movies, a Maxim/Stuff/Esquire/Playboy pinup girl, an ex-”Baywatch: Hawaii” regular and (evidently, from watching her here) an actress of substantial gifts attempting to overcome her stunning good looks.
An homage to hard-won talent
Clooney is not only an actor but a movie star, of the old not-breathing-hard school epitomized by Gary Cooper and John Wayne. He has the looks and the heft to dominate a 40-foot screen, and it seems so natural to him that one doesn’t imagine he works hard at his craft or feels any sort of solidarity with the less-fortunate rank and file. But on the evidence of “Unscripted,” which is more or less a love letter to his fellow members of SAG and AFTRA, this is dead wrong.
Certainly, there is an industry tendency to cast faces and bodies, sometimes with little regard for actual talent, which means that some people become actors because they have been told often enough that they look like Johnny Depp or Cameron Diaz, and some people hire them because they do. (It has also helped create an unfortunate culture of plastic surgery.) But even bad actors would like to be good actors, obviously, and not all actors care -- or care exclusively -- about becoming stars. Most will only ever act in front of other actors, in the kind of classes and workshops “Untitled” portrays. And because they want to act, and because there is so little opportunity for so many, they will take what jobs they can get, and say and do whatever ridiculous or embarrassing things they are asked. Because notwithstanding the many well-known examples of the Demanding Superstar, actors are surprisingly powerless -- at the mercy of their dialogue, and their director, and cinematographers and lighting directors and editors who cannot quite yet do without them. (Though someone is probably working on the software for that right now.)
“If you are a theater actor,” says Langella in his acting teacher role, “you tend to think you are the creme de la creme, and you tend to look down on movie stars, movie actors; if you’re a movie actor, you tend to think that television actors are low on the rung; if you’re a television actor you say to yourself, ‘Well, at least I’m not doing commercials ... ‘ What you want to do is, you want to somehow find a way that you can have a small percentage of your work be something that you can be proud of.”
Theater began in religious ritual and even now, even in the context of modern blockbusting show business, actors continue to perform a priestly function -- they distill, focus, refract and amplify what it means to be alive. “They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the times,” as Shakespeare wrote, but also of something beyond time. They have learned to speak more distinctly than the rest of us, and to stand and walk and to place their bodies in space, so that they sound and look the way we only imagine we do, the way we would like to sound and look and move. More than that, a great actor understands abandon -- they grow big by letting go, become larger than life all the better to represent it.
“This is a noble profession,” Langella tells his students, and that sounds right to me.
