The method, p.44
The Method, page 44
In the early 1990s, the Studio again embraced a more public role. James T. Lipton, a journeyman writer and actor who had studied with Clurman, Adler, and Bobby Lewis, visited the Studio at the strenuous urging of Norman Mailer and soon joined it as a writer and director. He loved it, but there was one persistent problem: Even after forty-seven years of cultural prominence, the Studio still teetered on the verge of bankruptcy from one month to the next. “It was a time when cultural institutions … were all begging for pennies,” Lipton recalled, “including the Studio, which has never been a school, never charged tuition, never charged for membership … as a result, it has lived from hand to mouth.”
Lipton’s solution was to approach the New School about creating a new MFA program run by the Studio, a latter-day version of Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop. Every teacher would be drawn from the ranks of the Actors Studio, and while students would not be guaranteed membership in the Studio, they would at least have a connection to it and its teachings. The program was an immediate success. The Actors Studio Drama School soon became its own entity within the university, with Lipton, much to his surprise, as its dean. The Studio, and Lipton, found a new fame with the launch of Inside the Actors Studio. The television show, which is also an upper-level course at the school, began as a way of getting the Studio’s most famous members to share their wisdom with the students. Over the years, as it grew in fame, it became a showcase for career-spanning interviews with celebrities, many of whom, like Billy Joel or Hugh Grant, had connections to neither the Studio nor the Method.
In 2005, the Actors Studio’s ten-year contract with the New School expired, and negotiations over its renewal broke down. The New School cut ties with the Actors Studio and with its now long-in-the-tooth television show. “It’s a divorce, and a divorce always has a certain sadness to it,” Ellen Burstyn said. But she predicted the school would “go on, and it will have a new home.” Before long, both the school and its most famous class/show were ensconced at Pace University.
The ascendant American actors of the 1970s overwhelmingly came out of the Method tradition. Many studied with Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, or some combination of the three. For all of their differences, those teachers shared a belief in acting as a vehicle for truth, in perezhivanie, in the artistic supremacy of the stage, and in their own absolute righteousness. But in the 1980s, a period of remarkable diversity in acting style, approach, and background began. First came the Juilliard kids, actors like Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, Robin Williams, Christopher Reeve, and Val Kilmer, who had been taught an approach that eschewed the rigid boundaries of both the classical British and American Method forms.
The Juilliard School’s drama program, founded in 1968, grew out of Lincoln Center’s rejection of Strasberg and the Actors Studio. Its initial in-house guru was the director, teacher, and theorist Michel Saint-Denis. While his work was less well known in the United States—his lone Broadway credit was a production of Oedipus Rex starring Laurence Olivier, which ran for fifteen performances—in Europe, he was a titan. A nephew of Jacques Copeau, he founded the London Theatre Studio in 1936 and served as the founding director of the Old Vic Theatre School a decade later. He founded the National Theatre School of Canada and the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique in Strasbourg, France. In 1961, he became the co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Peter Hall, who credits Saint-Denis with shaping not only the RSC but also the Royal Court, the Royal National Theatre, and the English National Opera.
In 1960, Saint-Denis published Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, which collected a series of lectures he gave in the United States during the Method’s theatrical peak in the late 1950s. In its final chapter, he laid out his vision for the Old Vic School, which had closed in 1952. Its goal was to train people “in all branches of the theatre … concerning ourselves with all the means of expression which are characteristic of our time.” This training would take the raw clay of the actor and shape her into an “ensemblier, one who is ‘an artist who aims at unity of general effect.’ ” Not an individual, then, but a member of a company. Saint-Denis’s approach was based on “classical disciplines”—which is to say, entirely external techniques. He even cautioned against having theater students study realism too early because “the meaning often lies below the surface … excessive work too early on a Chekhov text, for instance, might be extremely damaging.”
