James Lipton, best known as the host of the Bravo television show Inside the Actors Studio, is a man of many talents. He was first broadcast in American homes on The Lone Ranger radio show in the 1940s and now visits more than 84 million homes via Inside the Actors Studio, a show that he created, and which he writes, hosts, and executive produces at Pace University. Lipton’s talents are many: he’s been a Broadway lyricist, dancer, actor, author, writer for television dramas, award-winning equestrian, pilot, and, most recently, dean emeritus of The Actors Studio MFA program. The program moved to Pace in 2006, after 11 years at the New School. In 2009, The Actors Studio MFA students who began at Pace will perform their repertory season, the culmination of three years of intensive training in the program. This will be the first opportunity for anyone not teaching or enrolled in the program to see the work of this class of students. This April, James Lipton was Pace’s 2008 Leaders in Management honoree and he sat down with Pace Magazine to speak about his recent memoir Inside Inside, and The Actors Studio MFA program at Pace University—the only school sanctioned by the prestigious Actors Studio.
With a three-year commitment and the expectation that students will be at The Actors Studio fulltime, The Actors Studio MFA program is quite different from other acting, writing, and directing MFA programs. What are the strengths of The Actors Studio approach?
The school is unique in that the actor, the writer, and the director are trained for three years side by side. You cannot tell the directors from the writers from the actors in the first-year acting program; they are all being trained alike. You can get a playwriting degree at many universities and never have seen your work standing on its feet, never have addressed the actors, never had wrestled with the writer’s primary dilemma which occurs when the script is handed to another person who must somehow absorb it, release it, and recreate it. That is a disadvantage. There are many directors in film schools who know everything about the camera, lenses, and writing, but nothing about how to get a performance out of an actor. It’s deeper than camaraderie––it makes no sense for a playwright or a screenwriter to write a part for an actor without knowing what the actor can and cannot do or how the actor does it.
The writers and the directors also have intensive training in their own disciplines outside those basic technique classes; nevertheless, they are inoculated with the craft of acting. In the second year, they go their separate ways. The training of the directors and playwrights is extremely intense. During this time original works are created, along with working with the standard repertory, plays by Odetts, Williams, and Stoppard and so forth. A great deal of work is done and a great deal is learned in the second year.
The idea of the third year came largely from me because I was going to be a lawyer, and every lawyer or would-be lawyer knows that the third year is the practicum year, where you have moot court and argue cases in front of an imaginary judge. We decided that the repertory season would be the practicum year.
One of the perks of being a student in the program is that, in addition to being able to attend these extraordinary evenings of tapings of Inside the Actors Studio, students are invited into the edit room. They see four or five hours on stage and they see it edited to a one- to two-hour show, a really serious state-of-the-art edit.
I’ve said to the actors, “You can now discover what can be done for your work, with your work, and to your work, for better or for worse.” I say to writers, “You’ll discover the way in which the editor can turn what you said upside down or make it crystal clear.” To the directors, I’ve said, “This is what eventually you’ll be called upon to do.” So that’s a definite perk and something else I think we’ve brought to Pace.
Stanislavski said, “Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.” Can you talk about how Stanislavski’s philosophy informs The Actors Studio’s teaching?
The quote that I like of Stanislavski’s is that talent can’t be taught but technique can, and of course that’s what we’re all about. The talent is what the student brings to the table and technique is what we teach. When you have a great native talent combined with a really rigorous and effective technique then you get a Brando, a Nicholson, or a De Niro.
In the spring of 2009, the first MFA class that started at Pace will begin their repertory season. Can you tell me a bit about the season and the decision to have classes work together for three years before performing for the public?
The privacy surrounding The Actors Studio and The Actors Studio Drama School allows [the actors, directors, and playwrights] to be able to dare, and to make mistakes. We learn by trial and error, and error is often the better tool by which to learn. The repertory season showcases short works, so that three works can be done in an evening, every evening for a week. The directors—all of them—at the end of the repertory season look like owls. They all have circles under their eyes because each week presents a different program and, depending on the number of students in that cohort, the season can run as long as 15 weeks.
