Abstract
Chapter 9 offers new insights into the history of Modern Acting and film industry practices that emerged due to the transition to sound. It shows that Hollywood’s pressing need for actors who could create complex characterizations on their own prompted the studios to hire drama coaches to train young actors, and dialogue directors to work privately with actors to prepare for specific roles. The chapter describes the acting programs established at MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, 20th Century Fox, and Universal, and the careers of acting mentors such as Phyllis Loughton, Lillian Burns, Florence Enright, and Sophie Rosenstein. It shows that these teachers trained actors to use script analysis to clarify characters’ given circumstances, objectives, and actions, and the obstacles created by those characters’ conflicting objectives.
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Notes
- 1.
Lynn Bari, Interview August 18, 1986, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. See Kirsten Pullen, Like a Natural Woman: Spectacular Female Performance in Classical Hollywood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 69–79. These pages offer a brief overview of actor training programs in the studio era.
- 2.
Phyllis Loughton Seaton, Interview July 22, 1979, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 3.
Marsha Hunt, Interview August 12, 1983, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. Lizabeth Scott, known for 1940s noir roles, recalls that Sophie Rosenstein spent considerable time preparing her for an early screen test; Scott was eventually signed by Paramount (Lizabeth Scott, Interview July 27, 1984, and May 30, 1985, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX).
- 4.
Loughton, Interview July 22, 1979.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
“Poverty Row” studios produced films “destined for the low part of double bills in the 1930s and 1940s” (Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006], 10). While Poverty Row studios were known for doing Westerns and other action-adventure films, Monogram and Republic also sought to produce “prestige level” films (64). In contrast to Hollywood’s A- and B-level films “aimed primarily at adult urban audiences,” Poverty Row audiences included: “lower classes and ethnic immigrants . . . children and juveniles [and an] urban audience in the American Southern states [interested in] singing cowboy westerns starring country music stars” (75, 76).
- 7.
Lillian Burns Sidney, Interview August 17, 1986, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Lillian Burns Sidney, Interview 1945, Gladys Hall Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.
- 11.
Al Trescony, Interview August 20, 1986, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Burns Sidney, Interview 1945.
- 14.
Virginia Mayo, Interview November 30, 1973, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. See Ron Davis, The Glamour Factory (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993). Davis touches on studio drama coaches on pages 82–91. Framing Florence Enright as best known for having no studio affiliation, he describes her and Elsa Schreiber as “distinguished Los Angeles drama teachers who specialized in screen acting” (89). He notes that Josephine Hutchinson “was a coach for a time at Columbia,” and that her successor at Columbia was Natasha Lytess, “who eventually worked privately with Marilyn Monroe” (85).
- 15.
Kay Noske, “Lela Rogers: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Movie Star Makeover, June 28, 2011, http://moviestarmakeover.blogspot.com/2011/06/mrs-rogers-neighborhood.html.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Barbara Hale, Interview July 19, 1984, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 19.
Noske, “Lela Rogers.”
- 20.
Qtd. in Doug McClelland, Forties Film Talk (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), 175.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Mary Astor, A Life on Film (New York: Delacorte, 1971), 53.
- 23.
Ibid., 54.
- 24.
Sophie Rosenstein, “Memo to Edward Muhl: April 4, 1952,” Box 6291/19686, Talent School Files, Universal-International Collection, Cinema-Television Library, University of Southern California.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Joan Leslie, Interview August 13, 1984, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 28.
Janet Leigh, Interview July 25, 1984, Performing Arts Oral History Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
- 29.
Sophie Rosenstein, “Memo: January 6, 1942,” Drama School File, Warner Bros. Collection, Cinema-Television Library, University of Southern California.
- 30.
Loughton, Interview July 22, 1979.
- 31.
Burns Sidney, Interview August 17, 1986.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Erin Hill, “Recasting the Casting Director: Managed Change, Gendered Labor,” in Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, eds. Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 143. The term “girl Friday” refers to capable female personal assistants, and arises from the idea of a “man Friday,” a servant or personal assistant, a concept drawn from Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. In the story, Crusoe has been alone on a desert island for twenty-four years when he discovers that cannibals have come ashore with captives. Crusoe helps one captive escape and makes him his servant, whom he names Friday for the weekday they met.
- 34.
Ibid., 153, 157.
- 35.
Ibid., 155.
- 36.
Miranda J. Banks, “Gender Below-the-Line: Defining Feminist Production Studies,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, eds. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 91.
- 37.
Ibid., 94.
- 38.
Ibid., 91.
- 39.
Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 251; Margaret Andersen, Thinking about Women (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 130.
- 40.
Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 3. Oliver Hensdell, from the Dallas Community Theatre led by Marjo Jones, was hired to work with contract players; while he did not direct, several male screen-test directors did become film directors, including Lillian Burns’ husband, George Sidney.
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Baron, C. (2016). Training in Modern Acting on the Studio Lots. In: Modern Acting. Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40655-2_9
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