Let's see what you've seen! For aspiring film directors, let's see what you can catch in your actors. With your help, we can assemble a quick and dirty guideline that can brief actors on everything they need to get through a production after sleeping with you! (Producers take note.)
Acting can be hard, and actors can be imitative. Some even imitate themselves. What a relief to have a mannerism to fall back on, especially if nobody else seems to have discovered it yet. Unfortunately, even most actors aren't entirely stupid, and as-yet-unpopularized acting mannerisms tend to be seized upon with the relentless voracity of piranha packs trying to protect their tenuous paychecks en masse and exhibited right when your own movie comes out, displaying your own lack of originality, or, as it should properly be seen, your originality. Happily, there is such a flood of product and viewers are so numb that freebies like these are usually far from lethal.
But there is an ever-growing need for new lacks of orginality. Below is a starter set for the up-to-date mediocre talent, and his/her hack or teat-addled director, to be aware of.
ACTING MANNERISMS THAT HAVE BEEN PLAYED OUT FOR WELL OVER A DECADE:
1. The Expressive Sigh: When your mind can't really fathom the complexity of your part and you don't know what to do, try the double-pronged attack of a heavy sigh. This has the wonderful dual virtue of making your performance work no matter how people interpret the mannerism.
Example: You have thought out the depths of the ramifications of your situation: A heavy sigh conveys the burden of of the heavy doings going on in your mind.
or:
You have felt the depths of your emotional response to the situation. A heavy sigh conveys your depth of feeling.
The ingenuity of this mannerism is that, if you have just staggered out of your trailer and are not really sure what your character is thinking or feeling, you can make the SAME sigh and be covered. Now you are just flustered and unable to deal with your undoubtedly deep and full-bodied thoughts and/or feelings! Really, you can't lose. Now that's good acting!
ACTING MANNERISMS THAT HAVE BEEN PLAYED OUT FOR ONLY ABOUT A DECADE:
Example No. 1: After the heyday of the Heavy Sigh, many actors were completely at a loss as to how to keep their jobs and drug habits. Luckily, out of left field, an incredibly avant garde mannerism spranged up to knock Hollywood talent sensors flat! It was the A-A-A-A Stutter!
This gambit took the stunned vapidity of the Heavy Sigh to new frontiers! Upping the ante, in retrospect it seemed like a simple natural progression, but at the time it had the unexpected tangy freshness of a peach at the height of its perfume or an indifferent but frightened intern.
This was unprecedented. It was a kind of acting holy grail. Beyond Strasbergian disassociative submergence in the fictive, it needed no anchoring reality at all! Pre-verbal, even an infant could do it! Think of it! A-A-A-A (repeat as necessary) before ANY line could convey so many things -- doubt, reticence, the need to go potty. What viewer hasn't had that soul-stirring mental disconnection?
Unobtrusive yet glaring, nuanced yet flatulent, A-A-A-A staked a postmodern claim in the history of acting mannerisms that redefined stupidity for the future: No longer would such tripe as raised eyebrows, tilted heads, or the vague sighs of players who might be supposed intelligent do -- No! Now we have entered a world beyond intelligence, where mere abstract sounds could convey to numbskulls an uneasy, hard to manage depth of feeling and inability to adress matters at hand.
A brilliant exponent of the A-A-A-A response to situations requiring an actually comprehensible reaction, Ms. Gellar served as a role model and rallying point for actors completely out of their depth across two millenia. Modestly-breasted, Ms. Gellar made clear that middling acting choices could sustain an ingenue's career long past its initial pubertal brightness well into the depths of fantastically remunerative syndication and creative bankruptcy.
What wonders face we next? And what able exponents? The history of acting horsepoop dribbles back through the ages to fall upon illustrious foreheads. What clumps have we yet to discover, and how may they point the way to our composted future?