The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir

by Paul Newman

wasn’t a lover. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a student. I wasn’t a leader. I measured things by what I wasn’t, not by anything I was. I felt that there was something lacking in me that I couldn’t bridge, didn’t know much about and couldn’t fathom. I wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t getting the message. So

I know Marty helped me during rehearsals. He’d make me get rid of any extraneous shit in my performance. He’d make sure to give you a line, an intention, an active verb, to use in your moment.

Kazan also worked with me on something that could be called “the Kazan transition.” It means that onstage, you don’t sit around waiting for one emotional image to pop up, use it, and when it is finished, you just supplant it with a different one. Instead, you start with an image, and in the middle of that first image, you begin transitioning to seeing a second image and then to a third image and so on. Maybe Kazan did this with me because he wanted me to hurry moving from one feeling to the next, to make things more urgent for me, more hysterical