Saint-Denis was no fan of the style of acting that the Group Theatre had pioneered. He had seen the Group’s production of Golden Boy when it toured to London. “They were going so deep into themselves,” he wrote, “that they succeeded in revealing the insides of their characters … they showed the essence.” But while “the results were incredible,” they were hardly desirable. “Instead of watching men of flesh and bone I was looking at skinless creatures moving about and stammering. If a photograph of life was intended, the negative was shown, not the finished print.” He worried about the Method’s influence in the United States, particularly in university programs. To Saint-Denis, the classics were the basis of acting training. What students picked up as they learned how to tackle Shakespeare could be applied to anything, and, as Europeans never tired of saying, the Method and Shakespeare did not work well together.
In creating Juilliard Drama, Saint-Denis and his co-founder, John Houseman, recruited an idiosyncratic group of teachers. For all the public opposition between Saint-Denis and the ideas of Stanislavski and Strasberg, their first group included both the movement teacher and Adler associate Moni Yakim and Michael Kahn of the Actors Studio’s Directors Unit. A few years later, the Drama Division added John Stix, who had been a member of the Studio and the administrator of the Lee Strasberg Institute. According to Yakim, “The whole idea was that the school should be eclectic. They took me because I came from a very European kind of mentality. Michael Kahn studied with Lee Strasberg … Liz Smith came from London with speech and voice … they chose the people [who they thought would bring] different understandings and different influences.”
At first, following Saint-Denis’s book, acting instruction was called “interpretation.” Students were taught an external approach. “If I was going to squeeze an orange,” Kahn explained, “it was more ‘What does your body do when you do that?’ ” than sense memory. Actors did not begin scene study until their final year. But Kahn soon realized that this approach wouldn’t work. “After a couple of years I said, ‘Where are the acting classes?’ Finally, I think they allowed me to do Acting in the third year.” Kahn drew on his own adaptation of Stanislavski’s script analysis, with a heavy dose of Strasberg. He used affective memory exercises and the private moment. He taught actors how to divide scripts up into beats. He trained them in defining and pursuing objectives, even when acting Shakespeare.
According to Kahn, in the late 1960s, “acting was divided into emotional actors who could ‘be’ but could not ‘speak’ and actors—who had studied in England mostly—who could ‘speak’ but couldn’t ‘be.’ It was really an American version of the Method against an English tradition of working from the outside. This school was trying to put that together, and it did.” A decade after its founding, Juilliard alums began breaking through to major roles in television and film. In the 1980s, they would become a dominant force.
Yet the Juilliard synthesis of Europe and America still kept the faith with perezhivanie over presentation, maintaining that great acting should sweep you away in a heightened experience of a character rather than with grand oratorical displays. The foundation of acting was still constructed out of a few simple questions—What does your character want? What is in the way? What will they do to get it?
In the 1980s, even these ideas would be challenged. Some actors embraced a new expressionist style best described as American Gonzo. Nicolas Cage, the foremost actor of this approach, rarely attempted to convince the audience that he was playing a “real” human being. His performances are odd, his choices outré, his deliveries extreme. He often bases his performances on animals or cartoon characters, and he physically quotes other actors’ work. “Laurence Olivier said, ‘What is acting but lying, and what is good lying but convincing lying?’ I don’t want to look at acting that way,” he explained. “Why not experiment?” Cage was not alone in this larger-than-life approach. Actors like Crispin Glover, Bill Paxton, Bobcat Goldthwait, John Malkovich, and John Turturro often delivered gonzo performances, and even Method-trained actors like Al Pacino (with Scarface) and Jack Nicholson (with Batman) gleefully embraced its neo-expressionist feel.
