Here’s a link for SAG members to a SAG Foundation discussion with agents who talk about what works and doesn’t work for them in terms of getting an agent and how to work with your agent. They talk about how to contact them, marketing yourself, and taking classes.
Agents discuss how to get and work with an agent-see link below.
January 22nd, 2010Choosing good acting classes and a good acting school in Los Angeles- beware!
December 16th, 2009There are well over a thousand acting teachers and coaches in Los Angeles. How do you choose the right one?
Rule #1 – Trust your gut. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. If an acting school sounds too good to be true and is promising you everything, don’t believe it. You’re just going to get a lot of slick marketing hype, false promises, phony gimmicks and naive formulas.
There are no gimmicks and there are no formulas. There is just putting in the time and hard work to learn the skills you really need to do professional-level performances. That’s just as true in acting as in any other profession. If you don’t understand that, you’re going to get hurt.
Any school that promises to teach you everything you need to know in a weekend or 4 weeks or in a 10-week casting director workshop just isn’t being honest.
What percentage of students who attend short-term acting or casting director workshops actually get a career-changing job – or any job? How many of those jobs lead to a real breakthrough in film or television? You know the answer. If it were that easy, everyone would be a big success.
Would you want to have a surgeon operate on you who had taken a workshop in surgery??? If you were a producer or writer or director with your whole career and millions of dollars at stake, would you want to hire someone who had only taken some short-term acting workshop, bootcamp, intensive, or the like?
Also, please remember that no school can fulfill the promise of getting you an agent, manager, or work – and it’s illegal to do so.
The actors you admire have been working on their acting for years. They didn’t do “intensives” or study short-term and become stars. Leonardo DiCaprio started acting when he was 9 years old. Angelina Jolie (with all her beauty and contacts via her Oscar award winning father Jon Voight) studied acting. So did Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep (Yale grad), Kevin Spacey (Julliard grad), Robin Williams (Julliard grad), Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley and on and on.
We’d all like to find a bootcamp or 10-week workshop intensive that would give us everything we need to be a big success. But, we really know better. There is no such thing. Don’t become part of that vast number of new students who get taken in. There is no instant!
Look for a class taught by seasoned professionals from the top acting conservatories in the world (Yale School of Drama, Carnegie-Mellon University started in 1915, New York University Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Program stared in 1966, and Julliard are the top acting training programs in the United States) who have worked in the industry frequently and have been teaching for a long time.
Find a school that’s real and down-to-earth.
Don’t waste your money (which you can replace) and your time (which you can’t get back and is your most precious commodity) enriching someone else other than yourself.
Copyright 2008 David Kagen
All rights reserved
Perfectionism and success-How does it affect your acting?
June 8th, 2009In Paris this year, the number 6 female tennis player in the world beat the number 1 female player in the world. #1’s destructive perfectionism and feeling that she’s not enough destroyed her game and got in the way of her true talent. That’s a great lesson for the rest of us concerning perfectionism in our acting work. Strive for excellence. Not perfection.
More on being the character vs. “acting” the character
April 23rd, 2009Here’s an excerpt from an email from a student talking about her confusion about playing a character vs. being yourself in the scene, along with my answer:
Acting student: In regards to character, things are still a little fuzzy. For instance, playing a prostitute who’s grown up on the streets vs. playing a housewife. They are both being played by ME, yet I’d think each would have different emotional reactions to a same situation…?
David Kagen: This takes practice to really understand it. But… ALL of the imaginary circumstances will determine how you behave. That is, the circumstances of having or choosing to be a prostitute are different than the circumstances of having or choosing to be a housewife. And those circumstances affect YOU differently; make you a different person and therefore a different “character.” Too often playing a “character” results in acting it from outside and objectively, rather than putting yourself in the circumstances which gets you to act it from your insides and subjectively. This is what Meisner means when he says that, “Acting is living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances.” You put yourself in the circumstances; ALL the circumstances.
Acting student: In regards to cold readings, particularly the first time through, I always seem to have to warm up, because I feel like I’m suppose to start neutral, so I don’t take things in the scene as personal as I could.
David Kagen: Yes, we hear this about starting neutral a lot. That’s not what we want you to do. Start responding subjectively with your personal responses. Your personal responses are shaped by everything you’re experienced and everything you’ve felt in your life up to moment you do your scene. Don’t start in neutral.
