Auditioning On Camera

An Actor's Guide

Joseph Hacker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136699863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

To win a screen role, an actor must learn to contend with an on-camera audition. Understanding how to make the crucial adjustments to one's craft that this kind of audition requires is vital to the career of any screen actor.

Auditioning On Camera sets out the key elements of a successful on-camera audition and explains how to put them into practice. Joseph Hacker draws on 35 years of acting experience to guide the reader through the screen auditioning process with an engaging and undaunting approach. Key elements examined include:

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• textual analysis

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• knowing where to look

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• dealing with nerves

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• on-camera interviews

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• using the environment

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• retaining the camera's focus

The book also features point-by-point chapter summaries, as well as a glossary of acting and technical terms, and is a comprehensive and enlightening resource for screen actors of all levels.

Section III

Scene Preparation for on-Camera Auditions

Chapter 11

How to Paint a Nose

Basic Philosophy

– 1 –

Accomplished acting is the primary issue in any audition. All of the considerations addressed in this book are meant to support your capacity to perform the part. Since this book lays out the sequence of what must unfold to manifest a worthy on-camera audition, it would be incomplete without addressing the craft itself.

Let’s start by saying everyone wants to be special and have things come easy. But there are laws in the universe and woe to anyone who thinks they can short-change the universe. The “secret” for success? Ask any successful artist and they will answer: First comes work, then comes luck, then comes talent. Success can’t possibly happen if you don’t show up well prepared.

The single most important contributor to being well prepared is consistent participation in an acting workshop or local theater where you can pursue and express your craft. Actors are like athletes: they must work out every day. They don’t sit idle all week and expect to win the tournament that weekend. If you are an actor you have to be acting. You cannot sit around and wait. If you do, you will not be ready when an opportunity comes. And believe me, they come and go in a flash.

Former students often call me for my advice or coaching for a part they suddenly have an opportunity to audition for, and if in the course of our session they acknowledge to me that they have not been in workshop, I inwardly know they are probably not going to get the part. Like it or lump it, that’s the way it is.

That said, in this chapter I am going to attempt “a raid on the inarticulate” as T.S. Eliot so perfectly put it. I am going to outline what I have learned about the acting process itself and also give a summary of what clues an actor might pursue to bring his work to life. You are the artist. I venture this as a starting point that might be helpful to you in cobbling a process for yourself. The following is an assemblage of thoughts, anecdotes and approaches that might help if you need it. I know I did.

Note: I have had the blessing of studying with some truly great teachers: principally Stella Adler and Peggy Feury, but also Sean Nelson, Peter Flood, Jeff Cory, to name a few. I confess I am humbled when I venture to address the subject, eclectic as it is, which has been so brilliantly espoused by these gifted mentors. For an excellent and thorough exploration of the acting process I vigorously recommend the following:

The Intent to Live, Larry Moss, Bantam, 2005.
Directing Actors, Judith Weston, M. Wiese Productions, 1996
Stella Adler, The Art of Acting, H. Kissel, Applause Books, 2000
The Impersonal Actor (Audiotapes), Shawn Nelson, 1994
Acting in Commercials, Joan See, Backstage, 1993

Andrew Wyeth, the great American artist, was once asked if he ever took art classes. “No,” he said, “I was afraid someone would teach me how to paint a nose.” He didn’t want to know “how.” Indeed he wanted to discover “how” anew with each and every nose. And that is the way it should be for your acting; and it most certainly will be. There isn’t a “way.” No one can teach you how to act. You will have to teach yourself. But … in the beginning, most of us do not have a clue as to what we are doing and crave some guideposts to get us off in the right direction. Or we are aware that there are holes in our preparation for our oncamera auditions but don’t know where to look to fill them.

I want to start this discussion by relating an event that happened to me years ago. It may seem oblique to the subject but it actually cuts right to the heart of the matter.

Jennifer Part was a casting director working out of Screen Gems who was very supportive of my work, meaning she called me in to read for anything I was remotely right for. She was clearly in my corner as evidenced by the number of times I auditioned for projects she was casting. But I wasn’t landing any parts. One day, with the sides in my hands, as I was going in to read yet again for another project, she stopped me on the stairs that led up to the producers’ offices. After cordial greetings she said: “Joe, I have been thinking about you. I’ve been wanting to tell you something.” “What, Jennifer?” I asked with mild curiosity. She looked at me with warm eyes and said, “Joe, I have never seen you give a bad audition.” “Why, thank you, Jennifer,” I said. And then she shook me to my bones when she said with a genuinely kind tone as she patted me on my wrist: “Unfortunately, darling, that’s not a compliment.” Then she went toodling on down the stairs … “Bye!” … leaving me standing there in a state of stunned bewilderment. What in the world did she mean by that? “I have never seen you give a bad audition and that is not a compliment.” I was like you. I ached with ambition. I was studying like crazy, working on scene study every night, going to acting exercise class twice weekly. I was in great shape. I was moderate in my excesses. I was very talented at looking great and sounding natural. (That was my idea of acting at the time, I am embarrassed to say.) I was cool, very cool, too cool for TV, as they say. Never made a fool of myself. Always cool, always looking good. (I hope you hear a note of self-derision.) Producers were calling me in all the time. I was very active professionally. What in the world did Jennifer Part mean?!

