The Actualizer

New York Magazine/July 14, 2007
By New York Magazine

Giovanni Ribisi called me. Burt Reynolds asked me to call him at home. The director Joel Schumacher called me from Romania between takes for his next movie. Anne Archer and I played phone tag for two weeks. A-list, B-list, stars of stage, stars of screen, they were all eager to talk. The Tony winners John Glover and Tyne Daly. Edie McClurg, the dippy secretary in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." David Carradine.

Put the word on the street that you're writing about Milton Katselas, and every student he has ever had will want to tell you about the best acting teacher in the world, the man who took them from fresh-faced, straight-off-the-plane-at-LAX ingénues looking for work — commercials; God willing, someday a sitcom — to being real artists. They'll tell you about how he saved them from the failings of the artist's personality, like narcissism and drug addiction, and set them aright. They were born with the talent, but he gave them careers.

But there are dissenters too. Students have left Katselas's school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. Nobody ever told them to join, but they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists. Or the fact that Milton Katselas, the master himself, credits Hubbard for much of his success in life. And the assorted weirdness: one of Katselas's students works a day job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, where Tom Cruise and John Travolta study, and one zealous television star left the playhouse because she said she believed that Katselas wasn't committed enough to Scientology.

Before trying to metabolize this strange cocktail of Hollywood, dreams both deferred and achieved, and Scientology, consider the very sincere professions of faith in a bearded, baritone septuagenarian with a Mediterranean temper who began as a student of Lee Strasberg and became the teacher of Ribisi, Daly and Carradine; of Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Selleck, Tony Danza, Priscilla Presley, Patrick Swayze, Cheryl Ladd and hundreds more.

Richard Lawson, a Katselas student and occasional Scientologist, who now teaches at the playhouse, says that Katselas's teaching helped him cheat death in 1992 when his plane from LaGuardia crashed in Flushing Bay and he was submerged underwater. "I just got this inspiration to overcome it, to fight with everything I had to get out," Lawson told a reporter in 1998. "One of the things I attribute that to is the teachings of Milton." Anne Archer, who discovered Scientology at the playhouse nearly 30 years ago, says, "I have seen performances sometimes in that class that are so brilliant that they're better than anything I have seen on the stage or film." Her husband, the producer Terry Jastrow — also a Scientologist — says that Katselas changed the texture of his daily existence: "I go out in the world and look at human behavior now. I see a woman or man interacting with a saleslady, and I see the artistry in it. Life is an endless unspooling of art, of acting, of painting, of architecture. And where did I learn that? From Milton."

Most people in the Los Angeles acting community believe that the Beverly Hills Playhouse is a serious conservatory where actors train with a master teacher, while others think it's a recruitment center for Scientology. I wondered if it might be both. What if the playhouse was a serious conservatory, and Katselas a master teacher, not in spite of Scientology but because of it?

I first attended Katselas's weekly master class on a Saturday morning in April. I took my seat in his small theater on South Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills well before the 9:30 start time. I was stargazing — Justina Machado from "Six Feet Under" was there; Beth Grant from "Little Miss Sunshine" was there — when promptly at 9:30 the class rose to its feet in a standing ovation. Katselas had entered by the door near stage left, and he was proceeding slowly, with the shuffle of a man vigorous but in his 70s, to his chair on a landing a few rows up from stage right, offering small, regal waves as he went. Nobody sat until he did.

"What is this, Easter?" he asked.

"Passover," several students answered at once.

"What is this class, 82 percent Jewish — the rest goyim?" People laughed, and at that the lights dimmed, then came up, and a scene began.

And one thing very quickly became clear: Milton Katselas is an uncommonly good teacher.

In the first scene, Jack Betts, whom I later placed as the judge in "Office Space," played the actor John Barrymore, from the one-man show "Barrymore," made famous on Broadway by Christopher Plummer. I thought that Betts captured both the dissolution and the grandeur of a great man in his pickled decline, but after the scene, when Betts sat at the edge of the stage to receive his critique, Katselas made clear how much better the performance could have been.

