Paste your essay in here…The Analysis of the Character Marty in the Screenplay Marty
1) A director’s breakdown as to the nature of the character, what motivates or drives them and their salient contribution to the narrative (600)
The screenplay Marty (1953), written by Paddy Chayefsky, follows the story of Marty, a lonely and insecure but good middle-aged man in search for true love while under pressure from his family and middle-class Italian-American neighbourhood to get married. Living with his Italian mother, and working as a butcher, he comes off as a mother’s boy in the beginning of the script. All his siblings have married and the thirty-four years old Marty doesn’t seem close to getting married. However, as the script progresses, we realise that the reason that he is still single is far deeper than it might seem to the people around him. He is short, fat and ugly, and has never been able to win a girl’s heart. Marty has given up, and his life has become spending time with his shallow best friend Angie and going to ballrooms in the evenings in search of a girl to dance with. However, his insecurities have caused him to give up on trying, tired of being rejected by girls for other men and being laughed at. He is always nice and respectful, but it appears these qualities are not enough for him to find his soulmate. On a usual night at the ballroom with Angie, Marty unexpectedly meets Clara, a twenty-nine-year-old ugly, single and rejected woman. They instantly bond, and realise that their lives are very similar to each other. They fall in love and Marty’s future suddenly seems bright. The screenplay ends by Marty finally deciding to call Clara back, suggesting that they then end up together and potentially get married,
Marty is at his lowest point in the first act of the screenplay. He just wants his family and other people to leave him alone as he believes he will die alone. However, there is still that little bit of hope left in him that drives him to go to the ballroom one more time. He is a hopeless romantic that fantasises about having a nice family but never seems to be liked by any girl. The pressures on him are not helpful either, and make him very anxious even though he does not show it. Just before he decides to go to the ballroom, Marty has an argument with his mother and tells her, “Sooner or later, there comes a point in a man's life when he gotta face some facts, and one fact I gotta face is that whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it… I got hurt enough. I don't wanna get hurt no more.” At this point, even though he really wants to get married, he feels hopeless. However, in the second act, the event that turns the entire motivation of the character around is when he sees Clara drinking alone in the ballroom, rejected by her date. At first, he is just trying to be nice, because that is the kind of character that he is, but realising that he has more in common with Clara than he though, changes his viewpoint of life; there is a spark of hope in his character. The decisions that he makes after this event are very crucial to the screenplay as they drive the story forward and decide on how his entire life is going to turn out.
When he brings Clara home that night, he tries to kiss her but Clara rejects him, this causes him to become angry and hopeless again for a moment, thinking that this is just another encounter that will have no future. But when Clara explains why she rejected the kiss and tells him that she likes him and wants to see him again, Marty becomes even more hopeful than he was when he first tried to kiss her. Yet it seems as though even when he has found the girl he wants to marry, the world has suddenly gone against him. His mother doesn’t like Clara because she is afraid she will be left alone like her older sister, but says that she thinks that Clara is ugly. His friend Angie doesn’t want the relationship to proceed for the same reason, and because he is a little jealous of Marty and afraid of losing the only friend he could go out to find girls with. Despite these sudden discouragements, Marty finally decides to take matters in his own hands and call Clara back, doing something for himself and his own future for once, not thinking about the consequences. (744)
2)A detailed account of how you would like to realise the character on-screen, how you would seek to secure the performance you are looking for and how you would use rehearsal techniques together with camera, mise-en-scene another on-screen resources to enhance the realisation of character performance. (1800)
As a director, the first thing I would do to be able to know how I would like to realise the character on-screen is to know the character’s instinct and intellect. Firstly, it is important to know the character’s philosophy and attitude about sex, religion, morality, social customs and mortality (Bernard & Lemmon, 1998). For example, the fact that I know that Marty is an Italian-American working class man will have an influence on the way he looks, acts, and talks. The actor that will play his character needs to be short, quite ugly but in some way charming, and middle-aged. He needs to be a nice person, because actors will play and express themselves, just in different ways. Uta Hagen’s technique grew out of four firm principles: first, that the basic components of the characters that actors play are somewhere within themselves; second, that voice and speech, the soul and the mind, are not separate from the body but originate from it, originate through it; third, that the actor’s work must always find its way into action; and forth, that what happens is never totally in tune with them. Most important, she knew that when you have made every detail in the script as specific as it can be, you can let the circumstances of the script happen to you and propel you into action (Bartow, 2006: 128). Therefore, the actor that plays the character of Marty must let the circumstances happen to them, but must also have had similar encounters and situations like Marty has in the screenplay. Pudovkin and Jacobs write, “One cannot ‘play a part’ on a film; one must possess a sum of real qualities, externally clearly expressed, to attain a given effect on the spectator. It is an inevitable necessity to use, as acting material, persons possessing in reality the properties of the image required.” (1954: 135). Therefore, as much as it is important for the actor to relate to the character and understand him mentally, he must first physically reflect him to appear believable to the audience.
