Footlight Competition

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others

Ayn Rand
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Hello Diane
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OK, here's another acting lesson, so get out in the enter of the studio with everyone else and get ready.

One of the more useful techniques for an actor to employ, if the script allows it, is competition. It is better used by experienced actors than less experienced ones. Why do I say that? I'll explain later.

Plays are mostly made of critical situations and conflicts. If there is a conflict, an argument, one character will win and the other will lose. But the actor who plays the loser must not act as if he is going to lose. He fights to win until the inevitable outcome. Then the actor who plays the winning character gets to depict the satisfaction at winning, while the other actor must show his character's unhappiness at losing. In a tragedy sometimes the outcome is death, or something close to it. In comedy (which is known as serious business in the profession, because it is) the conflict is just as great and the fight is often fierce, although what the two characters are fighting over may be ridiculous. How often have you been caught up in an argument like that?

The conflict and hence the competition may not be so broad, but may be of a subtler level, more mental and psychological, and that's when it requires experienced actors.

Some inexperienced actors think the term competition refers to competition between actors for attention, praise and, in a comedy, laughs. It often results in upstaging, scene stealing, or what is known in the acting business as stealing focus. It's a terrible, unforgivable trait that many inexperienced actors have and, I'm sorry to say, some well known professionals also do.

I remember two incidents of stealing laughs. In one case an actress was delivering a speech to the audience and upstage of her was another actor making funny faces and getting laughs. I noticed it and pointed it out to him. He said he was just reacting to the speech. When I told him it was taking the focus away from the speech he stopped. He didn't realize what he was doing. He was inexperienced.

The second case was more damaging. In a comic scene the actor sat on a sofa and removed his shoes, feeling around inside of them searching for something important. One night he noticed that a certain laugh came early. The next night it did also but he caught a glimpse of another actor in the show sticking his head out from behind a door. So the following night he was ready. When the moment came he turned and flung the shoe right into the actor's face. The lesson was learned.

Competition on the stage or in film is, or should be, different from competition in real life. If it's done right the actors don't compete with each other, the characters do. See for yourself.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never give up.
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Objective Opportunity

World peace must be based on world plenty.

John Orr
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So there you are, are you?
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One of the few vivid images from my infancy that I still remember was looking up and seeing an airplane. As I knew nothing about fuels or aerodynamics, it was mysterious.The experience of seeing this large object, which wasn't a bird, gliding along through the air has stuck with me all my life.

As I grew I became very interested in the solar system. I was fascinated by those planets, all different from each other and all having mythical names. I wanted to visit all of them. But there was no such thing as space travel back then. In fact, most people thought it was an impossibility and merely the stuff of science fiction. And yet, in my lifetime, it has gone from an impossibility to a daily event.

Now NASA is discussing a manned trip to Mars, the nearest of those planets. Mars, the Roman god of war, which brings up a point to ponder. One way or another, through discovery or colonization, there is or will be life on other planets. Suppose we discovered another inhabited planer with a totally alien but intelligent civilization. What would we do about it? We could do the stupid thing that humans have been doing for centuries, assume they are hostile and out to destroy us and hence attack them. Wage war. It has been said many times by many great thinkers, presidents, generals and historians, that whenever a nation is waging war in a foreign land they are always claiming to be doing it in defense. The US Department Of Defense was originally called the Department of War.

But look at the history. Some people were assured the Russians were out to destroy us and so we set up a huge expensive defense against that happening. The Russians meanwhile had a similar opinion about the western world and so we had underwater ships sniffing around our borders, spy planes over head and eventually satellites taking pictures of each others armaments. That's still going on.

But then World War III became the Cold War. The Berlin Wall went up and came down again. Khrushchev came to visit. Nixon went to visit, Then the Sputnik flew and the Cold War suddenly became the Space Race which took us to the Moon. And now we, the Russians and the Japanese a real former enemy are all working together in space. I know I have just dashed headlong through a lot of important history, but my point is that we have come to a place of mutual cooperation in an effort which many, including myself, feel is the most important scientific activity for the human race.

Contrarily, some people are of the opinion that we shouldn't be spending so much time and money in outer space but should be concentrating on the problems we have right here on Earth. John Orr is probably right that world peace must be based on world plenty, which says that the biggest problem we have here is lack, lack of peace and lack of plenty. But I could turn that quote around and imply that world plenty must rely on world peace. If nations didn't spend so much time and money on defense, i.e. war, what would be the result? One result, which history shows us is that the enemies of today can become the friends of tomorrow. If we stopped waging war on each other or preparing to, we could cooperate and work together to solve the problem of the lack of plenty. That's a circumstance "devoutly to be wished," a pipe dream, you say, an opium trip, a pie in the sky.

But wait! We have a pie in the sky, in fact we have a lot of them and they come from all around the world. What if one of those pies found intelligent life somewhere? And what if we had learned our lessons well enough to not throw nuclear weapons at it? And what if we avoided the Cold War and went right for a Space Race with it.
One planet in a contest with another in a huge Cosmic Olympics of science, technology and culture. We are competitive type people after all.

There will be peace and plenty in this world when this world is competing with another world instead of with itself.

Vagabond Journeys
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Smile, the Universe is watching you.
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