…an actor’s about to deliver a line. there’ll be lots of hills and speed bumps and winding roads, so hold on tight. with both hands. and they’ll be inflecting through the entire line, in order to make the ride more interesting, and emphasizing a lot of words to make sure you know how important those words are. so pay attention. oh, and there’ll be lots of stops along the way, so you might want to bring a good book.

don’t ask me what the line is or what it means and don’t bother trying to figure it out for yourself. first of all, with all the stuff the actor’s going to be doing with the line, you won’t be able to follow it anyway. and second, what the line is and what it means can’t be very important because the actor’s more concerned with how much they’re doing with it than in the meaning or substance of it. and if the actor’s more concerned with what they’re doing with the line than in the line itself, well you should be too. after all, the actor always knows what’s best. don’t they?

oh, and by the way, the actor’ll be taking you on that ride with every one of their lines, so you might want to rest up a bit before you watch them play the scene. and speaking of the scene, i know the writer put a lot of time and energy into creating it but why should you worry about understanding what the writer wrote. the writer won’t even be there when you’re watching the actor play the scene. they’ll probably be off writing some other scene that some other actors are going to have to do all that stuff with to make it interesting for whoever’s going to be watching that one. god, writer’s are so high maintenance. and such know-it-alls. i mean, you know what the writer would probably say to the actor who’s more interested in what they the actor are doing with the line than in the line itself? they’d probably say something like…

the less you make of the line, the more you make of the scene.

“John Swanbeck’s: How To Steal The Scene & End Up Playing The Lead” – the Ebook – releasing 2012.

over-the-top doesn’t mean you’re making a big choice. it means your acting is flowing over the top of the glass, spilling all over the table, and running into our laps, which makes us want to jump out of our chair screeching and then grab something to clean ourselves off. and we don’t keep ordering the same drink, if every time someone serves it to us it’s making a mess. we order a different drink, or maybe patronize a different establishment all together.

over-the-top is the last resort of the unimaginative. scratch that. it’s the first resort of the unimaginative. they can’t come up with an interesting idea, so they try to drown you out  with a lot noise. they figure if they can’t intrigue you, surprise you, move you, make you laugh, they’ll smash it into your face and shove it down your throat. take that, damn you!

a “big” choice is a “specific” choice sustained over the course of the scene, because if you sustain a specific choice, it overshadows everything else in the scene, which makes it loom large, thus big. even an initially small choice can become big, if it’s sustained over the course of the scene. the more you sustain a choice, the bigger it will appear, the more vivid, the more memorable. big isn’t the same as over-the-top. over-the-top is messy. over-the-top means you have no skill, no ability to play a choice artistically. over-the-top is the surest way to being forgettable. over-the-top doesn’t mean the choice is big. it mean the acting sucks.

“John Swanbeck’s: How To Steal The Scene & End Up Playing The Lead” – the Ebook – releasing 2012.

you think actors like to shout with their voice, that’s nothing compared with what they like to do with their face. half the time you can’t understand what they’re saying because their faces are screaming at you. and not only do they like their facial expressions to overwhelm the lines they’re speaking (so much for trusting the writer and trusting the writing), their facial expressions are competing with their other facial expressions. the eyebrows are jumping up and down like worms on crack, their eyeballs move around in their sockets like a ventriloquist’s dummy, their mouths contort in the most unattractive ways (so much for looking good on camera) and, as much as they obsess about looking as young as possible for the sake of their careers, actors seem more obsessed with wrinkling their foreheads, which makes them look ten years older than whatever age they lie about being.

where did they get the idea that acting was about making funny faces? as much as they talk a lot about things like “making it real” and “emotional inner life” and “organic moments”, put them in a scene or in front of a camera and suddenly next to them chimpanzees look subtle. maybe that’s what they’re doing…getting in touch with their character’s backstory all the way back to the monkeys they descended from.

what do they think that thing is sitting on the tripod, with a lens attached to the front of it,  and a director looking through it to see what the actors are going to look like on camera, in the event the director wants to see them in his or her movie projected on a huge screen, which amplifies everything ten times…like facial expressions that are already too distracting to begin with?

“John Swanbeck’s: How To Steal The Scene & End Up Playing The Lead” – the Ebook – releasing 2012.

actors are like street peddlers. always pulling something else out a different part of their clothing to make the sale. “hey, you want happy? what about sad? i know, angry. no, no wait, i got it…sarcastic. no? what about elated? disappointed? disgusted? i got it! bored!!! oh, wait. that’s you watching my performance. um…gimme a minute. i’ll get it. um…”

it’s as though they’re throwing as many options as they can at the camera, the audience, at us watching their audition in the hopes that one of them will make us want to buy what they’re doing. they do it because they think variety’s more interesting than consistency. but think about it. how can something interest us if it’s never some-thing? in other words, we can’t be interested in something if it’s trying to be everything. it’s never something long enough for us to invest it.

and speaking of investing. imagine i came to you and asked you to invest in my business and when you asked, “what do you do?”, i said, “let’s see i’m a dry cleaner and a dog walker and a funeral director and i make pizza and i clean houses and i’m a contractor and an accountant…” would you invest in my business? then why should we, the camera or the audience watching invest in your acting? you don’t know what you want. you can’t make up your mind. you can’t make a decision.

and so you’re not that interesting. and we’re effing bored.

“John Swanbeck’s: How To Steal The Scene & End Up Playing The Lead” – the Ebook – releasing 2012.

here’s the actor’s priority check list: one, how do i feel the scene should be played. two, how does the writer want the scene to be played. three, what does the director want me to do. which is why most actors don’t get hired when they don’t get hired. they can only convincingly incorporate a director’s direction if, first, it makes sense to them and, second, it makes sense in the scene. but for as much as actors like to think everything hinges on their actor’s process, it’s not the director’s job to give a direction that accommodates that process. unless the actor’s a star. which most actors, thankfully, are not. what non-star actors need to understand is that directors aren’t looking to see what the actor’s interpretation of the scene is. we’re not looking to see how well the actor understands what the writer wrote. we’re looking to see how well the actor can turn the scene into what we want it to be. horrifying as it is to the well-trained actor, if they want to be hired, if they want to jump start their career, if they want to work, they will apply the director’s direction no matter how little sense it makes to them.

the clever actor will not only be able to do that quickly and easily, they will do it eagerly. they will do it as if the whole thing is a game they were born to play. the not-so-clever actor makes the director’s direction work only as long as it fits the scene or makes sense to them.

what makes a clever actor clever is that they can convince us of anything. if the scene is written as bitter and sarcastic and we want it played as nervous flirtation, the very clever actor will convince us someone is getting laid that night. if the line in a scene is “i hate you” and we want it delivered as heartbreak, the very clever actor will have the audience weeping over the fact that their character is in so much pain they’e been driven to be so cruel.

but don’t take our word for it. we’re just the person who has final say on casting.

“John Swanbeck’s: How To Steal The Scene & End Up Playing The Lead” – the Ebook – releasing 2012.