As a director, I will ask myself who is this character? What are the circumstances? What are his relationships? What does he want? What are his obstacles? What does he do to get what he wants? From reading the script I have a brief idea about who Marty is, at least what he appears to be (lonely hopeless romantic), and that he is stuck in a world where he is pressured to get married but has given up on the idea. The only relationships he really has are with his mother and Angie, the rest are just encounters. His obstacles are that he gets rejected by every girl he tries to ask out because he is ugly, fat and short. To get what he wants (a wife), he goes to the ballroom in search for his last hope in love. Consequently, the actor playing Marty’s character must be able to actually live in these circumstances. He must not just physically reflect the character’s traits, but must be him, have his hopeless mind set, and have his mind set changed throughout the course of the film. Like all human beings, characters have good days and bad. They behave in a consistent way, then suddenly change direction. They are in constant flux, because stimuli change from moment to moment. Or they resist change and become rigid. Even the most passive and boring character must still be interesting enough for the audience to watch, and it is the actor’s job to keep them interesting while being true to the character they are playing (Bernard & Lemmon, 1998).
I would seek to secure the performance I am looking for by ensuring that the actor knows exactly whom they are portraying and how to portray them. The final objective of the actor and his performance is to convey to the audience a real person, or at least a person who could conceivably exist. But at the same time, while he is creating this image, the actor nonetheless remains a live, organically whole self. When he acts, nothing within him is destroyed. If he is a nice man acting as a villain, he remains a nice man acting as a villain. An image of the necessary reality will only be achieved when the given series of expressions, both internal and external, required by the play is expressed not by a set of words, gestures, and intonations dictated by formula or whimsy and mechanically repeated, but because of the subjugation and re-expression of the actor’s own living individuality (Pudovkin & Jacobs, 1954).
There are several techniques that I believe might be effective in ensuring that the actor brings out his best performance of Marty. The first of these techniques are that of Stanislavsky’s and the importance of rehearsal. Pudovkin explains that Stanislavsky made his actors in rehearsal act not only in their parts as they stand in the play, but supplementary action not, in fact, in the text, but necessary to enable the actor completely to ‘feel’ himself into his part. Rehearsal work of this kind enables the actor to feel himself an organic unity moving freely in all directions within the frame of the image planned. Essentially, it is precisely this work that links the separate bits of his acting to the feeling, however discontinuous in fact, of a unified, continuous real image. Rehearsal work of this kind is precisely the opportunity for the actor to transform the abstract thought and general life of expression that he has hit on to express the image into concrete acts and manners of behaviour (1954: 245). The biggest problem with film is that it is almost always shot out of order, and so it is sometimes hard for the actor to be able to have an on-point performance when he suddenly might need to go from shooting a scene at the beginning of the film where Marty is hopeless and sad to the very last scene where he has gained back his confidence to an extent and decides to call Clara back. Rehearsal allows an actor to practice his performance in sequence, and experience all the feelings that he must express while on set. We must not avoid discontinuity, but simply seek and find corresponding technical methods to help the actor in struggling against and overcoming it, thereby re-establishing for him the possibility of internally creating and preserving a feeling of the sum of the separate fragments of acting as a single image, organically livened by himself, and rehearsal allows for that to happen.
