Dragnet style acting

One of the real problems of extreme low budget cinema is not-very-good acting. There's acting where you can see they're acting, and, very often, actors say their lines very, very slowly.

I saw one locally produced video. I rented it from a local video store. It was an extreme case. It was a comedy, but it appeared that no one in it had ever seen a comedy. They apparently thought that the way to make a line funny was to say it very, very slowly, and to stretch out certain words for no reason.

There was only one line of dialog I remember. The person started out speaking slowly but normally, but as she got to the end of the sentence, she slipped into it. She said, "This is very bad for my self-esteeeeeeeeeeeeeeem."

Even if they had spoken normally, the movie would have stunk.

I've seen much better extreme low budget comedies. There was one made for $2,000 by a guy I used to know. It was rather amazing. It had pyrotechnics, some fairly impressive special effects. It had a scene of a car exploding, of a water tower collapsing, of alien space craft. The acting was pretty good. The writing was very good. It had a large cast. It had a real airplane with a strafing scene, a real fire engine, a real jail cell, and real cops. A fake bazooka though.

But there were two flaws. One is that it was filmed on regular VHS. The other is that the otherwise good actors talked too slow.

So. I realized the solution to slow talking and bad acting.

It was the Jack Webb approach.

Dragnet

Actors on Dragnet never memorized anything. Jack Webb didn't want them to.

One actress told how she was speaking her lines in an episode. Jack Webb stopped her.

"What are you doing? You're not reading your lines!"

"I don't need to read them. I memorized them."

"Well, stop it! Just read your lines!"

She started reading the teleprompter. But her eyes were moving back and forth. Jack Webb stopped her.

"It looks like your reading!"

"You TOLD me to read!"

"Okay, well, just go back to what you were doing!"

Harry Morgan told her that she was the first person on the show to get away with memorizing lines.

Another guy told about an actor who was acting. In all the anecdotes, Webb was barking orders at the actors.

"Cut!" Jack Webb yelled. "What are you doing?"

"I'm acting."

"Well, stop it!"

He gave the guy a newspaper.

"Read this!"

The guy started reading the newspaper the way people generally read newspapers. Flat, unemotionally.

"THAT'S what I want!"

When they're reading, they can talk faster. The results were usually pretty good----not any worse than on some other shows, anyway.

It also sped up production. An episode that normally would have taken a week to film could be done in a day and a half.

I've never tried it

I do wonder if unpaid actors would play along. They're appearing in your stupid movie. You have to give them something in return, and if it's not money, you have to give them the opportunity to do something they want. I don't know if reading a cue card in front of a camera is going to fulfill their dream of being an actor.

And, anyway, this sort of thing would only work in certain types of unambitious productions.

Dragnet usually cut back and forth between close-ups of the actors reading their lines as fast as they could. I don't like that kind of thing. I want medium wide shots.

In fact, Jack Webb made a couple of failed attempts to use his production methods in theatrical film.