Actors Anonymous Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 by James Franco

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing

  www.apub.com

  eISBN: 9781477850367

  For the Columbia peeps

  Gary Shteyngart

  Ben Marcus

  Ed Park

  Darcey Steinke

  Victor LaValle

  Stacey D’Erasmo

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Preface

  The Twelve Steps of Actors Anonymous

  STEP 1

  STEP 2

  STEP 3

  STEP 4

  STEP 5

  STEP 6

  STEP 7

  STEP 8

  STEP 9

  STEP 10

  STEP 11

  STEP 12

  The Twelve Traditions of Actors Anonymous

  TRADITION 1

  TRADITION 2

  TRADITION 3

  TRADITION 4

  TRADITION 5

  TRADITION 6

  TRADITION 7

  TRADITION 8

  TRADITION 9

  TRADITION 10

  TRADITION 11

  TRADITION 12

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Players and painted stage took all my love,

  And not those things that they were emblems of.

  —Yeats

  Preface

  We of Actors Anonymous are more than fifty men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.

  In this volume, we relate our experiences in dealing with existence, modern society, and identity, in order to find suitable ways of acting and being in the world.

  Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself. The actor’s life has provided escape for many that find their lives too dull, painful, and insular. But the actor–escape artist can go too far as well.

  If one puts on too many different personas or goes too far into character, one is liable to lose oneself. Some have believed that this loss is a positive, and perhaps it is for those that enjoy a rootless swirl of personality in the void, but others, like those who have come to comprise Actors Anonymous, believe that there is a balance to be struck between life and art, between self-creation and the veridic self.

  We have put down our experiences in these pages in order to guide others—professional actors, amateurs, and nonactors alike—to a way of life that both defies psychological determinism on the one hand, and freewheeling insanity on the other.

  We are people who work in the world as professionals, whether we make our money from acting or not, and it is important for us to maintain our anonymity. There are centuries of prejudice piled on the actor and thus it is important that no one of us is thrust into the spotlight. (God knows that some of us get enough of the spotlight as it is.) So much money is made off the aggrandizement and defamation of actors already that we ask the press, especially the tabloid press, to hold their pens, video cameras, paparazzi flash blasts, and blogs, and respect our organization’s anonymity.

  This is a serious text that is intended for actors: “actors” in the most essential sense, not necessarily actors of stage and screen, but actors in the sound and fury of life. Anyone who wants this message is encouraged to glean what she will.

  We are not an exclusive club; the only requirement for membership is a desire to change oneself, to be able to act decently in a controlled manner. Everyone can act, but not everyone can act well, and not everyone knows how he actually presents himself to others.

  We have no spokesperson, and there is no hierarchy. We have no dues or fees, and we are open to all regardless of race, religion, nationality, or acting style.

  We do not oppose anyone—even those actors trained by I_____ C______ or L_____ M____ or any of the other charlatan acting teachers sucking actor blood in dark classrooms across the Los Angeles sprawl.

  Our simple desire is to help. Not to train, but to save individuals from training, whether that training was given in a classroom, by a parent, or by what can only be called contemporary life.

  We of Actors Anonymous subscribe to the following twelve steps and twelve traditions, not because they were handed down from on high by a bully studio, nor from a dictatorial director; we have no concern for deskbound screenwriters proclaiming Napoleonic ambitions of control, and we are certainly not adherents of the steps and traditions because we are beholden to the hordes of critics, both high and low, who proclaim to know something of which they write and speak but hardly do, these sideline vipers who sting and snare and then duck into their holes when the real animals of acting turn on them in anger.

  We salute and live by these principles because they were generated by the blood experience of those who have lived through the profession, its trials both on and offscreen, on and offstage, for surely the pitfalls of everyday life are increased in proportion to the heights one reaches in the realms of performance. One cannot live solely in the airy realms of the imagination.

  Let these steps and traditions guide you to a balanced life of creativity and truth in a world of surfaces and untruths, through realms of materialism and jealousy, past the vortices of public humiliation, and the private, tooth-ringed maws of self-doubt. We are here for you. Let us love you and guide you.

  We speak of what we do.

