Cayle Chernin's Blog - March 30th 2007
Cayle Chernin -ONE IN 2000 Where the action is. Long before Reality TV began to reveal 'real people' to each other, actors were learning how to be real in imaginary circumstances. That was the first thing I had to learn in acting. Spontaneity is hard, complicated work. I know I spent most of my twenties as an actor struggling to be real and spontaneous under adverse conditions, like the Director thinks you can't act. Thank you Henry, for that directing technique: shaming the actor into feeling real bad so you get a hit of what you call "real feeling" - it's a certain kind of real, an emotional collision, a shock or jump start into another level of perception. But you do feel real humiliation for example or self-loathing, always interesting, or helpless, always appealing. But as my dear neighbour Etta Sherman on Glen Cedar soothed me with when I had returned from L.A. bruised and battered, blood on the tracks, a bit the worse for wear: "The pottery that survives the firing in the kiln has real strength" - she helped me to understand that I must treasure my experience, my school of hard knocks,( no one could tell me anything mode..us operandi) and that it was a treasure chest of knowledge, information. I had been fired, all right, trumped, and my 'performance' ended up on the cutting room floor of Henry Jaglom's second film Tracks, where my love affair with the Movies ended and my work to become a good actor continued. I was hooked: on 'the movies'. They defined, I know for me, how to be, how to act, who to be, and what a love scene was: Played by the brightest and the biggest, the ones we could watch sink and swim, love and hate, feel intensely in terribly dramatic situations and unlike the written word, the image put a face on the dream. I day dreamed to my heart's content at the Movies, cried when I was moved, laughed and felt safe in the usually almost empty week day afternoons dark movie theatres. For 90 minutes I would be free of everything else, free of stupid high school, free to fantasize about acting with Marlon the great love scene. The movies and Marlon saved my sorry little non- life as a failing high school student running down to spend the weekends at Bloor and Yonge (how much time in my life is going to be spent in that vicinity, on the strip from Bloor to Wellesley, I have attended acting classes, sessions, workshops etc since my 'sainted' Mother schlepped me to Marjory Purvey's Theatre of The Air - School of Radio Drama, when I was 12 and we had just moved to Toronto from Stevenville, Newfoundland, a move I thought the Family had made for my acting career..I would have preferred New York, but Bloor and Yonge became the center of my Universe. Smash Cut To Hollywood:
Canadian actress, first day in Hollywood, lunch at the Old World Restaurant with Henry Jaglom, one of three people she knows.10 hours later, and an incredible parade of exotic people, like Roger who couldn't eat vegetables and seemed very intelligent and Rita, the beautiful Black activist who would become a close friend and so many more, capped by the image at closing time at the Rainbow when the handsome, great actor rising movie star JACK is coming at you, with a grin, you know that grin, meant for you, yes you, he's coming to see you. Henry had alerted Jack that there was fresh meat in town. "He's got a notch on his cock and he thinks he's a man" - Country Joe MacDonald song. Now apparently the Big Bad Jack-be-nimble has 2000 notches to his credit. Lota water under that bridge, which would overwhelm even the large black dildo Jack pulls out of his pants in The Departed. I bring this up only because my first night in Holly wood to have been cast in this Henry Jaglom experimental improv was more than even I could have expected of the Hollywood experience! WOW! And Don Johnson had one line: "Cayle, Henry had to go, his friend Jack will take you home". No kidding, crazy girl, you are here.
