Part One

      On the first day, I did nothing. On the second, the same, as word of this spread and a crowd began to form at my feet. On the third day, my nothing sparked a local sensation and by the fourth, my nothing was validated as I got my first taste of national exposure. My name is Samuel Harvey and I’ve become something of a star. It took me years to get to this point. I wasted a lot of time hoping for success before willfully climbing my way to the top. This is how I rose.

     At first, I was an artist. Before anyone knew me, I spent years honing my instrument, perfecting my body and my instincts, studying the art of performance, all to be ready for the stage upon which I now present myself. It wasn’t easy. I’ve crawled through hours of intense practice, over the years and under the radar. I don’t regret a moment of the journey for the payoff before me now is humbling and sublime. Just eleven months ago, I was a caged in a box and all my work seemed for naught. It’s not easy to be an aspiring actor in Hollywood. It’s considerably more difficult to be one mired in the middle of the country. Since I was a teenager, I tried out for countless plays and commercials only to find rejection each time. I kept telling myself that it was a valuable part of the process and I dug deeper into my craft, improving steadily through tireless work and preparation. Yet nothing changed. It’s as if they couldn’t see me well enough to hear me speak and they couldn’t hear me well enough to take a good look at me and where I might fit in. An example: I once tried out for a local spot advertising a heating and air conditioning repair service. In the days leading up to the audition, I researched heating and air repair, both online and by asking questions at a number of stores. I watched performances that could help inform the character (Paul Newman’s tool wielding everyman in Nobody’s Fool was a valuable starting point). I crouched down by the air conditioner outside of my apartment until the blood began to pool in my legs, getting a feel for what it would feel like to actually be a repairman giving me the necessary sense memory that might inform little details about my character.

     And when the day finally arrived, before I was even given the chance to read, I was pulled from the line and told that I didn’t have the right look for the part. “What” I asked  “Is an air conditioning repairman precisely gsupposed to look like?”

    The man brushed this off, saying that they just had a certain look in mind. I pondered on which qualities of mine he felt excluded me from the field of heating and air repair. Perhaps he felt it implausible that such a worker would have puffy cheeks and dusty brown hair. Perhaps a weak jaw line and thin lips were something never seen in the industry. Most likely he thought that my frame of roughly 5’5” would seem insufficient to lift AC units thus shattering the spell of verisimilitude these ad men desired to cast. Regardless, the taller yet chubbier, stronger chinned yet less prepared gentlemen who remained in line were clearly more to their tastes. In parting I said:

“The physically beautiful actor is often cursed with the passivity of easy conquest.”

His puzzled expression told me that he had never heard the quote. “It’s from Uta Hagen” I said.

“It means that someone overly handsome has trouble connecting with an audience. They expect for attention to come to them instead of drawing it”.

His blank stare told me that acting theory was not among his interests.

       I kept on undeterred. Ms. Hagen, possibly the greatest ever writer on the subject of acting, also says that an actor should be well-rounded. This struck me perfectly. To convey the fullest truth and to draw the greatest beauty from the human experience, to really show something to an audience, you must think of yourself as a teacher, and a teacher must first learn. Anything I could take in cognitively or emotionally was valid if I could somehow, someday, use it to reach an audience. I began to see my life as an extended research period. The more I prepared, the more assured I could be to not fail once my opportunity awoke to greet me.

     I read history and classic literature. I worked on my grammar and diction, as well as dance. I sought to train my mind, tongue and body to move gracefully. And over time, nearly all of my non-working hours, save for, of course, watching other performers on screen, I achieved this. I became an ideal conveyance for words and emotion. I was ready for my chance. But no one could see me.

      I’ve heard it said of Frank Sinatra that he was a real movie star because ‘you’d watch him drink a cup of coffee’. There’s truth in that statement but fallacy in its suggestion. Sinatra is one of our greatest singers while merely decent, nowhere close to the pantheon, as an actor. But he is in fact riveting on screen. Why? We will watch Frank Sinatra in the act of doing essentially nothing not because he does so with any particular flair, nor because he is particularly easy to look at or gifted in even the smallest details as he interprets a character. We watch him because he walked on the biggest of all stages. He lived his life before so many cameras, in a glare as bright as any that has ever been shown on one celebrity. He was so close to the heat of fame for so long that it’s forever seared to him, even now, posthumously. What makes a star? That heat, that flame- Screen Recognition. It validates everyone. You just have to get close enough to it.

