SIDNEY POLLACK

New York Times.
A. O. Scott,
May 28, 2008

". . . I hope that there are at least aspiring filmmakers and producers out there who dream of being the next Sydney Pollack."

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

SIDNEY POLLACK: "HE TALKS IN A LANGUAGE THAT ACTORS CAN UNDERSTAND"

A Student of Sanford Meisner

NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 2008

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died Monday at home here. He was 73.

The cause was cancer, said the publicist Leslee Dart, who spoke for his family.

Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.

Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).

“Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast, was nominated for a best picture Oscar earlier this year. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day 1!” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) Most recently, Mr. Pollack portrayed the father of Patrick Dempsey’s character in “Made of Honor.”

Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released in 2006, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.

Mr. Minghella died in March, at the age of 54, or complications from surgery for tonsil cancer.

Apart from the Gehry documentary, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others. A frequent collaborator was Robert Redford.

“Sydney’s and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years,” Mr. Redford said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s too personal to express in a sound bite.”

Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the book “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.

Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.

Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.

Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Mr. Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Mr. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”

After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey,” “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”

From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”

But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.

Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)

Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.

The second of those, “The Way We Were,” about ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was a huge hit despite critical hostility.

The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.

With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.

Sidney Pollack Directing "Tootsie"

But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player. By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.

As the film — a comedy about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a coveted television part — was being shot for Columbia Pictures, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Hoffman became embroiled in a semi-public feud, with Mr. Ovitz running shuttle diplomacy between them.

Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.

If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.

Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million domestically and received 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)

Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both TriStar Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.

Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” The film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.

Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.

That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.

“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.

Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.

Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are two daughters, Rebecca Pollack and Rachel Pollack, and his wife, Claire Griswold. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.

In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.

He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

9:08 PM PDT, May 26, 2008

Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of "Out of Africa" who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie," died Monday. He was 73.Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.

As a filmmaker, Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman -- "relentless and meticulous," screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.

"His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable," cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including "Tootsie" and "Havana," said when it was announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to filmmaking.

"He is never satisfied. . . . His passion is contagious. It inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper," Roizman said.

George Clooney, who starred with Pollack in "Michael Clayton," said: "Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly."

Beginning with "The Slender Thread," a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Pollack was credited with directing 20 films, including "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a 1969 drama about Depression-era marathon dancers starring Jane Fonda that earned Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.

Known for what New York Times film critic Janet Maslin once described as "his broadly commercial instincts and penchant for all-star casts," Pollack directed seven movies starring Robert Redford, beginning with "This Property Is Condemned" (with Natalie Wood) in 1966.

The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced "The Way We Were" (with Barbra Streisand), "Jeremiah Johnson," "Three Days of the Condor" (with Faye Dunaway), "The Electric Horseman" (with Fonda), "Out of Africa" (with Meryl Streep) and "Havana" (with Lena Olin).

"Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger told The Times.

In looking at Pollack's films, she said, "what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn't get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed."

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said "the hallmark" of Pollack's career "has been intelligence, both in his approach and his selection of subject matter."

"Good, bad or in between, his films at the very least respected their audience," Maltin told The Times. "And, of course, he worked with grade-A collaborators on both sides of the camera -- the best screenwriters, the best actors -- and it shows."

"Out of Africa," the 1985 drama based on Danish author Isak Dinesen's experiences in Kenya during the early part of the 20th century and her romance with English big-game hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, earned Pollack two Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film, which won the best picture Oscar.

Pollack also received a best director Oscar nomination -- and a New York Film Critics Circle Award -- for "Tootsie." In the 1982 comedy, Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, an unemployed New York actor who revives his career by transforming himself into a "woman" -- actress Dorothy Michaels -- who lands a role in a TV soap opera and then finds himself falling in love with an actress on the show, played by Jessica Lange. In the process of masquerading as a woman, Dorsey becomes a better man.

The making of the film was marked by creative tension between Pollack and Hoffman -- and unexpected difficulties.

"It's like working with the mechanical shark in 'Jaws,' " Pollack told the New York Times in 1982. "Dustin's breasts fall down. The high heels hurt his feet. The makeup causes pimples, and the heat makes his beard show through after a couple of hours. It's a 3 1/2 -hour makeup job, and then the makeup only has a life of four or five hours. We didn't anticipate that."

Pollack spoke of his preference for working with big stars in an interview with the New York Times in 1982.

"Stars are like thoroughbreds," he said. "Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best -- whatever it is that's made them a star -- it's really exciting."

Sometimes, he added, "if you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form."

Pressed by Hoffman to play his actor-character's exasperated agent in "Tootsie," Pollack finally consented to his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film "War Hunt," during which he met Redford, who also was making his film debut.

"Dustin really kept after me to do the part," Pollack told the New York Times in another interview in 1982. "At one point, he even sent me flowers and signed the note, 'Love, Dorothy.' The acting itself was fun. It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration."

