INT. LOS ANGELES THEATER - DAY
               Two actors shuffle scripts on a stage as a class of hopefuls
               look on.  The guru steeples her fingertips and nods.

                                   JOHN
                             (reading)
                         It's a dress.  Why won't you wear
                         it?

                                   LINDA
                             (reading)
                         I hate it... I hate the way... you
                         proposed to me.

                                   JOHN
                             (reading)
                         So what are you saying?

                                   LINDA
                             (reading)
                         I'm saying that --

                                   GURU
                         Okay, let's just stop.  One of the
                         mistakes I see here is straight out
                         of theater, or rather, I should
                         say, community theater.  There's no
                         connection.  No connection at all. 
                         You see how you're reading away
                         from one another?  Totally amateur. 
                         This is El Lay.  That sort of thing
                         will get you kicked out of an
                         audition, quick quick quick.  How
                         much fundamentals have you had?

                                   LINDA
                         Um... I don't know?

                                   GURU
                         You?

                                   JOHN
                         What do you mean by fundamentals?

                                   GURU
                         Ah.  I see.  Basic motivation. 
                         Scene, counter-scene.  Mind-sense
                         memory.  I see so many actors come
                         in, so many actors across the
                         United States, and they don't have
                         their basics.  You gotta ask the
                         fundamentals.  In this scene, what
                         is it that you want?  What do you
                         want to accomplish?  How do you
                         feel?  Do you love them?  I run a
                         three-day workshop, by the way, on
                         these issues.  We really get into
                         the details of the emotions.  And
                         it's a non-judgemental place, I
                         tell you.  A place for actors to
                         free themselves.  And their
                         emotions.  We accomplish some great
                         things there.

               Guru holds up a booklet labelled "Art Is."

                                   GURU
                         This is my book of poetry, it's
                         called "Art Is."  "Art Is" came
                         from a pretty personal place, I can
                         tell you.  I believe in the healing
                         power of acting.  And I think that
                         comes through pretty clearly in the
                         poetry.  That's the essence of
                         poetry, is Art.  And Art Is.  Well. 
                         Let's start the scene again.

               John and Linda shuffle pages.

                                   JOHN
                             (reading)
                         It's a dress.  Why won't you --

                                   GURU
                         Okay, stop.  I want you to look at
                         her, and say, "I love you, wear the
                         dress."

                                   JOHN
                         I love you.  Wear the dress.

                                   GURU
                         Look at him.  Say, "I love you, I
                         won't wear the dress."

                                   LINDA
                         I love you.  I won't wear the
                         dress.

                                   GURU
                         Again.

                                   JOHN
                         I love you.  Wear the dress.

                                   LINDA
                         I love you.  I won't wear the
                         dress.

                                   JOHN
                             (breathy)
                         I love you, wear the dress --

                                   LINDA
                             (breathy)
                         I love you, I won't wear the dress 
                         -

                                   GURU
                         Start the scene.

                                   JOHN
                         It's a dress.  Why won't you wear
                         it?

                                   LINDA
                         I hate it... I hate the way... you
                         proposed to me.

                                   GURU
                         There, we have a connection.  And
                         the most important part of the
                         connection is learning to play
                         love.  How do you play love?  How
                         do you play love for a person
                         you've never met before in your
                         life?  It has to come from
                         somewhere.  It has to come from a
                         personal experience.  You have to
                         make it your own.  I teach an
                         advanced course -- and granted,
                         you're still very new, but some of
                         my five-year and six-year students
                         make the cut -- where you can pop
                         in and out of love.  This is the
                         key thing.  This is what the
                         casting agents are looking for. 
                         What if you don't love?  Where's
                         the interest?  I'm asking you a
                         question.
                                   JOHN
                         Um...
                                                         FADE TO BLACK.

As you right well pointed out, actors are an insecure lot, roughly saddled with the need for artistic and personal validation. Given these market forces, and the number of fresh-faced young girls arriving in L.A. each summer, it’s impossible to imagine that a profitable artistic-guru industry would not spring up.

All professional acting gurus have a deep conflict of interest: I’ll tell you how to act, how to find your character and make your art and get rich and break into an upcoming Paramount Pictures release, so long as you buy my tapes and attend my workshops and and pay for my back office.

“Without talent or ability one must not go on the stage. In our organized schools of dramatic art it is not so today. What they need is a certain quantity of paying pupils.” That sounds like it was written two weeks ago, but Stanislavski actually wrote it in 1925.

There is no more important choice for the aspiring artist than the choice of guru. And most artists make this choice far too hastily. The math is simple: if you emulate a guru, you will, in the optimal case, achieve the results that the guru has achieved.

The acid test for any guru — religious, political, or artistic — should be the following: What have you done recently? Not what have your students done, not what did you do 30 years ago in a Boston regional theater, not what do you have a romantic vision of yourself doing… but, simply, what have you done recently?

Nearly all modern artistic gurus fail miserably by this standard. They tend to have recently published poetry on web sites, or at best, supervised three-day workshops.

If you don’t know how to do something, start by copying someone who does it with fine success, by your definition of what constitutes success.

Here are the artistic gurus that have been most influential on my life.

Everett Chambers. A short, curmudgeonly grumpus of a director, pushing seventy-five… crotchety, sharp and very, very funny. Directed me in two plays. The producer of the “Columbo” TV series and about a dozen movies-of-the-week, mostly for ABC. Directs on his feet.

