April 30, 2007 by webmaster.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness , that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant, talented, fabulous? Actually who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God within us; It’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we’re liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others.

Nelson Mandela
(1994 Inauguration address)

(Although I am pretty sure he got this out of a spiritual book called the Course in Miracles)

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April 30, 2007 by webmaster.

The director yells “action” , and from a standing start the moment begins. The powerful sense that the actor is busy, and must remain busy until the end of the scene, has begun..  Get an agent - book a job - fill your resume - get your SAG insurance - make the day - don’t lose the light - make it before you pass your prime - your clock is ticking … and on and on it goes.  The work and the career of the actor are filled with pressure to perform both on and off stage.  But any piece, (on or off stage) is made up of action and repose.  And so often the repose is never considered for it’s true value.  In order to become great at anything there must be focus, discipline, training, and last but not least … rest.  The poetic heart, the wandering mind, may have the best chance of finding it’s true path, because it’s in the quiet moments, the few restful second that live between our actions that give us the right to act.  Like so many other useful concepts in the craft of acting, this one too has fallen into disuse and abuse.  The comical figure of the method actor hogging the stage with endless pauses to find each moment isn’t such a bad idea - it’s just in the wrong place and at the wrong time.  In film, where rehearsal is a rare and precious commodity, it’s that time before the camera rolls or alone in your trailer, that the silence must be examined for its value.  If a scene is made up of beats, and a beat is a unit of action, then it’s just as important that we examine the gaps between each beat as well as the beats themselves.  During rehearsal, (remember it means to, “re hear”) in those gaps ask yourself, “what is happening here?”  Don’t force the answer, just sit in the repose and listen.  The scene, and your work on it, will inform you about its life.  Even any moderately well written scene is a series of failures.  With the realization of each failure, (the end of a beat) the characters adjust and play a new action.  Without a consideration, a meditation of that failure, the scene simply becomes a race against time.  We have pulled the false mask of pace, over the real face of human drama.  So in your preparation, your rehearsal, take the time to listen to the silence.  Find the failure, and the reasons your character must adjust and go on.  Own those moments, linger in them . By doing so you give yourself the right to move through them at a natural pace in the scene itself.  And in your life as an actor, stop and listen to the silence.  Don’t do a thing, and let your heart and mind wander.  In this modern world of instant call and response it is the artist that is the last line of defense for the human heart.  It’s the wandering heart that makes us different than the machines we build.   Sit with it, and find the value of the silence.

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April 24, 2007 by webmaster.

As an actor, your goal in a scene is the one most important factor of your acting.  There is no way you can do a scene without a very specific and personally important goal.  In the chaos, panic and nerves that overwhelm you have right before the director says action or before the curtain rises, your one great life preserver is your goal.

I like the way we tell our actors to state their goals.    Three simple but very effective questions; “What am I fighting for?  Why are you fighting for it now?  What will happen if you don’t get it now?”   When you answer these, try to make them specific and very personal.  Relate your goal as closely as you can to the thing that is missing in your life.  What is the one thing you are fighting for in your life?  What is it that will make your life complete?  What is it that will give your life meaning?  Can you relate this directly to your character’s goal?  If you can, your goal will give you all the power you need to do even the most difficult scenes.

Don’t be too intellectual with your goal; it needs to come from your heart.  And don’t make these questions a mental question and answer game.  In other words, don’t say in your mind “What am I fighting for?  Jane’s love.  Why am I fighting for it now?  Because the train is coming.   What happens if I don’t get it now?  She’ll be gone.”   Instead, make statements; “ I’m fighting to get Jane to love me.  I have to get her to love me now because her train is coming.  If I don’t get her love now, she’ll be out of my life forever.”   If true love is also your personal quest (who’s isn’t!), you now have a very powerful tool that will push you through any scene no matter what happens.  This will give you the one and only thing you can focus on right before that director says “Action”.  You’ll find that the 15-minute prep time you seem to need before every take start to diminish.  And that fear and nervousness that is all about you, will transform into the power you use to get what you’re fighting for.

Remember, your goal is almost always in the other person.  By doing this simple exercise, you will get out of yourself and into the fight that is your scene.  You will feel a new simplicity in your acting, a stronger focus in your work, and  you will know…the great value of your goal.

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April 17, 2007 by webmaster.

The word, “commitment” gets bounced around pretty liberally in this society. So before we join those ranks, let’s examine the word itself. The word, “commitment” is a relatively new one, first appearing in the English language around 1611 and not being used to express a promise or a pledge until more than one hundred years later in 1793. It’s root word, “commit” first popped up about 1390 as, “committen” meaning to give in charge, or to entrust. It was borrowed from the Latin, “committere” which was a joining of com - “with” and mittere - “send” or “put”. The word, “commit” is a verb. Let’s go with the first definition as found in the American Heritage dictionary, “To do, perform, or perpetrate”. The word, “commitment” is a noun. It is defined as, “The State of being bound emotionally or intellectually to a course of action And now you know more about the word, “commitment” than you ever thought you would … you could say you are committed to it.

