ACTING CLASS, WITH BRANDO

Hamlet offered advice to the traveling troop of actors who visited Elsinore:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. . .

We act every day; life is performance. Most of us are not very good at it. Some elevate acting to the professional level. This clip is from a New York City acting workshop led by award-winning actor/director Thurman E. Scott.

An actor behind the scenes: Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of "The Godfather."

To help us, we've recruited Marlon Brando the greatest screen actor of his generation, perhaps all time, who revolutionized and naturalized the art of acting. Even if we skip the more familiar performances from "A Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront," and "The Godfather," there are still many dynamic scenes to choose from.


Marlon Brando started on the stage, and here he plays Marc Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." (1953) Contrast this big grand style of stage acting with the films that follow.


A scene with the amazing Anna Magnani from "The Fugitive Kind" (1960). Brando achieved stardom on Broadway, playing Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." Here he plays Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier in a film based on another Williams' play, "Orpheus Descending."


Paul's eulogy in "Last Tango in Paris." (1972) Believe it or not, this was the same year he played Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." An absolutely brilliant performance. (language warning on this clip)

Brando is interviewed in 1973, after winning--and rejecting--the Academy Award for Best Actor for "The Godfather." He skipped the ceremony and sent Native American rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather, in full Apache dress, to explain his objection to the depiction of American Indians by Hollywood and television. Needless to say, Brando stirred some controversy, especially among the old warhorses like John Wayne. Here, Brando plays himself.

TIN HOUSE WRITERS CONFERENCE

Last summer, I attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop--a one week intensive of workshops, readings, panels, and lectures. It was a wonderful experience. Reed College was jammed with enthusiastic writers and a good spirit of creativity pervaded the workshops and readings--and just hanging out under the trees. Writers included Denis Johnson, Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Charles D'Ambrosio, Anthony Doerr, Nick Flynn, Walter Kirn, and Colson Whitehead.

They just finished this years' conference, and that's where this film comes from. If you write fiction, memoir, or poetry, by all means apply for next year. By the way, Tin House is also a highly regarded literary magazine that features the best writing out there. Pick it up at the newstand.

Check out Tin House.

WRITERS' WORKSHOP

Do you ever wonder why some stories capture you while others meander and lose steam, or lumber predictably toward a ho-hum ending? Here's an interesting lecture from John Truby, author of "The Anatomy of a Story," that may answer these questions. You may agree or disagree, and his model may seem somewhat formulaic or mechanistic, but he has some valuable insights into story structure. (This clip contains Part 1, "Premise," and Part 2, "Seven Steps." You can find the rest of the lecture at Google Video)

Here is an excerpt from Truby's book, The Anatomy of Story:

Everyone can tell a story. We do it every day. “You won’t believe what happened at work.” Or “Guess what I just did!” Or “A guy goes into a bar . . .” We see, hear, read, and tell thousands of stories in our lives.
The problem comes in telling a great story. If you want to become a master storyteller, and maybe even get paid to be one, you run up against tremendous obstacles. For one thing, showing the how and why of human life is a monumental job. You have to have a deep and precise understanding of the biggest, most complex subject there is. And then you have to be able to translate your understanding into a story. For most writers, that may be the biggest challenge of all.
I want to be specific about the obstacles of story technique because that’s the only way a writer can hope to overcome them. The first obstacle is the common terminology most writers use to think about story. Terms like “rising action,” “climax,” “progressive complication,” and “denouement,” terms that go as far back as Aristotle, are so broad and theoretical as to be almost meaningless. Let’s be honest: they have no practical value for storytellers. Say you are writing a scene where your hero is hanging by his fingertips, seconds from falling to his death. Is that a progressive complication, a rising action, a denouement, or the opening scene of the story? It may be none of them or all of them, but in any event, these terms don’t tell you how to write the scene or whether to write it at all.
The classic story terms suggest an even bigger obstacle to good technique: the very ideaof what story is and how it works. As a storyteller in training, the first thing you probably did was read Aristotle’s Poetics. I believe Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history. But his thinking about story, while powerful, is surprisingly narrow, focused on a limited number of plots and genres. It is also extremely theoretical and difficult to put into actual practice, which is why most storytellers trying to learn the practical techniques of their craft from Aristotle leave empty-handed.
If you are a screenwriter, you probably moved from Aristotle to a much simpler understanding of story called “three-act structure.” This is also problematic, because three-act structure, albeit a lot easier to understand than Aristotle, is hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong.
Three-act theory says that every story for the screen has three “acts”: the first act is the beginning, the second is the middle, and the third is the end. The first act is about thirty pages long. The third act is also about thirty pages long. And the second act runs to around sixty pages. And this three-act story supposedly has two or three “plot points” (whatever those are). Got that? Great. Now go and write a professional script.
I’m simplifying this theory of story, but not by much. It should be obvious that such an elementary approach has even less practical value than Aristotle. But what’s worse is that it promotes a view of story that is mechanical. The idea of an act break comes from the conventions of traditional theater, where we close the curtain to signal the end of an act. We don’t need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays.
In short, act breaks are external to the story. Three-act structure is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic—where the story should or should not go.
A mechanical view of story, like three-act theory, inevitably leads to episodic storytelling. An episodic story is a collection of pieces, like parts stored in a box. Events in the story stand out as discrete elements and don’t connect or build steadily from beginning to end. The result is a story that moves the audience sporadically, if at all.
Another obstacle to mastering storytelling has to do with the writing process. Just as many writers have a mechanical view of what a story is, they use a mechanical process for creating one. This is especially true of screenwriters whose mistaken notions of what makes a script salable lead them to write a script that is neither popular nor good. Screenwriters typically come up with a story idea that is a slight variation on a movie they saw six months previously. Then they apply a genre, like “detective,” “love,” or “action,” and fill in the characters and plot beats (story events) that go with that form. The result: a hopelessly generic, formulaic story devoid of originality.
In this book, I want to show you a better way. My goal is to explain how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one, so that you will have the best chance of writing a great story of your own. Some would argue that it’s impossible to teach someone how to tell a great story. I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story differently than in the past.
In simplest terms, I’m going to lay out a practical poetics for storytellers that works whether you’re writing a screenplay, a novel, a play, a teleplay, or a short story. I will
*Show that a great story is organic—not a machine but a living body that develops
*Treat storytelling as an exacting craft with precise techniques that will help you be successful, regardless of the medium or genre you choose
*Work through a writing process that is also organic, meaning that we will develop characters and plot that grow naturally out of your original story idea
The main challenge facing any storyteller is overcoming the contradiction between the first and second of these tasks. You construct a story from hundreds, even thousands, of elements using a vast array of techniques. Yet the story must feel organic to the audience; it must seem like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax. If you want to become a great storyteller, you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, as they must, even though you are the one making them act that way.
In this sense we storytellers are a lot like athletes. A great athlete makes everything look easy, as though his body just naturally moves that way. But in fact he has so mastered the techniques of his sport that his technique has simply disappeared from view, and the audience sees only beauty.
Excerpted from The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. Copyright © 2007 by John Truby. Published in October 2007 by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Buy Truby's book here.