But perhaps you wanted neither authenticity nor heightened artifice. Perhaps you instead wanted a return of charm, of the old-school persona style of acting. This too was available in abundance in the 1980s. The Brat Pack, that loose affiliation of actors that included Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Tom Cruise, and Molly Ringwald, made up in good looks, distinct personae, and a willingness to play the studio game what they lacked in formal training. As David Blum described it for New York magazine in 1985, “Young actors used to spend years at the knee of such respected teachers as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler before venturing out onstage, let alone in movies; today, that step isn’t considered so necessary. No one from the Brat Pack has graduated from college—most went straight from high school into acting.” Tom Hanks, who would rise to become one of the most beloved actors alive, cannily understood his persona as well. “There are a lot of writers who aren’t very attractive but who are fairly funny and want to have sex a lot,” Hanks said in 1986, “so they write about these guys who are not very attractive, but they’re funny and do have sex a lot … I guess I’m the chief beneficiary of that.” In explaining his reluctance to tackle villains, he said, “I guess I see myself playing more Jimmy Stewart–type roles than anything else … I do this thing fairly well … I like being a funny guy!”
Just as gonzo acting fit a new embrace of artifice, persona acting filled the needs of an international market that craved charismatic actors with clear, easy-to-spot types. When Spielberg made Jaws in 1975, the fully realized, complex humanity of his characters was part of the film’s appeal. But in the 1980s, rounded, naturalistic, human characters only got in the way of the dependable delivery of huge thrills. In the work of directors like James Cameron, characters struggle to have more than one dimension; they’re flecked with a light dusting of humanity so you can easily root for them. Marketable, persona-driven stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis flourished during the decade, as did Jack Nicholson, the closest of the New Hollywood breakouts to the old star system model. Bemoaning this state of affairs, Meryl Streep once told an interviewer that “people don’t need to understand English to know something is exploding and to enjoy that spectacle. They don’t call it the bottom line for nothing. Where have the classic films gone? Look under the wheels of the blockbusters.”
Streep in many ways personified the new anti-dogmatic approach, charting a path that rejected acting theory and the various methods. She studied at Yale, but the regular turnover in the acting department left her feeling unmoored. “When I was at Yale I wanted some tools, something I could get my hands on in this ephemeral art,” she once said. “I learned that the only thing you can count on is that you can’t count on anything.” One of the educators she learned she could not count on was Bobby Lewis, who was reaching the end of his teaching career and spent much of his class time recounting anecdotes about his past. Another of her teachers was Allan Miller, who attempted Method-style probing of Streep’s inner self, her pain and rage and vulnerabilities. To Streep, these Method ideas about the necessity of true vulnerability were “a lot of bullshit,” and Miller “delved into personal lives in a way I found obnoxious.” Miller, for his part, nicknamed her the Ice Princess because, as he put it, “she didn’t want to be vulnerable.” She also, much to his frustration, did not want to date him.
Miller wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Over the course of Streep’s early career, her critical bête noire was Pauline Kael, who savaged her in review after review. Kael found Streep too invulnerable, and too calculating. “Something about her puzzles me,” Kael once wrote. “After I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down … It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance. Instead of trying to achieve freedom in front of the camera, she’s predetermining what it records.” Streep wondered if the hostility had to do with the Jewish Kael’s resentment of her WASP background, but it seems far more likely that Streep represented a shift away from the New Hollywood that Kael had championed.
Meryl Streep won her first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, for Kramer vs. Kramer, a 1979 film in which she battled Dustin Hoffman onscreen and off. Hoffman and Streep’s conflict was an inverse of the Tandy/Brando rows during A Streetcar Named Desire. Now it was Hoffman, the Method actor, in the Tandy role, holding on to an old-fashioned way of working, while Streep played Brando, a natural genius rejecting everything the established star stood for. In Kramer, Hoffman and Streep played a divorcing couple warring over custody of their son. Prior to the action of the film, Hoffman’s Ted Kramer was neglectful and self-centered, taking his family for granted. His wife, Joanna, played by Streep, leaves him, and in her absence he must learn to accommodate, and then truly father, their son, Billy. Joanna is gone for much of the film. When she returns, she sets in motion the film’s final act by asking Ted to dinner and demanding custody of Billy. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which Joanna shows how far she has grown offscreen, while Ted, who reacts by throwing a glass against a wall in a restaurant and shattering it, shows how much farther he has to go.
