Philip Carlson
The Actor’s Center Journal Vol. 1 Num. 1 September 2009
Letter From The Editor
Welcome to the first edition of The Actors Center Journal. We will be a bi-monthly trove of information and opinion mostly emanating from anything having to do with the concept of the actor as an artist. Time was when the actor, almost by definition, was an artist. It is the feeling around here, it is certainly my feeling, that that concept has kind of gotten lost. Maybe even buried.
I represented actors for thirty-two years and loved it in the beginning. I was a manager for ten years and then an agent for twenty-two. The business has changed. The way actors are treated has changed. The way actors treat themselves has changed as well. Thirty years ago I had a client who studied with Stella Adler and he got cast as the lead in a movie. A classmate at Stella Adler threw him a party and several fellow students chose the occasion to dress him down for selling out by “going Hollywood”. He did the movie but he went through several days of wondering if he should. Such a story seems almost quaint now. Of course, I was his agent. I was jumping up and down that my client had the lead in a movie. But I could understand, even be sympathetic to all those peers of his who wanted him to work in the theatre and thought it was perhaps too soon to do a film. (He is doing a play now, thirty years later, with his career somewhat in eclipse and his children grown.) What happened to the field in those thirty years? It is the intention of this Journal to find out.
Those of us who labor in the theatre, whether as artists (actors, writers, directors) or those who provide the artist with his forum (producers, Â casting directors, agents), were most likely brought to the profession because we were touched at an early age by an actor’s performance. And I mean touched. Deeply. We saw something, felt something we had never known it was possible to feel and, somewhere, deep in our heart, we promised to dedicate ourselves to making that feeling possible for ourselves and others and to become a part of the world where that depth of feeling was possible, indeed sought after. We had been touched, I might almost say scarred, by what the artistry of an actor is capable of doing.
The Actors Center Journal is meant to address those of us who have been thusly marked. And we intend to do so through the prism of the acting teacher’s perspective. This makes perfect sense to us. For having been so stirred by something an actor did (“Think of a great performance,” said Meisner. “Think of a moment in that performance. Is your actor talking? Probably not.”) what must we now do? Why, seek out the wizard who can lead us to the knowledge of how to do what we have seen and felt and which has changed us for a lifetime. And so we do. And we become actors or agents or producers. Most of us started as actors. But we work in the theatre, though increasingly less often. We have to eat, right? So we try to find where we fit in show business.
Please respond to what we say and do here. Letters to the Editor are welcome. And for more immediate gratification, please avail yourselves of our discussion forum.
Philip Carlson