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"THE METHOD." Those are words which struck terror into the souls of many a Hollywood actor in the 1950s, exactly as the phrase "Talking Pictures" sobered up numerous film players in the late 1920s (and in a few cases did just the opposite, sending them straight to the bottle). Seemingly overnight, the acting style known as "the Method" blew into Hollywood, arriving with a tornado-like force not unlike that big wind which sent Dorothy Gale off to Oz - sending numerous A-, B- and C-grade actors scurrying off to learn this new acting style in order to save their careers.
What was, and is, "the Method"? It's a process by which actors behave naturally, stripping themselves of all artifi ce, using their emotional memory of past experiences and feelings to create a character's motivation. (It's worth noting that the man considered one of the greatest of all screen actors, Spencer Tracy, had been giving naturalistic performances for years, using a method quite his own.) Interestingly, this "Method" we'll be looking at on TCM this month was far from new at the time Americans embraced it. It started in Russia in the late 1890s, nurtured there by producer-director-theoretician Konstantin Stanislavsky, and was famously given new life (with adjustments) in America by the legendary Group Theatre in New York in the 1930s, then in the 1940s by several teachers such as Lee Strasberg, David Lewis and Elia Kazan at N.Y.'s Actors Studio.
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