So, let’s think about the commitment to choices in a scene. Making a choice in any given scene, or in any given moment in a scene, is a two-part process. First the actor makes the choice, then the actor commits to it. Many actors err by only following through with one of the two parts. They’ll make a nonspecific choice and then act on it; this usually reads as emotional flailing about. Or they’ll be very specific about the choice and then never act on it; this usually reads as a mood. You need to do both parts of the process, you have to make the specific choice, and commit to it. You have to discover how you are, “bound emotionally and intellectually to a course of action”. And with apologies to the American Heritage Dictionary, I’d like to suggest that you also must commit physically. For example, you’re an actress lucky enough to have the opportunity to play Tennessee Williams profound character, Blanche Dubois. In this scene Stanley has come home from the hospital. You, (as Blanche) know that trouble is brewing, Stanley is dangerous. Now one of the hallmarks of Blanche is that she avoids the light, she prefers the kindness that shadows show to her face. So when she retreats to the bedroom to avoid Stanley she would adjust the light, bringing it down so that she can stay hidden. So at this point you’ve made a choice using your intellect: the light must be dimmed. Now you make a choice emotionally: spend some time with the light, find out how it burns Blanche to the quick. Now you want to make a choice physically: you reach for the light. Here is where understanding commitment comes in handy. You are, “bound emotionally and intellectually to a course of action”. An actor who doesn’t have a grasp on the concept of commitment might reach to turn off the light, a flick or two and maybe the light doesn’t work, this actor gives up and returns to the dialogue - this person is not, “bound” to a course of action. The actor who understands the concept of commitment will reach to turn off the light, it doesn’t work, they throw a scarf over A, still not dim enough and they crawl behind the table to pull the plug. They are clearly, “bound” to a course of action. And in doing so, they find themselves on the hands and knees in the corner just when Stanley enters the room, a very provocative image that the director is bound to take credit for. So, consider the word, understand it’s true meaning, execute its meaning in your work, and you can feel … the value of commitment.

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April 11, 2007 by webmaster.

This is the text of the [Stanford University] Commencement

address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from
one of the finest universities in the world. I never
graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest
I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to
tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal.
Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but
then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so
before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a
young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put
me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be
adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for
me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except
that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that
they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a
waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:
“We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said:
“Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my
mother had never graduated from college and that my father
had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the
final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later
when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a
college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of
my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my
college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value
in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no
idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here
I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their
entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would
all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking
back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute
I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that
didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that
looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept
on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for
the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7
miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a
week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what
I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition
turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one
example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best
calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus
every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully
hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have
to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san
serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between
different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically
subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it
fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in
my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the
first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we
designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since
Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal
computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would
have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they
do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking
forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear
looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can
only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust
that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has
made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky ¬ I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz
and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We
worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the
two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over
4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation -
the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And
then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you
started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought
was very talented to run the company with me, and for the
first year or so things went well. But then our visions of
the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So
at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the
focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was
devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that
I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down -
that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I
met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize
for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I
even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me ¬ I still loved what I
did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one
bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I
decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired
from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened
to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the
lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about
everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT,
another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing
woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the
worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and
is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In
a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to
Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the
heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have
a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t
been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I
guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the
head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the
only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for
your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to
fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly
satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the
only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like
any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the
years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t
settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If
you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most
certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since
then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror
every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day
of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a
row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool
I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in
life. Because almost everything ¬ all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these
things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what
is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is
the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have
something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason
not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at
7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my
pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors
told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is
incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than
three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get
my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to
die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought
you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few
months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so
that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means
to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had
a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat,
through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into
my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was
sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they
viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started
crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of
pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the
surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope
its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived
through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more
certainty than when death was a useful but purely
intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven
don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And
that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the
single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It
clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new
is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually
become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic,
but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s
life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the
results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of
other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to
become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The
Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my
generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand
not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life
with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made
with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort
of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came
along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and
great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole
Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put
out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an
early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself
hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were
the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell
message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I
have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate
to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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April 11, 2007 by webmaster.

Too many actors waste their time trying to find the proper emotion for a

scene. Actors are at their root cooperative and intelligent people. This
quality works against them when they are trying to make a scene come alive.
For something to live it must contain contradiction. We only notice
something based on the background upon which it appears. We could have
no idea what a dog is unless we see the dog in reference to something else,
going up a hill, sleeping in it’s bed, etc. By searching your heart for the
emotion that is more than the scene can handle, you’ve set about the process
of contradiction. If, as the artist in the scene, I choose a brush stroke of red
against a canvas of red, I may make myself happy because I’m cooperating
with my canvas, but I’m distancing my work from the viewer because it’s
the clash and contradiction that the viewers heart seeks out. When I feel in
the scene that I’m using the text to hold in something I’m not sure it can
succeed at, things grow unsure, they start to rumble, and both myself and the
audience hook into the story being told. We’ve created the all important
dramatic tension by following a simple idea to its end … the joy of acting is
to find an emotion that the text can’t handle.

