by ELMORE TERADONOVICH, Alternate Reality News Service Film and Television Writer
What do actors do when 73.763% of film and television productions are shut down due to uncontrollably rampant mongeeses running willy nelsonilly all over sets around the world? If you said, "Get a real job," shame on you for being so cynical. If you said, "Make lemonade," you reached for the wrong metaphor, but at least you made a good faith effort. The correct answer is, of course, "Become acting coaches."
But how do you find students when so many of your fellow actors are also out of work? You could swap lessons (you coach them one week, they coach you the following week), but the only thing that would do would be to test which of you is better at acting happy because, of course, none of you would be getting paid.
The only alternative to joining your uncle's haberdashery ("You should pardon me for asking, but what's wrong with making an honest living?" "Not now, Uncle Abe!") is to teach non-professionals. Fortunately, the Republican Party is paying top dollar for a particular kind of coaching for amateurs: trial crying preparation for those accused of killing people on the left.
"I was the coach for...let's call him K. R.," said Anthillonella Lucce, who has been a background actor for over 20 years, most notably having a speaking part on Star Blap: Disco Recovery. (Her line, "I...I don't know what you mean. I would never have confused the warped drive with the coffee maker, Captain!" was cut back to "I...I, Captain!" in editing, but it was still enough to get her into a whole new category on the Imaginary Movie DataBase.)
Kyle Rittenhouse ("I didn't name him," Lucce rudely interrupted. "For all you know, K. R. Could have been...Kode...Kode Rottenheiser.") shot three people, killing two. The defence wanted to put him on the stand, but only if doing so could help him gain the sympathy of the jury. One member of the team suggested he be taught how to write 12th century epic romantic poetry.
That's when they called on Lucce.
"Amateurs!" the acting coach complained. "You ask them to cry, and they sound like they're doing voice overs for a live action production of Dante's Inferno, and they produce enough tears to put out the fire, even if it was created by CGI! You try to get them to dial it back a little - you don't want to strain the credulity of the audience, after all - and they look at you like you just told them that nobody killed their dog!"
So, Rittenhouse didn't take her advice?
"Oh, no," Lucce shook her head. "Rittenhouse did dial it back. If he hadn't, members of the jury would have had to have been issued life preservers!"
Sylvain Accreshundisk, one of whose first students was Brett Kavanaugh ("B. K.!" Lucce interrupted. "He's not even your client!" I protested. "The need for confidentiality is universal!" Lucce argued.) and whose most recent student was Kim Potter (Lucce, perhaps sensing she had lost the argument, did not interrupt.), a police officer who killed an unarmed man when she mistook her baton for a gun, wholeheartedly agreed. "I advise my pupils to remember something that made them cry, whether it is the death of a pet tortoise from being run over by a speeding snail who didn't even have the decency to report the accident to the forest authorities, or the loss of a favourite boa scarf that it turned out years later had been 'borrowed' by a friend who neglected to tell you and returned it to you so threadbare you would have thought she had deliberately plucked it apart! Such sense memories can lead to believable sobbing, especially the second one."
Despite the unusual specificity of his examples, the point Accreshundisk, whose work off-Broadway was fabled (in the sense that it didn't happen the way the story was told, but was a cautionary tale for others), was making was more or less the same as the point Lucce had made: amateur performers make terrible cryers. Especially on the witness stand.
What of the fact that Rittenhouse was acquitted of the crimes he had been charged with and Kavanaugh made it to the Supreme Court? (Two out of three ain't bad.) Accreshundisk shrugged and answered "It's possible that the performances worked better live than they did recorded: the camera is more intimate, so it requires more subtlety.
Lucce shrugged even shruggier and answered, "I guess they know their audience!"