Presenting at EG

Tamra and I are heading up to Monterey to go to the EG Conference, (which is not, as I had supposed, a gathering of people who are fans of the actor E.G. Marshall) where I will be presenting about 20 minutes of my Jimpressions material for an eclectic audience of interesting and interested people.

I’m still trying to work out how best to fill my time and create something that is a bit deeper than my usual celebrity voices “tour”.  There’s something sort of daunting about being asked to go to something like this, where I’ll be basically sharing the platform with physicists, filmmakers, polar biologists, architects, violin makers, designers, the royal calligrapher, and a woman who rows across oceans.

The temptation is to try and create a talk that somehow positions celebrity impressionists as being on the same level as Dr. Linus Pauling.

On the other hand, there is an terrific opportunity here to explore some of the more subtle and personal aspects of doing other people’s voices for a more sophisticated crowd that isn’t just interested in hearing a guy do a Christopher Walken imitation.

It’s also going to be streaming live on the web, and I will be helping  interview the participants in between presentations over the three days.  If you are interested, and I can guarantee that there will be much to be interested in, go and check out the website: https://www.the-eg.com/ and sign up for the webcast.

And I will let you know my experiences when it’s all over!  Maybe E.G. Marshall will actually be there…

A REVOLUTIONARY NEW KIND OF ACTING TRAINING

For some time, my wife Tamra Meskimen and I have been on a path of supporting and establishing safe places where actors and students can pursue their craft without abuse from invalidative gurus who dominate the performing arts.

In New York for many years, after having enjoyed improv classes that had the goal of eliminating criticism from acting instruction, we were staff at the National Improvisational Theatre (N.I.T.) and shepherded hundreds of would be improvisers onto the stage, and into new levels of self confidence and professionalism.

Many of these students have gone on to be major figures in theater, film and television.

We made many lifelong friends and did innumerable improvised shows, which left behind a trail of laughter which still occasionally resounds from an appreciative former patron with a good memory.

Later on, in the 1990’s, Tamra founded a new company of players in Los Angeles from the ranks of actors who had trained together in New York. and relocated west.

Called “The Really Spontaneous Theatre Company”, we were chiefly dedicated to performing totally improvised one-act plays, what’s known as “Long form” improv. The group shared the original goal of spontaneous creation without criticism, as in their training, and audiences were generally delighted with the result.

In 2004, Tamra began work on another, even more ambitious undertaking. With friend and successful artist/businessman Bill Kilpatrick, she began to explore what it would take to establish an acting school in Hollywood that would avoid all trappings of the typical acting schools around which, in one way or another, all depend upon the evaluation of the student’s artistic choices by an instructor.

It was the same purpose as the earlier training in New York at N.I.T. but with even more dedication and, of course, experience. And it had the strength of being a philosophy which (though completely at odds with the current agreed upon way of instruction) was a much more empowering and ultimately more effective method than other disciplines, even the oft spoke of and little understood “Method”.

The idea of teaching art of any kind without someone acting as a judge of the relative goodness and badness of the student’s work is hard for modern students to grasp. Indeed, many feel a misconceived desire to BE judged, and sometimes harshly, for their missteps along the path of knowledge.

But the grim joke is, the more this kind of instruction flourishes and operates as the status quo, the less really self determined art gets produced, and the entire culture sags and grows more ossified.

The school that has emerged from the pursuit of the philosophy of non-criticism/evaluation is called The Acting Center, and it’s founders, Tamra, Bill Kilpatrick, Christopher Smith and Eric Matheny have worked diligently for years to develop a full acting curriculum that does more than any other to completely cancel out the influence of the invalidative, judgmental “Guru”, and bring about understanding and skill in the student.

Now they offer an excellent curriculum in Improv, as well, with the same emphasis as in the regular Acting classes.