     Personally, I could not have been further away and practical sense told me that I didn’t have a means to get much closer. I knew enough about Los Angeles to know that it was prohibitively expensive and that my day job selling cable packages had netted me only about a hundred dollars in saving for every year I’d been there. I knew from numerous memoirs and one Gladys Knight song that taking off for Hollywood with $600 in pocket, could lead to a quick pride-shattering trip back. Still, I would have tried if I could have only built up the briefest of resumes, but not a single local production gave me a chance. My confidence ebbed about a year ago when a great stroke of luck came my way. I was fired.

     My boss called me into his office with a dour expression and asked me if I’d heard about the layoffs. Of course I had. Gossip at my job was unavoidable when it concerned false rumors and innuendo.  Something of genuine importance turned the hen cackling up to an unbearable level. I nodded and I took in his grave expression as my pulse quickened in anticipation.

Could it be?

He informed me that although I had more seniority than most of the employees who were being let go…

Oh, this was promising. He turned his eyes away pitifully and slowed his speech. I noticed that his goatee was uneven, slightly thicker on the left side with a speck of something white buried there as well…

My numbers had been very low over the last quarter and, well, this was a very hard time for the company….

God, his feigned sincerity was terrible. It would be unwatchable if he wasn’t delivering such glorious news…

And he hoped I understood…

Yes! Ok, that’s enough.

“Bill, let me stop you there” I said. “Are you telling me I’m fired?”

He nodded grimly.

“I’m eligible for unemployment, right?”

He nodded with a patronizing half smile.

“That’s good for a year?”

“Um, yeah, Sam, it is.”

“Don’t call me, Sam, Bill. I never really liked you. Where do I sign and do you know where the unemployment office is?”

He looked at me quizzically. His mind had trouble toggling between the great sympathy he had intended to fake for me and the possible umbrage he should take at not being liked. I brushed the back of my hand across the right side of my face twice. Instinctively, he rubbed his index finger on the right side of his chin, removing the speck of whatever and stared at me slack-mouthed trying to find words.

“Bill, please, it’s a very stressful for me right now. Don’t take offense at how I feel about you. We’re different people and I’ve always considered you a bit of a phony and a lazy jackass. Hey, at least you have a job. I’d like to do this quickly. I’ll sign whatever you give me and could you tell me where that office is?”

He pushed the papers across the table and grunted out the address while staring past me at the door. Bill’s sourness at a moment when he was mandated to be comforting amused me. It added to my elation, which I kept inside, storing it away for a time when I might need to project genuine happiness.

       Every great film has to have a turning point, a fork in the road. Every heroic protagonist has to reach this point and make the right choice. This choice is often rewarded by the closing credits with a happy ending but even if things turn out badly, it’s doesn’t invalidate the fact that the protagonist chose correctly, bravely. This is what makes them a hero. I knew I stood at a crossroads. I was 27 years old and 30 credits short of a degree. I could take the safe route, take out student loans and try to get a piece of paper that might guarantee me better employment or I could throw myself even more completely into my craft. If I was brave enough: the hero of my own story, I could use this gift, this blessed year off to improve further as an actor, trusting that if I made myself a truly great thespian, recognition would follow. I’d like to say that the choice was tough but really… no. I was compelled into it. Not following my muse was unthinkable.

      Because I see my life and art as being so intertwined, you may ask if I am, in fact, a method actor. Well, yes and no. I subscribe to many method teachings, but I also believe that above all, an actor must be a great pretender. I think it’s instructive here to talk about, perhaps, our two greatest modern day thespians: the mythical Daniel Day Lewis and the incomparable Meryl Streep.

     Mr. Lewis goes to great lengths to encounter, in a visceral way, many of the same tangible things that his character would come into contact with. He goes to greater lengths in this vein than perhaps anyone ever has and therein lies his genius. By connecting his character to real things, by taking him through real physical experiences as opposed to hypothetical ones, he manifests that character from hypothetical to real. Bringing such a man fully to life, he has to give himself over, at least in part, to keep him breathing and aware. He thus cannot break character. To do so would rob his creation, this living free-willed entity- under his control, but only just- of its very essence, turning it into a walking automaton. Mr. Lewis is Victor Frankenstein if we stop the reels at the moment of his great success: his monster summoned to life, fully obedient, basking in the sunlight but not yet spooked by fire.

