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Oh, fun. The high-speed wi-fi that has been mysteriously beamed not only where intended but into our apartment for months has apparently been taken away from us as of two days ago. Now we are back with dial-up on older computers and the debate over whether we can afford to spring for our own high-speed connection (and now, for about thirty seconds here and there, an occasional weak but usable wi-fi signal from one or two other sources). Berit wants to wait and see if it'll come back. I dunno. It's vanished before, but not for days like this.
But, dial-up or not, I'm online and sending out things to the cast of Temptation and getting back what I need from them.
Oh, yeah, the main part of casting is over, and I have a company, here they are:
FOUSTKA - Walter Brandes
FISTULA - Timothy Reynolds
THE DIRECTOR - Danny Bowes
THE DEPUTY - Roger Nasser
VILMA - Alyssa Simon
KOTRLY - Fred Backus
LORENCOVA - Christiaan Koop
MARKETA - Jessi Gotta
MRS. HOUBOVA/PETRUSHKA - Maggie Cino
NEUWIRTH - to be cast
DANCER/SECRET MESSENGER - to be cast
MALE LOVER - to be cast
FEMALE LOVER - to be cast
Hmmn. Just realized I gotta email them all to check on AEA status. I know Walter and Alyssa are Equity, don't know about Timothy, pretty sure the rest aren't. Still have several "small" roles to cast, but I guess Edward's doing a specific casting call for those roles throughout the Havel Fest, so I'll join in there.
The set and lighting are more and more clear in my head every day, and at least in my head it's beginning to look and feel like one of "my" shows, thank god. If it hadn't, I'd be losing interest pretty quick. Now I have actors to throw into the show in my head, and I like it better. I can hear it, and it's good.
The acting tone, or more precisely tones, will be a bit tricky, but there's plenty of time to work it. The play is about false faces, or two-facedness, and for the most part everyone in the play is putting on a false face for somebody else -- I want to make this clear with specific levels and kinds of vocal tones and physical tenseness. There needs to be a baseline, a control, where we see some of the characters without a mask on, and I think that comes in the office scenes between the scientists before their bureaucratic bosses enter. A low key, "non-acting" style needed there. Just enough diction and projection to be intelligible to the audience, but so quiet and subtle that we risk audience boredom, just holding it long enough until the bureaucrats enter and everything becomes a bit heightened and unreal, false-faced. Vilma and Foustka should also have this quality in their bed scenes, between their performed games of jealousy -- quiet, loving, personal, like we're spying on a real conversation between lovers. Uncomfortable.
So subtle levels and degrees of acting tones to be worked out, ranging from "non-acting" to "over-the-top." All about changing the mask to fit the situation.
(use real masks for the "masquerade" scene to hit the point home? maybe . . .)
Coming together.
I've been getting work done a lot in the morning this week, as I've been having to wake up early to make sure Berit gets up early to go off to jury duty in downtown Brooklyn. Since I can get a bit self-conscious, even with Berit, about my work habits (like pacing furiously back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom, talking to myself, working things out, dancing wildly to whatever music's playing for no good reason), it's given me some "alone" time to work things out. I did some work yesterday on the music score for the show, primarily in trying many things out and discovering what didn't work. The score as described by Havel should be a "spacy, psychedelic" one, and what I keep going to on acoustic guitar is too "folky." I think I need to drag my keyboards and Les Paul up from the car (they're still there from the Maine trip) and play around with them. I need something airy and spacy, but which can be turned into a harder, more driving, percussive, electric theme for certain parts, especially the ending (like early Pink Floyd suddenly played by the MC5).
I also need to get back to work on my voiceover demo tapes, which have wound up being a lot more work than I anticipated -- finding the best scripts for my voice, or rather a good variety for all my voices, recording takes that are both good in performance and sound quality, adding subtle effects to the tracks to make them sound "professional," finding acceptable backing tracks for all of them, and of course, constantly second-guessing every decision I make. I have five pieces that are good for me for the "commercial" demo (scripts from Dunkin Donuts, Lowenbrau, Kodak, FedEx, and a drunk driving PSA), and acceptable takes of four of them. I think I need to listen to the reels I have of people who are actually working again, as they always inspire me -- first, I'm as good as any of them, and second, I can make a reel at home that sounds as good as 70% of the ones I hear.