During rehearsal, real obstacles must be put into place so that the actor feels that he is actually doing something rather than pretending to be. For example, if the actor playing the role of Marty is to have a dance with Clara, I would allow for him to do it while rehearsing, in an actual ballroom so that he can remember the feeling he had while actually doing it and bringing back the same feeling while performing on set. Dwight quoted Strasberg in his, “a good practical definition of acting would be this: The ability to create reality while on stage” (Dwight, 1981: 14). The same could apply to on-screen performances. Another technique I would use to ensure that my actor brings out his best performance is Sense Memory and Affective Memory. Sense Memory is a controversial but very useful technique to use while working with an actor. It is a remembering of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. The use of Sense Memory brings a feeling of life to every object that is associated with these five senses. An actor cannot just say that he is in pain or hurt, pain needs to be created and remembered. I would ask the actor to remember a time where he was rejected by many girls and started to give up, and where he was at his lowest point. I would ask him to remember the feeling he had in his chest, what did he taste? What did he smell? What did he touch? Did he use violence. These, if remembered, could help bring back that emotion to the actor.
Affective Memory is the conscious creation of remembered emotions which have occurred in the actor’s own past life and then their application to the character being portrayed on set. To make a character come alive, the emotions, thoughts, and feelings of the character must be real to the actor. He must learn to search his own past for emotions that will correspond to his character’s life (Dwight, 1981: 44-5). I will remind the actor that he is always playing himself and not to dissociate himself from the character and his identity. I realise that the actor cannot just turn himself into this other totally different character and pretend to be him for the duration of the shoot, and then just come out of it and become himself again. Therefore I will try to find feelings, emotions, and aspects in that actor’s life that he can relate to Marty’s character and also experiences he has had that are similar to what Marty experiences in the film.
A lot of acting needs to be filtered through imagination. The actor will discover that imaginative results do not occur from ‘magical inspiration’, but through the conscious effort of the individual. Marty’s character must consciously be imagining himself in circumstances he is not actually in. This is called Personalisation and Substitution. In the first he will recognise that there are experiences, relationships, involvements, desires, and situations arising in the screenplay that can best be expressed by finding a common ground with his own life’s desires, relationships, and involvements. The actor will find a greater affinity for these circumstances within the role by a direct association of that circumstance which is real to him because it stems from his own life and the one present in the script. for example, in the scene where Marty is at the bar with his friends, the actor can associate that with his own experiences with his friends at the bar. When he forms this direct association, he is using his concentration and imagination to personalise them (Dwight, 1981). Substitutions are concerned more closely with physical objects:
“An imaginative Substitution is a mental means whereby a stage property, an object or a situation, even another actor, can seemingly be ‘transformed’, literally substituted, for someone or something else. Actual inorganic objects can be transformed into organic objects.”
(Dwight, 1981: 127)
For example, a doll can be substituted for a baby. Substituting things for my actor to work with will allow him to dissociate himself to what he is looking at and focus more on the emotions he expresses to it.
I believe these techniques would allow me to secure the performance I am looking for from the actor of Marty, but other factors can aid this performance as well. I will make use of close-ups and use points of tension in the screenplay to bring out the actor’s performance. For example, when Marty is calling the girl that he went to the cinema with despite not liking her, I would use close-ups to really focus on his facial expressions when he gets rejected by even the girl he dislikes. I would like to see him sweating on screen. Mise-en-scène can also heighted the actor’s performance. Actually being placed in a ballroom with many beautiful women and men all dancing with each other can make Marty’s actor feel nervous and anxious. I would create every atmosphere as it would be in real life. At the ballroom the women must be dressed beautifully and at the bar every single aspect of a bar conversation must be kept real (low-lighting, loud people, football, drinks, 1950s style men, etc.). These will all help the actor to heighted his performance and make it more believable.
3)A section on how your approach would differ if you were seeking to develop the same character on stage as opposed to screen. (600)