A Katselas critique is a respectful dialogue; he is never mean, but he is challenging. Katselas wanted Betts to find the quieter notes in Barrymore. One place to start, he thought, might be in the song with which the scene begins: Barrymore singing "I've Got a Girl in Kalamazoo." As Betts had sung it, the song was brassy, vaudevillelike: "A! B! C! D! E! F! G! H! I got a gal in KAL-amazoo!" Katselas had him sing it over again, several times, suggesting that he turn the final syllable, the zoo, into a drunken, slurred, tossed-off note of disdain. After several more takes of the song, Katselas wasn't satisfied, but it seemed that Betts was getting there. The Barrymore that emerged at the end of 45 minutes was stranger, sadder, perhaps a bit louche, less of a stereotype and altogether more believable than what Betts had delivered at the beginning of class.

In many ways Katselas embodies what we expect from the acting pedagogue. He has a sexual, dangerous edge — I wasn't shocked when he confessed that he had dated several of his students. He looks unkempt, but deliberately so, very bohemian. He swears a lot, as if perpetually burdened by his inability to wring better performances from his students. But although he believes in sex and danger and anger, Katselas never sounds like a Freudian in search of those emotions, and in this regard he breaks the stereotype.

The great American acting teachers, like Strasberg and Stella Adler, have typically insisted that there is a role for an actor's emotional history in his or her performance. In various versions of Strasberg's "Method," the actor uses "sense memory" or "affective memory" to relive actual experiences — the death of a parent, an episode of sexual violence, the birth of a child — to summon tears, horror, elation or some other emotion for the character. Acting classes can thus resemble talk therapy, as actors, lost in the moment, weep, scream or cackle. But Katselas is adamant that he doesn't care what his students have been through. Digging into the past might work for some students, and as an avowed pragmatist Katselas tells actors to use whatever works. But he mostly gives actors bits of physical direction rather than asking probing questions about their motivation. In one scene, he had two lovers touch their foreheads together, injecting a note of true intimacy into what had been pure farce; in another, he told an angry junkie to clench his hair in his fists and yank, and all of a sudden the actor found the rage that had been missing from his performance.

"The purpose of the acting art is not to bring about therapy," Katselas told me later. "One taps their own experience of love or violence and tries to pull from it whatever is possible in terms of an association or understanding, but there is also the imagination and the character and the writing. The personal thing is always very strong and can be created, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you go into the traumas of your life in order to get it."

Is this teaching Scientology? Not at all. But it happens to be quite consonant with Scientology, which is famous for its opposition to psychiatry and psychotherapy. (A group founded by the Church of Scientology operates a museum in Hollywood called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.) The only time I heard Katselas quote L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology founder, in class, he was oblique about it. Four students had just performed a scene in which two college students, about to have a one-night stand, are suddenly, in an absurdist, "Oleanna"-like twist, interrupted by lawyers who want them to agree in advance how far their petting may go. In his critique of the scene, Katselas railed against the legal profession: he wanted the actors to understand that this was more than a funny scene; it was also an indictment of how litigiousness, as well as the fear of it, separates us from our desires. Lawyers are just one group to whom Americans give over their autonomy, and these undergrads, having let the lawyers in, needed to push them back out and take responsibility for their own actions. It is not therapy that reunites us with our authentic selves but willpower, properly directed. "A cat that I study says you are responsible for the condition you are in," Katselas told the room. "Period."

That "cat" is Hubbard. But Katselas never says so, and it's not clear that he ought to. In the context of the scene critique, Hubbard's seems a germane aphorism, one that might help the actors get a better feel for the shifting alliances onstage. In other arts, it's easy to gauge proficiency, if not genius. We know what technically correct music sounds like, and writers have rules of grammar and syntax to follow or to tactfully violate. But what makes a good acting performance? How do you disappear into a character? In addition to being the most ineffable of arts, acting depends on extraneous accidents of fate, like the right look. And it's the only art that you can't master alone; there's not much market for soliloquies. With all those uncertainties, a fine performance, let alone a paycheck for it, can seem terrifyingly elusive. It must be the rare actor who can dismiss supernatural aids, whether Scientology or superstitious incantations like "Break a leg," without a slight loss of nerve.

