Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  My father was a remarkable man of the theater. There has probably never been an American repertory theater director as civil and gentlemanly. He was gracious, generous, humorous, and deeply intelligent. He gave a leg up to hundreds of young people, signing many of them to their first professional jobs. These were qualities that made him a charismatic, beloved teacher when he was occasionally forced into that fallback line of work. I am constantly approached by people with grateful tales of my father changing their lives, in a classroom, a rehearsal studio, or a school play. He was deeply lovable, not an adjective often applied to your boss when you work in the theater.

  But it is possible that his finest traits as a person were the very things that hobbled him as a theater manager. He was missing a key son-of-a-bitch chromosome, the quality that would have helped him make short work of Biff Richards. In creating his companies, he typically sought out theater talent that was just as easygoing and companionable as he was. He valued niceness overmuch. Often he would hire happily married couples to strengthen the social dynamic of an acting troupe, ignoring the fact that one of the partners was dead weight. By the same token, he steered clear of the blazing talents, the prima donnas, the edgy, challenging stars-in-embryo that light up the stage and magnetically draw audiences into theaters. These preferences extended to actors, directors, and designers alike. He refused to believe that such ego-driven behavior was an essential element in great theater. To him, it was not worth the trade-off.

  Maybe he was right. Right or wrong, it was his inescapable nature. In retrospect, I revere him for it. But in those days I was a young Oedipus. I was hungry. I was impatient. I wanted to be involved in the best theater out there. I wanted to work for the best directors. I wanted to go up against the best actors. I didn’t give a damn for niceness. Bring on the tyrants! The monsters! The sons of bitches! I wanted to work for people who would settle for nothing but the best.

  That McCarter season continued until the following May. My two productions came off well enough. I acted in two or three others. My father and I had a perfectly good working relationship. We never exchanged a word about the Biff Richards mess. This was a little weird, but it never seemed to cause us undue strain. In the summer, Jean and I kept our Princeton apartment while I acted and directed at the Bucks County Playhouse, a half hour’s drive away. Dad offered me another season at McCarter. He even proposed making me his associate director. I turned him down. I told him I needed to strike out on my own, to test myself in the marketplace, to audition and compete, to perform without a net. I needed to go to New York. He said he understood and he gave me his blessing, but he was probably more disappointed than he let on. By September, Jean and I had moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With her usual resourcefulness and alacrity, Jean found a job. I assumed the long-running role of an unemployed New York actor. There was work waiting for me in Princeton but I wouldn’t even consider it. Was this naked ambition on my part? Was it Oedipal pigheadedness? Did I have too high an opinion of my own abilities? Too low an opinion of my father’s? Whatever the reasons, I never worked for him again.

  [21]

  Reality

  How stupid can you get? That September I arrived in New York City a jobless twenty-four-year-old with no savings, and no income, only to learn that I had blown my chance to collect unemployment insurance. During the long McCarter season, my canny actor friends had advised me to contrive a fake New York address and apply those eight months of rep work in New Jersey to my record of earnings as a resident of New York State. That way I could start collecting unemployment as soon as I moved into town. “Unemployment is our biggest source of income,” my friends had proclaimed. “It’s the closest thing there is to state support for the arts. No actor in New York can survive without it!”

  But alas, I am my father’s son. With the airheaded heedlessness that has always characterized my financial dealings, I barely heard their advice. I arrived in New York with no official work history whatsoever. This was an appalling strategic lapse. My first week there, I walked into the Unemployment Insurance Office at Broadway and Eighty-ninth to make a claim. I stood at a window as a weary, contemptuous woman informed me that, as far as New York State was concerned, I had never earned a salary in my life. Go out and accumulate twenty weeks of work, I was told, or you can’t collect a penny. Listening to her testy, offhand words, I was seized with money panic. My knees were like water, my face was ashen, I was clammy with sweat. I had turned my back on Princeton, eager to perform without a net. And I was already in free fall.