Keith Johnstone. Wrote “Impro,” the most worthwhile book I’ve ever read on the acting process. Invented several key improvisation formats that morphed into popular television shows.

With this new litmus paper in hand, let’s return to letter three and our man Rilke. “Let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism — such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reaches as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just towards them.” Rilke is oblivious to the fact that he himself is, in this very paragraph, writing aesthetic criticism. Were we to follow his instructions exactly, we should stop reading his letter right away.

But the most telling bit of the letter is not his general artistic advice — “I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” — but rather the closing of the letter, where we learn What He Has Done Recently: “Finally, as to my books, I would like best to send you all that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, when once they have appeared, no longer belong to me. I cannot buy them myself — and, as I would so often like, give them to those who would be kind to them.” I am a bad writer and a worse guru, but I can surely afford to give away my own books.

Let’s not be too ad-hominem against Rilke. And I am fully aware that I am judging the quality of his life by my own standards of success. And he clearly has no specific desire to be a quoted authority on the grandeur and depth of the artistic process — he never asked to be a guru. And this is a private correspondence.

But if we follow his advice on how to be an artist, should we be particularly surprised if we achieve his results?

Letter One: “You ask whether your verses are good. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.”

Up until 1930 or so, the creative process was mostly solitary. Storytellers went into the great hibernation or trance that permitted them to spin out a story on the page. In the golden age of Hollywood however, a sea change occurred in the way by which popular art is developed. It became too expensive and too risky for creativity to be dependent only on one perception of what is “good” and “bad.”

And so, popular writing, and art in general, became fundamentally collaborative.

Collaborative art is agony. For a young creator, there is no deeper hell than to have their art audited. But the proof is in the product: q.v. Casablanca, arguably the best movie ever written, with a screenplay that was poked and prodded and argued over by three very competent writers, Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Their tension and disagreement over what constituted “good writing” produced a fuller, more considered work than any of the three could have produced individually. And there are other forms of art that are by definition collaborative — you can scrub the invisible blood alone in your basement, if you like, but unless there’s an audience, you ain’t Lady Macbeth and it ain’t theater.

The hallmark of the modern commercial artist is his ability to accept and incorporate criticism. Were we plumbers or architects, we would never refuse our customer’s request to redo the project. We’d simply nod, apologize, and bill more hours. So it is with commercial artists. Commercial artists have a sufficiently thick skin to take criticism, interpret it, and layer it into their art without whining or throwing things.

Commercial artists can do this because they see themselves as distinct from their work products. The secret mental gymnastic: a critique against the art is not leveled at the artist. It’s against the art, which is distinct from its creator. For the dedicated artist, acting can always be changed; writing can always be rewritten, and no art is ever completed; it is only abandoned.

It is fallacious to believe that an artist can only accomplish art through solitude. Art is consummated only when it is understood, and the muses themselves beg to be whored out.

Rebecca, the director, flipped through a script. Katie asked me, “How old am I? Guess.”

“No way I’m gonna guess,” I said. “Any answer I give is wrong. This is a dangerous game.”

“Come on, guess,” she said again.

“Um? Twenty three?” I asked, and Katie laughed. I said, “No? Twenty seven?”

“I just turned twenty-one,” she said.

At this instant I stopped time and said: “Damn. I guess I have Hollywood to thank for what we’re about to do. I’m old enough to be your father, genetically speaking. All thirty-six year old guys fantasize about making out with twenty-one year old girls, so technically I should be horny as a three-horned ram, but there’s at least a continent and one or two oceans between the fantasy and the deed. When it’s on television, it’s culturally acceptable, but this is not pre-recorded; here we are. It’s just that you’re barely a woman yet, and so I feel like the oldest creepiest most uncomfortable guy in the world right now.”

“Did you say something?” asked Katie.

“No,” I said.

“How old are you?” Katie asked me.

“I will die before I speak the truth,” I said.

“So are you two ready to block the kissing scene?” said Rebecca, one finger in the script.

Tonight: dinner at Typhoon in Los Angeles. Appetizer: crickets. And I don’t mean like cucumbers cut in the shape of crickets or any such cutesy chi-chi crap like that; I mean we ate a big plate of deep-fried motherfucking insects. These were little bitty crickets, each one about an inch long or so, deep fried in butter and oil, with a big mound of shoestring garlic fries. After we tried the crickets, we pushed the potatoes aside and fished around with chopsticks at the bottom of the bowl for the rest of the crickets, and we munched them like popcorn. You’ll try crickets for the Fear Factor value, but you’ll stay with ’em for the taste. Crickets: the other other other white meat.

Basically, anything in the world deep-fried with enough butter and garlic and salt is bound to be pretty yummy.

We went to go see the opening night of a black-box production of “That May Well Be True,” a new play by Jay Reiss, who is one of the guys behind “Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” At the post party, a drunken industry something-or-other dude named Scott pulled me aside. “You’re an actor?”

“At times,” I said. “Sometimes I write.”

“Anything for TV?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, I wrote one season for this tiny UPN show you’ve never heard of called Seriously –”

“First rule in L.A.,” said Scott, waving his drink at me. “Never roll your eyes! Hay!” Scott collared all the actors in the show and brought them over to me. “This is John from San Francisco. He’s thinking of coming down here and being an actor. What would you tell him? To encourage him to move down to here from San Francisco? As professional actors? What do you tell him?”

The actors looked a little pained. “Don’t you fucking take any work from me,” said one.