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April 2, 2007 by webmaster.

1. YOU WILL RECEIVE A BODY.

You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2. YOU WILL LEARN LESSONS.
You are enrolled in a full time, informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.

3. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, ONLY LESSONS.
Growth is a process of trial and error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works”.

4. A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL IT IS LEARNED.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it, then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. LEARNING LESSONS DOES NOT END.
There is no part of this life that it does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. “THERE” IS NO BETTER THAN “HERE”.
When your “there” becomes a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will, again, look better than “here”.

7. OTHERS ARE MERELY MIRRORS OF YOU.
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something that you love or hate about yourself.

8. WHAT YOU MAKE OF YOUR LIFE IS UP TO YOU.
You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. THE ANSWERS LIE INSIDE YOU.
The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

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April 2, 2007 by webmaster.

Their names are everywhere, on billboards, on the sides of buses, whispered over coffee clutches at Starbucks, and perhaps most importantly at the top of all the rating and revenue charts: American Idol, Survivor, The Bachelor, etc. These titles draw sneers and disrespect from the artistic community. The actors, producers, directors, and writers who make their living and find their joy in creating story based film and television, look down their collective noses at these types of shows. Write them off as a, “phase” and keep champagne chilled ready to pop the day the bottom drops out of their viewing market. A word to the wise: Stock up on ice … it may be a while.

As sad as it is that jobs are being lost in the creative community to these shows that can be produced for so little and draw so many eyeballs, it may be even sadder still that the story based community, (caught up in a orgy of self congratulatory dismissal) is missing the point. We should use the extra time we have on our hands waiting for the phone to ring to use our practiced pen and whip off a letter of, “Thank You” to the producers of these shows for raising the creative bar for all of us. Those who suggest that Reality Based, (What the hell does that mean?) Programming is throwing us backwards into some media Stone Age has got it all wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Funny how we tend to think of our audience as evolved and enlightened when they tune in to our product but write the very same demographic off as simple voyeurs when they migrate into the Reality Based camp. The reality, (no not “based”, just straight-up reality, no mixer) is that our audience is, was, and always will be pretty damn sharp. But more important than their intellectual acuity, they are, have been, and will continue to be, human. To be a storyteller is to be a student of the human condition. We do our job when we entertain and inform, and importantly so, we do those things in that order. Nobody give ‘a damn what you have to say no mater how high minded or noble unless they are being entertained. And if we want to get peoples attention, if we want to inform and reflect them, we have to meet certain basic human needs. And there is very little as important to us humans as authenticity.

That’s the Golden Key that Reality Based has slipped in the lock that all the rest of us dinosaurs are missing. Don’t write off Survivor, sit down, whip out your pen, and start taking notes. Without authenticity there can be no real intimacy and without intimacy people cannot connect and when people don’t connect they get divorced, move to a new state, or change the channel. One thing is for sure; the sense that someone is true, that they act with their own authority, that they are authentic reads as clear as a bell. When we see an authentic experience on someone’s face we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame. As ridiculous as it is when Fox fools some batch of silly greedy gals into thinking Bright Boy is a millionaire, the shock and embarrassment on their faces is USDA Prime authentic when they find out in fact he’s a roofer from Terrace. The audience will put up with all kinds of assaults on their reason and moral compasses when they are given a peek at authentic experience.    ’

In truth, Reality Based Programming has sharpened the viewing publics eye for honesty in behavior. As Story Based craftspeople we have the opportunity now to redouble our efforts to tell stories that cut deeper to the heart of the matter. As writers we must look circumstances and metaphor that are honest and clear. Like the work of Alan Ball, we have to look deeper into the private lives and personal needs of our characters. As directors and producers we must find new technique and sharper focus to deliver the product to a far more discerning public. They’ll let you slide on production design here and there, but they’ll string you up if you look them in the eye and lie. And actors, maybe vote important than all the others, have to seek out new and innovative ways of analysis arc, kind execution in their craft. American Idol has trained our audiences to tie on the look out for phonies. The actors mainstay, a profound understanding of self and others, has never been more important. The reason, when you look at typical television acting of twenty or thirty years ago it seems far more stagey and far less honest than the typical work today, isn’t because the actors took a vote and decided to improve, it’s because the audience learned more and demanded more. If the actor doesn’t focus like a laser beam on the need for authentic experience in their work, they’re not going to be able to put food on the table. The idea that the arts and commerce don’t mix is horseshit. What’s happening now is a perfect example of how market forces will improve the arts much faster and more effectively then they would if we all sat around and willed it so.

Don’t waste another second demeaning Reality Based Programming. Study it, probe it, and see what lessons it brings. Let’s take the art and craft of story telling in all its disciplines up to a whole new level.

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