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Margie Haber has been one of my oldest friends ever since we were each other’s students. She studied speech and voice with me at Music Center’s comedy workshop, while I took classes with her to learn her cold reading technique. Haber is one of the busiest and most well-respected cold reading teachers in town. A new house, her family, and the imminent publication of her book, fill the rest of life, making finding the time to talk to her no easy task. After much schedule juggling, we ultimately found some time to sit on her lovely backyard patio to chat art of cold reading.
Back Stage West/Drama-Logue: Did you always want to teach?
Margie Haber: I started out as an actress but I was always teaching at the same time. I love both. I taught speech at the Strasberg Institute and I am a degreed speech pathologist and audiologist. Essentially, that’s speech therapist.
BSW/D-L: What made you decide to give up acting?
Haber: I was up for the part of the daughter on Maude. It was between myself and Adrenne Barbeau, and I was very excited about it. I went on this major diet because the casting director thought I need to lose weight. It was my first really big audition. I was so green. I was freaking out. I told myself I wasn’t good enough I. I completely believed that I was not right and not ready for this. And I didn’t have any skills to keep me form psyching myself out. No one taught audition technique then. I had gone to some wonderful acting teachers, including Milton Katselas and Lee Strasberg, and I love studying, but no one taught auditioning. I could work on scenes and be great. But in audition, you sometime have to be good with three seconds of preparation. That was not something I ever learned.
Consequently, I had zero confidence and zero audition technique. I just had chutzpah. I was very available. I’ve always allowed people to see who I am and I am very connected to my emotions. I think I had an availability that [Maude producer] Norman Lear liked. And I had comedic timing, and that’s not something that can be taught. If you have timing, it can get you someplace. You may not always book the job, but it will get you on the running.
What I teach now is basically an audition cold reading workshop for people to learn the skills I didn’t have. It’s good for theatre, TV film, and commercials. I teach people how to break down a script in 10 steps. You see, everybody knows that when you audition, you have to work on a scene, but many actors don’t know where to begin and where to end. I cannot tell you how many of my students have been at auditions where the producer says, "you know, I really like what you did. You try this other scene?" So there you are having to do another scene right away. Obviously you want to have more time if you can, but I teach how to work on it quickly and thoroughly if you don’t.
BSW/D-L: Who have some of your students been?
Haber: I’ve taught Brad Pitt, Halle Berry, Stephen Collins, Tea Leoni, Laura Innes. Heather Locklear used to sit on the corner panicking because she hated auditions so much. Some of these people are wonderful actors but they freak out at auditions. To me, auditioning is an animal of its own nature- its own creation, its own beast.
BSW/D-L: Are you saying that there are wonderful actors who are not good readers?
Haber: That’s right. They can be brilliant once they’ve had the material for a while but they freak out at cold readings or auditions. And I teach auditioning, as well, not just cold reading. It’s a whole process, from coming in the door, taking the material and owning it. It’s about being able to marry the heart and the brain. The heart is the passion of auditioning, while the brain is the structure. Most people have tremendous passion, but they have no structure.
I used to have a guy in class whom was severely dyslexic. He scared everybody because he was so emotionally connected, yet he has no ability to read at all. Then when I taught him structure, he loved auditioning. By the way that’s one of the most important things I teach – to enjoy the process. If you’re not going to enjoy it, then find another profession. You may get three jobs a year, but you ‘re going to have 20 or 30 auditions. Why would you wait just, to enjoy the job when you can enjoy the audition? And to me. The only way to enjoy auditioning is through confidence. The only way you can be confident is by knowing how to prepare, and that’s what I teach – how to prepare correctly and to be specific.
BSW/D-L: You use a camera in you classes, don’t you?
Haber: I always use a camera. I find that actors have no thermometer. They think that they’re doing one thing and they’re actually doing another. They will go on an audition and they’ll say to their agent, "I was fabulous," and they were probably awful. Or they think they did terribly and they get a callback.
So my job is to help them realize what it is that’s coming across. Are their intentions clear? Are they physically free. I find it really interesting that when people audition, they have no idea how free they need to be physically. They stand erect, holding their sides like a foreign object or a tray they hold by their belly button. They always keep the paper really low and they are afraid to be physical, so their heads just go up and down from the camera to the page.
The opening beats of a scene should come from a previous moment of some physical life, some connection to you body. You don’t have to move your body all around, just be physically aware. If, for example, you were doing a scene and you are playing a doctor in an ER, if you are able to take a chair and put pressure on it as if it were a gurney you were pushing into the emergency room, that feeds you and makes you feel that you’re there, instead of just doing a reading. Don’t get me wrong, I go not believe in props at auditions and I don’t believe on doing any kind of pantomiming unless it is necessary,
An actor named Michael Easton was up for a series called Two. Michael came to me before the audition to try to figure out how difference between the two. So we decided that the bead twin smoked. Before the scene, he took an imaginary cigarette from physical work was enough to made him feel different from when he was playing the good twin. Physical life is so important in auditions and people forget that.
BSW/D-L: Can you talk about your 10 steps technique?
