Due to spam issues I had to get a new updated blog template and did a whole re-design. As for my hair chewing loop, the feet as footer and “barbed wire of fangirl lovin’(tm)”… let us have a moment of silence to bid are adieus to them…. They will live on forever on my hard-drive.
The new blog theme I call “Hollywood Retro” in ode to my new hobby of reading books from the dawn of Hollywood. You can find tons of em’ here.
I just finished Mae Marsh’s “Screen Acting”. It was a very inspiration and informative read, I recommend to filmmakers, actors and film enthusiasts a like.
Here are some good snippets from the book:
“If I were requested to choose from among ten beginners the one who would go the farthest in motion pictures I should unhesitatingly lay my finger upon the one who possessed the following qualifications:
(1) Natural talent.
(2) Ambition.
(3) Personality.
(4) Sincerity.
(5) Agreeable appearance.
(6) Vitality and strength.
(7) Ability to learn quickly.”
“Natural talent, as I have called it, is no more than a tendency toward, or an aptitude for, some form of endeavor.”
“A natural talent for acting implies more than a mere desire to act. It is the art, usually discovered during childhood, of mimicry, and the joy in that art.”
“Ambition must, of course, go hand in hand with natural talent. In any form of vocational training it is assumed that the student has a feverish desire to succeed in the particular line that he has elected to follow. It is the same on the screen.”
“… one has an ambition to gain the top, and that to reach that position one has the enthusiasm to practise all the forms of self-denial, discipline and study that are important to artistic success in any line.”
“Personality is important for the reason that the camera has a way of registering it unerringly. It is keen in detecting the weak or vapid.”
“It is precisely the same with sincerity. In any line there is probably little hope for those who lack this salient quality. But a motion picture camera seems especially to delight in exposing insincerity.”
“I now come to the matter of personal appearance. This is a topic in which every man under 65, and every woman under 100 vears seem interested. I sometimes wonder if it is not the desire to see how they would look on the screen, rather than how they might act, that fills so many boys and girls and men and women with an ambition for a screen career.”
“..it is not only because good health radiates from the screen that it is important. In point of nervous and muscular strain, and the often long studio hours that are necessary when production has begun, good health is essential.”
“My candidate, then, will have strength and vitality and, equally important, he or she will cling to both, whatever social sacrifices may have to be made to preserve them.”
“The ability to learn quickly will save anyone going into screen work so much trouble and possible humiliation that it may well be listed as an essential qualification.
The screen is no place for the mental laggard. The beginner, particularly, must be alive to learn the new lessons that each day will bring, and learning them he must remember.
During the course of production in a studio things are at high tension. Time is money. Each of us constitutes a more or less important cog in a great machine. Those cogs that inexcusably to function are eliminated.”
The endings probably one of the sweetest endings of any book I’ve read:
“I have enjoyed doing this book. From time to time I have been forced to drop my work upon the urgent appeal of my eighteen-months’ old daughter. She has gorgeous blue eyes with lashes long as twilight shadows. Her cheeks are exquisitely pink and her little mouth is like a rose-bud in spring. Her name is Mary. She has brought me worlds of undreamed of happiness.
Someday Mary may want to go upon the screen. Even now she acts before the long mirror. If she can, in any way, secure her mother’s hat she gives a complete performance.
My blessed baby! When the time has arrived for her to start upon her career I shall place my little book in her hands and say:
‘There is the most and the best that I knew about the screen back in those old-fashioned days of 1921.’”