The method, p.41
The Method, page 41
The Godfather, for instance, might take place in the 1940s, but its portrait of family dynamics, masculinity, ethnic pride, and poisonous capitalism is pure 1970s, as is its reliance on the Method. To buy a ticket for The Godfather in 1972 meant that you would see not only the death of Don Corleone but also Marlon Brando’s passing of the Method torch to a new generation. Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, and James Caan, who played Kay, Tom Hagen, and Sonny Corleone, respectively, all studied with Sanford Meisner. John Cazale, who played Fredo, studied with Clifford Odets protégé Peter Meyer Kass at Boston University. And playing Michael Corleone, the anchor and protagonist of the family saga, was Al Pacino, one of Strasberg’s favorite finds.
Al Pacino had first studied acting at the High School of the Performing Arts, where, like Michael Kahn three years earlier, he likely would have learned some form of the Method from Michael Howard. Two years into high school, however, he dropped out and began studying at HB Studio under Charles Laughton. Lacking a roof to call his own, he slept on the school’s stage. After joining the Studio, he made a name for himself with a monologue that mashed up a soliloquy from Hamlet with a speech of Hickey’s from The Iceman Cometh. Strasberg asked him to perform the monologue again, swapping his characterizations of Hamlet and Hickey. When Pacino complied, he became one of the few actors ever to get applause for an exercise at the Studio. His ascent to the top of the profession was swift. First came the Off-Broadway breakthrough with The Indian Wants the Bronx, then his Broadway debut, in 1969, with Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, which garnered him both a Tony Award and his first leading role in a film, in The Panic in Needle Park. The Godfather was his third film. At the time of its release, he was thirty-two years old.
Pacino did not like to use extensive script analysis or affective memory exercises. His own process was far more intuitive; he worked “from the unconscious … what you hope happens is your unconscious is freed, you trust that part of you.” He became known in the industry for his ability to “absorb” people, watching them intensely and then somehow, mysteriously, taking on their essence and embodying it.
Coppola fought hard to cast the relatively unknown Pacino, and then fought even harder to keep him in the film. Dustin Hoffman had proved with The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy that you didn’t have to possess conventional good looks to anchor a film, but the studios still suspected actors who looked a little too ethnic. Pacino may have been tenderly handsome, with a mischievous smile and physical grace, but he read as explicitly Italian. It was also unclear to the film’s producers what, exactly, he was doing with the character. Michael’s arc in The Godfather is enormous. He begins it as a total mystery, a returning war hero who is supposed to go legitimate and leave his family’s Mafia ties behind. By the end of the film, he’s taken over the Corleone family and sanctioned hits on both his competition and his own brother-in-law. “What I thought was to low-key it early on, hoping that a character would emerge that will surprise you … That was the key to the character, you would say ‘Where did he come from? … How did it happen?’ ” This would mirror, in turn, the audience’s reaction to Pacino himself.
All the executives at Paramount saw, however, was an actor doing nothing at all. In order to protect Pacino, Coppola moved up the filming of the pivotal scene in which Michael murders the men who tried to kill his father, revealing to everyone what both actor and character could do. The scene is a wonder of Strasbergian internalization. You see Michael’s entire decision-making process, his fears over his safety and his future, and his eventual rage and resolution, travel through Pacino in a few wordless seconds. As in many of Pacino’s performances, the whole role dwells in his eyes, which appear at times to be lit by an internal flame and are as expressive as most actors’ entire bodies.
Later in his career, Pacino would become known for his operatic ability to go over the top, find a new top, and then go over that one as well. But The Godfather gives us an Al Pacino of extreme, even brave, restraint. Lee “taught me something that I don’t do enough of,” he said decades later. “He said ‘Sometimes don’t go as far as you can go.’ ” There is only one moment when we get a glimpse of the volcanic performances that lay in his future, and it is at the end of the film. Pressed by his wife about whether he had his brother-in-law killed, Michael repeats “Don’t ask me about my business, Kay,” over and over, finally ending the conversation by slamming his hand on his desk and shouting a simple “No!” The scene, in its repetition and escalation of stakes and its rapid, overlapping, improvised energy, feels exactly like a first-year exercise in a Meisner classroom. It is the one scene in which Keaton—who by her own admission was lost playing Kay in the film—comes alive, and it contains a multivalent thrill. We are witness to the unveiling of a new and terrifying Michael Corleone, and we are witness to two actors working like great tennis players to provoke each other to new levels of their gifts.