Pollack later appeared in a number of films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and the recent Oscar-nominated Tony Gilroy film "Michael Clayton." Pollack also turned up in guest roles on TV series such as "Frasier," "Will & Grace" and "The Sopranos."

"I don't care much about acting," he told the South Bend Tribune in 2002. "It's more about watching other directors work."

Basinger, head of the film studies department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the author of numerous books on film, said Pollack "was a fabulous actor, and he understood actors and got the best out of them" as a director.

"Here's a man who could have himself been a movie star of a certain type had he so chosen, because he really is that good an actor," she said, adding that Pollack, who spoke to film students at Wesleyan several times, also "cared about education" and was a "natural-born teacher."

Pollack's experience as an actor and acting teacher helped earn him a reputation as an "actor's director."

"He talks in a language that actors can understand," Ed Harris, who played an FBI agent in Pollack's 1993 dramatic thriller "The Firm," told USA Today at the time. "He won't just say 'speed up' or 'slow down'; he'll talk to you about the situation."

Fonda, who earned an Oscar nomination for her leading role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," has said the darkly dramatic film was "a turning point for me, both professionally and personally."

With Pollack's guidance, she said, "I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor," she wrote in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."

In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pollack said he liked to talk to his actors at length.

"When I start a scene, I say, 'Let's not make this a movie.' It's my way of wanting it first to be realistic. You're not doing it to be observed. You're doing it alone. I tell actors, 'Watch "Candid Camera," then flick the channel to something else, then turn back. You'll see how phony the acting looks because real reaction so often means doing nothing.' It's always simple. The tendency with actors is to think that if you're doing more, you're doing more."

The son of a pharmacist, Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and later moved with his family to South Bend.

"I think of it with great sadness," he said of his experiences in South Bend in a 1993 interview with the New York Times. "It was a real cultural desert. There weren't many Jews like us, and it was real anti-Semitic."

His parents divorced while he was growing up, and his mother, who he said "had emotional problems and became an alcoholic," died when Pollack was 16. Although his father envisioned him becoming a dentist, Pollack left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York to become an actor. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Pollack became Meisner's assistant.

Pollack, whose career was interrupted by Army service from 1957 to 1959, had a small role in the 1955 Broadway comedy "The Dark Is Light Enough" and later appeared on "Playhouse 90" and "The United States Steel Hour," as well as series such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Have Gun Will Travel."

As an actor, however, he viewed teaching as his meal ticket.

"I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor -- the way I looked I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend," he told the New York Times in 1993. "I taught. That's how I made my living."

Pollack's work as an actor on director John Frankenheimer's two-part adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on "Playhouse 90" led Frankenheimer to ask him to work as a dialogue coach for two children in his "Playhouse 90" production of "Turn of the Screw."

That in turn led Pollack to do similar work in Hollywood on Frankenheimer's 1961 film "The Young Savages," starring Burt Lancaster.

"Lancaster told me to come to his office one day and said, 'You should be a director,' and I said that I didn't know anything about directing, so he introduced me to Lew Wasserman," then chairman of MCA, owner of Universal Pictures, Pollack told the New York Times.

Poitier told the Los Angeles Times on Monday night that working with Pollack on "The Slender Thread" from 1965 was "a great experience." Pollack, Poitier said, "was young and gifted and enormously talented. He wound up leaving an amazing mark on the American film industry."

Over the next several years, Pollack directed episodes of TV shows such as "The Fugitive," "The Defenders," "Kraft Suspense Theatre" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."

In 1966, he won an Emmy for his direction of "The Game," an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre." He also received Emmy nominations as the director of another segment of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" and an episode of "Ben Casey."

Pollack's other films as a director are "The Scalphunters" (with Lancaster), "Castle Keep," "The Yakuza," "Bobby Deerfield," "Absence of Malice," "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts" and "The Interpreter."

His most recent film, released in the U.S. in 2006, was a departure: "Sketches of Frank Gehry," a feature-length documentary about his friend, the renowned architect whose work includes the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy called Pollack's portrait of the architectural giant, shot in part with Pollack's own hand-held camera, "a rich tour of [Gehry's] artistic world and the journey that brought him to where he is today."

Pollack also had more than 40 credits as a producer or executive producer on films such as "Presumed Innocent," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Cold Mountain" and "Michael Clayton."

The HBO production "Recount," which premiered Sunday, was executive-produced by Pollack and Jay Roach. He was originally scheduled to direct the project but pulled out in August for health reasons.

Pollack, who co-founded Mirage Productions in 1985, was a founding member of the Sundance Institute, chairman emeritus of the American Cinematheque, a founding member of the Film Foundation, and a member of the board of directors for the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

He met his wife, Claire, when he was teaching and she was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse. They were married in 1958 and had three children, Rebecca, Rachel and Steven. Steven died in a plane crash in 1993.

He is also survived by six grandchildren and a brother, Bernie, a Hollywood costume designer.

