[deleted]
I’ve heard of actors freezing up on stage until someone feeds them a line. Seems to be a bried temporary thing that can happen to any of us at our professions.
This is the film directed by Frank Oz…where Brando said “I won’t direction from Miss Piggy” so Oz ended up having to direct Brando’s scenes from a monitor in another room.
I heard around this time that Brando would give a “test” to a director on the first day. He’d deliberately do one terrific take, and one awful one. Based on the director’s reaction (if he picked the right one, basically) that would determine if Brando would actually show up and act, or if he’d just phone it in for the rest of the shoot. What an ass.
https://comicbook.com/dc/news/marlon-brando-wanted-to-play-jor-el-as-a-bagel-in-original-super”
“Donner recounts the first time he met with Brando at his house about the role of Jor-El.
"He said, “Why don’t I play this like a bagel?” I was ready for him to say “a green suitcase” and he said “bagel.” He said, “How do we know what the people on Krypton looked like?” He had good logic. He said, “Maybe they looked like bagels up there in those days?” I said, “Jeez, Marlon, let me tell you something.” He’d just told us the story about a kid [and how smart he was] and I said, “It’s 1939. There isn’t a kid in the world that doesn’t know what Jor-El looks like, and he looks like Marlon Brando.” And he looked at me and smiled [and said], “I talk too much, don’t I?” He said, "OK. Show me the wardrobe
I think managing Marlon Brando was a big part of getting performances out of him. Donner clearly did the right thing here since Marlon more or less delivered in that movie. Francis Coppola also was able to get Marlon to do actual acting, but only at great pains sometimes.
Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, was a regular on his radio show until she developed debilitating stage fright which ended her career.
Dolores Hart was an up-and-coming movie star in the 1950s. She made 10 movies in 5 years, some of them major hits, and then at age 24 she decided to walk away from it all to join a Benedictine abbey. She’s still there.
In the case of Brando, the talent was still there but the interest wasn’t. Sometime after The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, I think he determined he’d gone as far as could go and mostly treated acting as a job to pay his bills and child support. I’m more curious about the instances of actors who had a track record of good work behind them only to suddenly lose their spark. They still may be putting in the same amount of effort in their performances as they did before but the results now vary from mediocre to wretched. It’s as if a switch was flicked and they forgot how to act.
Did either of them make any recorded performances, poorly, while in this transition state?
I never saw his earlier movies, but there is the case of that guy who played Anakin Skywalker.
That said, there are some tricks that a clever director can use to get a better performance than an actor can actually give. They might be able to trick the person into thinking that they’re just practicing their lines - so they just say them, without trying to act; they can get into a discussion with the performer, where the discussion will cause very similar answers to come out as the lines that they would perform; they can work some editing tricks to help isolate the moments of better acting or change the story to better match those moments, even if it requires some reshoots/dialogue changes with other actors.
There are probably some cases where you can find a case where the quality of a performance drops when the actor changes directors, but none are coming to mind at the moment. I’d probably look for pop-stars who were able to force their way into a role.
Interesting. I see that he (Hayden Christensen) played the role in some non-Lucas Star Wars stories:
So the issue seems likely to have been bad choices by Lucas, not the actor.
Good point - that was the actual question.
This book has a quote suggesting that Livingstone performed poorly in her one film performance (in “This Way Please”), seeming very nervous throughout. Compared to how quick-witted she was in the early days of the radio show, she did apparently “lose it”
Early on he was in a few movies that were suited to his limited abilities. For a low budget action movie Above the Law was a fun movie. Under Seige was a Die Hard ripoff but was able to pull it off. Even Under Seige 2 worked. By then he thought he was a thespian.
Is corpsing freezing up and being unable to speak, or is it laughing too hard to be able to get a line out? Because I remember Carol Burnett being more the latter.
I heard an interview with Bill Hader, the guy who does Barry. He has severe anxiety. He said he had a full-blown panic attack during a skit on SNL. And that is what prompted him to get help.
My understanding is that corpsing is laughing out of character (particularly bad when you are playing the corpse, of course). And the folks on the Carol Burnett show used to love to make each other “corpse.”
I just watched a scene from “Happy Days” and noticed that Henry Winkler was biting his lip, presumably to keep from corpsing when Tom Bosley entered the scene, wearing a leather jacket.
Addressing the OP: It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The “yips” is a term for musicians (technically known as musical dystonia), probably preceding its use in sports. It refers to spasms in the hands or a sudden inability to play the instrument. It must be scary when it happens. Acting is a creative art, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t happen to them. I’m always astonished by John Krasinski’s ability to - after nine years of mugging for the camera in The Office - just turn that off and ignore the 4th wall.
I am too young to have watched that when it originally aired but they must have had it in syndication or something because I watched a lot of Carol Burnett growing up. One of the classic moments of corpsing and my favorite skit is the elephant story. (You Tube link.) To this day I still say SNORKIE! and crack up.
I have a number of friends who act in community theater. I’ve heard them use the term “going up” for freezing up and forgetting your lines while in a stage performance, though I cannot vouch for if that’s the common term in professional theater.
It sounds like a nightmare. In fact, I have nightmares exactly like that.
(Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building has a great send-up of this idea, called The White Room, which might be what they call it in theatre, where you can’t even remember what you said because you were so freaked out… Season 3 is great, by the way.)