When David Carradine met Milton Katselas at an audition in the mid-1960s, there were 50 people sitting in the back rows of the theater, just watching Katselas watch actors. "He already had a cult fame, these followers who were like disciples," Carradine says. "He was the hot young director. I read the play, and I really hated it, but I went to the audition anyway." Katselas was barely 30 years old.

Born to Greek immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1933, Katselas moved to New York straight after graduating from the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Mellon). There was no period of ignominy, no nights of waiting tables. He had seeded the town for his arrival. "I told the guy at Carnegie that within a week, I'd be working with Kazan and I'd be studying with Strasberg," Katselas told me last spring when we met at his house in West Hollywood. "Prior to that, when I was still in university, I was walking in the streets of New York, just visiting over holiday, and I saw Kazan, and I said to a guy, 'Is that Kazan?' and he said, 'Yeah.' " Elia Kazan was fast becoming a legend. He directed "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1951; "On the Waterfront" would come in 1954 and "East of Eden" the year after. "I ran after him; I lost him; I found him; he went up in a building," Katselas said. "I had my back to the building, looking away from the building. Then this guy taps me on the back, says, 'What do you want?' It's Kazan. He went up, knew that I was chasing him. We spoke a little bit in Greek. I told him I was in university. He says: 'When you come from university, look me up. I'll give you a job.' " When Katselas arrived in New York, Kazan kept his promise and hired him as his gofer during the Broadway run of "Tea and Sympathy."

The charmed life got more charmed. Strasberg let Katselas into his class at the Actors Studio. Kazan sent his young Turk — or, rather, Greek — to the stage director Joseph Anthony, who hired him. Katselas talked himself into a job with Joshua Logan, the great director of movies like "Picnic" and "Bus Stop." Katselas began teaching and directing, and in 1960, at Edward Albee's request, he directed the American premiere of "The Zoo Story" for the Provincetown Playhouse. His greatest success, though, was "Butterflies Are Free," a timely play about a blind Manhattanite who falls for a free-spirited hippie, which opened in 1969 and ran for more than 1,000 performances. Blythe Danner won a Tony for her performance, and Katselas was nominated for his direction. In the early 1970s, Katselas moved to California to direct "40 Carats" with Liv Ullmann and the film version of "Butterflies Are Free," in which Goldie Hawn took Danner's role.

Katselas never made it back to New York to live. In his telling, his migration sounds like an inevitable progression: Hollywood beckoned; he began teaching in California; it agreed with him. The truth is somewhat more complicated: New York was where Katselas succumbed to, then defeated, an addiction to methamphetamines; it's where his first marriage, to an alcoholic, began to fail. California must have represented an escape and a fresh start. In 1983, he returned East to direct "Private Lives" with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton but was fired during the tryouts before the show reached New York. "I got along great with Burton, and he told me I was one of the few directors he ever accepted notes from," Katselas says. "But I didn't get along with Elizabeth, and I'd rather not go into why." He never worked on the East Coast again.

In California, Katselas met L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer and amateur scientist whose teachings form the basis of Scientology. Scientology promises its adherents the ability to become "clear," ridding themselves of negative memories, or "engrams," that retard their abilities. After becoming clear, they can proceed up "the bridge to total freedom," realizing their full potential as "thetans," spirits trapped in bodies. One mechanism of advancement is "auditing," in which the Scientologist, in conversation with a church "auditor" and hooked up to a machine called an "E-meter," deletes engrams; there are also church classes like "Personal Efficiency" and "Life Repair." As a Scientologist proceeds "up the bridge," he can gain access to esoteric knowledge, like how we thetans got here. Scientology, it has been widely reported, teaches that 75 million years ago the evil alien Xenu solved galactic overpopulation by dumping 13.5 trillion beings in volcanoes on Earth, where they were vaporized, scattering their souls. (John Carmichael, the president of the Church of Scientology of New York, told me, "That's not what we believe." He refused to discuss the church's esoteric teachings, though he did claim that Scientology's beliefs about the origins of the universe and mankind "follow the much older tradition of Eastern religion dating back to the Vedic hymns.")