Copyright David Kagen 2009
All rights reserved
The Quest for Excellence (excerpts)
May 19th, 2008It is inspirational to know that actors of distinction believe that learning is an ongoing process, and that there are always new avenues toward the goal of continuing excellence. When accepting his Lifetime Oscar, [Lawrence] Olivier referred to himself as a student.
You embark upon a voyage of discovery in training to provide the impetus and opportunity to initially unleash your talent or to further refine it. The best of the training centers also guide you from strong expressive impulses toward the discovery of the true meaning of your gift. You will be thrust into an exploratory process which will afford you and image of your acting instrument and the power it is capable of realizing.
Experimentation is what training is all about and you should lunge into it with daring determination. With an “Anything goes!” attitude, you will perceive what you need and also what you already have. Your acting instrument will be strengthened by the recognition that your talent is becoming superior to anything you thought it could become.
A teacher cannot always give you quick solutions, but can make you aware of your strengths and shortcomings.
If you embrace acting as a profession, then you must invest the same energy in professional development required by other occupations. IT IS A DELUSION TO THINK THAT NO SPECIAL TRAINING IS NEEDED TO ACT. HARDLY ANYONE WILL HIRE AN INEXPERIENCED ACTOR.
Athletes train rigorously; why shouldn’t actors? After a succession of athletic meets, top athletes return to a period of training and improve their skills before the next cycle of competition. They have the capacity to grow even while enjoying being at the top. This kid of discipline will make a gymnast train twenty hours a week for ten to fifteen years or will prevent dancers from letting an entire week go by with out practice. Let there be no doubt about it; champs work hard. The bottom line is that you can only expect it get out of life what you put into it.
Author unknown
Casting director workshops – Will you get a career move from a CD workshop??
April 29th, 2008Go to the link below to see what the State of California feels about Casting Director workshops:
http://www.actorsite.com/guidelines.html
How to learn to be the best actor you can be.
March 19th, 2008Tip for the day to develop an acting career:
In order to learn any skill, we need to set aside what we already believe in order to be able to learn what we don’t know how to do.
“What get us into trouble is not what we don’t know.
It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
In our classes, put aside your ideas about how to do good acting work or what you believe good acting is, to learn how to do your best professional-level acting work.
Quote from Tom Landry, famous, winning, Dallas Cowboys football coach:
“A coach is someone who gets you to do what you don’t want to do, so
you can be who you want to be.”
Best wishes,
David Kagen
David Kagen’s School of Film Acting
Check out our website at www.davidkagen.com or call us at
(818) 752-9678
OUR ACTING TECHNIQUE
February 27th, 2008Here’s the 4 basic skills we’re teaching:
1) cold reading skills so that you can look at their partner almost all the
time and not worry about being able to easily and quickly pick up words off the page
2) emotional openness and spontaneity
3) getting your emotions from you partner and the imaginary circumstances, not from your idea of how you should be reacting
4) developing the habit of initiating your own openness, spontaneity and
risk-taking as a habit whenever and wherever you act.
You need to be able to do all of the above at the same time at least 90% of
the time to meet the professional standard and be competitive in the
business.
It all starts with emotional openness.
The choices you make for your performance of any scene are arrived at through doing your scene over and over again with an open heart and mind.
Those choices you finally decide to include in your performance are the end result of what you learn through the emotional experiences you have each time you rehearse your scene. You arrive at your final set of choices by going through a process of allowing yourself to fully experience and fully express your instinctive emotional responses to each moment of a scene, without worrying about right and wrong.
There is no purely intellectual process which will lead to your best and unique performance of a scene. Your talent comes from your instincts.
We’re all emotionally controlled and guarded in some ways. Being
emotionally controlled and guarded is the opposite of being instinctive and
spontaneous so it’s bad for your acting.
Everything we do is to get people out of their own way by not being in
emotional control and guarded, so that they can let their instincts take
over and be truly spontaneous.
By being instinctive and truly spontaneous moment by moment, each actor will be able discover his instinctive responses to each and every moment in the scene, during each run-through and thereby discover his best and unique performance of each moment of each scene he performs.