    Mistress Streep is Michelangelo. Her masterful representations seem to evoke reality better than life itself. As the legendary artist began with paint or marble, she shapes her characters from sound and motion. She can drop her affectations and pick them back up with ease, but what she creates in the end (much like the statue of David) is as beautifully human as anything composed of flesh and bone. A pretender so overwhelmingly gifted ceases to be a pretender. She becomes a historian, documenting our existence through art much like the renaissance men of yore.

     So, as I embarked on my journey, with several months to shape my own great creation, I drew on both techniques for inspiration. The Lewis technique taught me that if I wished to be a star I must truly believe that I was one. Going through the motions of a struggling actor only fortifies your existence as a struggling actor. So, I wouldn’t behave like one. No matter what I took on, I would do so with full conviction and artistic integrity. The Streep technique motivated me to further refine my physical movement. I had erased all of my previous clumsiness, in fact made myself agile through physical training and repeated practice of the basic steps of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. Now I began to study silent film actors to learn how to more fully convey truth without words.

     A typical day for me during this period was regimented. I woke no later than 6:30 and began my exercises. This sometimes, involved a DVD dedicated to Yoga or at home strength training, but I knew the routines well enough that I usually did them unaccompanied. I believe that an actor should possess great endurance and physical strength but that too much bulk can distort the clean lines of one’s physique, so I made a point to train vigorously but only with my own bodyweight as resistance (when I became capable of performing 15 shoulder presses from a hand stand position, I knew that I was getting quite strong). After my workout, I’d shower and prepare a light breakfast. I’d then watch a film, not for pleasure but to study the actors’ movements.

     This is when I began to truly appreciate Chaplin. Every movement, every second he was on screen, he was conveying something with his physical form. It takes a remarkable amount of control to appear clumsy while going through the precise gymnastics of his comedy routines. He was every moment able to remain in character- a nuanced character at that. His tramp was desperately poor but we were permitted to laugh at him because he clearly didn’t see himself that way. He was a man of wealth merely occupying the body of a hobo. It was in the way, after a fall, he straightened his coat and hat with proudly lifted chin, in the dainty way that he ate- no matter how hungry he was- in the courtly smile he gave to even those he was attempting to steal from; all these things gave him a dignity that shone through and softened any dreadful circumstance. I mimicked Chaplin’s mannerisms for hours at a time until they began to feel comfortable: the (extremely) pigeon toed walk, the wide-eyed alert look connoting fright or excited curiosity, the rhythmic happy way in which he chewed and dabbed primly at his mouth. Chaplin was one of many actors that I attempted to recreate physically, but he remains for me the pinnacle of motion and grace.

    These wordless physical sessions led me to a light afternoon lunch, after which I practiced monologues and accents: everything from Shakespeare to Shaw to Simon to modern cinema transcripts. Before each speech, I’d visualize its delivery, asking questions:  Who am I? What are my circumstances? Why am I compelled to speak? I would then choose a relevant or, in fact, absurdly irrelevant dialect and project the words in a clear voice. If I didn’t believe them, I’d refocus and deliver them again until they felt authentic.

    Having completed that work, I’d run through another workout routine, shower, and dress for the evening. My manner of dress as well as what I prepared for dinner were determined by my viewing plans for the evening. If I planned on watching an Italian movie, say Fellini or De Sica, I would typically go with slacks, a button up and a salad with a light serving of pasta. I’d go with roughly the same adding a sports coat if my agenda called for episodes of the TV show Frasier. Although finer dress and French food would be more appropriate, budgetary concerns kept me practical. For something like Tarantino, I always went with jeans and a t-shirt while choosing a meal that best put me in the mood for each film: (veggie) burger and a (protein) shake for Pulp Fiction; rice, fish and soup for Kill Bill Vol. 2. In the evenings I watched merely for pleasure and let myself get lost in the stories. All my work served to earn me those concluding three hours that served as the best part of my day.

    I fell into blissful rhythm with this schedule. Every day had purpose and every night reminded me of what I was working towards. There’s something about craftsmanship that can’t be replaced by anything else. To know you’re improving yourself and honing a skill is more rewarding than anything else in this world. My best days were to come but my most satisfying ones all occurred while hard at practice in those months leading up to the nadir and zenith of my life.