The Godfather accounted for 10 percent of box office grosses for 1972, and it improved the fortunes of its cast, particularly Brando (who won an Oscar for his performance) and Pacino. In the next two years, Pacino made Scarecrow, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes before bombing in the States, and Serpico, which made nearly ten times its budget of $3 million. When he agreed to make a sequel to The Godfather for Paramount, he now had enough clout to weigh in on the film’s casting. There was a role in the movie that he had his eye on, an elderly Jewish gangster based on Meyer Lansky named Hyman Roth. Coppola hadn’t cast it yet, but Pacino and Charles Laughton had a very good idea of who should play the part.
When the Actors Studio Theatre failed, Strasberg’s decadeslong dream of running a national theater was over. But even had he wanted to withdraw into the Studio’s renovated Greek church in midtown, it would have been impossible. He and his organization needed money, and so both turned back to the public with a series of events called Special Evenings. In their first year, these presentations drew from the work of the Playwrights Unit; in their second season, Strasberg offered public talks on his personal pantheon of actors, including Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. Fiske, and John Barrymore.
Strasberg suffered personally and financially during this period. His pay from the Studio was minimal and erratic, and Paula’s death, like many in America’s health care system, was expensive. Paula had always been the social force of their lives, the one who organized star-filled New Year’s Eve parties and took care of the more wayward members of the Studio. She was the den mother, Lee the ice king. At the age of sixty-four, Strasberg still had difficulty relating to the world, and without Paula, he often seemed lost. One time, Shelley Winters found him sitting in his apartment in the dark. She asked him why. “I don’t know how to turn the lights on,” he replied.
But Strasberg’s revitalization happened with incredible speed. While out in Los Angeles to moderate summer sessions at the Actors Studio West, he was introduced to Anna Mizrahi, thirty years his junior, an aspiring actor and alum of John Lindsay’s campaign for Mayor of New York City. Anna had studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, “where Sandy talked against Lee Strasberg and his Method junk,” and had played small roles in film and television. When they met, she was an observer at the Actors Studio West, where someone had told her to read Stanislavski but “I couldn’t get through the bloody book. I was no devotee.” One day at a friend’s house, Lee asked her out. She was wary of him until he suggested they go and get an ice cream soda instead of visiting a nightclub. “I found this refreshing and charming, as I’m not a nightclub kind of person,” she recalled. “What cemented our relationship was my love of books, ever since I was a young girl. I always felt strongly that someday I would have a great library. Little did I know, when I walked into his home, that he would have the most incredible library I had ever seen.” The two married in 1967.
Strasberg’s career rebounded that year as well. He went to Paris at the behest of his friend Alain Resnais to teach master classes on acting. For most of September, he lectured and taught to an audience that included Jeanne Moreau, François Truffaut, and many members of the Comédie Française. From there, he lectured at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and taught in Vienna, Germany, and Brazil. Strasberg returned to the United States with a new idea. His career as a director might be over, but he was now a world-renowned teacher. The time had come to build a proper school, which would eventually be called the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. As he put it when addressing the Studio in 1969, “I became aware somehow in a more personal way of the enormous concern and interest and, in addition to that, the enormous need for the ideas that we here take for granted.”
That school would, unlike the Actors Studio, train the whole actor. Over three “phases” of study, actors would learn everything from tai chi to acting for the camera. But the emphasis in the Institute’s acting classes remained on the inner life of the character and the self. In the third phase, actors would spend twelve weeks studying affective memory, learning to combine a summoned emotion with “an unrelated physical sequence and a section of unrelated text,” and then move toward merging an affective memory “with a text and action that are one with the emotional event.”