Sidney Pollack

By Howard Kissel
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, May 27th 2008, 2:08 AM

Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack, director of such iconic films as "Out of Africa," "Tootsie," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "The Way We Were," has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 73.

The end came Monday in his Pacific Palisades home with his family at his bedside, publicist and friend Leslee Dart said.

Pollack was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director three times, winning for "Out of Africa." He also won an Oscar for producing that film.

"Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly," said George Clooney, who starred in last year's Oscar-nominated "Michael Clayton." Pollack played an unsavory corporate lawyer in the film.

Robert Redford, who starred in "The Electric Horseman" and "Three Days of the Condor," said, "Sydney's and my relationship, both professionally and personally, covers 40 years. It's too personal to express in a sound bite. I would only hope for the sake of dignity that his family can get the peace it deserves at this time."

Legendary New York publicist Bobby Zarem called the death of his friend and colleague for nearly 30 years "a major loss to the industry and to all of us."

Elaine Kaufman, owner of the upper East Side restaurant Elaine's, long a hangout for celebrity writers, Hollywood movers and shakers and politicians, said she was "deeply saddened" by Pollack's death.

"I've known him since the '70s," Kaufman said. "We traveled together in France about 10, 12 years ago. He was one terrific guy with a really good heart. This is just terrible."

A director to whom actors were extremely loyal, Pollack started out as an actor himself after studying and teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.

Years later, he returned to acting when the star of his 1982 film "Tootsie," Dustin Hoffman, urged him to take on the role of his agent. The two sparred over creative differences during shooting, and their combative relationship transferred effortlessly to the screen.

Pollack went on to play in more than 15 films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" and "Michael Clayton," which he also co-produced.

He had a recurring role on "Will & Grace" as Eric McCormack's father.

Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants.

He came to New York in 1952 and studied with the influential acting teacher Sanford Meisner, who eventually invited him to teach. His wife, Claire, whom he married in 1958, was one of his students. They had three children.

Of his craft, Pollack once said, "I don't value a film I've enjoyed making. If it's good, it's damned hard work."

With Leo Standora, Joe Neumaier and George Rush

Sidney Pollack

NEW YORK POST
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON, AP

May 27, 2008 --

LOS ANGELES -- Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay who achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with the gender-bending comedy "Tootsie" and the period drama "Out of Africa" while often dabbling as a television and movie actor, has died. He was 73.

Pollack died of cancer Monday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, said publicist Leslee Dart. Pollack had been diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, said Dart.

Pollack, who occasionally appeared on the big screen himself, worked with and gained the respect of Hollywood's best actors in a long career that reached prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act," George Clooney said in a statement from his publicist.

"He'll be missed terribly," Clooney said.

Last fall, he played law firm boss Marty Bach opposite Clooney in "Michael Clayton," a drama that examines the life of fixer for lawyers. The film, which Pollack co-produced, received seven Oscar nominations, including for best picture and a best actor nod for Clooney. Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for supporting actress.

Pollack was no stranger to the Academy Awards. In 1986, "Out of Africa" a romantic epic of a woman's passion set against the landscape of colonial Kenya, captured seven Oscars, including best director and best picture.

In accepting his Oscar, Pollack commended Meryl Streep, who was nominated for best actress but didn't win.

"I could not have made this movie without Meryl Streep," Pollack said. "She is astounding - personally, professionally, all ways."

Over the years, several of his other films, including "Tootsie" and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" got several nominations, including best director nods.

The list of actors he directed reads like a who's who of Hollywood A-listers: Sally Field and Paul Newman in "Absence of Malice," Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn in "The Interpreter," Robert Mitchum in "The Yakuza," Tom Cruise in "The Firm," Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," and Redford and Barbra Streisand in "The Way We Were," and other big-name actors in other films.

"Having the opportunity to know Sydney and work with him was a great gift in my life," Field said in a statement. "He was a good friend and a phenomenal director and I will cherish every moment that I ever spent with him."

In later years, he devoted more time to acting, appearing in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her," and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."

His last screen appearance was in "Made of Honor," a romantic comedy currently in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.

Pollack had an occasional recurring role on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" playing Will's (Eric McCormack) father, and also appeared in the "The Sopranos," "Frasier" and "Mad About You."

Pollack also produced many independent films with filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who died in March, and the production company Mirage Enterprises. His recent producing credits include "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain."

The Lafayette, Ind. native was born to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school in South Bend, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him to forego college and move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.

Studying under Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.

"We started together in New York and he always excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity as much as his talents," said Martin Landau, a longtime close friend and associate in the Actors Studio, through spokesman Dick Guttman.

After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Pollack turned his eye to directing - where he would ultimately leave his biggest mark.

"Sydney let the dialogue and the emotion of a scene speak for itself. Not given to cinematic tricks, his gentle and thoughtful touch and his focus on the story let us inhabit the world he created in each film," said Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America.