In obit news, Glenn Ford died yesterday. There's a nice visual tribute to him at the great website If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. He's being remembered, it seems, primarily for his work in The Blackboard Jungle and as Pa Kent in Superman, but he was also the lead in two of the very greatest films noir, of two different styles/periods of the "classic" noir era -- Gilda, a 40s studio glitzy noir, where he's part of a love triangle with Rita Hayworth and George Macready (a triangle which, pretty obviously goes in all directions, too), and later in The Big Heat, Fritz Lang's nasty 50s "noir-of-hysteria," where he's a good cop who goes more than a bit nuts. That's a double-bill for later tonight.
Also dead, screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who transformed Robert Bloch's novel Psycho into a beautiful, elegant screenplay for Mr. Hitchcock, and who co-created the underrated TV show The Outer Limits with Leslie Stevens. At its best, with scripts by Stevens and Stefano (and a few others, including two classics from Harlan Ellison), photography by the great Conrad Hall, and a rotating group of talented directors (many old noir hands from the 40s/50s), Limits was some of the most stylish, poetic, moving television ever created. At its worst, it was never as bad as the worst episodes of Twilight Zone. Also on for tonight, some of the best of Stefano's work for Limits, including his sci-fi rewrite of Macbeth, "The Bellero Shield," starring Martin Landau, Sally Kellerman, and Chita Rivera; the how-did-they-get-away-with-that-in-1964 Freudian sexual nightmare "Don't Open Till Doomsday," with Miriam Hopkins; and the amazing experimental-film-disguised-as-a-fantasy-TV-show "The Forms of Things Unknown," with David McCallum, Vera Miles, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
Finally, if you haven't read or seen Keith Olbermann's commentary from last night on Donald Rumsfeld and the recent speech in which Rummy basically compared over half of all Americans to "Nazi appeasers," it's a lovely takedown, and you can check it out here on video, or if like me, you're stuck in the land of the dialup, in transcript.
Back tomorrow with cats and a random 10 for Friday.
But, dial-up or not, I'm online and sending out things to the cast of Temptation and getting back what I need from them.
Oh, yeah, the main part of casting is over, and I have a company, here they are:
FOUSTKA - Walter Brandes
FISTULA - Timothy Reynolds
THE DIRECTOR - Danny Bowes
THE DEPUTY - Roger Nasser
VILMA - Alyssa Simon
KOTRLY - Fred Backus
LORENCOVA - Christiaan Koop
MARKETA - Jessi Gotta
MRS. HOUBOVA/PETRUSHKA - Maggie Cino
NEUWIRTH - to be cast
DANCER/SECRET MESSENGER - to be cast
MALE LOVER - to be cast
FEMALE LOVER - to be cast
Hmmn. Just realized I gotta email them all to check on AEA status. I know Walter and Alyssa are Equity, don't know about Timothy, pretty sure the rest aren't. Still have several "small" roles to cast, but I guess Edward's doing a specific casting call for those roles throughout the Havel Fest, so I'll join in there.
The set and lighting are more and more clear in my head every day, and at least in my head it's beginning to look and feel like one of "my" shows, thank god. If it hadn't, I'd be losing interest pretty quick. Now I have actors to throw into the show in my head, and I like it better. I can hear it, and it's good.
The acting tone, or more precisely tones, will be a bit tricky, but there's plenty of time to work it. The play is about false faces, or two-facedness, and for the most part everyone in the play is putting on a false face for somebody else -- I want to make this clear with specific levels and kinds of vocal tones and physical tenseness. There needs to be a baseline, a control, where we see some of the characters without a mask on, and I think that comes in the office scenes between the scientists before their bureaucratic bosses enter. A low key, "non-acting" style needed there. Just enough diction and projection to be intelligible to the audience, but so quiet and subtle that we risk audience boredom, just holding it long enough until the bureaucrats enter and everything becomes a bit heightened and unreal, false-faced. Vilma and Foustka should also have this quality in their bed scenes, between their performed games of jealousy -- quiet, loving, personal, like we're spying on a real conversation between lovers. Uncomfortable.