With campuses in Los Angeles and New York, the Institute provided Strasberg first with financial stability, then with wealth. Students could pay extra for special classes taught directly by Strasberg, and from these alone he made around $100,000 a year, half of which he donated back to the Institute. He also began elite coaching for a thousand dollars a session, with a list of prominent clients including Barbra Streisand. By 1980, the Institute was the largest acting school in the country, drawing in fifteen hundred students between its two campuses.
In 1973, when Al Pacino hit on the idea that Strasberg should play Hyman Roth, Lee had no particular need to appear in a big Hollywood movie. He was already the most successful, acclaimed, and controversial figure in his field, and he hadn’t acted since the 1920s. But, as Pacino put it, “When I have an idea, I move on it.” For the first phase of his plan, he showed up at the Strasberg apartment during a party and gave Lee a copy of the script. There was a part in it, Pacino said, one that Lee would be great for. Lee said he’d consider it, not because he had any great need to act again, but because it might be a nice opportunity to investigate how his techniques could be used on film. Actors had long been coming to him with complaints about the difficulties of using their preparation on the tight schedules of a film set. As Shelley Winters put it, “Everybody tugs and pulls at you. Then somebody announces ‘you’re all set now … action’ … You then have to act to a camera. But how do we do all our stuff in front of that machinery?” Lee had never figured out the answer because he’d never seriously worked in film.
Strasberg decided he was interested. But there were more obstacles in his way: Coppola wanted Elia Kazan for the role, did not like being pressured into accepting other people’s ideas, and, as he had already started filming The Godfather, Part II, in Los Angeles, needed to cast the role quickly. Pacino would have to manipulate Coppola into casting Strasberg the way a great Method director like Kazan or Nichols coaxed a truthful performance. A wrap party on the next lot over from Godfather II gave him an opportunity, and he enlisted Anna in a conspiracy to maneuver Strasberg and Coppola together so they could meet. Soon Strasberg was offered the role. He turned it down, offended by the $10,000 salary. When it was upped to $60,000, he agreed to play Roth and flew, only days later, to Santo Domingo to begin filming.
On set, Strasberg struggled with the same problems his actors had brought to him. How do you start an emotion at its peak, right when the director yells “Action,” in a scene shot out of sequence? How do you remember your lines and where you are in the given circumstances of the film? He also experienced, for the first time, character bleed, the psychic overlap between character and self that occurs on many film and theater sets regardless of one’s training. The romantic couple will pair off in real life, the antagonists will grow to hate each other offstage. In Strasberg’s case, he began keeping secrets from Anna, encouraging her to gamble at the casino where they were staying and to leave him alone, as if she were a gangster’s wife.
Strasberg’s performance in The Godfather, Part II is compellingly odd. It’s not the bold transformation that Pacino undertook as he became Michael, and then, as Michael, moved through ever darker and more amoral territories. Instead, it is Strasberg’s essential qualities—the catarrh cough that made his throat click while he talked, the white-hot rage lurking beneath his placid face—that make Roth unforgettable. The real affection between Pacino and Strasberg gave them great onscreen chemistry. Even in scenes where they plot to kill each other, their interactions were so warm, so like a father and his son, that Michael’s hurt at Roth’s betrayal felt all the more vivid.
After The Godfather, Part II opened, Lee Strasberg became a successful and sought-after film actor. At the age of seventy-three, he at last had the fame and acceptance he had always felt he deserved. For his performance in the film, unforgettable as it is brief, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the forty-seventh Academy Awards. The nominees that night included his former students Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Talia Shire, and Michael V. Gazzo, whose play Hatful of Rain had brought the Studio much acclaim twenty years earlier. Jack Nicholson and Diane Ladd, also nominated, had studied the Method elsewhere. Ellen Burstyn, perhaps the actor most devoted to Strasberg, won Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Only a little over a decade from its London debacle, the Method approached its peak as a force in Hollywood and American culture. By 1979, nine of the ten acting nominees would be members of the Actors Studio, including both winners, Jane Fonda and Christopher Walken. By 1980, members of the Studio had been nominated for or won Oscars more than 125 times.