Copyright 2006 David Kagen
All rights reserved
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Excellence in On-Camera Acting [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
The following is an excerpt from Marlon Brando’s autobiography, BRANDO Songs My Mother Taught Me:
“On the day Gadg (Elia Kazan) showed me the complete picture (of ON THE WATERFRONT), I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room. I thought i was a huge failure, and walked out with out a word to him. I was simply embarrassed for myself.”
Marlon Brando went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in ON THE WATERFRONT. It turned out to be one of his finest film performances.
Please think about this when you are so sure your acting “sucks.” Our own feelings about how we are doing in a performance are unreliable. That’s hard to deal with while you’re performing, as well as afterward. You’ve just got to keep hanging in there and keep giving/committing 100% regardless of your personal feelings, and let others be the judge.
This is what we help people learn by practicing in our Los Angeles On-Camera acting classes.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
Copyright David Kagen 2006
All rights reserved
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Meisner’s ON ACTING Study Guide [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
Find each of the following principles in the Sanford Meisner’s book, ON ACTING, and study them over and over again. These are the core skills Meisner discusses that we teach:
1) Meisner quotes George Bernard Shaw who said…Self-betrayal, magnified to suit the optics of the theater, is the whole art of acting. By “self-betrayal,” Shaw meant the pure, unselfconscious revelation of the gifted actor’s most inner and most private being to the people in his audience. (This is at the heart of all good acting. You’re supposed to reveal the most personal, private feelings you have in the course of doing a scene. That’s the hardest part.)
2) Your talent comes from your instincts; from your instinctive emotional responses to your partners emotions and your instinctive emotional responses to the imaginary circumstances
Most of us have ways we control our feelings and ways we control how other people see us. All that control is the opposite of being spontaneous and instinctive when you act and is therefore terrible for your acting. Your controls prevent you from being deeply emotional and expressing the deepest human aspects of yourself in a scene. In order to be a good actor you have to want to reveal yourself emotionally, not hide your true feelings and not fake feelings in your scenes. Never say,”that’s as far as I’m going to go emotionally.”
3) Acting is living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances.
4) The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.
5) Getting your attention off yourself is the big battle won.
6) An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
7) Let the words be the canoe that rides on the river of your emotions.
Act before you think.
9) The pinch and the ouch – that acting requires your immediate visceral response to everything that happens.
10) Acting is reacting – reacting to your partner in each and every moment.
11) Act impulse to impulse, not cue to cue.
12) Try to be as mindless as possible when you act.
13) Don’t change until something happens to make you change.
14) Don’t hold onto your preparation/ideas about any scene.
15) There’s no character; it’s always you in the scene. It’s a part of you that is the “character.”
16) Your emotional reactions in scenes should come out of you like “Elenora Duse’s blush;” from the heart, not the head.
17) Always assume you’re getting something from you partner. There’s no such thing as your partner not giving you anything. There is no such thing as nothing.
—————————————————————————————————-
At our school we are going to the heart of the matter with regard to acting. Learn what we’re teaching and you can work, and do good work, in the film and television business. Though you do need some experience acting on your feet, the getting-up-on-your-feet part is usually very simple for the camera and doesn’t take much to pick up; not anything close to what it takes to learn how to be instinctive and bare your soul.
The following email from one of our students who was in HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG with Ben Kingsley sums up what we’re trying to get across:
So the main thing I learned on the set of House of Sand and Fog or I should say had been reinforced that I have heard you ask of us in class is not try to perform the final product. That it is really a discovery, that everyone is searching for. You the actor, the other actors, the director and even sometimes the DP depending on the shot. You might have some vague idea as a jumping off point but its really about letting go of those ideas to let the discoveries birth. And the ideas are not really “ideas” about how the scene should go but more how you the actor/character feels something. How the Imaginary circumstances affect you. And even after you have rehearsed or even shot a few takes it is still about LETTING GO and really trying to let even more discoveries happen. It never stops.
The other high point was watching Ben Kingsly, Jennifer Connelly, and Ron Eldard work with this Director who I respect very much. The director really put the work and the art first. This made him a bit hard to deal with at some points, but it was great to see everyone just put the ego’s aside and just continue to collaborate. It wasn’t to hurt anyone’s feelings it was a commitment to getting the best work. I loved that.