It took no small bit of work, either. Drills were researched and created that allowed a student to gradually test out the relationship between emotions, actions, moods and character, etc. and the courses were piloted, evaluated and revised. (Indeed, the polishing continues, and drills are continually reviewed, taking into account reports from the students themselves, to remove all barriers to making the student responsible for their own artistic judgment, which they then can own and express at will.)

Acting can be a sort of mystical subject; it is so wrapped up in fundamental questions of identity, expression and one’s personal taste. It has suffered, as have all the arts, by an invasion of a kind of materialistic thinking that stressed result over integrity, and often devolved into an effort to please a mentor, or “be the same as” someone else’s idea of what was right and proper.

So this new school is actually quite revolutionary, and so are the results. The actors I have seen come out of the classes at The Acting Center are confident individual creators, uncomplicated, honest, skilled and consistent. They do not toady, nit-pick, lord over others or destroy themselves in the service of their art. They seem… confident.

And why not? Nobody is going to force them to admit they are wrong for what they have figured out is right for THEM.

Perhaps, you might say, someone WILL tell them soon enough that what they are doing doesn’t please.

True. That will happen enough out in the professional world, but THAT is another environment entirely; the workplace. The environment in which one undertakes to LEARN an art MUST be one of good positive control, uncritical support of the student who, after all, just wants to learn how to be a more able entertainer.

This is the gift that The Acting Center offers. I’ve been privileged to watch it grow, and I’m a student myself.

You know what? This stuff works!

For more information, visit http://www.theactingcenterla.com.

(And of course, don’t miss my new one man show, JIMPRESSIONS, presented by The Acting Center. http://theactingcenterla.com/on-the-stage-2/ Check under “Events” at the web site above for more information.)

“Thunder, Thunder, THUNDER…”

If you happen to know the next couple of utterances that follow that repetitive call, then you may not know it, but I had a big effect on your childhood.

It’s generally not well known that in the 1980’s, when I lived in New York, I had a job at Rankin/Bass productions. (Yes, the same Rankin/Bass of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” fame; his cute little articulated figure was in a special case at the office.)

I was the chief character designer of their hit animated show, Thundercats.

I was not only the chief character designer, I was the ONLY illustrator on the premises.

The main heroes, Lion-O, Snarf, Tygra, Cheetara, Panthro and the main antagonists, the “Mutants”, and the villainous Mumm Ra were all designed by another artist before I got my job. My job became designing all the new characters that populated “Third Earth”, and a lot of weapons, devices, vehicles, and strange plants and animals.

Originally, I had been hired to do storyboards, based on my experience, much inflated by me, of working at Hanna Barbera studios in Hollywood, which I did in 1978. I was totally undeserving of the job of storyboard artist, as I was entirely untrained, really had mostly just darkened with #2 pencils the blue-pencilled storyboards of my senior, Don Rico.

I knew about as much about telling a story visually with a storyboard as I did about whaling.

Perhaps that became apparent in my first weeks at Rankin/Bass. In any case, for some reason that was intensely satisfying to me, I was taken off storyboards, and told to design CHARACTERS, starting with a character named “Pumm Ra”, a half man, half puma.

Now THIS I could do.

Every Thundercats script contained new “guest characters.” I got to envision them, and once approved, they were sent along the assembly line. The schedule for some reason was not very intense, or if it was, I didn’t notice it, because most of the characters were approved very quickly with minimal changes if at all.

I would draw them, sitting at my lone artist’s desk next to the accountant and the head writer, and then use a new piece of technology called a “Fax machine” to transmit the designs to the animators and artist in the Pacific Rim studios that were producing the finished animation.

In New York (at 53rd and Fifth Avenue, above the old Museum of Broadcasting) the scripts were written, the recordings were organized, and the character designs were done. Overseas, the actual animation was done, the in-betweens, the layout, the camerawork… and all long before digital anything.

I worked with a pencil on paper, and some watercolor pens. Oh, and white-out.

My mother had given me a little stone “Chop” with my name in Chinese, so I would put that stamp on my drawings before faxing them. That the recipients were not Chinese didn’t ever occur to me.

