ACTION! Professional Acting for Film and Television

by Robert Benedetti

Action!( Professional Acting for Film and Television) <> Paperback <> RobertBenedetti <> LongmanPublishingGroup

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2006

About the author

A distinguished teacher of theatre, and three-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning film producer, Robert Benedetti received his PhD from Northwestern University. After serving as Artistic Director of the Court Theatre in Chicago, he was an early member of Chicago’s Second City Theatre, and then taught for fifty years at the University of Wisconsin, Carnegie-Mellon University, The National Theatre School of Canada, and the University of California, Riverside.
He was Chairman of Theatre at York University in Toronto, Chairman of the Acting Program at the Yale Drama School, and for eight years Dean of Theatre at The California Institute of the Arts. He was until 2011 a tenured Full Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Artistic Director of the Nevada Conservatory Theatre.
Benedetti has directed at many regional theatres, including the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Australia’s Melbourne Theatre Company, the Milwaukee, South Coast, and San Diego Repertory Theatres, the Oregon, Colorado, and Great Lakes Shakespeare festivals, and many others.
He has also worked in the art museum field, recreating the 1913 Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun by Kazimir Malevich for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has also created shows on German Expressionism and Russian Agitprop. His productions have appeared at the Berlin Festival, the Demeervart in Amsterdam, the Hirschhorn Museum at the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Academy. His films are in the permanent collection of MoMA and many other museums and university art departments.
He served as an advisor to the U. S. Department of Education and as a Fulbright Panelist.
As President of Ted Danson’s Anasazi Productions at Paramount Studios, and later as an independent screenwriter/producer, he won three Best Picture Emmys, two Humanitas Prizes, and a Peabody Award for producing Miss Evers’ Boys and A Lesson Before Dying for HBO, and six other films. He most recently completed a screenplay for HBO on the 1885 Chicago Haymarket bombing.
Benedetti has also written six books on acting and film production, including The Actor At Work 10th edition, The Actor in You, 5th edition (recently translated into Danish), ACTION! Acting for Film and Television, and From Concept to Screen, an Overview of Film and TV production (recently published in Chinese.)
In 2005 he received the Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. In 2012 he was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center. He and his wife collect Folk and Fine Art.

Reviews

[Krí S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and I believe an essential addition to the library of anyone in the industry. This great book is also an engaging read for anybody curious about how things work in film and TV. It is full of helpful information such as how the casting process works, and includes a glossary of terms and useful scene sources. Benedetti's exercises and acting concepts have certainly given me a heightened understanding of how to become a believable, real character in acting. I recommend this book to actors who want to better themselves and blow audiences away on stage and on screen.

[Joshua Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been an acting coach for over 15 years and an actor for 30. I can truly say THIS book should be the very first one someone reads when they want to get into film and television acting. Forget Stanislavsky. Seriously. This is the book to read. "The Method" has its place, but this is a practical guide to film acting that will give you secrets to make sure the camera, not to mention directors, producers and casting directors, love your work!

[Dylan Kussman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've assigned this book to my on-camera acting class this semester, and it seems to be serving us well so far. In order to avoid a tedious first half learning about nuts-and-bolts industry practices, I'm having to bounce back and forth between Parts I and II, which is fine, and the exercises are fun and useful. All told, a nice introductory text for performers looking to wade into film and tv acting.

[Nya · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was just okay