Hoffman’s glass throwing was improvised, and genuinely frightening, dusting Streep’s hair with fragments of broken glass. The incident is one of many times over the course of Kramer vs. Kramer when the actors’ contrasting styles led to on-set clashes. Like Ted, Hoffman needed to control the environment to get what he felt were the best results. Like Joanna, Streep needed space to find her own way. But it was space Hoffman was unwilling to give. In one scene, he slapped her before the cameras started rolling so that her pained response would feel sufficiently real. In another, he taunted her about her partner, John Cazale, who had recently died of cancer, in order to provoke her to distraught, tormented tears.
Streep’s performance is the best part of Kramer, which was rightfully denounced in some corners as preposterous and sexist in the year of its release. Joanna’s situation—the housewife who must learn how to live on her own without the controlling influence of powerful men—is the more interesting one, but her character development happens offscreen so that the audience can genuflect before Ted teaching Billy how to ride a bike. The film culminates in Joanna’s tearful recognition that Ted is the more deserving parent, and she subsequently relinquishes custody of their son to a man who, only a half hour of screen time before, was hurling a glass of wine at a wall in public. The film works only because of the fullness that Streep brings to the role. On the page, Joanna is a man’s idea of a woman. Streep makes her an actual woman, and, at the director’s request, she rewrote important lines of dialogue to make the character more realistic.
Kramer vs. Kramer showed that an actor who totally eschewed the various methods, and seemingly made up a new acting process for each role, could get the same naturalistic results that were supposed to be the sole property of Stanislavski. With Sophie’s Choice, which garnered Streep the Best Actress Oscar a few years later, she showed that she could also design a De Niro–style transformation. For the role of Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor caught in a love triangle between Kevin Kline’s Nathan and Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, Streep gained weight and studied Polish for months to learn the accent and language. On set, she wore false teeth, because, as writer/director Alan Pakula explained it, “Sophie would have lost all her teeth in the concentration camp. It was remarkable. And when she spoke Polish, she looked different.” When production moved to the flashback sequences set in the concentration camps, Streep lost more than twenty pounds and learned to speak German.
As Streep was influenced, so she became an influence on other actors. Her work on Sophie’s Choice was an important bridge between De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis, and Al Pacino would later credit Sophie’s Choice with inspiring his work on Scarface. He admired, and wanted to draw from, her “way of involving herself in playing someone who is from another country and another world [which] was particularly fine and committed and … courageous.” But Streep did not settle into a single technique in role after role. Instead, she reinvented her process again and again, depending on the particular challenge of the character she had decided to play. There was, for Streep, and for much of America, no One True Process.
When Stella Adler died of heart failure in 1992 and her grandson Tom Oppenheim took over her school, it was remodeled in recognition of the culture’s move away from singular visions. Whereas the Lee Strasberg Institute stressed continuity with its founder’s ideas, Oppenheim pushed the Stella Adler Studio to stop “worshipping the past,” he said. “I felt the way forward was to relinquish dogmatism and to embrace, rather than the letter of Adlerian law, what I understood to be the spirit of Stella Adler: the idea that growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous.” While Adler’s techniques are still taught at the Studio, it now encourages a wider range of methods, including Strasberg’s. This anti-dogmatic approach reflects Oppenheim’s own acting training. While he spent time studying with his grandmother, his main acting education came at the National Shakespeare Conservatory, where his teachers included former students of both Adler and Strasberg.
The myriad approaches and styles adopted by American actors in the 1980s mirrored a similar heterodoxy on America’s movie screens. As America fractured, so did the monolithic audience. We became a nation of micro-demographics, catered to by the multiplex, the home video market, and cable television, all new developments that helped finance an enormous boom in film production. Hiding in the shadow cast by the super-blockbuster was an era of surprising variety. The 1980s was the decade of Top Gun and E.T., but it was also the decade of John Sayles, the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Michael Mann, and other idiosyncratic directors. Many of these directors were stylists rather than narrative realists, embracing non-naturalistic filming methods and acting approaches.
