by
Ray Carney
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When I got back home from Florida, I bumped into some friends of mine – funny, funny guys who said, ‘Hey, John, we just signed up at the American Academy to become actors, man! Come with us – the school is packed with girls!’ So I went home to ask my family for some loot. I went to my father and said, ‘I don’t want to go to college. I want to be an actor and go to this school.’ That was a lie, of course; I just wanted to be near all those girls. My mother said, ‘An actor?!’ But my father – he was very disappointed about my leaving college – said, ‘At least it’s something, let him be something!’
Then he gave me this very solemn look and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m really going to get it.’ And he said, ‘That’s a very noble thing to do. Do you know what kind of responsibility that is? You are going to be representing the lives of human beings. You will speak for all the people who have no voice.’
Nothing changes from where you are right now. Nothing will ever change except your own attitudes. Nothing. You’ll be put down. And you’ll get better. And you’re stupid, just stupid, if you get put down and you don’t find some way to fight that put-down. The main thing of being an actor or an actress is you have to fight the put-downs in yourself. You have to keep your mind’s eye view of what you think you are. You’ve got to keep it when you’re twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy – as long as you’re acting. As long as you’re doing it, you have to keep your own mind’s eye image because, when you get to be my age, what are you going to do? You’ll be impotent. The loss of your own unique thoughts and feelings makes it impossible to make a film that expresses what you’re trying to say.
Since none of us had any money, we had to use our wits. We had to get girls to give us their apartment, come in and cook for us, bring food over. We found that trying to get along with actresses who are broke too is no good. We had to go out and find people who weren’t actresses – airline hostesses, women who worked in grocery stores who could pick up some groceries for us. We had to find librarians to get a better book collection, and stuff like that. We had a wonderful time. I couldn’t wait for the next day to come so I could get involved with some new girl and promise to marry her and then stop seeing her. In those days, I promised to marry just about every girl I took out. I felt if that’s what they wanted to hear, that’s what I’d tell them.
christ lol
When an actor is out of work a long time, he grows self-centered and bitter. I know. I went through it for five years. I used to walk around angry all the time. You get so wrapped up in your personal worries and miseries, you lose interest in other people. That’s deadly for anyone – especially an actor. Watching people is the only way to discover what they’re like. How else can you expect to understand them?
When I told Sam I wanted to act in films he went to an agent, Robert Lang, and said he’d found a boy who was a great writer. And he showed a lot of old, unused filmscripts by the top boys as if they were mine. Naturally this agent is impressed and wants to sign me. But my friend explained how I’m an eccentric and, in spite of my literary genius, my great ambition is to be an actor. ‘Sign him as an actor,’ he said. ‘And then he’ll do the scripts for you.’ The agent agrees. I spilled a little soup on my collar before we met and sure enough I get a feature part on television. After a while he stopped asking me about the scripts.
idk if i approve but lol
It’s that terrible ego. What I mean is: don’t be ashamed of your ego. Because it’s the only thing that’s gonna carry you through. Can you imagine going on a show and saying, ‘Jeez, I have to put all this armor on and I’m not gonna be good doing “Hark!” the best that ever was?’ An actor is a rare animal. He only feels what he feels and is completely unaware of what anyone else feels. He’s a passionate person – passionate to the point where he has no logic as far as the rest of the world goes. He’s a person that has got to believe a dream. In other words, there’s a character. You read it – Dr. Wasserman – and you must play Dr. Wasserman to the point where society doesn’t bother you anymore. The life and love of this person must be the only important thing to you at this time. The person who is affected by society, and worries whether he’s making a good impression or people like him, fails because he’s not in what he’s supposed to be in, not fully concentrated on what he is, does not believe – and therefore cannot spin the dream that is so important to making films, theater or anything theatrical.
When his work doesn’t satisfy him, the actor can grow bitter. He knocks everything – knocks the political life, life in America, other actors, knocks himself – everything. That happens when an actor wants something so greatly and in his own mind doesn’t believe that he will ever achieve it. He has discovered for himself that he will never be a great actor. So he goes out to get something else – material gains – and the material gain, even if he achieves that, is not what he really wants. His motivation, his life’s force, is slowed up to a halt, and he has to go and get another reason to go on in order to survive. So it becomes money or success, or the cocktail party, or knowing people, being able to say hello to more important people than himself.
If a man gets paid, say, $300,000 for directing a picture, it is hard for him not to compromise. When you work in a major studio, when the studio owns the story, you have to be very clear in your own mind why you are there. If you are there primarily to make money, then compromise is all right, in fact it becomes obligatory. In my case, I have to know when to draw the line, and I have to be prepared to quit at any time. If I am prepared to quit rather than give in to changes, then I am safe. It is only when you are not prepared to do this that you are in trouble. I don’t want to get into a thing about New York and Hollywood. Gena and I like it here, the swimming pools and all that, but it makes it harder to fight. A movie or TV producer calls you into his office and pleads with you not to do this or that. It is too controversial, not commercial. You think of the life out here, then wind up doing something he wants you to do. They have a wonderful way of just simply saying no and then inviting you to go out and play golf with them later on, or to dinner that same night. So, it becomes very, very difficult to fight with personal friends.
The world is so downbeat, so cynical; people want something to believe in. At least, people do deep down, but they’re afraid to admit to humanities out loud for fear their friends and neighbors will think they are ‘square’. I get awfully sick of the mass flip attitude. I wish we weren’t so hard-boiled. The human spirit is really at a dangerously low ebb. We need to pump adrenaline into our sentimental values, which have become so badly depleted. In this age of war fears, the destruction of everything and the fantastic progress of scientific wonders, we seem to have adopted only the rasping emotions of nerves for feelings – not emotions of the heart and soul that speak for faith and kindness and understanding. There is something important in people, something that’s dying – the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.
People don’t want to say, ‘Yes, we are confused; we are nothing.’ It destroys all kinds of entertainment. If you really observe and put within the framework of the story some more important facet of life, if you say something that is a positive statement rather than a negative one, you have confirmed somebody’s belief. If you affirm somebody’s emotion or ideas, they don’t feel ashamed of feeling this belief. I want to stress the indomitable qualities of people, not the defeatism. Too Late Blues is a compassionate picture about people in combat with life.
in contrast to eg breathless and l'avventura
I agree with a lot of what the kids are saying, but it really disgusts me that most white militants hate middle-class people – and are middleclass themselves. That really makes me ill, because those kids ought to understand why their parents are middle-class, know about their parents’ fears; but instead of caring, they’d rather hate. Ideals must be achieved by caring.
referring to 60s protest stuff