  I also had no idea how to get a job. Unemployed in New York, I was the victim of an absurd irony. A Harvard degree, a Fulbright grant, two years of study in London, and a year in my father’s employ—all of this had given me a substantial head start in the profession. But it had also spoiled me rotten. I had never had to scramble for work. I had learned nothing of the gritty, fiercely competitive dogfight that is New York theater. Having abruptly left my father’s protective cocoon and moved into the city, I suddenly found myself lagging far behind every other actor in town. Reality hit and it hit hard.

  Jean was now a teaching specialist in Westchester County and was essentially supporting the two of us. Her job required a daily forty-minute commute up the Saw Mill River Parkway. She couldn’t drive, so she got a learner’s permit and set out to learn. Seated beside her in the passenger seat of our VW wagon, I became her driving instructor. I squired her to and from her job in White Plains with my heart in my throat, five times a week. For all intents and purposes, this was the only work I could get. The rest of each day was spent chasing my tail in a parody of the clueless neophyte New York actor. I printed up résumés and glossy photos, I sat through frosty meetings with B-list agents, I pored through issues of Backstage, I sat for hours at Equity open calls, waiting for a two-minute interview with the assistant stage manager of a show I would later learn had already been cast. Day by day I was learning the most basic hardship of the acting profession: getting rejected by people of no consequence.

  Photograph by Van Williams. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor.

  On a good day I would land a commercial audition at one of the big Madison Avenue ad agencies—Young & Rubicam perhaps, or Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. This was the golden age of television advertising, with terrific character actors in stylish little mini-comedies pitching every conceivable product. To sell Alka Seltzer, a heavyset man in a T-shirt sits on the edge of his bed and moans, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” and the sentence enters the cultural lexicon overnight. A woman in a flowing white gown sits under a tree and, when she is told that she has tasted Chiffon margarine and not butter, her response becomes a catchphrase for passive-aggressives everywhere: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” Lay’s Potato Chips even reeled in the great Bert Lahr. In a commercial for Lay’s, Bert donned a hokey devil’s costume and stood in red light with hellish smoke surrounding him. Holding a bag of potato chips, he comically growled Lay’s famous tagline: “Bet you can’t eat just one!” Ads like this were classy, clever, and extremely lucrative. Landing them was hardly where my larger ambitions lay, but I tried desperately to get one.

  Bert Lahr’s memorable ad may have lent an extra measure of excitement when I got an audition for another Lay’s Potato Chip spot. This one was to be a parody of Mutiny on the Bounty. I was set to read for the Fletcher Christian role. In the ad, Captain Bligh tortures the crew of the ship by insisting that they be limited to only one Lay’s potato chip. “But, Captain, that’s impossible!” Mr. Christian exclaims. “Everyone knows you can’t eat just one!” Waiting to audition, I sat with a gang of Christians and a band of Blighs, spotting among them some of the best character men in New York. I was called in to audition with one of the Blighs. Scrutinizing us were the director, the writers, the admen, and the fretful folks from Lay’s. When I read the ad copy, this group seemed to like what they saw. I was called
in again and paired with another Bligh. Then another. By the third time through I was performing off book, confident and cocky. Finally I was thanked profusely by all the parties and sent on my way.

  I waited at the elevator, giddy with optimism. The elevator doors opened, disgorging a gabbling crowd of salty, grizzled men in bell bottoms, striped nautical T-shirts, and tam o’shanters. One had an eye-patch, another clenched a corncob pipe in his mouth. These were the actors auditioning for the Bounty’s crew, summoned from one floor below. Their entrance was hilarious, their high spirits infectious. I rode the elevator to the ground floor, laughing out loud the whole way. I stepped out of the building and onto Madison Avenue, golden in the midday autumn light. “I got the gig!” I thought to myself. “I’m sure of it!”

  But no. I didn’t get it.

