This is a review of Margie Haber’s Cold Reading Classes at the Margie Haber Studios. Margie (and her teachers) offer classes on cold reading for the Los Angeles actor, although I’ve heard Margie travels around and does seminars out of LA once in a while. Margie also has a book on cold reading and has coached countless of celebrities and work-a-day actors.
Before a review of the studio, what is a cold read? A cold read is an audition where you are not given a huge amount of time to prepare. Typically a cold read is an audition where you are only given the sides (short part of the script with your lines) when you show up to the audition and you aren’t given the option or time of downloading your audition materials off the internet. The idea behind studying this technique is that you will be confronted with this scenario where you will be required to create a fully realized character and deliver lines perfectly with nothing but a few minutes to read a short section of the script. In reality this tends to happen most of the time with commercials and even then there are not going to be many lines to learn or deep characters to create. Still, it happens.
Let me start my (first ever) review by saying that in hindsight I think this class was pretty worthless. When I took the class it was incredibly expensive but recommended to me by dozens of people around LA. There are only a handful of “audition technique” teachers around Los Angeles and Margie is usually listed near the top of the heap. This may be because of her famous clients, her book or the thousands of students she’s taught but either way she is usually one of the first ones mentioned. Now, I’ve said this before but I think most acting classes are a waste of time. In a future review I’ll have some nice things to say about The Groundlings but for now let’s just say I think that there are few classes in which you can learn anything useful to your career as an actor. So there’s that problem.
Second, the quality of teaching at Margie’s is very hit and miss. I was unfortunate to have Barbara Gannen as a teacher. She was, bar none, the worst acting teacher I have ever experienced. Let me explain. Every class (except one) was run the same way. The actors came in, were given a script to read and then sent out. A few minutes later the actors would come in and do the script in front of a camera. After everyone emoted we would take a short break and then watch the tape together. The first thing Barbara did after showing the tape was to ask the class if they had any opinions on the matter. Let me skip to my third point and then I’ll come back to the second point. This would make more sense if I wasn’t numbering my points.
Third, there were no real standards as to what an “advanced” or “beginner” were at the studio other than having had the experience of paying huge sums of money to go through one class, then an “ongoing” class and after an amount of time be moved into a higher up class. I was placed in the “beginner class” which sounded fine to me because I had been in LA for a few years, had a few professional gigs and had been acting much of my life but only the past few years professionally. By any rational standpoint I was a “beginner” in the professional world. From what I could gather from my “beginner class” a beginner at Margie Haber’s was a person who had never acted in any capacity before (but woke up one morning and decided they would be a professional actor) or someone who had acted only in theater for a few years in high school/college. If there were three people in that class that had ever auditioned for a professional job in their lives I’ll eat my hat. After two classes I realized this and asked to be switched to a more advanced class. I explained, “I know how to act, I am not being challenged or even educated at this level.” Margie herself said, “no.” This was the only time I talked to or even looked directly at the great Margie Haber.
Back to class. After watching a tape of our audition Barbara would pause the tape and ask the class what was right and what was wrong. This was a class of people who had never acted before and certainly weren’t being well paid for their opinion. So that was a waste of time. After the students had their say Barbara would announce what was “right” and “wrong” with these scenes. That sounds like a point four.
Point four, she had been using the same materials for the past half-decade (at that point) and had decided exactly how each scene should be done. I’m not saying that I’m such an amazing actor that I always take a piece someone’s seen a billion times and blow their minds with a totally new rendition but there was no wiggle room. Often times she didn’t actually know the source of the material. If it was a sit-com and you played it like a sit-com she’d tell you that you needed to pause dramatically at certain points because she seemed to think it was a drama. The process would then repeat.
The little good I took out of this class were technical points. I learned to hold much stiller than I had on my earlier auditions and saw how much the camera amplifies little shifty movements. That’s something I could have done on my Flip. I didn’t need to fork out hundreds of dollars for this experience.
Let me pause here and say a few wonderful things about Margie Haber’s studio, since at this point everyone must think this place is a death trap. When I tell people these stories they all told me the same thing, “of course, Barabara is awful. You need to take classes with Jim Gleason or Annie Grindlay.” You’ll note from those links that both Jim and Annie have since left to coach on their own. I know Jim personally and have met Annie before and they’re both wonderful people and anyone looking for an audition coach/technique teacher could do no better than them. I haven’t taken classes directly from either so I can’t write full reviews, but let me say I’ve heard and experienced nothing but amazing things from them (mostly Jim, but that’s because I know him better). Most people told me these two teachers were better than the legendary Margie herself. Even though I took this class years ago and everyone says horrible things about Barbara, I was shocked today to find out she still works at Margie Haber’s.
At this point I could tell the story about how Barbara used “The Method” as she saw it to demand actors relive horrible memories and tragedies from their past for the benefit of a single pretend audition (where each person could only say one word) but I think I’ve made my point. The best way to learn how to audition is to audition. There’s no real substitute for it. The next best thing is taping yourself auditioning and then watching it and looking for technical things you can be doing better.
Taking a class where you’re told the “right way” to audition for a part isn’t helpful to anyone. It doesn’t allow you to learn how to figure out a script on your own for future auditions which may be the point. All the teachers could also coach your privately for your auditions and help you make the “right choices” for a fee. No thanks.
That’s right, this Friday (7/25/2008) at 8:30PM Eitan will be appearing on Nickelodeon’s