In the "The Interpreter," that world was the United Nations. The first feature film to be shot inside the U.N., Pollack had never been inside the Manhattan landmark until starting work on the film in 2004.

"I am ashamed to admit that I went to school here in New York. I got married here, I worked here, I walked by this building a thousand times," he told reporters. "I had never been inside it until the first location scouting trip, and I was awed by it."

Pollack, who stood over six feet tall and had a striking presence on the screen, never totally gave up acting.

"Most of the great directors that I know of were not actors, so I can't tell you it's a requirement," he said. "On the other hand, it's an enormous help."

At the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, Pollack said "Tootsie" star Dustin Hoffman pushed the director into playing the actor's exasperated agent.

Pollack said Hoffman repeatedly sent him roses with a note reading, "Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy." At that point, Pollack hadn't acted in 20 years.

In the 1982 movie, Hoffman plays an out-of-work actor who pretends to be a woman to land a role on a soap opera.

"I didn't think anyone would believe him as a woman," Pollack said. "But the world did, they went crazy."

Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren.Pollack's son, Steven, died in a plane crash in 1993.
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

REFLECTIONS ON "AGON" THE CENTRAL ELEMENT OF "CONTEST" IN WESTERN DRAMA

The spirit of contest in Ancient Greece.

Aien Aristeuein (Ever to Excel): During a battle between the Greeks and Trojans, Diomedes is impressed by the bravery of a mysterious young man and demands to know his identity. Glaucus replies: "Hippolocus begat me. I claim to be his son, and he sent me to Troy with strict instructions: Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great ... This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit." (Iliad 6. 208)

Aien Aristeuein: The World of the Hawk

The Homeric heroic world, as it comes across in the Iliad and the Odyssey, is a predominantly aristocratic, warrior-culture whose mentality is largely governed by power in its naked, immediate form. Aretē, a key word in understanding the Homeric hero's behavior, points to the ethical ideals of the aristoi (noblemen, aristocrats) -- significantly, the two words seem to have a common etymological root -- and it emphasizes the agonistic nature of their values. Although it is usually translated as "virtue" or "excellence," aretē in Homer can more accurately be rendered as "prowess in battle" and is geared toward those qualities that are most needed in a warlike society, such as physical strength, valor, endurance, and so on. Homeric aretē also has a second meaning, describing intellectual rather than physical abilities, but again in a competitive context: for example, Odysseus is praised as being aristos in counsel, that is, because of his ability to bring about, through skillful manipulation or cunning (mētis), his own party's success in war or peace. In the Homeric world, therefore, power presents itself as agon or competitive play. This means not only that contest has an important function in Homeric society, but also that the hero sees his relationship to other humans and to the divinities, as well as to existence at large, in terms of a universal game of power. Hippolochus' valedictory words to his son Glaukos, "Aien aristeuein kai hupeirochon emmenai allon" ("always be best and excel others," Il. 6.208), repeated by Nestor, who this time puts them in the mouth of Peleus as the latter sends his son Achilles off to the Trojan War (Il. 11.784), aptly express the Hellenic aristocratic ideal of life, based on play as contest.

Before examining the various forms of agonistic play in the Homeric epic, it would be useful to recall briefly the semantic history of words such as agōn and aethlos. In Homer, agōn designates "an assembly with games or contests," "the place where the games are held," and the "competitors or the potential competitors" themselves (any member of the assembly may join in the competition). Some dictionaries list "place of assembly" as the original meaning of agōn and "assembly to witness games" as a secondary meaning. A closer look at the Iliad and the Odyssey, however, shows that the agōn semantic group is almost always used in connection with games or contests. Out of the twenty-three lines where agōn appears in the Iliad, sixteen relate to the funeral games held in Patroclus' honor (book 23), whereas in the Odyssey all six lines where the word appears are in some way associated with games. G. G. P. Autenrieth lists the Homeric meanings of agōn in the correct order: (1) assembly, especially to witness games; contest, games; (2) assemblage or place of assemblage of the ships; (3) place of combat, arena, including the space occupied by the spectators. At the outset, therefore, the word agōn clearly holds a central position in the Hellenic vocabulary of play. In post Homeric times, agōn becomes increasingly abstract, designating only the game or the contest itself. It gradually transcends the sphere of athletic games, extending to such abstract contexts as law, politics, warfare, eros, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and literary criticism; even in these contexts, however, its connection with the notion of play remains firm.