Looking great and acting natural, yes. That’s what I was doing. Back then I knew how to do everything but I didn’t know what to do. See, I thought my job in an audition was to show them I could do whatever it was “they” wanted me to do. If you think about it, what that meant was I basically had to come from the neutral center. I had no point of view. It took me a long time to understand what Jennifer was getting at. I remember a note that Peggy gave me in class once. She said when great actors are bad, they are very bad. What she meant was, and this is the whole point, our characters are meant to be real people, actual people, caught in the circumstances of the story … and those circumstances are not “everyday” circumstances. They are special, unusual circumstances; because otherwise we don’t have a story. The choices that an actor makes have to live up to the unusualness of the character’s situation. The characters are pushed out “on the edge” as it were … not in the center, which is where I was playing it (in my effort to be natural). When a great actor – who is great partially because he knows this – goofs, it is because he is out on the edge, but it is the “wrong” edge, and that’s why it looks so bad. That’s the risk an actor takes. But being out there is also where courage and greatness lies. This I was not doing.

I was not doing it because I had not yet devoted a portion of my preparation to identifying why I, Joe, personally (and with some passion) wanted to do the scene. I wasn’t investing myself personally in the work. I had a passion for being professional and accomplished in my craft. But I didn’t, in the beginning, have a passion for the character and the situation he was in. I spent not one calorie of energy establishing for myself what it was about the character and his situation that I personally wanted to express. I just wanted to be good.

I know for your auditions you are going to be all wrapped up getting the lines right and sounding the way you want to sound … but I urge you to focus with all your muscles on what it is about the situation and the nature of the character that you personally want to express and therefore bring to life.

I can tell you that when you audition well, one of the main reasons will be because you have an insight or an enthusiasm for some aspect of the scene: the predicament or tactics of the character, or the theme of the story. This can be as simple as: “I would love to play a part in a scary movie. I’ll make it just like my nightmares.” Or “There is so much needless violence in the world. Why do we treat each other this way?” Or “I was at a wedding once, my sister’s … it was hilarious! A total catastrophe!” Or “God, it would be awful to be in that situation, and I know why.” You need a connection to the scene/screenplay that excites and interests and challenges you such that you look forward to the audition as an opportunity of expression rather than a booby trap.

Larry Moss addresses this issue with an anecdote in his book Intent to Live. He describes how as a young acting student he felt completely insecure, confused and doomed to humiliation as he tried to prepare a Chekhov scene for class the next morning. Then it struck him to his bones that the catastrophe he was forecasting for himself was exactly parallel to the social situation of the character in the scene. Once he embraced that point of view, the entire scene along with every impulse fell into place for him.

Stella Adler used to say that an actor’s talent does not lie in mastering the actor’s craft; rather it manifests itself in the actor’s choices.

And where do we find these choices? There is only one guide to lead you: yourself. Look to what you, the artist, through your own life experience and imagination, find compelling, funny or interesting in the scene. Believe in it. It is, after all, the key to what you have to offer as an artist. It is all you have, actually. Try not to be distracted by what you think “They” want; rather look inward, to yourself, as if you yourself were the producer of the project driven by a passion for its theme, and you the actor were perfect for the part. Show them exactly how the part should be played.

– 2 –

A really precise definition of the word “talent” eludes me. I made the glib comment the other day that talent is: “You do it, I like it.” In the same conversation a teaching colleague, Lora Zane, offered a more instructive definition: that talent was the ability of the actor to be in the character’s situation; to be the doctor attending a patient, the student falling in love, the outcast seeking revenge … to be whatever the screenplay required. This dovetails with Sandy Meisner’s definition of acting: living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

Every once in a while I have a student who doesn’t know the first thing about acting who comes in and knocks my socks off. As an “actor” he doesn’t know what he is doing … but he knows exactly what the character is doing! In other words he throws himself completely into the situation and makes believe! He doesn’t seem to have trouble memorizing his lines, because he instinctively connects them to what the character is doing, what the actual human dynamic of the circumstance is. He loses all self-consciousness, because he is absorbed completely in the reality he has created. He is not wondering if what he is doing is any good or not, or what the audience is thinking of him as he does it. Just like when we were kids. He’s thoroughly engrossed in making believe.

That is the goal … to put yourself in the situation the script calls for and live inside of it … just like you did when you were a child making believe. When we were kids we would build a fort and ready ourselves for the bad guys, or we would paint our faces, fashion a tomahawk and live in a teepee, or present ourselves to the Queen of England to receive the honors of a Knight of the Realm. And while we were doing this never once did we break the spell of what we had created or doubt for an instant that we were anything but what we were pretending to be. This is acting at its best. This is the goal. All the rest is subordinate to this … whatever it takes.

I read a Playboy interview with Dustin Hoffman in which he said (what’s with the always Dustin Hoffman!?) in association with his work on the film Lenny that the work for an actor gets harder, not easier, because the actor becomes more and more demanding that his work include this total involvement. It is both elusive and essential. He was alluding to the fact that an actor becomes increasingly selfcritical – he knows when he is faking – as he seeks an authen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Exercises
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Section I: What the Camera Requires
• Section II: On-Camera Audition Strategies
• Section III: Scene Preparation for On-Camera Auditions
• Bibliography
• Index