VKSP #10: Sorry about this… 2005/12/08

Hey guys,

It was a huge goal of mine to avoid letting this blog go all issue-y. My almost total apathy toward current events is best represented by a series of completely self-centered posts, I feel.

Still, I've just been sent an article from the New York Times. Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/arts/07maki.html?incamp=article_popular

Also, sorry to endorse the Times, whose Times Select scheme offends me to my oily black core.

Anyway, it's about American Universities and Conservatories cranking out way too many students...students who will, by and large, never be able to maintain solvency within the entertainment business.

I've gone to a conservatory (two actually...one for music and one for theater). Okay. The article is correct. There are too many students.

Let's look at the unexamined roots, for a moment. The following paragraph is an excerpt, for your examination:

Actually, it wasn't so long ago that if you were a teenager hungering to be an actor, the last place you'd prepare would be college. Maybe you'd go to New York and study in a private conservatory environment with a guru like Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg. Maybe you'd study accounting, try out for amateur productions of "The Music Man" and "The Taming of the Shrew" and then apply to a graduate program like Yale's to hone your skills as an artist. Maybe you'd go to Los Angeles and hang out on the stool at Schwab's Pharmacy and look pretty.

Yes. Then these Scwab's alumni and Adler and Strasberg gradutes (the least commercially successful, mind you) hit the late 70s and early 80s with child support payments and enormous coke problems, and decided it would be way cooler (, man) to step away from "the biz" and make steady, even luxurious amounts of money while enjoying a neverending stream of young, worshipful, wannabe actresses from Iowa.

Thus, academic conservatory training was born. As "turning on and dropping out" gave way to "where's the beef", such ex-idealists talked to their buddies (ex-hippie poets they dropped acid with at the Chelsea after that Three Dog Night concert) who had already begun to invade the literature and philosophy departments of Universities. In the interest of expanding Literature departments into Theater Departments (under the auspices of the Liberal Arts umbrella) a genius scam was hatched.

Sympathies and Concurrence fell thusly into place...can that be everything?

No, jackass. There's money.

Elisabeth Pugh Decatur's beautiful, sweet (and "good", if you get me) daughter, Bunny, has taken tap-dancing lessons practically since birth, singing lessons since puberty, and has had the lead in every school play and musical Mama Decatur can remember. Theater school seems a logical next step for her prodigously talented spawn. James Walter Farnsworth Decatur III is all too willing to pay for it.

All of it. This awkwardly cobbled example happens more often than you'd think. It is the rule, rather than the exception. Certainly at Carnegie Mellon, where I went to grad school, virtually NO ONE (in the undergraduate acting program) was on a scholarship. My fellow grad students, however, were all living on Ramen Noodles and unsubsidised loans. Anyway...that's not relevant at the moment.

Think about it. Daddy (insurance agent) and Mama (3rd grade teacher) from Ashtabula, Ohio are going to send their son (though he dances and sings alarmingly well) to New York to become Michael Cerveris? One year at Tisch (with living expenses) would cost the equilvalent of one of their salaries: $40,000 at LEAST.

Financial aid is scarce, tell you what.

I have two items of advice as pertains to this situation.

Actors. Jump in. Move to NYC or LA, bartend or start fucking a rich married guy, join a dance conditioning studio, find a reputable dramatic coach. Read your ass off. Audition. Familiarlize yourself with the literature and infrastructure of the film or stage community of which you'd like to take part. Starve youself. (Sorry, but I'm not kidding). You're worth more to the entertainment industry as an ambitious, hot, fresh-faced 18-year-old that a cynical 22-year old college graduate with alcohol-induced attitude problems.

To the industry. Stop being such dicks about papers and initials. It is irresponsible and nepotistic to disqualify auditionees who don't have an B.A. from Tisch, Juilliard, CMU, Michigan, etc. If they do have those letters, it just means their folks have some serious cash. I know literally DOZENS of shitty directors, certainly, who have an M.F.A. I also know dozens more (also shitty) who will go into hock in order to get one. They will not improve as "artists", they will simply receive a new badge to sew onto their little sashes, next to citizenship and knot-tying.

It's a preposterous system. Greedy schools employing washed-out (or at least relatively professionally inactive) faculty to teach an enormous army of upper-upper-upper middle class kids, most of whom will never be cast anyway. However, this entire illogical system is somehow justified by a totally arbitrary expectation of institutional education in a business that, at its core, doesn't require it.

It's a hose job, pure and simple. Don't blame it all on the kids.

The unspoken third bit of advice, of course, is for the government to start dumping significant amounts of cash into the arts, in order to create a system for publically funded performance and arts venues. Then, maybe, performers and creators (given more secure opportunities, therefore decreasing stagnation via fiscal desperation) would feel more inclined to really stretch the form in interesting ways (instead of importing it, a la BAM), rather than enter their trite piece of shit show into the New York Fringe with the specific hopes of getting it picked up for a teeny off-Broadway run.

The pretentious, hackneyed, unimaginative charm of which might, then, light the theater flame within the breast of yet another marginally-talented high school senior from Pelham Manor.