What most Americans know of Scientology is the alien myth, parodied on a famous "South Park" episode; or the German government's view that Scientology is less a religion than a cult with totalitarian overtones; or the church's winning fight for tax-exempt status despite the fees it charges, which for many courses are thousands of dollars; or reports in The Times and elsewhere that while battling with the I.R.S., church lawyers hired private investigators to find dirt on federal employees. Millions are also aware of the religion's celebrity practitioners, like John Travolta, Isaac Hayes and Beck. But for most people who dabble in Scientology, including dozens of Beverly Hills Playhouse students, the religion boils down to two rather prosaic practices. There is the auditing, which, despite Scientologists' angry denials, is a lot like the psychotherapy they abhor, and there are the classroom teachings. In class, Scientologists learn Hubbard wisdom like "What's true is what's true for you" and "Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication," as well as practical advice about the importance of working hard, not blaming others and communicating clearly. Scientology is a quintessentially American mix of prosperity gospel, grandiose hopes for technology, bizarre New Age mythology and useful self-help nostrums.

Katselas was introduced to Scientology in 1965 and has been studying it, off and on, ever since. He has achieved the state of clear, and gone well beyond it; he is, he told me, an Operating Thetan, Level 5, or O.T. V. According to "What Is Scientology?" published by the church, being an Operating Thetan means that you "can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance. . . . It doesn't mean one becomes God. It means one becomes wholly oneself." But despite his advanced level of Scientology training, only "on five or six occasions," Katselas says, has he urged a student to explore Scientology.

Others confirmed that Katselas does not proselytize. "I didn't know he was a Scientologist until four days ago," says Burt Reynolds, who has been a guest teacher at the playhouse. "The Scientologists I know, the actors I know, practically want to drag me there. He's never brought it up." Katselas's devotion to Hubbard notwithstanding — he keeps a picture of L.R.H., as Scientologists call him, on a table in his office — he makes rather modest claims for Scientology. "It certainly helped me," he says. "It helped me as a painter. I started doing a lot of painting, did the Scientology, and it opened up my visual sense. And it helped me in communication, endlessly, and that's a vital thing in teaching or directing."

It was in precisely those two areas, painting and communication, in which I thought I could divine Scientology's influence. Katselas thinks highly of himself as a visual artist. He maintains his own studio, employs a full-time assistant who helps with his sculpture and mixed-media works and has had a handful of shows (three in a gallery that he owns). And although he has no architectural training, he has collaborated with a local architect, offering ideas for the design of two houses in the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles; one of the houses, it so happens, was purchased by Apl.de.Ap, one of the singers for the Black Eyed Peas. Katselas does not do the blueprints for the houses he "designs," just as he does not do all the technical work for his art. Katselas has no reputation among critics of painting or architecture. But he seems to have a strong belief in the multifarious nature of his genius — he eagerly showed me the houses he has helped build and gave me a long tour of his art studio — and that is typical of Scientologists, who are taught to think of their potential as limitless.

As for communication, Katselas is, like Hubbard, fairly obsessed with the idea that if only people communicated better, the world's problems would disappear. Katselas told me that if he sat down the warring parties in Israel, he could broker a truce — a comment that nicely marries Scientology's human-potential hubris and its faith in communication as the greatest virtue. Katselas also shares Scientologists' admirable habit of looking words up in dictionaries. Every teacher at the playhouse has a dictionary handy and has actors learn words they don't know, and Katselas uses numerous dictionary definitions in "Dreams Into Action," the self-help book he published in 1996 and hawked on "Oprah." The book acknowledges Hubbard "for his wisdom, writings and inspiration" and carries blurbs from, incongruously, Mario Cuomo and Molly Yard, the former president of the National Organization for Women.