In turn, Homeric aethlos (Att. athlos) specifically signifies "prize-contest," but it can also mean "combat in war" as well as "toil" and "hardship," such as Euristheus imposes on Heracles (Il. 8.363). Like agōn, athlos turns increasingly abstract and in the classical period the two terms become interchangeable: both of them can denote "athletic contest," such as the great Panhellenic festivals. At the same time agōn undergoes an ethical polarization, acquiring negative meanings; like athlos, it can signify "hardship" or "toil," for example, in agōnia. This polarization appears approximately at the moment when, in certain Sophists and in Plato, paidia comes to denote not only "children's play" but also "play" in general. It is the moment when philosophy separates play from agōn, that is, from violent contest and power -- a separation that took place especially in the context of the Platonic theory of education (paideia) and that was adopted and perpetuated by subsequent classical scholarship. It can be concluded, then, that the semantic development of agōn and aethlos equally reflects the shift in emphasis from an archaic to a median mentality in Hellenic thought, where the aristocratic notion of contest undergoes a process of ethical polarization, acquiring an increasingly ambivalent emotional value.

In the Homeric epic, play as agōn governs the transactions among heroes, among gods, between men and gods, and between mortals and Moira. Heroes relate to other heroes in terms of a competitive game, the goal of which is to establish a relative hierarchy (primus inter pares) within the aristocratic group. This hierarchy, however, remains highly unstable. The hero ceaselessly worries about his order of rank in relation to his peers and about "what people will say," because success is labile by nature. He constantly has to prove his aretē in battle and in the assembly, constantly has to remain in the public eye. For instance, after his quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles cannot afford to stay away from the battlefield for too long lest he should be forgotten, a fate worse than death for the Homeric hero. He has no moral scruples in enlisting the help of his mother, Thetis (even if this means bringing almost total disaster upon the Greek camp), in order to make sure that his comrades need his services. Moral scruples (in the modern sense, arising from the notion of ethical responsibility toward fellow humans at large) are irrelevant in a heroic society, where intentions count less than performance, and where performance is judged largely in terms of success and failure. Achilles is less concerned with the common good than with his own timē (fame, reputation, but also sphere of influence), which depends only indirectly upon this common good. (Actually, the welfare of the Greek camp can only be, and should have been, Agamemnon's concern, being part of his timē as the commander-in-chief of the army.)

From, "God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle" Book by Mihai I. Spariosu; Duke University Press, 1991

So, what does all of this mean and what relevance does it hold for working with actors? Movies (Fiction and Non-Fiction), plays, "reality shows," and certainly Game Shows, as well as most all forms of 'Western' entertainment, growing as it does out of the soil of a compulsively competitive Greek culture, inherits agōn/contest/conflict, as a given; to the point, whereby, “no agōn, no entertainment” to the 'Western' viewer, for the better or for the worse.

And so, one might approach all drama today from the standpoint that ALL characters' "super-super-objective" is to WIN (something).

What do you think?

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

PABLO PICASSO

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

KIM CHUEH: TERRIFIC YOUNG ACTOR

Kim's Facebook Profile

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ON GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES

Sincerity of emotions, feelings that seem true in given circumstances -- that is what we ask of a dramatist. -- Aleksandr Pushkin

GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES

"This expression means . . . the story of the play, the facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors' and régisseur's (director's) interpretation, the mise-en-scène, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects -- all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role." -- An Actor Prepares

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ADAPTATION/DOCUMENTARY MARATHON

Just came home from watching two-days of movies made by the students who I'll be working with next year. What a pleasure. Each film, springs from a keen mind and filled with heart. Subject matter and execution so in keeping with meaningful and engaging -- movie making. In this time, when so much popular entertainment fails to satisfy, these two days have been like an oasis. What an inspiration. -- Thank you.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY:CREATIVE WORK WITH THE ACTOR; A DISCUSSION ON DIRECTING

KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY

Creative Work with the Actor; A Discussion on Directing

From: "Directors on Directing" by Toby Cole, Helen Krich Chinoy; Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. ( .pdf version)

K. S. STANISLAVSKY: . . . I am told that we must create directors, but I must say that this question has never been clear to me. My experience tells me that you cannot create a director--a director is born. It is possible to create a favorable atmosphere in which he can grow. But to take Ivan Ivanovich and make a director out of him is hardly feasible. The true director comprises within his own person a director-teacher, a director-artist, a director-writer, a director-administrator. What can we do if one has these qualifications while another has not?

If the director realizes that "I possess certain elements and lack others, but I shall try to acquire more, and in the meantime give the theater all I have"; if he does this with discernment and helps create a collective of directors--this might, to a certain extent, compensate for the absence of all those elements in one man. . . .

One thing is clear to me: there are directors of the result and directors of the root. We must distinguish one from the other. We need directors of the root. This is one of the most important requisites for the Art Theater.

The first seeks immediate results. . . . He often takes two--three-five substances, mixes them in the retort to see what will happen. Sometimes what happens is not what is required. "How can I, the director, fix it? I can add to these elements the inorganic substance opopanax . . . I can say to the actor 'Make a good try in this passage . . . otherwise they'll blame me as director.'"

This method of work I consider a crime. If you drop opopanax into a retort containing organic substances everything will begin to boil, hiss, stink.

Hence, one or the other--result or root.

