If You Ask Me - Betty White [16]
Doing comedy—if you don’t get the laugh, you know you bombed.
It’s a tough business.
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THE CRAFT
When a script comes to me, I read through the whole thing so I know what the story is about, who the other people are, and where they’re coming from. It gives me an overview.
Then I go back and start learning.
I have trouble acting with a script in my hand, so I memorize as quickly as I can to get both hands free.
Other actors that I’ve worked with are more comfortable holding their script through dress rehearsal, like a security blanket. Everyone works differently.
On a series, every week it’s inevitable that at some point someone forgets what the next line is. In front of a live audience, there is that deadly silence. You all look at one another, wondering, Is it me? So we just stop and start to giggle in spite of ourselves, which spreads like wildfire in the audience. We have a good (??) laugh, then we just go back a couple of lines and start where we were before.
Similarly, if you stumble or your tongue gets twisted, you can stop and start up again with the line before, and the editors can make their magic.
Though technology has advanced so dramatically and the equipment is better (since, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show), the actors do it more or less the same according to whatever works for us, personally.
You go with it—and pray a lot.
Sometimes it’s not all laughs—even on a comedy set. On The Golden Girls just a couple of weeks into the show the first season, both my mom and Bea Arthur’s mother became seriously ill. Ironically, the script we were doing at the time happened to be heavily mother-daughter-oriented—just by coincidence. Two weeks later, both our mothers were gone. Not an easy time.
Line readings are always a challenge. When the line falls right, you feel it in your gut. That’s how you intend to do it from then on. But just try to repeat it—you can’t get it back to save your soul from perdition. Now and then, that “good line reading” doesn’t happen until you’re driving home after the show. But, of course, the party’s over by then.
I’ve heard some of the best actors say the same.
It’s a strange craft!
With James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio.
BRAVO/PHOTOFEST
TELEVISION
Over time, I’ve turned down three Broadway shows. I love summer stock. But with summer stock, there’s a beginning and an end to the production. Maybe a week’s rehearsal and three or four weeks playing the show, then you’re free.
If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn’t work, you’re a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn’t sound great to me!
My theatrical friends think I’m a Neanderthal.
“It’s THEATER,” they protest.
“I know,” I say, “but I’m television!”
I was there when television first started. We grew up together.
When I graduated from high school, television had just begun in New York, but it hadn’t yet started in California.
I had done our senior play and was asked to do an experimental television show downtown. Our senior class president and I did a scene from The Merry Widow up on the fifth floor of the Packard Automobile building. And it was broadcast all the way to the bottom floor. My parents had to stand in front of a tiny little monitor on the first floor to see me! But it was the beginning of television in Los Angeles.
Then I actually got paid (a little) to do a role as the girl behind the hotel desk on a show called Tom, Dick, and Harry. Never do a show with three comics who have a broom. But it was fun.
Al Jarvis had seen me on that, and he called and asked if I would be his Girl Friday on a TV show he was going to do. Al had had a marathon radio show, and now he was going to be on for five hours, five days a week. They soon upped it to five and a half hours a day and added Saturday. That was Hollywood on Television. I’d been getting paid $5 by the local station.
When Al called, I thought, Maybe I’ll get another $5!
Instead, Al offered me $50 a week! I was shocked. Even more so when