It might seem odd, then, that Katselas and the Scientologists have been somewhat at odds. I asked Katselas if it was true that the actress Jenna Elfman left the playhouse because she found him insufficiently committed to the church. He confirmed the rumor, hesitantly. "In a certain way, yes," he said. "I don't know what really occurred there. She was going to be fully involved with Scientology at a certain point in her life. I don't know if that crept back in." (Gary Grossman, who has worked at the playhouse for more than 20 years, also said he thought that Elfman wanted to move Katselas "up the bridge" in Scientology, though he added that "the only ones that would know would be Milton and Jenna." Elfman never returned calls that I made to her publicist.) "But I've got to do what I'm going to do," Katselas continued, "and I'm not going to do it because somebody tells me I should do it, and it doesn't matter what somebody else thinks is right."

Katselas's stubbornness, and his sheer ego, are the keys to understanding his relationship to Scientology. He takes what he can from the teachings, but he can be rather contemptuous of the church. "I know [Hubbard] made a statement once that Scientology is not the people in it," Katselas said. "Scientology is a technology that he's developed that is really powerful, and these artists respond to it because it cleans up certain things that they've looking to or that they're dealing with, and that helps them in their quest or in their way, and there's no doubt of that." But, he added: "I don't go to parties, I don't go to Scientology events. I just don't do it. And they're not enthralled with me because of that." Katselas agreed that some Scientologists were "zealots," by which he might have meant that for them Scientology was primary, whereas for Katselas Scientology is instrumental. This is a man, after all, who had the chutzpah to chase down Elia Kazan on the street and ask for a job. Scientology didn't convince Milton that he had unlimited potential; it just confirmed what he already suspected.

Katselas was born with the ego and the talent, but Adam Donshik wasn't. Donshik, who first told me about Katselas three summers ago, is an old high-school classmate of mine. We were part of the small theater crowd, and we acted together in "Guys and Dolls" and "Gypsy." He had a lovely voice and was always cast in the musicals, but he was an indifferent actor. We hadn't spoken for more than 10 years when in 2003 I flipped to the ABC drama "Threat Matrix" and saw him playing a terrorist. Eight months later, I was in Beverly Hills on an assignment, and we met for a drink. His hair was a little thinner, but he looked great, all tan and muscled. The West Coast suited him. The career was going great, he said. Life was going great. "You want to know why?" he asked. "Scientology. I've become a Scientologist!" He smiled as if to acknowledge the improbability of this Jewish kid from New England finding Scientology. He had gotten involved through friends at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where he studied.

Donshik now works for the playhouse as an admission interviewer, acting in TV series on the side. Of a total playhouse payroll of about a dozen teachers, interviewers and assistants, nearly all, I discovered, had at least dabbled in Scientology. Some, like Allen Barton, who is executive director of the school, are committed Scientologists; others, like Rick Podell and Gary Grossman (who starred with Tom Hanks in "Bachelor Party"), have taken just one class and do not consider themselves Scientologists. Jocelyn Jones and Gary Imhoff, former faculty members, are Scientologists, as is Jeffrey Tambor, an actor best known as the imprisoned patriarch George Bluth Sr. on "Arrested Development" and who was Katselas's heir apparent until he abruptly quit the faculty several years ago. (Katselas blamed Tambor's wife: "I think she felt there was a tension between her and me and the school, and I think Jeffrey was caught in the middle of it.")

Of the students, I easily located a dozen who are Scientologists, and based on interviews, I concluded there are probably several dozen more in the current student body of 500. Like their teachers, some students are devout while others indulge a mild curiosity and then drop off. "I went down and took a couple of classes," David Carradine said. "I'm no kind of Scientologist, but I've been around it enough to know it's a very intelligent thing." This being Hollywood, some students, like Giovanni Ribisi, were Scientologists before they came to the playhouse.

Of course, other students worry less about how Scientology will help their acting than how it will help their careers; there's a widespread perception in Hollywood that Scientology is a networking tool. People notice that, say, two stars of "My Name Is Earl," Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee, are Scientologists; that the Scientologist Kirstie Alley did a guest appearance on Elfman's "Dharma and Greg"; that Ribisi has popped up on "My Name Is Earl." "I knew someone at the playhouse who joined Scientology because she thought it would help her career," one agent told me. "She thought Jenna Elfman would be her best friend." And actors who study at the Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue do bump into the stars, chat with them, even have lunch with them at the restaurant. How bad could that be for a career?