  The Actor’s Opinion

  We of Actors Anonymous believe that the reader will be interested in a professional opinion regarding our situation. There are so many hucksters in the world of performance training that it is important to receive some corroboration from a professional with experience on all levels of the acting strata.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I have been a professional actor since I was eighteen. I trained for eight years, and I have been working as a professional actor for fourteen years. I have met many actors from all over the world. It is hard to find a common denominator, but there are many similarities in most of the actors I meet. There is usually an ingredient of self-hatred that underlies actors. This hatred manifests in different ways; sometimes it is so buried that it is virtually unnoticeable, but don’t be fooled, it’s there. Anyone that is driven to play dress-up for a living is trying to hide something either from himself or from others. Or the self-hatred may be manifested in the drive for success and fame, the algorithm being: “If many people love me, then I must be important.” This can be written a different way: “I hate myself, but I am going to transform myself into something charismatic so that everyone loves me, and if people love me, then I won’t hate myself anymore.”

  Most actors are doomed, because the self-hatred never goes away—even for the few that achieve the kind of success that is recognizable by the greater population. I speak about fame. Roughly one tenth of SAG is made up of actors able to support themselves by their acting alone, and only 2 percent approach what might be called famous. So even for those fortunate few, the demons of self-doubt inevitably whisper songs of unworthiness, or else the subject is so insulated in fantasies of grandeur that he lives a life of hermetic madness: He might function in the world, but his eyes see hardly beyond his own pumpkin head. Nothing lasts, not even the films themselves: Look at Edwin S. Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk, Life of an American Fireman, and The Grea
t Train Robbery and George Cukor’s A Star Is Born—works of art, ripped and deformed. This speaks of the destruction of film classics, the ostensibly most durable vehicle and storage facility for actors’ souls, nonchalantly defaced—and these are the respected films of their day, goodness forbid the contemplation of the fates of the lesser known films, ships of fool actor souls adrift and lost in the tides of eternity. So, the actor is someone with the need for immortality who will never find it, often a locus of intensely driven ambition that can only flare out or burn up in a quick bright moment. This situation has left generations of actors broken on either side of the divide of success, and until now there has been little consolation outside of SAG-funded actors’ homes for the elderly.

  I can honestly say that until this volume I thought actors were fucked, but here hope has miraculously touched down on earth, one hundred years after the advent of the moving picture, six hundred years since Everyman and the religious morality plays, four hundred years since Shakespeare played Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and thousands upon thousands of years since the Lascaux population did ritualized dances for campfire roasted venison. Here is a collection of experiences that can give the actor not a way to act better, but a way to live better. For so long actors have carried the conscience of the world across screen and stage and in their personal lives, but they have received little consideration for their pain. They are considered arrogant and self-centered by their fellows, at the same time that they are being applauded for their brave explorations of the darkest places of human experience. Now, with the advent of computer-generated images, actors glance timidly at the future in which their luminosity will be dimmed to the dullness of the poet, novelist, and painter. But all is not lost; there are others who understand, and that understanding in conjunction with a spiritual connection is already guiding dozens if not hundreds out of the wasteland of Hollywood into Elysian Fields.

  Peace,

  James Franco

  The Twelve Steps of Actors Anonymous

  STEP 1

  We admitted that life is a performance—that we are all performers, at all times—and that our “performance” had left our control.

  STEP 2

  Came to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves, some sort of directing force, that could restore our “performance” to sanity.

  STEP 3

  Turned our will and our “performances” over to the Great Director.

  STEP 4

  Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our “character.”

  STEP 5

  Admitted to the Great Director, to ourselves, and to another actor the exact nature of our “character’s” wrongs.

  STEP 6

  Were entirely ready to have the Great Director remove all of these defects from our “character.”

  STEP 7

  Humbly asked the Great Director to remove our “character’s” shortcomings.

  STEP 8

  Made a list of actors our “character” had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

  STEP 9

  Made direct amends to such “actors” whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or other “actors.”

  STEP 10

  Continued to take our “character’s” inventory, and when he was wrong, promptly admitted it.

  STEP 11

  Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Great Director, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry out his direction.

  STEP 12

  After our “character” has had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other actors and to practice these principles in all our scenes.

  STEP 1

  We admitted that life is a performance—that we are all performers, at all times—and that our “performance” had left our control.

  I Am the Actor

  I AM THE ACTOR.

  I am alive in 2013 and I was alive in 1913.

  I am an actor, so I can play everything. Everyone is in me, and I am a part of everyone.

  I am a part of your consciousness. You don’t think so? You want to deny that I have made my way inside? Just because you think you don’t know me doesn’t mean you don’t know me. I am all actors.