The Thundercats recording sessions were where the fun happened.

The voices of the actors playing the principal characters were recorded down near Grand Central Station in the Graybar building, at Howard Schwartz recording.

I visited a Thundercats session one day and watched the series regulars Larry Kenney, Bob McFadden, Earl Hyman, Earl Hammond, Peter Newman and Lynn Lipton run thru the script and goof around on mic.

“THIS is the job!” I epiphanized.

I worked at Rankin/Bass about a year, then continued to work for them as a freelancer, on a new series they followed up with called “Silverhawks” . I think my greatest contribution as chief character designer was to bring on as my successor the great cartoonist Bob Camp, who cut his animation teeth on Silverhawks before going on to put his indelible mark on shows like the hilariously subversive “Ren & Stimpy”.

In about 1985, I moved on from my life as a professional illustrator/cartoonist/designer to enter the world of acting fulltime. One of my first big jobs was doing voices for a Rankin/Bass cartoon series called “The Comic Strip”.

I never pursued character design ever again, and Thundercats left my mind utterly.

But, just a few short weeks ago I received a call from my voiceover agent. The excellent animation director Andrea Romano requested that I provide some character voices for the latest version of the Thundercats series, now being produced at Warner Brothers by a young artist and producer named Dan Norton, who was a big, BIG fan of the show.

I don’t know if Andrea knew of my early relationship to the show when she hired me, but I know she sure does now! I’m telling EVERYBODY.

So now at this point I have worked twice as a voice actor on the brand new Thundercats, some 25 plus years since I started working for Rankin/Bass on the original Thundercats…

Pretty cool.

And the funny part?

I’m actually allergic to cats.

Here are some of the designs I did for the show:

 

Goodbye to Area 51

Today marks my 51st birthday, or the end of my yearlong excursion into “Area 51”.

I find I have a lot to admire and be thankful for. First of all, being alive and still a part of this incredible experience called living. I enjoy life very much, even when it is more or less insufferable. How is that even possible? Only in a world like this, where irony seems to be the underlying glue holding everything together.

I have a magnificent family. My wife Tamra is simply a goddess. My daughter Taylor brings me so much joy, and I have been thrilled to watch her truly come into her own this last year, as she left the house and began her career, with all the enthusiasm and earnestness that such great beginnings require.

My incredible mother, now 82 (!), is just now wrapping up a record-breaking five week run of a play with her husband, the magnificent actor Paul Michael, down in San Diego at the Old Globe Theater. We’ve gone to see it twice. (Knestor Jackdaws did, too.) Starring in a wonderfully funny two act play written expressly for her and her mate by Tony-winning playwright Joe DiPietro, Marion continues to pull off the impossible, setting a marvelous example for performers everywhere.

I even have a brand new niece, my brilliant sister and brother in law’s daughter Roxanne, just a few weeks old today.

I have so many friends who delight and inspire me, they are far too many to list.

I have all my teeth, even the wisdom ones that I was supposed to have gotten rid of decades ago.  (And I even have Knestor’s teeth!  Two sets!)

I enjoy my many creative outlets and have many plans for future shows, paintings, films and on and on.

Life is a tremendous challenge and I strive to play the game better and better. That is going to be the theme of my 52nd year.

Right now I’m just very cognizant of the fact that life is easy to take for granted, that the thin gloss on existence that makes it all seem orderly and assured can wear away in a breath, and that people and their endless abilities to share and enjoy one another’s company is the single redeeming thing in a cold universe.

Yikes!

As Professor Knestor Jackdaws once said (five minutes ago), “The more I look at art, the more I recognize that the boundary between all life and what we commonly view as works of art, is practically nonexistent. When one leaves the gallery or the museum, one simply enters the larger gallery of Life itself, with it’s rotating collections, its special exhibitions, and its permanent installations.”

I am very happy to share my time in this splendid gallery with you.