SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER
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September to December and Beyond into 2008!
Cayle Chernin Blog Entry 2008
Looking back and leaning in:
bla bla blog...I've been resistant to releasing this doddling writing. I feel a little like I began to regard keeping journals. It was great to have a close constant companion, a writing to and for myself activity, but it also kept me to myself..blogging is outward bound, but there still remains the intention, of what you need to bother to say..and at the risk of inviting agreement, I get tired of hearing myself. Nonetheless, here goes: notes I've been making for the past few months:
In the AGE OF AROUSAL, THE LIVES OF OTHERS, THE BODY BUILDER AND I, like TRACEY FRAGMENTS, TEDDY BEAR, POOR BOYS GAME are reminders that The Theatre Lives and Movies are good and better.
I've seen a lot of Film and Theatre over the past few months, the mind reels, from Sweeney Todd (the play, in a brilliant production at The Princess Of Wales that I was lucky enough to win free tickets for compliments of Up Stage Productions - to Blood Diamonds, though I would have to say I liked Fernando Meirelles THE CONSTANT GARDENER much more, and Meirelles of course shot Blindness this year in Toronto.. Meirelles: “The coolest part is that it's an international independent coproduction without any studio. Brazil is entering with talent and money from the incentive laws; Canada,with the project and the script; Japan with a lot of money; and the English with money and legal resources. The cool part is that the film, in English, can be called Brazilian”.
BLOOD DIAMONDS was very much Hollywood, and also set against the magnificent African back drop, with the pharmaceutical corporate monster replaced by the mercenaries and diamond greed – engaging and Leo was almost Clark Gable but I was constantly aware of plot contrivances and Movie Action – that is: 'action that only takes place in the movies and has no resemblance to any life, just as movie dialogue is things people say in movies that they would never say in real life, sometimes called writers talk, but not always identifiable as so.
THE LIGHT HOUSE KEEPER'S WIFE, the latest live action/animation that Jason I. Brown has created this year, was and is an amazing learning experience for me..the nature of acting on the Green Screen, theatre on film, the layers of digital animation that together have a hyper reality that is more dimensional than ever.
Had a reading at PAL with the AYA Actors (Actra Act Your Age Actors) of LOST SOULS, a film script I've been working on, and hope to have the next draft of in the very near, and that has really kept me out of the blogging mentality and thinking in terms of story and choices, of structure and what's important.
One seems to need to ruminate on the Past Year, to reflect on what you've learned, made, lost, felt, did:
It was the best of times and, you said it: the worst of times..the naked Emperor/King with the monkey brain sits unelected on the throne of the most self-promoted, self-declared successful 'democracy' the World has ever seen, a mean-spirited also born again, middle class prig sits on the Northern (throne's too good a word, how about) Bench, and The World resounds daily with natural and unnatural disasters that you can see simultaneously as they occur. It's magic. And it is a dangerous time!
This year I started to think that maybe Albert Speer was the first Holocaust Denier, and that was a further crime he committed, prior I've always had an interest and a soft spot for Speer, but I experienced a shift.
Maybe we haven't come so far – we are still fighting the same battles in the name of Baby Jesus.
Movies are better than ever... I have seen a number of fabulous plays and films, have worked as an actor, a standardized patient (sort of acting), poured at wine shows, conducted some Pilates classes, and basically barely made a living.
But I did a production of COLLECTED STORIES, I am grateful for, Donald Marguelis excellent two act, two hander. I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant young Toronto actor Erin MacKinnon (suffice to say neither of our agents made it to the show), and directed by Sasha Wentges, info at www.cayle.ca and at www.meaculpaproductions.ca and we have interest and incentive to take our show to Los Angeles.
I am also eternally grateful for Chris Owens Monday Night Theatre group for Thespians, where I get to work out with other brilliant talented dedicated Thespians and Dwight and I celebrated our 8th anniversary December 19 and are still enjoying our new digs (since last December) with back yard and fireplace, and the new addition to our household my very welcome new LapTop, who I like to call Tosh(iba) Hannah:
Jewish Prayer takes as its model the Prayer of Hannah, a woman who promised God that if he gave her a son she would dedicate him to The Lord. Childless Hannah was beloved by her husband Elkanah but tormented by his other wife Pennina who was a prolific child bearer. I discovered on the Net that Hannah is also the poster Mother for Christian organizations for thwarted Mothers.
Hannah prays silently and so desperately for a child in The Temple, that Eli the Priest assumes she is drunk and admonishes her for unseemly behaviour until he realizes she is praying in a heartfelt agony.
Hannah's moving lips though no sound was heard has become the bottom line for true prayer.
