All credit goes to the amazing Luna over on Tenforward.social.
Seriously. A fucking awesome person with an even better taste in memes. Also great at giving hugs and a thousand times funnier than I am.
PNG template for the ‘This Guy Sucks’ part can be found here as provided by the equally epic and truly wonderful Maurice over on Tenforward.social, although originally created by ‘ihaveaweirdidea’ over on Tumblr.
So happy that I’ve been able to spend my time lately around two people who are so kind, generous, and incredible. You could do a lot worse than following them on Mastodon. Just saying.
As much as I hate him, I also hate actors who change and ad lib lines. Someone went through this work to phrase or develop a conversation or monologue, stayed up to make it the way they want, then an actor comes and changes it. I realized that while watching the making of Sopranos and David Chase explaining how disrespectful it is to to writer. But yeah Berman sucks.
Maybe, just maybe the actor is more invested in their particular character than the writer. Or maybe the line suits the actor better.
It’s disrespectful for the writers to expect actors to play their characters without putting anything of themselves into the act.
It should absolutely be a collaboration, and not one side dictating to the other, with no feedback allowed.
But I’m not going to downvote a contribution to the conversation just because I disagree.
Like David Chase once said to Tony Sirico when Sirico said “my character wouldn’t say that”
“Your character?? This is MY character mother fucker, I wrote him”
Everyone needs to stick to their job and not fuck with the jobs of others. Collaboration is ok, but not on most shows, as most scripts are written just the way they’re meant to be said
But it’s not there character any longer, they gave them away. The writer isn’t going to be able to, much less should they dictate every little detail about a performance. Those details are so important to a charter, you can’t say a charter is solely the writers creation.
Sometimes the actors know their characters a lot better than the writers. For example, in the empire strikes back, the original script had Han saying something else, whereas Ford came up with the ‘I know’, which fits much better with his character.
Or Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.
One of the most influential science fiction monologues was ad libbed, and it’s so much better than the original script.
Original script:
Hauer’s monologue:
Huh. I always assumed Rutger Hauer came up with the ‘Tannhäuser Gate’ part.
I’ve worked in all sorts of performance disciplines. Comedia dell’arte, High clown, low clown / children’s ents, improv, film, theatre in pros-arch, round…, puppet , Grotowskian devised theatre, Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed…
Only one small subset of that work demands word-perfect adherence. Performance is much more than post-Stanivlaskian Aristotlean drama.
Even Beckett, who was completely, insanely anal about everything from the design of the tree in Waiting for Godot, to the size of the spotlight in Not I, to the length and timing of the tapes in Krapps Last Tape, still made on-set changes right up to the performance.
Not to mention, often on set the script supervisor will sometimes give you last minute changes between takes.
Then, no script is ever perfect. I did Glengarry Glen Ross (which is suuuper tight in terms of interruptions, e.g.
A: “And a man has to shiver in his…”
B: “…shoes…”
A: “…boots…”
B: “…shoes… boots…”
A: “…And for what?” )
But one night the cop missed his cue during one of the sections where people are coming in and out of the office to be interviewed, and I’m (as Roma) trying to put the screws on the guy from the Chinese restaurant so I have to keep vamping on convincing him not to call his wife until the cop remembers to come out and confuses him for Shelly Levene.
It’s so much better for the audience for me to vamp than it is for us to stop the play and go and tell the actor he missed his cue. The show must go on.