Film and Television Acting offers solid techniques for creating a natural, believable performance for film and television. The reader will discover techniques for listening and reacting, blocking and business, character, focus, the closeup, and comedy as they pertain to acting in front of a camera. The book analyzes the differences between theatre, film, and television acting, providing the theatre trained actor with specific approaches for making the transition to on-camera work. This second edition is thoroughly revised and updated. The book contains numerous scenes and exercises, including sample scenes from Cheers and Seinfeld, which provide the reader with ways to practice the specific techniques outlined by the author. Included are interviews with well-know actors and directors: Don Murray, Norman Jewison, and Emmy award winner, Glenn Jordan, to name a few. These interviews illustrate how the professionals apply their training and technique to filmed performances. There is also a chapter-length interview with John Lithgow, in which the actor provides a first-hand account of the differences of acting for the theatre and for the camera.

This book investigates the development of Sherlock Holmes adaptations in British theatre since the turn of the millennium. Sherlock Holmes has become a cultural phenomenon all over again in the twenty-first century, as a result of the television series Sherlock and Elementary, and films like Mr Holmes and the Guy Ritchie franchise starring Robert Downey Jr. In the light of these new interpretations, British theatre has produced timely and topical responses to developments in the screen Sherlocks’ stories. Moreover, stage Sherlocks of the last three decades have often anticipated the knowing, metafictional tropes employed by screen adaptations. This study traces the recent history of Sherlock Holmes in the theatre, about which very little has been written for an academic readership. It argues that the world of Sherlock Holmes is conveyed in theatre by a variety of games that activate new modes of audience engagement.

Introduced by a comprehensive account of the factors governing the adaptation of stage plays and musicals in Hollywood from the early 1910s to the mid-to-late 1950s, Screening the Stage consists of a series of chapter-length studies of feature-length films, the plays and musicals on which they were based, and their remakes where pertinent. Founded on an awareness of evolving technologies and industrial practices rather than the tenets of adaptation theory, particular attention is paid to the evolving practices of Hollywood as well as to the purport and structure of the plays and stage musicals on which the film versions were based. Each play or musical is contextualized and summarized in detail, and each film is analyzed so as to pinpoint the ways in which they articulate, modify, or rework the former. Examples range from dramas, comedies, melodramas, musicals, operettas, thrillers, westerns and war film, and include The Squaw Man, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Merry Widow, 7th Heaven, The Cocoanuts, Waterloo Bridge, Stage Door, I Remember Mama, The Pirate, Dial M for Murder and Attack.

One of our most brilliantly iconoclastic playwrights takes on the art of profession of acting with these words: invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school. Acting schools, “interpretation,” “sense memory,” “The Method”—David Mamet takes a jackhammer to the idols of contemporary acting, while revealing the true heroism and nobility of the craft. He shows actors how to undertake auditions and rehearsals, deal with agents and directors, engage audiences, and stay faithful to the script, while rejecting the temptations that seduce so many of their colleagues. Bracing in its clarity, exhilarating in its common sense, True and False is as shocking as it is practical, as witty as it is instructive, and as irreverent as it is inspiring.

Dialogue between film and theatre studies is frequently hampered by the lack of a shared vocabulary. Stage-Play and Screen-Play sets out to remedy this, mapping out an intermedial space in which both film and theatre might be examined. Each chapter’s evaluation of the processes and products of stage-to-screen and screen-to-stage transfer is grounded in relevant, applied contexts. Michael Ingham draws upon the growing field of adaptation studies to present case studies ranging from Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and RSC Live’s simulcast of Richard II to F.W. Murnau’s silent Tartüff, Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, and Akiro Kurosawa’s Ran, highlighting the multiple interfaces between media. Offering a fresh insight into the ways in which film and theatre communicate dramatic performances, this volume is a must-read for students and scholars of stage and screen.

The camera enables us to see right into a character's soul, revealing his or her innermost thoughts and emotions. Screen acting requires a more rigorously truthful and spontaneous performance than the stage, as well as very different technical expertise. From Stage to Screen is a handbook for the professional actor packed with advice on how to make the transition and fully prepare for a TV or film role. The book is divided into three sections: the first examines the relationship between the actor and the camera and how it differs from that of a performer with a stage audience; the second addresses the technical skills the screen actor needs in order to work as part of a large collaborative team and 'make the shot work'; and the third explores the very different experience of an actor working on a screen project, including getting the job, how to prepare properly, what to expect and how to manage the whole process, from casting through to ADR, in order to deliver the very best work.

William Hobbs has written his book as a guide to the inexperienced, so they are able to put their ideas into action more smoothly. The author's aim is to promote a more professional attitude and way of thinking about the task of performing and arranging fights that will demonstrate the range of exciting challenges which are open to directors, actors and fight arrangers alike. Both amateurs and professionals will find the problems and dangers of stage combat dealt with by the author. There is a fully illustrated glossary of strokes, a chapter on battle scenes and mass fighting, and an account of how to arrange comic and symbolic fights and how to stage unarmed fights. The author explains his system of notation for recording the moves of a fight, and includes a 6short chapter on weapons. The final chapter covers slapstick - a deceptively simple art. Forewords by Laurence Olivier and Roman Polanski. The author's first fight direction was for Franco Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic and he was Fight Director to Olivier's National Theatre Company for 9 years. He has worked at the National Theatre with Peter Hall, the RSC, the Royal Opera House and the ENO and on many productions in Europe. His many TV productions include Olivier's King Lear and the recent BBC series, Clarissa. Fight direction on feature films includes Cyrano de Bergerac, Dangerous Liaisons, Hamlet, The Duellists, Excalibur and many others. He has just finished shooting the film Rob Roy."