All religious communities can be networks for business contacts, but Scientology makes a special pitch to celebrities, and church literature is filled with testimonials from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and other stars. According to a pamphlet I was given at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood (there are eight Celebrity Centres, in cities from Paris to Munich to Nashville), the center was founded in 1969 "to take care of those who entertain, fashion and take care of the world . . . the artists, the leaders of industry, politicians, sports figures and the like." As a very successful hack sci-fi writer, Hubbard was something of a junior-varsity celebrity himself, and he had great esteem for his betters. "Hollywood makes a picture which strikes the public fancy, and tomorrow we have girls made up like a star walking along the streets of the small towns of America," Hubbard once wrote. "A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists."

Of course, the majority of those who study at Celebrity Centres are not actual celebrities, and for many of them the chance to be valued for their art alongside more successful peers, the Cruises and the Travoltas, must be salubrious for the ego. At the centers, the agent can join the same exclusive club as his client, the editor as his writer. And all of them can bask in a theology that holds, again to quote Hubbard, that "one of the greatest single moves which could be made to advance and vitalize a culture such as America would be to free, completely, the artist from all taxes and similar oppressions."

But if a few students have appreciated the playhouse for its connections to Scientology, others have left alienated. "I have clients who left there because of all the Scientology," one longtime Hollywood agent told me. Terrell Clayton, who had a recurring role on "Six Feet Under" and studied at the playhouse for five years, says that the pressure to study Scientology is subtle. "It's not like while you're being critiqued they say you need to join Scientology," he says. "It's small conversations you might have with colleagues or fellow students." He now studies with Ivana Chubbuck, a highly regarded teacher who wrote "The Power of the Actor." Chubbuck has kind words for Katselas. "It seems when people come from his studio to work with me, they seem to be pretty good actors, so he must be doing something right," she says. "In terms of how he operates as a Scientologist or a human being, I would be remiss in saying something based on rumor or hearsay."

And then Chubbuck told me something unexpected and clarifying: "If he's putting something else he does in his teaching, if it works, it works." In other words, even if he were dispensing Scientology-flavored pedagogy, even if his example did lead some young actors to the Celebrity Centre to spend their dollars — earned at union scale, working bit parts in Lifetime movies — on classes meant to bring about a state of clear, that might not be a bad thing, not if it helped their art.

Katselas is adamant that he does not want a cult around himself. "It worries me," he said when I mentioned that his students seem to worship him. But he collects disciples. His personal chef, art assistant and longtime girlfriend are all students or former students (the latter two have studied Scientology). He knows what's best for others too: he threatened to fire his art assistant, Richard Shirley, unless Shirley lost weight. ("He's in my life; it's very much my business," Katselas said. "Everything is everybody's business. Our fellows are our responsibility.") And he cultivates the image of a man with almost magical powers. "Dreams Into Action," his motivational book, is full of promises for future greatness, if only people would heed his words. He has style: he drove me around in a restored vintage Mercedes. He's an entrepreneur, a real estate investor, even a partner in Skylight Books, one of L.A.'s best independent bookstores. He once got drunk with the sculptor David Smith. He has the wit of Thurber, the charm of Zorba. According to one Scientology text, man "is not only able to solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also to achieve new states of awareness he may never have dreamed possible." Katselas seems to have achieved such a state — what student could be blamed for wanting to drink his elixir?

On my last day in Los Angeles, I saw Adam Donshik play Hamlet in class. It was the scene in which he kills Polonius and fights with his mother. Katselas wasn't impressed — his critique was barbed — but Adam was worlds better than in high school. Even accounting for age and maturity, something else had intervened. An unusual teacher had given Adam both a religion and a talent for acting. If the two were somehow inseparable, it might not pay to try to pull them apart. I could mock Adam for following the man or for following the faith. But perhaps it would be wiser to simply watch him act.