Hey, Von Stroheim! Yeah, you there, planning your great tracking shots and pouring over the specs on the newest HD camera— I got a flash for you: if you want to make a successful movie you better get yourself some good acting in there. The truth is that that big deal movie making apparatus you’re going to put together is just an elaborate recording device. It won’t matter how fancy or primitive that device is if there’s no event to capture with it; and it’s usually the actors who are the ones who make that event come off… or not. In “The Puffy Chair” they got something like fifteen minutes of entertaining movie time out of three talented actors in a van planning how they were going to rent a single room at a motel and then sneak more people into it. Every Jennifer Aniston movie has state of the art production values, yet not always do these works achieve, shall we say, film greatness. Even if you have a movie that can accommodate “non-acting” actors, because the style you’re going for is stark, you probably want to get at least one virtuoso performer to pull off the high notes so the whole thing doesn’t just lay there.
Dash Mihok & Me from my film, On The Inside.
Here’s the good news… well, it’s the title of this article: price does not equal talent for acting. While it’s true there may be very few actors as good as Leonardo DiCaprio, in my expert opinion there are some who make the same amount of money as him that aren’t any better than many currently working for scale. People will ask me, “Don’t the most talented people have the most success?” No. They don’t. For many reasons. Acting is an art and, unlike sports, where you either have the fastest 40 yard dash or you don’t, taste is subjective; and this means nepotism and marketing play a huge part. There’s also, without a doubt, a great deal of luck involved. Making a name as an actor requires that a person negotiate all kinds of hurdles: money, family, health, etc. Perhaps the right part just didn’t come their way at the right time to lift them into recognition.
In addition to all that, an actor also has to have the temperament to endure the necessary battering they’re going to get from the awfulness that is show business (and the reptilian individuals working therein)— something sensitive artistic types have an especially hard time doing. An analogy might be the mathematician, Grigori Perelman, who recently turned down a million dollar award for solving a hundred year old math problem. It took someone like that, contemptuous of success and money, to have the purity of mind to solve the problem. William Blake said, “Works of art are created by people who are either affluent or above care of it.” What I’m getting at is that money is not the motivating factor for a lot of very talented actors and a scrappy little film like yours might be all the more attractive to them for that reason. There are gems out there to be had if you know how to find them (and have a little bit of luck of your own).
