Following is admittedly a hair-raising idea for freelancers and for clients who hire them.
Most will never do it.
I’d have been too chicken to do it myself in my early freelance days when I didn’t have a pot to pizz in or a window to throw it out.
But, I’m gonna share it anyway.
Here goes:
I was reading a book called Backstory 2 (interviews with old timey day screenwriters) a few months ago, and one of the interviews (with screenwriter Stewart Stern) talked about how Marlon Brando — often considered the single best method actor who ever lived — once started arguing with the screenwriter over a scene.
Originally, Brando approved the scene.
Then, suddenly, he hated and despised it.
The screenwriter tried calling Brando out about having approved it:
“We worked on this. You said it was great and everything had been cured.”
To which Brando replied:
“Well, it hasn’t. I looked at it again and it doesn’t work.”
And then Brando started challenging Stern:
“[Brando] would stand up in his dressing-room trailer and glare right into my eyes and demand to know what the Communists were doing up on the northern border. Challenge me to respond. Force me to be the prime minister [character in the scene]. He was saying things like [in a loud, enraged shout] ‘I don’t care if I approved this scene before — I PISS ON IT!” And he would throw the script across the trailer. Then I would pick it up and throw it back. The heat of it, the emotion of it, got us both screaming at each other. One or two very good lines passed our lips in the course of this that we then sat down and talked about. I wish I could remember the specifics of it. But something was generated in me that ideas began to come, that I felt this flush of emotion. . .that I had to write down. So, I went back and wrote a new scene—really a brand-new scene and brought it to him.”
The result?
The new scene hit it right out of the park.
And the next day Brando laughed saying it was good to see Stern fight for how much it meant to him, and praised him etc.
I don’t know about you.
But I find this sort of thing extremely fascinating.
In fact, I sent the above to Brian Timoney (who is a world renown Method Acting actor, instructor, & author) and he said:
You gotta love Marlon. Very method approach. I’ve used this myself in class with students. With the right person at the right time, it can produce results they didn’t think they had in them. They forget themselves and stop trying to be polite and just do it.
What Marlon did was use a provocation technique. It was first established by a guy called Eugene Vakhtangov, a Russian at the Moscow Arts Theatre. . .He believed that you needed to provoke the inner psyche of the actor. He once told an actress he was directing before she went on stage that she was too plain looking to play the part, which of course, made her furious, and she went on stage and blew it away.
Immoral of the story?
If I was a copywriter or client, I’d be asking myself:
1. How much crap copy has been written because a client didn’t challenge the copywriter like this?
2. And how many crap products have been sold because a copywriter didn’t challenge the client’s weak product like this?
We’ll never know.
But copywriters who don’t do this to weak products ain’t doing their job.
And clients who don’t challenge their copywriters like this ain’t doing their job.
There is much you can learn from the old school method actors.
Something to think on.
In the meantime?
Go here next:
Ben Settle