Another thing: "I, as director, produce a play and that's all." Or "I produce a play and in the process create an actor." There is a difference. The director might make a play without worrying about the actor. He can get the actor full-fledged. However, one must first create an actor's company--the plays and the theater will follow as a matter of course.

It is possible to "make" a play, to "model" a play to prove yourself a director. The actor can pass muster by a certain cleverness . . . but nothing significant will come of it so long as the actor is oblivious of the word "organic." Many have forgotten the difference between the organic and the inorganic, theatrical truth and organic truth. . . .

The question is whether you can prepare an actor with whom I can talk about his role so that, like a piece of clay, he could feel the pressure of my fingers. Not every kind of clay is fit for sculpture and it is not every actor you can talk to about art. But if we set aside this first moment, we start everything by compulsion. If a director foists upon an actor his own, the director's thoughts, derived from his own personal emotional memories, if he tells him "You must act precisely so," he does violence to the actor's nature. Does he need my emotional memories? He has his own. I must cling to his soul like a magnet and see what it contains. Then cast another magnet. I want to see the material side of him. Aha! Now I understand of what living emotional material he is constituted. There can be no other. . . .

But there is still the sequence and logic of the emotions--what about them? How can we speak of the logic and sequence of the emotions? I do not even know to what university I should turn to learn about the inner logic and sequence of the emotions. How to understand them? How to record them? I say this is not necessary. The business of an actor is to act. You play Romeo. If you were in love what would you do? Take your notebook and write "Met her at some spot, she did not look at me, I turned away offended." In this way you can fill a whole volume. You recall your life, you transfer your emotions to your role. This passion, love, you analyze into its component moments of logical action. All of them together constitute love. . . . To all the stages in the unfolding of the emotions there will be corresponding logical sequences. Along these stages you will step into your role, because you took from your own life everything that concerns love and you transfer it to your role. These are not merely bits of Romeo, they are bits of yourself. . . .

N. N. LITOVTZEVA: And when do you give the actors the necessary words?

STANISLAVSKY: That is the most difficult moment. I try at first not to give any words at all--all I need is the plan of the action. When the actor has mastered that, a certain line of action has matured within him which he begins to feel with his body, his muscles. When this happens the actor realizes where he is going and why. He reaches a moment when he must act for the sake of something. That is a very agitating moment. . . . I give them the words when they have to act with words. At first they can act only with thoughts. And when I see that they understand these thoughts and that they also grasp the inner logic and sequence of these thoughts, I say: "Now take the words." Then they will have a different relation to the words. They need the words not in order to memorize them by rote but to act them out. They put the words not on the muscles of their tongue, not even in the brain, but into the very soul whence the actor strives toward the super-objective. 1 Then the words will become super-effective.

The correct actions and the correct thoughts have been established.

Now you are nearer to the essence of the role. You have a base on which to stand.

But can you succeed without through action? Definitely not. This is achieved gradually, not in a formal but in an absolutely correct sense. . . .

V. G. SAKHNOVSKY: . . . Supposing that a favorable combination of circumstances makes it possible to organize an ensemble. Is it enough to train the group technically and professionally or would you make other demands on it, as for example, that the actors should be capable of analyzing the phenomena of life, that they should be broadly cultured, that they should be abreast of their age?

STANISLAVSKY: I am surprised that such a question is put to me at all. Can there be any doubt about whether we need an actor with a wide or a narrow horizon, an actor who is intelligent or one who is stupid--by all means, the broadest outlook, the most cultured. . . .

E. S. TELESHEVA: Must you explain the super-objective to the actor? Do you yourself define it before work begins?

STANISLAVSKY: I am afraid to make a definitive decision prematurely. There must be something of a hint first. I know where I am going-to the right or to the left. But I am looking for a device whose logic itself will lead us by the nose to the point where we must say: this is definitely the super-objective, there can be no other.

Suppose you play a certain scene. What is your objective? I want to know what you are driving at. I say to the actor: "Start playing and proceed." The first objective has been dissolved in the new--it is no longer needed. Let us take the next fragment. I discover a new circumstance. Now the foregoing objective is no longer useful. It has been dissolved by a more powerful solvent. My attention is already drawn to the fourth fragment.

Thus you go through the entire play till you reach the super-objective. If you found an actor who was so thoroughly steeped in the super-objective, who understood it so profoundly and completely that this objective swallowed all the fragments and all the subordinate objectives of the play, a most powerful through action would result and the entire role would be created largely unconsciously. Every great objective destroys and absorbs in itself all the preceding smaller objectives which recede into the subconscious. They no longer burden your mind. You take the super-objective and everything only serves to bring you to it.

LITOVTZEVA: Then the path is from the minor objective to the super-objective?

