Saturday, March 27, 2010

Effect of Plastic Surgery on Crazy Actors

I recently added the blog Neatorama to my daily reading and came across this:
Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts a stabbing or smashes a car with a baseball bat, some part of the face is going to crease or bunch up. Not so with these women. As though to compensate for their facial inertia, both perform with stagy vigor, attempting broad looks of surprise or disappointment, gesticulating and bellowing. If you can’t frown with your mouth, they seem intent on proving, you can try to frown with your voice.
Or maybe they'll start hiring the actors who naturally look young, like um, me. So if this surgery won't help them act, who would be so crazy and vain as to get the work done? Only celebrities are that crazy:
People always ask me: why are movie stars so crazy? There are a number of reasons: emotional people are attracted to the arts, insecure people desire fame, money changes you, etc. But one factor I think doesn't get enough attention is how painful the process of being an aspiring actor can be. You're shown enormous and relentless amounts of disrespect, paid a pittance, and have no job security at all -- if you're lucky enough to even get jobs. After a few years, who would put up with this? I'll tell you who: crazy people -- the ones who stick around despite being constantly treated in a way no sane person with self-respect would put up with. Now this doesn't say persistence = success in acting. Sorry, the volume of insane people is too high and the number of positions for stars is too low. But many who succeed will have this quality because it's almost essential in order to survive the "tournament" of Hollywood.
If it's true for the competitive world of acting, does it also explain our representatives in Washington?

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