Strasberg lost the Best Supporting Actor trophy to his Godfather, Part II castmate Robert De Niro, who played the young Vito Corleone. Much like Marlon Brando, to whom he was already being compared, De Niro had been claimed by Strasberg and made a member of the Studio, but he disliked Strasberg’s technique and personality, preferring what he learned from Stella Adler. De Niro’s Oscar win helped fuel a remarkable ascension that by 1991 would have fellow actors like Jeremy Irons and Harvey Keitel declaring him America’s greatest living actor. As De Niro rose, and rose, and rose, he transformed the Method, or at least the public perception of it, at the precise moment that its permanent decline began.
CHAPTER 23
That Level of Being Real
In November 1973, the New York Times dispatched Guy Flatley to figure out, as he put it, “Who the devil is Robert De Niro?” That fall, De Niro had two movies running in theaters simultaneously that could credibly be called his breakthrough. Taken together, De Niro’s performances in Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets demonstrated a breadth rarely seen before. The announcement that he had just been cast as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II positioned him as the latest, and perhaps final, heir to Marlon Brando. While Brando’s golden period was well behind him, he was still considered the apogee of American film acting, and actors had been chasing his achievements for twenty years. Now De Niro was, as the article’s headline promised, “slipping into Brando’s shoes.”
There was just one problem for Flatley. Readers might want to know about Robert De Niro, but Bobby did not want to be known. Instead of revealing much about himself, De Niro spent their interview quietly drawing Flatley out, studying him. “He is such a sympathetic listener,” Flatley wrote, “that before long he has found out all about you, your wife, your kids, your dog, your pals and your politics. And you have found out that Bobby is an actor.”
De Niro rarely talked about his childhood, and he fiercely guards his privacy even today. In one interview for Playboy in 1989, he turned the reporter’s tape recorder off whenever pressed on the details of his life. He was born August 17, 1943, the child of two artists, Robert De Niro Sr. and Virginia Admiral. His parents split when he was a young boy—an experience common to many prominent actors of his generation—and he was raised by his mother. She largely abandoned her career as an artist and took various clerical jobs to pay the bills. One of her clients was Maria Ley-Piscator, the wife of Erwin Piscator. Having learned that young Bobby wanted to be an actor, Ley-Piscator recommended he enroll in the Dramatic Workshop and study with Stella Adler. Bobby, like his friendly rival Al Pacino, quit high school at sixteen to study acting.
De Niro found Adler’s grand style—what he called “how she behaved, her affectation, that whole side of her”—grating in the extreme, but the actual teaching affected him deeply. He studied with Adler off and on until he was twenty-one, and he took from her the idea that an actor earns the right to play a role through extensive preparation, script analysis, and research. To prepare for parts, De Niro read books, conducted lengthy interviews, and learned his characters’ key physical habits. He also dissected his scripts in such detail that he often substantially rewrote them, becoming, in effect, the co-creator of his roles alongside his writers and directors.
For Bang the Drum Slowly, in which De Niro played a slow-witted, terminally ill catcher named Bruce Pearson, he began with reading and interviews, generating pages of questions that he felt needed answering. One list of questions to ask a baseball player identified as “Eddie” included “Should I gain or lose weight?” “How do averages work?” “What do ballplayers usually eat?” and “What [are the] written + unwritten rules, what you see—what you hear—what you do or don’t do outside of the club?” He traveled to Georgia for three weeks, soaking up the atmosphere and asking locals to read his lines into a tape recorder so he could practice Bruce’s dialect. De Niro, who had never played baseball, learned the sport, adopted its training regimen, and mastered chewing tobacco. He purchased his own props and costumes to bring him closer to the character, and he wrote extensive backstories for himself and others.