STANISLAVSKY: . . . Every important objective commands your attention completely. You do not have enough concentration to perform consciously every step of the way. Your own creative nature does it. That is true creativity. Organic nature itself, with which you cannot meddle, is the creator. But not every super-objective is capable of awakening our nature to creativeness. Suppose that my super-objective in Hamlet is to show the profligate mother in conflict with her son who deeply loves his father. Can such a super-objective satisfy? No, because I brought it down to a trivial level. I reduced it to a philistine idea. If I base the super-objective on a profound conception of life, that is a different thing altogether.

Imagine that I have the following objective. I am convinced that I, Hamlet, must cleanse the entire court, the entire world of evil and I must involve in this objective all the people around me in order to save my martyred father. I have undertaken an unequalled objective, but I fulfill it. You understand what torture, to be unable to fulfill an objective which could save my father. This overpowering objective facing a man who struggles and tosses about trying to accomplish it will of course move you more strongly than the other. . . .

I say to the actor: "Give me what is in the play, but give it to me so that it is true to the very end." Let him go over it ten times. He can don his costume only when he is one with the role and the role is one with him. But heaven forbid that the image be molded when the actor is not yet warm, not yet pliable. This is harmful to the role. The role is not yet one with him and he is not yet one with the role. That is a moment which we often miss. If, however, you want to achieve a full blending of the actor with his role, then sit him down with you at the table. He will appeal to you himself. "I have a line on the role--I would not like to spoil it--what given circumstances do I still lack to breathe more life into the role?"

I. Y. SUDAKOV: To be ready to mount the stage how many of these given circumstances does he need?

STANISLAVSKY: He will not enter the room until it is made alive by the given circumstances. The actor will beg you for it because he must place himself within the role. He will think: "They say I entered the wrong way. But how should I enter? What should I do? I don't know yet to whom I am going and where I came from."

"Let us talk about where you came from."

"And where did I come to?"

You tell him: "Play so that I can believe you," and he will have to go through the same process all over again.

SUDAKOV: And if he had buried his father that day, he would enter differently.

STANISLAVSKY: If he buried his father--that is one thing. If he returned drunk from a tavern-that's another. If he came from his bride--that is still a third.

He will not know how to drink a glass of tea unless he knows where he came from and why.

SUDAKOV: Then the life of the image will result from the evaluation of the given circumstances.

STANISLAVSKY: The result will be the life of the human body. But that is a trap. The question is not in the life of the human body. In order to create the life of the human body we must create the life of the human soul. From it you create the logic of action, you create the inner line, but give it form externally. If you go through three-four acts in a given sequence the appropriate mood will come naturally.

A moment arrives when from the fusion of the actor's personal inner truth with the truth of the role, something transpires. His head swims in the literal sense. "Where am I? Where is the role?" And right there is the beginning of the amalgamation of the actor and his role. The mood is yours but it also flows from the role. The logic of the mood is inherent in the role. The given circumstances are from the role. You cannot tell where you are and where the role is. There is complete amalgamation. And that is the moment of unity. . . .

SUDAKOV: You follow the line of the play.

STANISLAVSKY: I follow the facts of the play. I take the actor as such. He places himself in the given circumstances of the role. He has to create a characteristic image. But he remains himself. Whenever he withdraws from himself, he kills the role. You live with your emotions. Remove the emotions and the role is dead. You must remain yourself in the image. If I walk around with a sick leg am I a different man? Am I different if bitten by a bee? These are external circumstances. . . .

We are analyzing all the procedures, all the possibilities which take us to the threshold of the subconscious, which generate the subconscious reactions. The most powerful are through action and the super-objective. What is our present objective? Take two-three-four-five cues. You say: "I want to attract attention" and someone else will say "I try to understand what I am told." The first objective has here been swallowed by the second, and the third will swallow the second, and all of them will be swallowed in the end by the superobjective.

If now you find an actor who adheres fast to the super-objective and follows through action all the subordinate objectives will be resolved subconsciously.

LITOVITZEVA: It is not clear to me how each preliminary objective is swallowed by the subsequent one.

STANISLAVSKY: For example:

"What dost thou say?"

"Nothing, my lord: or if--I know not what."

What is Iago's objective?

LITOVTZEVA: To arouse suspicion.

STANISLAVSKY: And Othello's?

LITOVTZEVA: To understand Iago's hint.

STANISLAVSKY: And what is the next objective? Othello laughs at

Iago's words "Nothing, my lord." What then happened to the first objective? It was swallowed up by the second. Let us go further. You have a powerful objective:"to sacrifice life for the ideal woman." If your every sentence supports this objective you will realize how ridiculous it is to permit suspicion to fall on Desdemona. How you will laugh! But if you come upon some plausible circumstance cunningly contrived by Iago you will become perplexed. Everything will appear self-evident precisely because I cleave strongly to the superobjective and the through action. . . .

SAKHNOVSKY: The director read the play as attentively as the actor. Then the director and the actor met and followed the organic line of action which you speak about. What next? Do you go through act after act, scene after scene? What will this lead to? When does the question of the super-objective and through action arise?