  I am Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and Jimmy Stewart and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Steve McQueen.

  I am Meryl Streep and Natalie Wood and Cate Blanchett and Marilyn Monroe.

  I am Nicolas Cage and Robert Pattinson and James Dean and Rock Hudson. I am Sean Penn and Robert De Niro and Cary Grant.

  I am Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck and Kathryn Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Jean Harlow and Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland and Greer Garson. I am Norma Shearer and Lillian Gish. I am Garbo. I am Joan Crawford and Joan Blondell, Jean Moreau and Anna Karina and Marlene Dietrich and Monica Vitti. I am Ann Dvorak and Lucille Ball and Louise Brooks. I am Vivien Leigh and fucking Shelley Winters.

  I am Clark Gable.

  I am Montgomery Clift.

  I am W. C. Fields.

  I’m here to entertain you, but I don’t really care about entertaining you, know what I mean?

  Audiences have a taste for shit, so I am not trying to entertain them anymore. Even the smartest critics have a taste for shit, at least when it comes to acting.

  Yes, every once in a while people will get it right and appreciate good performances. We have plenty of awards shows. We have the Oscars.

  But where were the Oscars for Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, and Chinatown? The Oscars for De Niro in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver? What about Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and Last Tango in Paris? What about Clift in A Place in the Sun, Dean in East of Eden and Giant?

  I used to care a lot about acting, but now I see that you’re only as good as the material you’re given, and if you have good material, you’re only as good as your director. There is so much dependence on others that I can’t care about acting anymore.

  I’m like a sophisticated prop. I’ll give you all the feeling you want, all the accents you want, all the hairstyles and wardrobe changes you want, and I’ll say whatever you put in front of me. But don’t ask me to take pride in the work.

  Did Brando deal with fame by getting fat and bitter?

  Did McQueen fuck himself to death?

  I was alive when Shakespeare wrote all that crap. It was good then, but it wasn’t Shakespeare.

  I performed for money, and I performed for free. It’s better to perform for money if you hate the director; it’s better to perform for free if you love him.

  I used to care about how I looked. Now I don’t care as much. Maybe it’s because I’m so handsome.

  Jack Nicholson used to worry about losing his hair. You can see it going as early as 1963 in the Roger Corman film The Terror, and it’s definitely going by Five Easy Pieces. But he’s ten times sexier in all his films of the ’70s (post–Easy Rider) than he is in the shitty films he did before that. When he had more hair.

  Many actors want to direct. Nowadays, many actors end up directing. It’s weird how their films feel small and cliché when they do. I don’t even like thinking about most of them.

  If you work in Hollywood, you usually have to play the game. It’s damn hard to only do movies that are good. Even Daniel Day-Lewis did The Boxer, The Crucible, and Nine. Not that he was bad in any of them, but if you think about how he only does one film every two or three or five years, he must have felt pretty shitty after those films came out.

  I hate actors that make their performances more important than the project. Get the fuck over yourself. What’s the point? Don’t you know you’re in a collaborative business? Your career isn’t that important.

  I hate books that try to give advice about how movies work. This is how it works: do what you love and believe in. Sometimes you can do a project that will not be the best movie, but it has aspects about it that make it worthwhile, l
ike you get to work with a cool actor for a week, or you get to work with new technology, or you get to play a crazy role for a little bit. But who cares about movies that work? The only people that care about those are the people that care about money and praise: the executives, the agents, and the nonartists.

  Yes, film is a populist art form, but it’s been losing its populist standing since the ’60s. Of course you can still produce movies that make tons of money, but so what? Even though books are dying, you can still publish books that make tons of money. That doesn’t mean that the movie industry is going to stay dominant forever.

  Theater used to be the place where the stars were.

  What about all the vaudeville kings and queens?

  It’s great when you travel for a film. You get to stay in a hotel, get fed, see new places, and lots of people from the cast and crew screw each other.

  There are some people that are very serious about their acting. But the ones that are too serious are boring and usually end up strangling their own performances.

  Daniel Day-Lewis never breaks character, even when he’s in the makeup chair or at home. Can you imagine being Bill the Butcher for half a year? Wouldn’t you feel silly walking around town dressed like Abraham Lincoln? If you were eighteen? If you were twenty-five? If you were forty, fifty years old?

  What if you walked around as an insecure loser character for thirty-three years? Wait…