Haber: First, let me say that to use the 10 steps, it doesn’t make a difference how long you have to prepare. If you have 25 minutes, you can do these 10 steps. Of course, if you have two days, you’ll have more time to be deeper in the work. I don’t believe in winging it. I think you need to have a very specific structure – and then throw it away. If you think about the structure during the audition, then you’re not going to be present. You have to trust the work and then leave it alone. And to really trust imagery and sensory work. People give that up when auditioning. I can’t tell you how many people walk into my office and say, "You should see me when I do film or a play, I’m so much better." Of course, but they should do the same work for auditions, it just has to be quicker, and it has to be thorough.
So the steps are as follows. When you break down a scene, you have a system and structure. You always start with "Relationship." Who you are to me? Are you my friend? Are you someone who makes me happy of sad? Am I scared of you? When I am with you do I feel passionate? It’s the basis of all. I believe that actors should be detectives. If they can be detectives then they can dissect the scene will. The first thing is relationship. And that changes. The relationship in page 10 us going to be different from the one on page 40 or page 90. The relationships will change and you have to track that. Acting is an imitation of life we change our relationships all of the time. So start with that.
Then comes the "Intention." Know what you want from that other person. That also changes and the ways to get what you want change. Some actors walk in and they have very strong intentions. The whole scene becomes the intention. I lose the personality, the relationship, the history, because they’re hitting me so hard with the intention. Acting is like cooking soup; intention is just one of the ingredients.
Then come "History." The history of the relationship, the history of myself. Then, "personalization," which is, if this happened to me, how would I fell? You use sensory work to make that clear for you. If you haven’t studied sensory work, then you have to be very aware of your senses in life and how they make you react. Then actors’ fears are replaced by characters’ thoughts. If you’re having characters thoughts. There’s no room for actor fears.
Next there are the "Character Analyses," which are values, intellect, physical being, social, etc. then there’s "opening Beat" and "Transitions." And something I call "Core and Masking." Actors are always going on about their feelings: "If I’m not in pain, I’m not acting. I have to feel." Enough already with the feeling. I’m so sick of it. We don’t walk around showing all of our feelings all of the time. If we did, we’d be put in a mental hospital. You’re got to cover it. Only once in a while am I interested in seeing the pain and sadness.
"Humor" is number nine. It is so important. I don’t know why people think that they can leave that out. Everything on life has some type of irony of humor. Even when people are dying, there’s something humorous. There are light moments in life, even if they are ironic.
The last step is staying "Moment to Moment." Just throw it all away and be present, because that’s where it counts. If you’re not going to be present, then a scene’s not going to work.
BSW/D-L: Do you believe that people should memorize for auditions?
Haber: There are a lot of teachers I know that teach differently, but if you speak to casting directors, they agree that you do not have to memorize every single word. I reach people how to use the paper. They use it by making it a part of themselves rather than as if it shouldn’t be seen. It’s not a foreign object. It’s an extension of yourself. I give actors permission to stay on the paper longer than they think thy can.
Thy do this through what I call a "phrase technique." Thy stay on the paper for groups of words and come up for other groups. It’s very instinctual and very rhythmic. You chose moments to connect to you partner. You feel when to do that. There’s natural rhythm. As long as you keep your character’s life and intention when you go down on the paper, you’re fine. A lit of people will have a strong life going on and then as soon as they put their eyes on the paper, they lost it.
BSW/D-L: Do you find that there’s difference in teaching film technique to theatre actors?
Haber: I’ve had theatre actors who, in trying to adjust to film, say, "Oh, I have to be so small, so little, I can’t do anything." That’s not true, doing nothing doesn’t do it for you. Doing nothing means that you’re not giving yourself permission to use your personality, you just have to know the difference between film and theatre. Film is small, intimate medium, so your voce is going to be smaller. But it’s more like x-ray because they can see every truth or falseness that you project. When you look at them so closely that you can even see their intimate thoughts. All you need to do is to trust your thoughts, trust the intimacy of that medium and make containment an important part of it. It’s not about being smaller.
BSW/D-L: Let’s talk about your forthcoming book.
Haber: I’m so excited about it! The title’s How to Get the Part… Without Falling Apart. It’s coming out in the spring, it has wonderful audition stories.
BSW/D-L: Can you share one?
Haber: Well, Gabriel Byrne, who’s a brilliant actor, gave me a wonderful audition story which I’ll share. He said "When I went to London to become an actor, I was out of work for a year and it was very difficult that time for an Irish actor working in London to try and convince myself that the situation would ever change. After six months I began to despair. And I began to think that I would never, ever get that work. After nine months I was convinced that I should never be an actor. And coming up on a year, I was thinking about all kinds of employment.
"Then one day, I walk through a door and I got two jobs, tow movies on the same day, because I had changed my attitude, I no longer was in awe of the audition process or in fear of it, because I really didn’t care at that anymore. And I had learned a very valuable thing: to separate myself from my work. So that if my work was attacked, it didn’t necessarily mean I was a good person. I also stopped depending on my work to make me happy or sad. I tried to work on myself outside my work to try and make myself a rounded and interesting kind of human being. And that was very important. Because actors are taught that the only thing that’s important is acting and getting jobs and so forth. And life also goes on, you know?"
You may contact Margie Haber at:
971 N. La Cienega, Suite 206
LA, CA 90069
(310) 854-0870
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