Book on Acting: Improvisation Techniques for the Professional Actor in Film, Theater & Television - Softcover

Stephen Book

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1879505606 ISBN 13: 9781879505605

Publisher: Silman-James Press (US), 2001

Synopsis

Stephen Book is a top Hollywood acting coach and teacher and a theatre director. His students have won Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, Obies, and Grammys. Thirteen of his present or former students are featured in either starring roles or as cast regulars in the current primetime television schedule. This book contains film and television scenes in which Book-coached actors, used his Improvisation Technique to create their performances. These scenes, showing the actors' performance choices, demonstrate the use of Improvisation Technique in different genres of acting. Well-known theatre and film scenes are included, as well as scenes from such TV shows as 'Frasier', 'Melrose Place', 'Star Trek: Voyager', 'LA Law' and 'The Practice'.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Book is an acting teacher, coach, and director best known for creating Improvisation Technique: improvisational acting applied to scripted performances for film, stage, and television. In 1985 he opened the Stephen Book Acting Workshop in Hollywood, now in its 39th year.

His students have included Academy Award winners William Hurt, Rita Moreno, and Robin Williams, as well as Val Kilmer, Maura Tierney, Sanaa Lathan, Carla Gugino, Tim Matheson, Valerie Mahaffey, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, David Boreanaz, Kurtwood Smith, William Schallert, Grant Heslov, and stand-up comics George Carlin, Adam Ferrara, and Christopher Titus.

Stephen studied with the legendary Viola Spolin at Sarah Lawrence College. They later co-designed the Spolin Theater Game Center in Hollywood, where he served as executive director and principal teacher. He also studied with Lee Strasberg in the Directors Unit at the Actors Studio.

A former long-time faculty member of The Juilliard School and USC, he has also taught at Stanford, Brown, UCLA, the Esalen Institute, in London at the Globe Shakespeare Center, and in Moscow at both the Russian state theater school (GITIS) and as keynote speaker at the international conference on Modern Methods of the Actor’s Psychotechnique at the Stanislavsky Center.

He has directed productions Off Broadway and in regional and university theaters, including Washington Theater Club, Los Angeles Actors Theater, Stanford Repertory Theater, Equity Library Theater, New Dramatists, Princeton, Brown, Sarah Lawrence, USC, and the Theater of Dionysus in Athens.

His books include Book on Acting: Improvisation Technique for the Professional Actor in Film, Theater and Television (also translated and published in Poland), The Actor Takes a Meeting, and Secret Magic Stuff for Actors.

Edition details

• Publisher: Silman-James Press (US)
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1879505606
• ISBN 13: 9781879505605
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 630