A more modern, though still a long time ago (I don’t watch a lot of TV series) example, was when the Drew Carey Show would do some live improv episodes in character. Funny at the moment, but doesn’t stand up to repeat viewings. On the other hand, I can rewatch Whose Line Is It Anyway in it’s various incarnations repeatedly, because the expectation is completely different.
You may want to hire a professional proofreader to go over your posts.
Bingo. I’ve done a lot of community theatre, and while we try to get things word-for-word, it doesn’t always work that way. The idea is to know where the scene is going, and what needs to be said to get it there. If you need to improv or ad-lib to get things where they need to be, you do. As we so often say, “The audience hasn’t read the script, so they’ll never notice.”
Not just at the end of his career–supposedly when he played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1953) he had a hard time memorizing the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech and did at least part of it with cue cards.
Of course, anyone who has played the Dane on stage scoffs at mere film and TV acting. Well, not really, acting is a job after all, but there’s a hell of a lot of lines needed there.
I did a few high school plays. The one that was the most difficult for me was paying the defense attorney in the courtroom drama The Night of January 16th, which had the added difficultly of two different endings, since a part of the audience acted as a mock jury and decided the verdict every show (I think we did maybe 5 live shows).
Part of it was rote memorization of my lines, saying them over and over. Then I would go over my lines with someone else, and with a tape recording of leading lines before mine. You don’t have to memorize the whole thing, just your lines and the lines before yours. I also luckily had a legal pad in front of me where I had written down cue lines for me to say “I object!” To or whatever when I was seated. Cheating, but it took away some stress. Tons of practice, several rehearsals. I don’t think I have a much better memory than the average person, and a managed.
From what I’ve seen from behind the scenes in TV and movies, they typically only memorize whatever scene they’re working on that day, and get quite a bit of time for that with probably only a few sentences to memorize. The second they get a good take the line probably goes straight out of their brain.
Live plays probably require the most amount of long term memorization, but you have several months to get that right. Live TV is usually assisted by cue cards.
I don’t think being great at memorization makes a great actor. A lot of average people could memorize well enough. It’s taking what you’ve memorized and making it not sound memorized, a fluid natural conversation.
Just thought of an example.
I was in a community production of You Can’t Take It With You, and three of us were playing “J-men,” or basically FBI agents conducting a raid. Our chief agent led us in. Dialogue was supposed to be as follows (paraphrased):
Chief: Okay everybody, this is a raid. You [meaning me], check behind that door. Everybody else, freeze!
Me: Gotcha, Chief. [I go through the door.]
During one showing, the Chief went blank after “Okay, everybody.” The dialogue that night went like this:
Chief: Okay, everybody, this is a raid. [Big pause–I knew he was in trouble.]
Me: Chief, I’ll check behind this door. Might be somebody in the next room.
Chief: [Regaining composure.] Good idea; do it. Everybody else, freeze! [I went through the door.]
Thing is, I knew where the scene was going–I had to get through that door. So, seeing the chief go blank, I had to say something that would get me through that door. And I did. It wasn’t word-for-word, but it got the chief back on track, and got us us where we needed to be.
[Moderating]
Flyer, I know that folks here often get snarky about things like spelling mistakes. But usually, it’s just a small joke in the midst of a post that contributes something else to the conversation. Your post there reads more like an attack, and doesn’t contribute anything else. If you can’t find that line, then just cut the snark entirely.
[Not moderating]
Memorization ability is certainly an asset for an actor. One of those six plays I was in, I landed the role largely because I was good at memorizing (the largest role that didn’t have an understudy quit three weeks before opening night, so they asked me to take over). But I’d certainly agree that it’s far from the most important asset.
Moderator Note
And you may want to refrain from jerkish pedantry in GQ.
It’s one thing to correct something factually in GQ, and in fact, most of the time, pointing out an error is actually appreciated here. But being overly pedantic about grammar or spelling is generally not helpful, especially when you don’t even point out what the error was. That’s just jerkish behavior, and I shouldn’t have to remind you that our guiding principle here is “don’t be a jerk.”
Several people have mentioned cue cards; nowadays they’re usually replaced by a teleprompter, which has the advantage of being able to have them in multiple positions (so long as they don’t show within the recorded area), having text in different colors for different people, etc. There has also been at least a Mexican telenovela where the actors wore earpieces because the script was being worked on as they filmed.
Remember, when you’re in a play, you have rehearsals and you start out with a script in your hand. It helps immensely to say the lines aloud.
“And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Several friends of mine, in our teenage years, memorized quite a bit of Lewis Carroll poetry. We called ourselves “The Knights of the Vorpal Sword.”
Note that different people have different gifts, and for some the required memorization may come more easily.
I have a repertoire of about 200 songs which I (mostly) know by heart, which amazes some of my fellow singer/musicians. They can’t do much more than come up with the words to “Happy Birthday to You” without a lyric sheet in front of them, and marvel at how I remember all the words to so many songs. Yet some of them can play circles around me on the guitar. Different gifts.
You shoould check out the fantastic Canadian tv series Slings & Arrows. It’s set backstage at a surrogate for Canada’s real world Stratford Festival. Each of the three seasons is structured around a different Shakespeare play, with the drama paralleling the action in the play. It’s also wildly funny at the same time. Easily one of the best tv series from any country and a winner of every award Canada offers.
Each six-episode season follows the actors from gathering the cast to a final performance. We see the actors learning lines, forgetting lines, adapting to changes, welling with anxiety about performances, each at a different stage in their career from newcomer to star to senility, and the various means they use to cope. Working with one another - running the lines - is a huge help. One Hollywood action star, brought in to goose the box office, confounds everyone by paraphrasing his lines in rehearsal just to get their emotional feel. A drunk legend blacks out midscenes.
Is it true to life? Yes and no, of course. [Jon Lovitz]It’s theater!/Jon Lovitz]
Another example is Tom Waits. He’s primarily a musician but he has done some acting. I’ve heard he can’t remember lines and has to work from cue cards.
Moderator Action
Since this is about how actors actually perform their art, let’s move this to CS (from GQ).
Some has probably mentioned this already, but I’m far more impressed by stage actors. Imagine memorizing page after page of Shakespeare, or trying to perform a musical with specific dance routines. A stage actor must time their performance down to the second, because the entire show’s lights, music, and effects are synced by computer. They have to do it exactly the same way every single night.
I haven’t acted since fourth grade, so I have no first-hand knowledge, but I have several friends who do a lot of community theater, frequently in large / starring parts. From what they’ve told me, memorizing one’s lines for an entire play is a helluva lot of work. As others have already noted, part of what goes into it is not only memorizing your lines, but what those lines are in response to. My acting friends spend a lot of their evenings leading up to their productions going through reads of their lines, and getting friends or family members to stand in for the other actors, so that they can memorize the interactions of their lines to others.
One of my friends was in a production of The Curious Savage last fall. She told me that her lines for that one were particularly challenging to memorize, even though she didn’t have a large part, because there was one scene in which she had a number of very similar lines, which needed to be perfectly matched to different lines by other actors.
So was Shirley Temple.
At Middlebury, I did Russian theatre three summers in a row. The professor was a professional director who recorded each part on tape for us to listen to on our own. In addition, we had regular rehearsals almost every night for six weeks (blocking was not done until near the end). Everyone involved learned their lines perfectly through practice.