Hannah's prayers are answered and she bears Samuel who will become a Prophet and anointer of King David, which would do any Mother's heart proud and then Hannah goes on to bear her loving Husband more children.
The moral of the Story for me is about the nature of true communication of the Heart, expression of the deepest need and attempt to contact that which Edna St Vincent Millay called: “...the existence I cannot apprehend”.
So here's hoping that some of what Hannah and I create together will have power of true prayer to inform my endeavours and creations.
In spite of much evidence to the contrary, I wish people would stop saying acting isn't Brain Surgery, I think
acting is brain surgery, without the knives and scalpels - and just as actors need not to murder to play murderers or even love to play lovers, the actor has to and does at the best of times inhabit the emotional and physical landscapes of 'the character' accessed via the 'given circumstances', largely imaginary and all that needs to be real is 'the feeling'.
No so easy, Chum, because real feeling and behaviour that not only recreates life but exposes it, is high-level work: mental, physical, philosophical, psychological. You have to use everything including and significantly the unconscious to decipher the 'truth'. You have to live with an open mind and available heart. You have to be willing to feel and to express feeling and to control them. That's right, as actors we have an incredible ability to have that tantrum in scene two and recover in an instant for scene three, 6 months later.
If the general public could utilize certain acting techniques we may have fewer out of control crazies doing irreparable damage but I doubt if the average person is willing to study and suffer for 'the art' as only actors do..we do suffer. We take low level service jobs when we may be qualified to lead companies and master mind projects so that we can be available for that one audition that make come in.
We're willing to do that,because we know that we can't do anything about the audition time, that if we're not available, the agent will be pissed and may not call again, that if we attempt to improve our status in any way other than acting, we will loose our focus and not spend enough time working on our instrument, improving our craft, working 24/7 to be good actors and in the right place at the right time.
We keep many industries alive, acting schools, teachers, agents, photographers, casting agents, phones, websites, internet access, funneling dollars into wardrobe, cosmetics, and any other means of support necessary to the life of an actor.
Regional theatres to stay alive I guess, treat actors on the road pretty badly, so you get into town with bus fare money, they can't pay anything else...you have to find a place to stay off a list of possible billets and places that you will have to pay for out of your miniscule salary while you are also maintaining digs back home. And then you go onstage after often 9 days of rehearsal for 2 act, 2 hour plays in which you are playing a multi-dimensional human being you bring to life off the printed page.
And the most important thing about all of this, this whole process, is that the audience must be entertained, because they are putting the money down, limited though your amount of any take is, and ignorant though they may be.
And it's just basic politics after that. Money talks and makes the world go round. As an actor you are the lowest of the low unless you are identified as some kind of star because you bring in so much on the dollar you are paid, and that's not chicken feed when you've being paid millions of dollars.
From the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. Cannon fodder for the TV/print machine, as crucified as Christ – to wit, our little Brittany martyred to the causelessness, created, pampered, sucked dry for every cent she could make and left to figure out how to survive with precious few tools, like self esteem and real support. Life in the fast lane has its drawbacks one the champagne has gone flat.
My favorite film this year, I'm a little behind the times was: THE LIVES OF OTHERS. I was moved, intrigued, excited and felt like I was seeing something that mattered, that would stay with me and was about 'goodness' not about evil. I especially liked the fact that reading the script one would have been hard pressed to identify the plot point when the villain becomes the hero, protagonists interchange and one is moved by a sensation of depth that happens onscreen in an inimitable fashion that only movies cannot always achieve...in the same way one can be moved in a novel by words on paper so the movies give us the unspoken moments when lives are changed and things happen:
Raymond Chandler's quote (in Jerome Charyn's Movie land) defines Film as being closer to music than Literature or Theatre: "...its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent that its high lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can”.
I also loved PAN'S LABYRINTH and PERFUME. So original and fascinating.
There have been some notable Canadian films I've seen, Bruce MacDonald's experimental TRACEY FRAGMENTS with the excellent Ellen Page, Clement Virgo's POOR BOY'S GAME which I liked, the documentary THE BODY BUILDER AND I, I highly recommend this excellent film - the struggle of the film- maker son and his father to connect across the abyss of hurt and years of separation is compelling, amusing, heart-breaking and a real study of Fathers and Sons and Men. As Bryan and Bill Friedman revisit and navigate the 'narrows' of mind and body, the Son's search not just for the Father but for the man in himself and the Father's narcissistic, yet touching committement to the physical development of an ageing body, we are privy to some extra-ordinary moments of insight into the male psyche and to what it means to be a man circa 'now'...all three of which were supported by The First Week End Club.