  I didn’t get any others, either. The same story was repeated fifty times that year. I just couldn’t land a commercial. I began to think that something else was at work, that subconsciously I didn’t really want these jobs, that I thought they were beneath me, and that all those admen and their clients sensed my veiled contempt. I tried to cultivate my own indifference, to persuade myself that being turned down for commercials was a good thing. This way, I figured, I could pretend to stand on principle. I could loftily claim, for the rest of my life, that, no, I don’t do commercials. No one need ever know how hard I tried to get them. Of course this comforting rationale did not prevent me years later from hawking insurance companies, credit cards, telephone services, and Campbell’s Soup on TV with the best of them. It’s easy to stay uncorrupted, you see, if you’re never asked.

  But if no jobs came my way, I was far from discouraged—at least at first. New York was full of old friends, most of them in the same boat I was in. They hailed from all walks of my recent life: Harvard, LAMDA, Ohio Shakespeare, McCarter repertory, Bucks County Playhouse, Highfield Summer Theatre, even The Great Road Players (my friendship with Paul Zimet survived that debacle). All of us lived on the cheap and dealt with the futile pursuit of work with fatalistic gallows humor. Like them, I was determined to stay positive. I may have had no income, but to fend off gloom I kept myself frenetically busy. I did satirical skits for the radical radio station WBAI-FM. I acted in an off-off-Broadway workshop production in a church basement. I directed a completely incomprehensible new play in a studio on East Fourth Street where, at each performance, the five actors outnumbered the audience. I tried to convince myself that all of this was leading somewhere, but it was becoming a hard sell. I was just about to admit defeat, to return to McCarter Theatre with my tail between my legs and direct a production of Macbeth for my father, when something amazing happened.

  I got a movie.

  [22]

  Induced Insecurity

  A movie?!

  Until that moment, I never dreamed I would ever be in a movie. Acting in movies was simply outside the context of my life. From before I could even remember, acting on the stage was the only acting I had ever known. Beyond the odd commercial or soap opera, none of the actors I had ever worked with had appeared on a screen. I loved movies, of course. Like anyone else, I had my favorite movie stars, and going to the movies was part of the rhythm of my life. But movie actors struck me as a breed apart. To me, it seemed they worked in a different profession. I never pictured myself in their company. I never envied them, coveted their roles, or thought I could do any better.

  So imagine my astonishment when I got a phone call out of the blue asking me to come to a swanky townhouse in the East Sixties and interview for a major role in a Hollywood film. For months I had been pounding the New York pavements, looking for an open door into the acting game outside of the protective custody of my father. I had struggled with the ego-bruising reality that, apart from him, no one wanted to hire me for a paid acting job. And now a movie director was coming after me. How did this happen?

  The seeds had been planted years before. By a sublime irony, it turns out that my good fortune had had its beginnings at the lowest point in my fledgling professional life. In the disastrous summer of The Great Road Players, a young filmmaker named Brian De Palma came down to Princeton to see his old Columbia buddies in that long-ago production of Molière one-act farces. I had directed the show and performed the part of a loony philosopher, maniacally spouting a stream of philosophical gobbledygook. I remember being onstage that evening and hearing a wild cackle rising above the titters of the sparse audience. That cackle was Brian De Palma. When I met him briefly after the play he was effusive in his praise; but with the weight of the world on my shoulders, his compliments barely registered. I never heard of him again until a few years later when his anarchic low-budget film comedies Greetings and Hi, Mom! came out.

  I had forgotten Brian, but he had not forgotten me. And when another young filmmaker named Paul Williams was looking for someone to play a patrician Harvard undergraduate dope dealer, Brian De Palma told him to track me down. It didn’t hurt that Williams was a Harvard alumnus himself and remembered my glory days on the stage of the Loeb Drama Center. These two fleeting connections from my past steered me to that townhouse and got me that role. It was not the last of Brian De Palma’s favors. In the years to come he was to hire me more often than any other film director. By then he had become known as “the Master of the Macabre.” Each time he hired me, I was his villain. In three of his classic psychological suspense thrillers, I was the psychological suspense.