ABBEY ROAD ANNIVERSARY

Fans of the Beatles are descending upon Abbey Road to mark the forty year anniversary of this photograph. The iconic photo was taken in August of 1969, and became one of the most famous album covers in history and graced their last recorded work, "Abbey Road," which gave us such enduring classics as "Something," "Come Together," "Here Comes the Sun," "Oh! Darling," and that brilliant medley at the end of side two. (For those who don't know: unlike a compact disc, a long playing record had two sides)


The Beatles on Abbey Road

Here are some other shots from the photo session:

LEO KOTTKE

In the Old West, they used to say there was always a gunslinger better than you somewhere. The analogy is imperfect, since guitar-playing requires more than just speed and accuracy--it demands taste, musicality, timbre, rhythm--and when things go well nobody is left lying dead in the ditch. Still, with those caveats, Leo Kottke is the better gunslinger. Watch the fingers. There was a time any self-respecting music fan played Greenhouse incessantly, or 6- and 12-String Guitar (the one with the armadillo on the cover). Many a sunny morning was filled with Leo's phenomenal fingerpicking as the coffee brewed and someone made blueberry pancakes in the next room. Many a night's revelries ended with Leo's distinctive tones, his own impossible compositions or wonderful covers of "Tiny Island" or "Eight Miles High" or "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." On the whole, he probably inspired more guitar players to play than to bash their instruments into kindling, and for that we salute him. Leo Kottke!


Medley: Part Two/June Bug/Train And The Gate (from German TV, early 80s)

Listen. Once in a while he even sings, though he doesn't much care for his voice and on one occasion compared it to the sound of a goose farting on a muggy day. Even so, it's an expressive counterpoint to his lyrical, syncopated guitar playing. On this second piece, he sings the blues--in his own unique style--about the passing of time and how you can't go back because things have changed--a cold sharp feeling for most of us now and then--but what is surprising in this clip is how he smiles when he performs it. Like any good bluesman, he takes this painful realization and makes it bearable, if not joyful. Watch his face when he sings the second verse, the part that begins with "You can't go back." Priceless.


"Hear the Wind Howl"

Some cloudy day the sun won't shine my blues away
And all I've lived for seems far away
Some cloudy day

Hear the wind howl
Hear the wind howl

You can't go back, it's not the same
Things have changed
While I counted hours and you remained
And you remained

Leo Kottke looking down the barrel of a gun

BUDD SCHULBERG DIES

Marlon Brando was brilliant, and Rod Steiger was no slouch, but who put the words in their mouths? Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who died today.

The controversial Schulberg had a fascinating life that included working with John Ford's documentary unit in WWII, and being one of the first US servicemen to liberate Nazi-run concentration camps. Later, during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, Schulberg was named as a communist, and he buckled and decided to "name names" as a friendly witness. It was not his finest hour.

Maybe he assuaged his guilt with "On the Waterfront." The movie seems to be a parable about the courage of a man to "name names," in this case a palooka named Terry Malloy (Brando) whose brother, Charley the Gent (Steiger) is the lawyer for a mobbed-up union boss named Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). This iconic scene in the taxi is a testimony to Schulberg's art as well as the actors, and we feel Terry's pain as he laments his wasted life as a bum who "coulda been a contender," and then decides to do the right thing and be a "cheese-eater."

Budd Schulberg, 1954

LISTENING TO LEONARD

Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, March 10, 2008, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, in New York City.


Leonard Cohen back in the day: novelist, poet, songwriter, singer, legend, ladies man and hopeless romantic. Born in Montreal in 1934, the gravelly voiced folkie wore many faces but didn't crack the pop world and become famous until his first record album came out in 1967. Songs of Leonard Cohen included "So Long, Marianne" and "Suzanne," which became a huge hit for Judy Collins and was recorded by countless others.



On the BBC, Cohen said the song was written about Suzanne Verdal, the wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, in Montreal. The song is a love poem to Suzanne, and contains references to the city, the Saint Lawrence River and the tiny chapel on the water there, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours.




Leonard Cohen sings "Famous Blue Raincoat" in this rare clip. The gravity of his lyrics and the gravel in his voice make Cohen a tough listen for many, but his lyrics are rewarding even if they can be dark and even heartbreaking at times.

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
Youd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without lili marlene


A recent interview with Cohen from the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC).

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane's awake --

She sends her regards.