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The Joel Stein Show

Re: Actors

What does it take to morph into a successful thespian? Not as much as you might think (don't tell Madonna).

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By Joel Stein

Of course Eminem can act. As movie reviewers across the nation repeated the phrase ''surprisingly, Eminem can act'' in their 8 Mile reviews, they seemed to forget they were equally shocked by Ice Cube, Reba McEntire, The Rock, and -- because film critics give up their jobs less often than Supreme Court justices -- Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And it's not just singers. Successful actors are made out of models, athletes, stand-up comics, porn stars, Fly Girls, and Republican senators from Tennessee. Anyone can act.

In the ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY cover story about how Eminem ''had to shut up and learn how to act,'' the only fact to back the claim up was this Eminem quote: ''The scenes started getting better once I started memorizing my lines. That's basically what it's about.'' Acting isn't a craft. Shoe cobbling and silversmithing are crafts. Acting is modeling with talking thrown in. With the sole exception of Heather Graham, anyone in the world can act. That's why so many people move to L.A. to become actors and so few to Houston to become astrophysicists. Sen. Fred Thompson, who is leaving the Senate and has become a regular on Law & Order, told TIME that ''there's nothing hard about acting except the long hours.'' Although I couldn't get Thompson on the phone, the Law & Order publicist said the show's makeup artist told producer Dick Wolf she wanted to act, and he's auditioning her for a part. This let me know two things: The makeup chick is smoking, and Law & Order needs a new publicist.

People still take classes and read books and talk about Method as if there is a skill set to learn. I've taken acting classes twice: once in an effort to pass a college Shakespeare requirement without writing and another time in high school in a misguided attempt to hang out with Kerri Holt. There was a lot of breathing and yelling and -- this was for five credits at Stanford -- giving each other back rubs. I fulfilled the Shakespeare requirement five times.

I called Robin Williams, a stand-up-turned-Oscar winner, to see how he made the transition, but his publicist didn't get back to me, so I spoke to baseball player-turned-Mr. Belvedere costar Bob Uecker, who I fear will now forever be known as the poor reporter's Robin Williams. Uecker said the skill was completely dependent on the writer and the director. ''When I was doing that Belvedere stuff I had a director who would hit you with a cattle prod to make you look surprised or hurt.'' During five years of Belvederedom, Uecker never studied acting in any way. ''I didn't even finish high school, so why would I go to acting class? That's the last thing I wanted to do.''

Worse than taking classes, movie stars indulge this facade of talent by ''exploring their craft'' with James Lipton, host of the Bravo series Inside the Actors Studio. Lipton, a dean of acting at New York's New School University, gave me a lot of excuses about Eminem. ''Rap and hip-hop develop an attitude, a kind of bravery that serves them well when they play a part.'' But what these performers are doing, he argues, isn't really acting. It's just being themselves. ''When you're talking about acting, you're not talking about playing one thing over and over again year after year. An actor like De Niro or Pacino would cut their wrists if they had to live that life.'' Being an acting professor, apparently, means you don't have much time to go to the movies.

In the end, Lipton's argument is that the masses cannot appreciate the good stuff, that real acting is done in Oregon Shakespeare festivals or live theater or some other place no one wants to go to. But people have been conditioned to bad sitcom writing, and they still notice it. How many times have you walked out of a movie and blamed bad acting? You blame the scripts. I was in two plays my senior year of high school: Bye Bye Birdie as Hugo Peabody and some afterschool special-y thing called Dolls where I played a guy who was tricked into losing his virginity by a slutty girl. Was I any good? No. But Gielgud couldn't make a 17-year-old boy angry about losing his virginity work. My point here, more than dispelling the myth of the acting craft, is to say that writing is really, really hard. So hard that my second column isn't too soon to ask for a raise.