STANISLAVSKY: You indicate approximately some kind of an objective. But the super-objective will not be found in a long time. Perhaps only at the twentieth performance. However, you do suggest to the actor a temporary super-objective. He will make use of it. This objective is not final. It indicates for the moment the necessary direction, not far from the truth, yet not the truth itself which will emerge from the study of the role in one's self and one's self in the role.

SAKHNOVSKY: And when will through action appear?

STANISLAVSKY: All the actors in a body will suggest it to you. If you plan it alone it may be right formally yet wrong as living experience. The actors themselves will prompt you: "Here it is, the objective, this is about where we must look for it." Let us look for it together with the actors. . . .

L. M. LEONIDOV: You deduce the super-objective from indications by the author. But if we both play the Bailiff must we both have the same super-objective?

STANISLAVSKY: The same one but it is somewhat different in your case. Yours is pinkish blue, mine is pinkish green.

LEONIDOV: We walk along different corridors but we arrive at the same spot.

STANISLAVSKY: That spot is in your imagination and mine. The difference is there because each is the result of the difference in our entire lives, in our emotional memories.

LEONIDOV: In the life of the Bailiff?

STANISLAVSKY: It has become your life. In your reflection it will be somewhat different from mine.

LITOVTZEVA: How then can we go on if we do not immediately know where to go? We can lose our way.

STANISLAVSKY (passing a finger around the rim of a tea glass): Here is a circle. In the center is the super-objective. It is the circle of your life--the role. Life begins here and death. You take this section of life (indicating part of the circle). You know the past, you have prospects for the future. You must find your way to the super-objective. You know it is somewhere around here (points to the center of the glass). You proceed from here, from your simple action. You know that the super-objective is somewhere up there in the airless space. Presently you pass around the circle and determine the center. In the final analysis you must explore what constitutes the center, the essence, the soul of your role. . . .

LEONIDOV: Can an actor concentrate the entire length of four acts? Or are there still other factors?

STANISLAVSKY: Great actors like Salvini or Yermolayeva can. YerU00AD molayeva requires no other factors. From beginning to end her attention is concentrated both on the stage and behind the wings.

LEONIDOV: The most important thing is that on the stage no word is to be mumbled. Every sentence must be pregnant with thought. But to what extent is this possible through the length of four acts?

STANISLAVSKY: You may live with the super-objective but that need not prevent you from talking to someone between the acts about an unrelated subject. You do not thereby depart from your line. The line of physical action has a staying power; you may return to it very easily. Of course, if such a line is lacking, there will be trouble.

I have in my studio only God knows what talents--but they know how to pay attention to their work. When I said to them: "I give you just three problems: you meet, you look each other over, you get married," they told me this lightened their task so much, they had no trouble playing their parts. I found new adjustments, new situations. They made excellent actors.

LITOVTZEVA: Did you give them the mise en scène?

STANISLAVSKY: The worst mise en scène is the one given by the director. I watched them standing with their back to me doing something. I heard everything and understood everything. I could not invent another mise en scène like it.

I want to create a performance without any mises en scène. Today this wall is open and when the actor comes tomorrow he will not know which wall might be open. He might come to the theater and find that a pavilion is differently placed than it was yesterday, and all the mises en scène are changed. The fact that he has to improvise a mise en scène adds much that is unexpected and interesting. No director can invent such mises en scène.

Translated by Louis Lozowick

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ACTIONS: THE ACTORS' THESAURUS

After some conversations with students about the approaches from this semester, I did some research and found this book. I ordered it, and find that its approach bares a startling resemblance, to the "line-by-line" approach that I demonstrated for a bit, once in class. Aside from that, it's a very rich resource for a practical way to communicate with actors in their native language: action. (Amazon Link)

Book Description:

ACTIONS: The Actors' Thesaurus is a vital companion for actors in rehearsal—a thesaurus of action words to revitalize performance.

Actors need actions. Actors cannot ‘act’ adjectives, they need verbs. Verbs are an aim to achieve, an action to perform.

‘Actions’ are active verbs. ‘I tempt you.’ ‘You taunt me.’ In order to perform an action truthfully--and therefore convincingly-- an actor needs to find exactly the right action to suit that particular situation and that particular line. That is where this book comes in….

ACTIONS is a thesaurus of active verbs that the actor can use to refine performance until s/he hits exactly the right one to help make the action come alive. ACTIONS: The Actors’ Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone & Maggie Lloyd-Williams has gathered together the (formerly) dogged-eared photocopied lists of action verbs from greenrooms and rehearsal rooms and put them together in this pocket-sized thesaurus. All with a view to helping actors get to the heart of meaning and to a great performance. This thesaurus of action words is indispensable in developing mood, line readings, and acting choices for each and every line.

From the Publisher
This new book just released by Drama Publishers gathers together -- for the first time -- the acting community’s –- formerly — secret lists of action words and makes them available in an organized and comprehensive format.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."