Would I kiss and tell or talk out of school about something that probably I would be the only one who remembers. Why mention it? Star fucking is a long tradition, but for my part, sleeping with the famous is not what it was about - rather the romance and excitement of dreams coming true, which is more as Biff Rose used to sing: 'the dream come false' or as I later thought The American dream had become the American nightmare. I treasure all the many experiences I have had, some are worth talking about, some become the fabric for something else, all contribute to whatever it is I have to offer at this juncture. I am the sum total of my parts. The fact is I found The Departed disturbingly gros. Borat was gros but had it's heart in the right place. The good 'ol and young boys-will-be' in Hollywood grossed me out, finally and ultimately. I am trying to co-exist. I am challenged with negative destructiveness, power subverted and confidence undermined and under mining. Maybe The World is an ugly place and people are scum and life is tough.but best to approach from another angle I say. "What you say is what you are". Jack was truly rabid in Departed, and in true Jack form, was outrageous and unapologetic in his antics. He's the actor of this era - The man who Carole Eastman (Adrian Joyce) wrote the perfect role for in Five Easy Pieces is the archetype of the man who followed Marlon, Dean, Clift, then Newman to the next level: In 5 Easy Pieces, he reacted against the stuffy smugness of his artsy classical crazy family and even though he hated the Karen Black, poor silly girl character, he feels a connection to her emotional truthfulness and vulnerability in spite of the more obviously attractive and special Susan Anspack. Jack, the kid from New Jersey who thought his Grand Mother was his Mother and discovered that his Mother was his Sister certainly brings an authentic (his)story to the table. He has been ever present in a persona rich with excess and the best that money can buy. Smart and sharp, funny and with the explosion of violence that was first so powerful in the scene in 5 Easy where he's in the car and has decided to let Rayette (Karen Black) come with him..he erupts in a physical tirade swiping at the car around him, furious.the fury and the glee of it all! There's magnificence of self exposure of the exalted about all of Jack's performances. I recall he thought movies about actors or the biz'ness were NOT interesting to audiences.."the air is too rarified" Times have changed and there is nothing rarified or even rare about the air of the Departed. A very hard core World. Anti feminist/feminist Camille Paglia's take on POWER..and what she defines as 'the new feminism' "the path to power for women lies through male territory" and says "the first woman pres after 9/11 must have military expertise". Of course we have seen that World leaders do need to deal with the military. Golda perhaps put it best where she said of the Arabs that she could not forgive them for one thing: they had made killers of her children and she resigned when she realized that she had been willing to play the nuclear card. As for kissing and telling it's a bad idea. One in 2000 is not exactly something I want to be known for, it's worse than Goin' Down The Road being my only claim to fame. I watched two of Lea Pool's movies this past week, they are not easy to get, Lost and Delirious, possibly her first, I had actually seen on TV, and got a VHS that started jumping in my machine..and I gave up half way through, but I liked it..Liked that the teen sexuality had roots in character, and personality and a verisimilitude that was different from the fantasy presented sensationally in a lot of movies. How could the world saturated with the dying entrails of the Departed, not welcome a side to the story that is so much richer, dearer, honest'er, sensuous, yet not salacious, real sexuality, because why would titillation want to be co-opted by real feeling: why would a man interested in seeing two women sex it up, not want to know the story behind these people. A male version of the 'girls'school' lesbianism, we have seen many times. Beautiful bodies doing the same old positions and moves as actors verge on being sex performers, with what has become a fairly standardized act, and in the more outrageous hard core that plays on regular TV, we see sex being treated as a mechanical performance so devoid of passion or intimacy as to be a cartoon..like some reality TV version of sexuality. Even Girl Interruptus, while provocative with good performances and that ever remarkable special girl Angelina, gave us a female insanity, that never penetrated the creative candour in Pool's film when the three roommates talk about their mothers and write imaginary letters that they share. Including.. "i will carry you my back when you are old.." to "I wish you were dead" Could be called Girl In Transition. Anais Nin made quite a case against the man she and her pals called The 'Collector', who paid them by the page for porn..and constantly remonstrated them for going into too much other boring detail. Anais maintained that the real erotica exists in the specificity of the characters involved. I worshipped those male and to some degree female actors in the 'Movies' who taught me about life. It was a simpler world then , when I was growing up..fewer stars and they shone brighter. I was mad for Marlon. I adored him, in fact I had a kind of fantasy/fantasy where Marlon played the roles of the men I fantasized about. I think that made me a romancoholic so when gorgeous Jack came walking towards me that first overampted day and night in Hollyweird, I was putty in his hands..well, okay, I was enjoying my own sexual renaissance, having ended my first great love relationship with my first man and enjoying the sexual liberation of the 70ies, birth control pill and no Aids. Life was fun and sex was really fun. I learned about sex from men and from the movies. For the most part that stood me in good stead. I enjoyed it, had a certain freedon, including on camera. I have written at my own blog www.cayle.ca about Love In A Four Letter world, a Cinepix flick I worked on almost at the same time as Goin' Down The Road, there was an overlap that brought me back to Toronto from Montreal where we were shooting a film which apparently now has the distinction of being called 'Maple Syrup porn'. There was nothing pornographic about LIAFLW, just a kind of 'bad' movie, with simulated sex scenes that for me were simply an acting challenge. Working naked and trying to make the scenes believable. I played an itinerant hippy chickie who takes up with some questionable dudes who decide to open a record store.. I later felt that my role in that film actually affected my sexuality..prior I was the one-man woman of my first man, after, I embarked on my second childhood augmenting the one I never had because I entered into my first relationship so maturely, or perhaps that it was a mature committed liaison with a man who was my teacher and mentor and who I idolized, til I didn't. That's another story. At a panel on producing at the Canadian Film makers Festival, it was interesting to hear producer filmmakers wax poetic on the love of making movies, but I wish they'd stop saying "you gotta take the show out of show business - it's a business". Well guess what: Ya got no show, ya got no biz'ness - it's still about the
show!
|