All of it is professionally produced. Our students present their master degree theses where they must be presented––on stage.
In the closing chapter of your book Inside Inside, you cover the move of The Actors Studio from the New School to Pace. How has that move changed the program?
Pace has already given to us more than we could have asked for. The people who are involved—President Stephen J. Friedman, Provost Geoff Brackett, David Watson at the Schimmel Center for the Arts—have given us a remarkable venue for Inside the Actors Studio. We have a set for the first time, an entirely different look, and a much larger theater. The students work in the theater all year long. As they begin to absorb these techniques and learn what we have to teach them, they test themselves, and finally do it before the public.
How did The Actors Studio MFA get started?
The school began in 1994. A number of people worked hard on realizing it: Ellen Burstyn, Paul Newman, Lee Grant, Carlyn Glyn, Norman Mailer, other members of the Studio. One morning I woke up with this idea in my head; it was clear. I envisioned everything, even the shape of it, the classes, the kind of faculty we would use. I telephoned Jonathan Fanton, who was then the president of the New School. I had met him because my wife [Kedakai] is on the board of Parson’s School of Design which is one of the components of the New School. I called and asked if we could—at the stroke of a pen—restore some of the luster that adhered to the New School in the 1940s when Erwin Piscator created the Dramatic Workshop there. I said, “What if I could persuade my colleagues at The Actors Studio to create—for the first time in then 47 years—a degree-granting program? And he said, “Where’s the pen and where do I sign?”
The Studio has always been a very private place. It was designed that way—it was meant to be out of the spotlight, away from the public, away from the critics. The doors had always been famously closed and the public never knew what was going on in there. I suggested, at a board meeting, that we open the door to let the Method out by creating a degree-granting program in which every core course was taught by a lifetime member of The Actors Studio. As Victor Hugo once famously observed, there is no idea so powerful as an idea whose time has come. They looked around the table at each other and said why not?
When the Studio was created, there were a number of innovations. One was that it would accept the fact that the actor is central to this process. As we created the School, we built it on that premise. Does that make the actor more important than the writer or the director? Absolutely not. The actor becomes the embodiment and expression of their work, because they’re not there on the stage when the moment comes. The director’s behind the camera and the screenwriter is off a thousand miles away writing his next movie. This was the principle upon the Studio was founded and this was the principle upon which the school was founded.
What do you feel the Actors Studio MFA program has done for Pace?
I want to stress how much Pace has given to us. I have never been in an environment that I respect more or enjoy more. Pace understands what we’re trying to achieve, and offers support for it. I think it’s a good fit, and especially now as Pace plays a role in the renaissance of lower Manhattan.
The Actors Studio brings to Pace 61 years of unbroken, significant history of experimentation, education, and achievement in the dramatic arts. The teachers in our school at Pace are still, by mandate and by design, lifetime members of The Actors Studio. At any given moment, if you walk our corridors and look around, you’ll see 150 years of Actors Studio experience strolling by. So we bring with us all of this experience in the particular skills for which the Studio is famous. We also bring a name to the Actors Studio. To any venue we visit, we bring Inside the Actors Studio, which is broadcast in 84 million homes in America on Bravo, and 125 countries, and has received 13 Emmy nominations in 13 years. The show is a class for our students. This does not exist anywhere else in the world. No other school or University has a show on the air. In India, for example, at 7:00 on Sunday night, all across India people sit down and watch Inside The Actors Studio, they see our guests and they see our students: men, women, black, white, international, and American.
Over the years, we’ve had students who have been cast after being seen on the show. Directors have called and asked, “Who was the young man in the first row?” These are the least invisible students in the country, perhaps in the world. It is not just that they are seen on the small screen around the world; they are the continuing cast of the show. Over the period of three years, the public begins to know them.
Does The Actors Studio MFA program have a large international component as a result of that exposure?
We have had as high as a 24% international student enrollment. When our American audience or our international audience sees a young black woman stand up and say, “My name is so and so and I’m in the directing track here at The Actors Studio Drama School.” Whoa! All of a sudden young black women watching this show say, “Wait a minute, I might be a director. Maybe that’s something I can do.” And so the applications come in.