  And what about the movie itself?

  Does Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues ring a bell? Probably not. You will find almost nobody who has seen or even remembers the title of my first film. But for me it was huge. It introduced me to the magical, mysterious, nutty world of filmmaking. On location in Toronto within two weeks of that townhouse meeting, all the rigorous rules and protocols of theater were tossed out the window. For me, making a movie was like entering an altered state of consciousness. This was particularly true of Dealing, since the subject of the film and the process of making it were both suffused with the smell of pot smoke. Easy Rider had exploded on the scene only a year before, and the Hollywood studios were scrambling to duplicate its runaway success. Every one of them was throwing money at stoner filmmakers with reckless abandon. Dealing was Warner Brothers’ entry in this drug-addled cinema horse race. I’d never made a movie and I’d never been much of a pot smoker, so the entire Dealing enterprise was almost surreally new.

  Any stage actor recruited into films has shared my experience of the first time on a movie set. Nobody tells you anything. Who knew that a two-minute scene could take ten hours to shoot? Who knew that you would perform it sixty times (half of them off-camera) before it was in the can? Who knew the difference between masters, panning shots, two-shots, over-the-shoulders, and close-ups? Who knew the precise roles of operators, focus-pullers, key grips, dolly grips, gaffers, and best boys? Who knew the particular challenge of husbanding your physical and emotional resources, and keeping yourself fresh and spontaneous until your very last shot of the day? Typically the novice actor arrives on the set and is promptly flung into the deep end, left to discover all these mysteries for himself. On Dealing, this precipitous learning curve made me feel like I was learning the craft of acting all over again, and in the slow learners’ group at that. Never the most confident of actors, I found myself in the grips of an insecurity as acute as a chronic low-level fever.

  My big breakthrough came when I realized that insecurity is the prime currency of film acting. In a sense, induced insecurity is exactly what you strive for. This was a major shift from what I was used to. In theater acting, you work to overcome your insecurities. In weeks of exhaustive rehearsals you carefully craft a performance, polishing it like a gemstone. You work at it until you’re finally “secure” in your role. You rely on technique to sustain you and keep you consistent over the length of a run. That run can be weeks, months, or even years long. Your challenge is to sustain the illusion of the first time, for yours
elf and for the audience, from the first performance to the last.

  In the movies, you only need to achieve that illusion once and you’re given lots of chances to get it right. When shooting a single scene, the camera captures the trial-and-error process that a stage actor goes through during weeks of rehearsals. Only a tiny fraction of what’s shot eventually appears on film. In the course of several takes, all sorts of happy accidents can happen in front of the camera, completely uncalculated. The best of these accidents are like lightning in a bottle. They are flashes of artless reality born of your induced insecurity—your fear, your pain, your longing, your nervous laughter. They have a close-up truth that can’t be faked. Hence, when you’re shooting a film you must recklessly put your emotions into play. You must induce your own insecurity, ignoring all constraint (a plausible explanation for the on-set misbehavior of so many film and TV actors, luridly recounted by the tabloid media). Emotional accidents are a film actor’s most potent tools. You don’t actually need a stage actor’s skills to achieve them. You just need the willingness to let accidents happen and enough technique to put them to work. Indeed, the more polished your performance the more you risk losing its truthfulness. Happy accidents are at the heart of the best film acting. You offer them up to a filmmaker and hope that he or she will make good use of them. And as a general rule, those accidents make up your best work on film.

  Dealing was not my best work on film. It was a listless caper movie, lacking both comedy and suspense. A caustic viewer might have remarked that everyone involved had smoked a little too much weed. This did not dissuade me from thinking that we had made a masterpiece, destined for blinding success. That it opened to resounding silence and disappeared without a trace was a lesson that I would learn over and over again in the years to come: when you’re shooting a movie, you really don’t know what you’re doing. The process of making a film has a way of persuading you that it’s going to be great, often against all evidence to the contrary. Work that hard on something and it just has to be good, right? Not necessarily.