So subtle levels and degrees of acting tones to be worked out, ranging from "non-acting" to "over-the-top." All about changing the mask to fit the situation.
(use real masks for the "masquerade" scene to hit the point home? maybe . . .)
Coming together.
I've been getting work done a lot in the morning this week, as I've been having to wake up early to make sure Berit gets up early to go off to jury duty in downtown Brooklyn. Since I can get a bit self-conscious, even with Berit, about my work habits (like pacing furiously back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom, talking to myself, working things out, dancing wildly to whatever music's playing for no good reason), it's given me some "alone" time to work things out. I did some work yesterday on the music score for the show, primarily in trying many things out and discovering what didn't work. The score as described by Havel should be a "spacy, psychedelic" one, and what I keep going to on acoustic guitar is too "folky." I think I need to drag my keyboards and Les Paul up from the car (they're still there from the Maine trip) and play around with them. I need something airy and spacy, but which can be turned into a harder, more driving, percussive, electric theme for certain parts, especially the ending (like early Pink Floyd suddenly played by the MC5).
I also need to get back to work on my voiceover demo tapes, which have wound up being a lot more work than I anticipated -- finding the best scripts for my voice, or rather a good variety for all my voices, recording takes that are both good in performance and sound quality, adding subtle effects to the tracks to make them sound "professional," finding acceptable backing tracks for all of them, and of course, constantly second-guessing every decision I make. I have five pieces that are good for me for the "commercial" demo (scripts from Dunkin Donuts, Lowenbrau, Kodak, FedEx, and a drunk driving PSA), and acceptable takes of four of them. I think I need to listen to the reels I have of people who are actually working again, as they always inspire me -- first, I'm as good as any of them, and second, I can make a reel at home that sounds as good as 70% of the ones I hear.
In obit news, Glenn Ford died yesterday. There's a nice visual tribute to him at the great website If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. He's being remembered, it seems, primarily for his work in The Blackboard Jungle and as Pa Kent in Superman, but he was also the lead in two of the very greatest films noir, of two different styles/periods of the "classic" noir era -- Gilda, a 40s studio glitzy noir, where he's part of a love triangle with Rita Hayworth and George Macready (a triangle which, pretty obviously goes in all directions, too), and later in The Big Heat, Fritz Lang's nasty 50s "noir-of-hysteria," where he's a good cop who goes more than a bit nuts. That's a double-bill for later tonight.
Also dead, screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who transformed Robert Bloch's novel Psycho into a beautiful, elegant screenplay for Mr. Hitchcock, and who co-created the underrated TV show The Outer Limits with Leslie Stevens. At its best, with scripts by Stevens and Stefano (and a few others, including two classics from Harlan Ellison), photography by the great Conrad Hall, and a rotating group of talented directors (many old noir hands from the 40s/50s), Limits was some of the most stylish, poetic, moving television ever created. At its worst, it was never as bad as the worst episodes of Twilight Zone. Also on for tonight, some of the best of Stefano's work for Limits, including his sci-fi rewrite of Macbeth, "The Bellero Shield," starring Martin Landau, Sally Kellerman, and Chita Rivera; the how-did-they-get-away-with-that-in-1964 Freudian sexual nightmare "Don't Open Till Doomsday," with Miriam Hopkins; and the amazing experimental-film-disguised-as-a-fantasy-TV-show "The Forms of Things Unknown," with David McCallum, Vera Miles, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
Finally, if you haven't read or seen Keith Olbermann's commentary from last night on Donald Rumsfeld and the recent speech in which Rummy basically compared over half of all Americans to "Nazi appeasers," it's a lovely takedown, and you can check it out here on video, or if like me, you're stuck in the land of the dialup, in transcript.
Back tomorrow with cats and a random 10 for Friday.
