Improv in the Real World
Lately I've been holding auditions for my film that I'm shooting next month. Actors in Los Angeles are a dime a dozen, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how talented and funny so many of the people we've seen have been. And it's been the longer-form stuff with more precisely developed characters that's been more satisfying than when actors go for the easy jokes.
posted by Jeff McMahon at 12/01/2004 07:45:00 PM
5 Comments:
My favorite moments lately:
An actor is improvising a scene in which he wakes up after being dazed from a farm accident in which his arms have just been severed. He looks around, realizes what happened, and yells, "Ooowwwww!" Much better than a simple shriek.
A husband and wife are arguing over how to dispose of the body of their dead dog. The wife wants to dig it a grave, the husband wants to take it to the vet and have it cremated. They bicker back and forth, talking over each other for a long time, finally he gets fed up and leaves and mutters under his breath, "...dig you a grave" and she says "I heard that!"
Two paramedics come up on the guy with his arms severed and have no idea what to do with him. At one point one paramedic tries feeling the guy's wrist to take his pulse, leading the other paramedic to break the wall and ask "how are you taking that pulse exactly?"
Finally the guy seems to be dead so they concoct a plan to avoid getting blamed by ditching the body in the road, calling the town's other ambulance ("Yeah, Gary and Mike are assholes") and blaming them for it.
So I've gotten more useful career skills from Za than I did from, say, the Williams math-science divisional requirements.
Wow, you weren't kidding when you said it would be the funniest movie about a farming accident ever seen. Cool.
I like the dipshits taking a pulse for a guy who lost his arms. I also like the plot twist of the paramedics who ditch the body. Did you write that?
I agree that Combo Za comes in handy. It was especially useful when I was teaching in North Carolina. The only two things that prepared me to teach high school math was my history of math course (so I could provide biographical detail to some of the mathematicians behind the scenes) and Combo Za -- could I think of witty respones on my feet faster than the students? Somehow, Victor Hill's Mathematical Logic course and Alan White's Hegel course never seemed all that appropriate to bring. Don't get me wrong, I like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem as much as the next guy ...
I should clarify that only the first of those three scenes are things that actually happen in my script, the other two were improv scenes for the sake of auditions.
So the point is, those scenes are funny not because of anything that I wrote, but because the actors were able to create characters within my weird framework and be funny in the process.
Someone in Yale's graduate school of arts and sciences started an improv group, Phabricated Data. Almost everyone was smart and interesting. Definitely no theater types. The big problem was that they weren't funny and stage presence was definitely lacking. A few people were off-the-hook funny (much betterthan I), but most of the people were just painful to watch on stage. How could this come to be? Well, there were no tryouts -- anyone who wanted to join could (and graduate students are big dorks, who will do anything to avoid their dissertations -- like start a blog). I practiced with them twice and had a good time, but when they started encouraging me to perform -- forget it.
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