Can you talk a bit about the selection process? How are students selected and what does the admissions committee look for in prospective students?
Over years of experience in the professional world and conducting auditions, you know it when you see it. Sometimes it is like a torch on the stage and that student is the one you want to watch for three years.
What role can Inside the Actors Studio and The Actors Studio MFA Program play in the continuing revitalization of arts and culture in lower Manhattan?
There is a remarkable synergy. We have come to the right place at the right time. To my knowledge, we are the only continually functioning repertory company in lower Manhattan. The students will be performing for as long as it takes to do the repertory season every year. The public will come. The repertory season is free and open to the public and we are right next to Tribeca. Last year we offered one or two of our evenings as Tribeca Film Festival evenings. Fortunately, the atmosphere at Pace is so open and so eager for innovation that there’s nothing that we’re trying to do that doesn’t seem somehow to be a part of the University’s master plan.
After the repertory season concludes, is there ongoing mentoring for graduates? How does the program continue to support their careers?
The purpose of the third year is to give students a prominent platform. We make every effort to bring the professional community down to see them, week after week. We have heads of the unions, casting directors, production people, and all the people with whom they’ll be dealing with professionally come down to give them a forum to meet each other. They’re given a leg up.
But this is a terminal degree, and once our students have learned what they must learn, they go out into the world. It is not an easy world but of course Inside the Actors Studio is a big part of that. What the guests and I are saying is, this is what happened to this artist. That’s why the kids sit there and take notes. What we’re doing is handing them a telescope, they’re looking through the telescope for five hours. They see the road that they are going to have to travel. It isn’t easy and we never pretend that it is. The guests talk about their failures as much about their successes and they talk about what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it.
But once the students leave us, they all have one advantage that no other drama student has in any other school in America: they graduate as working finalists of The Actors Studio. For one year after they graduate, they can attend Studio sessions where they can continue to work on The Actors Studio stage, receive constructive criticism, and learn their craft. That means they pay for three years and get four. The fourth year of training can take place in either New York City or Los Angeles at the Actors Studio East or Actors Studio West. Those who pass their working finalist audition—more than 80 of them have—become lifetime members of The Actors Studio on the same level as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, or Ellen Burstyn.
Are graduates of the Actors Studio MFA automatically given lifetime membership to the Studio?
No. The working finalists get a year in the Studio, a year of free education, to prepare for their audition for admittance. It has to be difficult to get into, so that it means something. You have to demonstrate that you have the commitment. Once you’re a member of the Studio, you have a continuing education. There is nothing like that in any other school. If you’re accepted, you are a member for life.
You’re now dean emeritus. How would you characterize your involvement with The Actors Studio MFA program now?
The School is in such good hands. I am thrilled with what [Director of The Actors Studio MFA Program] Andreas Manolikakis has done and they don’t need me the way I was once needed—and that’s exactly the way I like it. But if I can be of any help in any way, I’m there and they know it. I was the founding dean, so you can imagine the stake I have in the successful future of the School. Andreas has stepped in and he brings to it his own education which began in classical theater in Greece, continued in Paris, and he is a member of The Actors Studio––what more could one ask? He’s just amazing.
Your book Inside Inside was published in 2007, and it detailed the major events of your life. What prompted the writing of the book?
Because Inside the Actors Studio is so well known, it brought me to a level of prominence that I didn’t know before. I was living two lives: executive producer, writer, and host of Inside the Actors Studio, and dean of the largest graduate drama school in America. When I stepped down as dean, I had only an eight- to ten-hour day and I couldn’t live with that. Dutton approached me with a book offer and, for the next two years, I vanished from the world. I was doing Inside the Actors Studio and every minute that I wasn’t doing it I was writing my book. Since I delivered my book to the publisher, it’s been an absolutely glorious adventure.
As the basis of some of interviews for Inside the Actors Studio, you use Bernard Pivot’s ten questions. One of them is about attempting another career. Is there anything that you wish you’d attempted or which you were afraid to attempt?
My answer to that question is I would like to be a premier dancer, but with this proviso: that I may be forever young, but never injured. It’s not asking much. [Laughs]