Copyright 2006 by David Kagen
All rights reserved
Acting and Being Receptive
February 27th, 2008Some experiences in life can be mastered and directed, as in performing a task or going on a trip. We can have other experiences only by being receptive. They come our way, as in the growing of a friendship or the unpredictable events on a trip.
To be receptive, we must not be so busy with what we can control that we fail to notice all the experiences which are there for us. Our senses need to be open to see what is around us and hear what is in the air. We must breathe in the beauty and pain of life. When there is a message in our experience, let us read it and not demand it fit our narrow, logical minds.
Anonymous
To discover how to do a scene well in our acting classes in Los Angeles, and find your “choices,” you need to be receptive. Don’t monitor yourself and don’t control your behavior.
Treat a scene and treat acting as though you are dancing to a song you love to dance to.
Copyright 2007 David Kagen
All rights reserved
Letting go of the story or looking good when you act.
February 27th, 2008This is from one of my current students.
Recently in class I started making some significant progress. David asked me to explain what I was suddenly connecting with that I wasn’t before. Here’s what I came up with, maybe it will strike a cord someone else as well.
Before I arrived at David’s acting classes in Los Angeles I believed acting was an accumulation of skill sets; character analysis, beat-by-beat
breakdowns, objectives, historical context, the moment before, etc David showed me, on the contrary, those are great concepts to vault from when I was first dipping my toes in the creative pool, but they can only lead to finite, text driven performances (i.e. line readings). If I wanted to break-through and begin taking my acting to the next level, however, then those intellectual concepts were training wheels that I needed to rid myself of. David convinced me it isn’t about the story, he’s even gone as far to say, “There is no story.” My scene partner and I will tell our own story by being emotionally connected to one another and the words will their impact all on their own. The skill set I have been holding onto so tightly is limiting and could only take me so far. It didn’t teach me to swim in my own creativity, it only gave me a life-preserver so I didn’t drown.
The big “Aha!“ for me was this shift in perspective. It isn’t about
accumulating skills that build upon one another that make a
performance rich and complex, but rather emptying out the
emotional/intellectual junk that stands in my way. Oddly enough, this process is much like coming of age was described in one of my favorite books:
‘Milestones passed.’…It was funny, but the more things I did…the
emptier I felt. Like you started out full and kept throwing things
overboard instead of the other way around. It wasn’t how I thought it would work. (Pete Fromm, As Cool As I Am, p125)
Since I began leashing my intellectual understanding and started
achieving some emotional clarity, I’ve been asking myself, what do I do now? Exactly that: do! With the aid of the cold reading exercise, David helped me see my need to be comfortable with the story before I would commit emotionally, was like standing on the edge of the pool and taking a temperature instead of jumping in and finding out. I need to quit worrying about the result and commit to ‘doing’ from the get-go regardless of whether my instincts make sense. I have to stop
trying to be good and start being instinctual. For me, this has been the scariest step, probably why I haven‘t gone there until recently. If I risk following my instincts irreverent of the result, I may fail; I may reveal something humiliating; or worse, I may belie my emotional security. But as we all know from watching our tapes, even failure and humiliation are more alive than line readings. So I’ve stopped waiting, stopped guessing, stopped worrying. Hey, sometimes the water is freezing and painful, but it is certainly more fun to just leap.
The final realization I attribute to my recent progress that I wish to share, is that I am seeing how much my need for validation, my need to be please, and my drive to be good, has blocked my development as an actor. The drive cultured by my need for validation is a great way to stay disciplined, but it has served as a major stumbling block throughout my development, because it brings in the third-eye: critical self-awareness, worry and self-doubt. To combat these desires (admittedly, I will probably never rid myself of them), I’ve quit crafting performances to save face. Furthermore, I can’t be hard on myself for making mistakes. After all, I can’t know what acting is until I know what it isn’t. It is just part of the process and I can’t beat myself up for progress exploring different avenues. Now I try to just sit down, breath deep, and trust that if I listen the other person my own authentic creative forces will come to my aid. And every time I do that, whether in class, sports or life, I feel myself grow.
Ben Maixner
Copyright 2007 David Kagen All rights reserved