I also loved TEDDY BEAR, and Dave Sparrow's virtuoso performance as a serial killer. It was sad, shocking but never exploitive, never a romanticizing of the ugly truths. Excellent performances by Tracey Huay, Sonia Cote and Brandy Marie Ward.
Loved LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, excellent, magnificent performance again from Ryan Gosling, very unleading man-like in this totally off beat and significant story of how a whole town supports a man in his delusion in order to help him..My old mentor Anais Nin wrote often how a delusion once shared is no longer the lonely place of insanity..it becomes shared and ultimately can become real. I was also reminded of the story of how a community up in Northwest Territories, (I think) that came up with an innovative way of dealing with one resident's bestiality. Apparently the man was getting very up-close and personal with one of his huskies..The Community decided that instead of exile, The man would have to perform his love for his Dog in front of the whole community..this led to a lot of laughter and a happy resoloution..The man also saw the humour of what he had fallen into by trying to be amorous with the dog in front of his peers.
I was excited by the Dylan film I'M NOT THERE, though it remained conceptual and not emotionally engaging but fascinating.
My least favorite movie experience of last year was AMERICAN GANGSTER I know, I know, sacrilege, but it fell short for me of being true to what might have been the real story..I loved hearing an interview of the man Denzel played saying that Crow's character, who captures him in the film couldn't 'catch a cold'.
This typically American Block buster, you could just see the millions that were spent in every shot, two scenes in and it's apparent we're already into millions of dollars, while impressive does not necessarily a great movie make, and the exploitation and glamorization of BUSINESS left me cold. The guy's amazing because he made a million dollars a day!...how very commendable, selling heroin to junkies..but we don't judge the market because in America, business is King.. Russell's character actually returned money, unlike all the other bad cops, and Denzel, though a psychopathic cold bastard, loves his Mama, wants to establish a God-Fatherish kingdom of Family, which doesn't stop him from killing off a brother or two..they are archetypes of American movies and as a movie, despite the obvious expense, frankly I was disappointed and bored by the violence and drug business that were the back drop for these two 'guys' to finally, (spoiler alert) bond like good buddies, because they both want to get the bad cops, for their own reasons. Movies make strange bedfellows but in this case, business makes a great partner ship out of two very disturbed men who for the big pay off scene where The STARS finally meet up for the moment we've all been waiting for, push a cup of coffee across the table between them.
Yawn and it felt like 6 hours whereas Ang Lee's LUST, CAUTION thrilled me and 3 hours later I was surprised at the time that had passed. I found it brilliantly executed, magnificent in scope and with something so tragic and human to say about our human condition and the nature of sexuality.
I also replied to my friend Daren Foster's blog here on WS when he lamented the death of Theatre after seeing Soul Peppers mounting of BLITHE SPIRIT, which I agree begged the question: why bother, in terms of the relevancy of Theatre. However, in a town that is more concerned about an Opera House for the Elites and being a World Class City by copying other cities rather than developing our own persona, or looking at the beauty of countries where Theatre and Opera, and the Arts are made reasonable and available to the general public, and artists are supported, oh well, maybe that doesn't really happen anywhere...but here's what I said to Daren, whose scripted FAMILY PRACTICE, a short film I acted in and that is available for viewing here at WS website:
I hear you, Daren, but you've exited the Stage too soon, Theatre will always 'comeback'..because the fact that 'you have to be there' will out distance any other entertainment experience and when it is good, it is great. I agree that sometimes the museum remounts which exist almost as revisited archives are not so interesting or valid, except perhaps historically, but yesterday I saw Linda Griffith's new show Age Of Arousal and it was a glorious time in the Theatre: good acting, good writing, good directing - an original, brilliant piece of work..also last month Dwight and I saw SWEENEY TODD at the Princess of Wales - it was FABULOUS! inspiring, exciting revolutionary Theatre. DROWSY CHAPERONE, our homegrown Broadway Success was absolutely wonderful! Saw an inspiring and exciting workshop of ETERNAL HYDRA at Buddies last week from Crows Theatre, which always gives us new and provocative fare. Not to mention the exquisite production of COLLECTED STORIES which I am told was a wonderful theatre experience for those who attended..(hee hee, had to get that in). I do think that sometimes the excitement originally generated by Soul Pepper has led to some disappointment, anything that eventually goes mainstream, has that potential liability - but consider also that most productions get a paltry 3 weeks of rehearsal and 2 and a half week runs..because of financial considerations and limitations, and that The Theatre has to work within these stingy strictures and still and ever, she will rise above and illuminate and inspire, thrill and delight. Don't give up on the old girl yet.
