Mother of Invention Acting School — Los Angeles — Blog

I went to see this movie tonight. Wow. Just, wow. This movie reminded of what a incredible pleasure a film can be. It’s masterful. Seductive. Engrossing. Suspenseful. Joy-inducing. Funny. Politically sharp. It’s incomparable.

At some point in the middle, I realized that these characters had become my good friends (there is some superb acting in it…). I was pierced by the thought that the movie would end at some point, and I would have to say good-bye to them. But I was quickly and easily drawn back in to the captivating story.

(Some)people in (some) other countries really know what a movie is. People who make movies in this country? Not so much.

I had walked across town to the cinema bebopping to my beloved New Pornographers (whose new album comes out in less than TWO WEEKS, and who I will be seeing at the Fox this summer!!!), but on the way home, after this movie, it was time for something a little more…melancholy. Soulful. Deeper. It was time for Damien Fucking Rice. (This had nothing to do with the movie, but it perfectly expresses the mood I was in when it was over.)

On the walk home, I felt like I was seeing San Francisco for the first time. The nineteenth century streetlights, the twentieth century buildings, the restaurant cleanup guys hosing down the sidewalks, people driving cars with the scars to show they have some good stories to tell, it was all a marvel. What a gift, what a treat, what a thrill! I will sleep the deep sleep of contentment tonight.

PS This movie won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Film!!!!!

On Talk of the Nation on NPR yesterday, they were remembering the Civil Rights activist and leader Dr. Dorothy Height, who passed away in the last few days.

She was quite a lady:

In 1963, as Martin Luther King, Jr. told the March on Washington, I have a dream, only one woman stood on the platform behind him: Dorothy Height. A lifelong champion of civil rights, she organized a meeting the next day where women in the movement could address racism and sexism. Dorothy Height died earlier today at the age of 98. She was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up near Pittsburg, won a scholarship to Barnard College in New York only to find the school had already admitted its quota of two blacks.

In the 1940s, she lobbied First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights, had the ear of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, who described her in a statement today as the godmother of the civil rights movement. She played leading roles in both the YWCA and the National Council of Negro Women

One of the guests talking about her was Blanche Williams, founder of the National Black Women’s Town Hall Incorporated. Ms. Williams told the following story about Dr. Height:

And I remember when I was about to go out and we had done it at the historical headquarters in D.C., I said, you know, Dr. Height, I’m really nervous, you know. I’ve got some butterflies, because, you know, C-SPAN was covering it. We had this, you know, sold-out – you know, sold-out event and so forth. And it was just – I was a little nervous. And, you know, I’m a speaker. I’m a talk show host, all these things. But it was for Dr. Height, you know. So she said, Blanche, I want you to remember something and then, you know, very, very calmly – and she just had this very profound way of saying things. And she said: All you need to do is organize your butterflies.

I know that many actors struggle with performance anxiety, so I thought it would be good to pass on this sentiment. What a great image of transforming fear into fortitude!

Dr. Height’s use of the word “organize” is interesting, also, because in the Alexander technique the concept of using the body in an organized way is constantly invoked.

We have lost a visionary and a courageous leader. Thank you for everything Dr. Height!

The New York Times has a nice piece up about David Hodge, a British actor playing the drag queen character in an upcoming production of La Cage Aux Folles, opposite Kelsey Grammer. The actor is a protege of Harold Pinter’s:

That changed in 1993, Mr. Hodge said, when the director David Leveaux cast him as the bodyguard Foster in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, in which “Pinter himself starred as the alcoholic intellectual, Hirst.

Harold and I became great friends, and the truth is he became a second father to me,” said Mr. Hodge, who went on to act in or direct the Pinter plays Moonlight,Betrayal and The Caretaker.

“He was someone I could talk to and confide in very easily,” Mr. Hodge added. “And I felt I was very like him. I just didn’t have his genius.”

Look what he has to say about how he has come to understand acting:

“For a time I really thought acting was just impersonating,” he recalled. “But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.“

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Pictures of a recent Neo-Nazi rally in downtown LA, complete with Swastika banners and flags, here. Also? The rally was apparently held to commemorate the birthday of Adolph Hitler.

I mention it because it’s totally unacceptable, and because I wrote about the film The Believer the other day, about a Jewish Neo-Nazi.

I went to Southcoast Rep in Costa Mesa to see Howard Korder’s new play In the Garden, and I bumped into the master director Mark Brokaw, a graduate of the Drama School at Yale and Obie Award winner, and one the the creators/synthesizers of the approach to acting that I teach at Mother of Invention. Mark was there because he was working on a new play called The Language Archive, which has since opened, and the production got a great review in the LA Times. I have seen quite a bit of Mark’s work, and it has been consistently superb. Particularly memorable was a production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in New York, which starred Mark Ruffalo. It was one of the most memorable nights I have spent in the theater, and I didn’t even really like the play itself.

Really looking forward to seeing Mark’s work again!