If I Were Inside the Actor's Studio with James Lipton

[This is a post in a series.  You may wish to read the introduction to the series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

We begin our classroom with the questionnaire that my hero Bernard Pivot popularized for 26 glorious years.
— James Lipton

James Lipton was probably the first person I ever heard interview someone that made me really care about what the answers were.  Up until then, I was seeing people like Johnny Carson or even (in my youth) Merv Griffin talking to celebrities, and I mostly didn’t care—neither about the questions nor the answers.  Lipton was the one that drew me in.  Previously, I could barely stand to watch an actor get “interviewed” for 5 minutes.  After I discovered Inside the Actor’s Studio, I was watching it for an hour at a time.  Primarily this is because Lipton is a genius interviewer, almost certainly unmatched in our time.  He was such a cultural phenomemon that he became a running skit on Saturday Night Live, with Will Ferrell doing a spot-on impression (which Lipton reportedly loved).  He was famous for meticulous notes, often surprising actors with his detailed knowledge of their careers (on more than one occasion knowing about something which the person themself had completely forgotten).  And he was famous for ending every interview with what he referred to as “the Pivot Questionnaire.”

Bernard Pivot was a French journalist and host of several televsion shows, including Apostrophes and Bouillon de culture, an episode of one of which inspired Lipton to create Inside the Actor’s Studio.  Liption adapted his version of the questionnaire from Pivot; Pivot adapted his version from the Proust Questionnaire, which Marcel Proust answered in 1890 (or thereabouts).  The author of the original questions is unknown; apparently writing down your answers to a set of questions that were passed on from person to person was a sort of Victorian parlor game.  (Reminds me of the “purity tests” of my college career.)  But it strikes me as apropos that this whole thing started as a person answering the questionnaire unasked so that people who came after him might know more of him.  Which is exactly what I hope to achieve here.

The Pivot Questionnaire

(as adapted by James Lipton)

• What is your favorite word?

This is a tough one.  I can tell you that many people given this question tend to interpret it as “what word represents your favorite thing?” On the other hand, some people (including myself) are more of the opinion that it means “what word do you find most euphonious?” “Euphonious,” by the way, means “pleasing to the ear,” and is itself a pretty euphonious word.  Being a writer by inclination (though not by profession), I love words, and there are many awesome words which are both pleasing and useful.  I’m fond of “serendipity,” which I learned at a moderately young age (I would guess around 10 or 11) from a book of the same name.  I also like “verisimilitude,” which is a wonderful word that I use all the time in connection with my D&D games: to talk about “realism” in a fantasy game is silly, but you can strive for verisimilitude, which just means that the internal story logic has to be sound.

I tried checking what words I’d used most in my blog posts, but of course I don’t want to look at small words like “the” or “to.” So I decided to define “interesting words” as words of a certain length.  I experimented with my most used 8-letter (or more) words, 9-letter (or more) words, and so on up to 15-letter (or more) words, and found some interesting results.  Throwing out the proper names and whatnot, the word “interesting” itself is in the #2 spot for both 10- and 11-letter words (beaten out both times by “necessarily”).  In fact, adverbs make up a big part of this group, since you can make almost any cool adjective just a wee bit longer by tossing an “ly at the end.  Some of these (“particularly,” “unfortunately,” “occasionally”) are not that interesting, but some, such as “simultaneously” and “paradoxically” are.  Apparently I’m also fond of “responsibility,” “aforementioned,” and “implementation.” My favorite was the #1 word at 15-or-more-letters: “phosphorescence,” which I’ve apparently used 14 times (although that’s cheating a bit, since it’s in the name of one of my music mixes).

Actually, I don’t know if I can pick just one word.  I’m fond of semi-obscure words that people probably have to look up when I use them, like “diaphanous” or “mellifluous” or “effervescent.” I’ve often been advised by readers that I asked for critiques (in college or since then) that I should change this word or that to make it more “accessble,” but I say screw that.  If you never hit a word you don’t know, you never have a reason to expand your vocabulary, and the language starts withering away from lack of use.

I guess if I have to pick just one, I might go with “paradox,” which is both pleasing to say and also holds great meaning to me personally.

• What is your least favorite word?

I’m not sure I even have one ... I know that a lot of people hate the word “moist,” for instance, but to me it’s just another word, and it can come in quite handy on occasion.  There are also very few words (outside racial slurs) that I find displeasing to the ear.  I don’t know ... the best I can come up with is “dreck,” which is both dissonant to the ear and also an unpleasant concept.

• What turns you on?

I really love heat.  Almost everyone I know says they’d rather be cold than hot: “you can always put on more clothing,” they say, “but there’s only so much you can take off!” Pish-posh.  I despise being cold, and while being hot and sweaty isn’t pleasant, it’s more tolerable than shivering.  I also don’t really care for clothes all that much.

And there’s a lot of really great applications of heat, most of them employing limited amounts of clothing (or none at all).  I love taking a hot shower, for instance, and I love saunas, and especially hot tubs.  For that matter, just laying in the sun on a hot (preferably not too humid) day is pretty damned fine if you ask me.

• What turns you off?

I suppose it sounds a bit pretentious, but I have to say: injustice.  I often tell my kids “the world isn’t fair ... but people can be, if they choose, and it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be.” People treating other people unfairly really gets under my skin, whether it’s something as small as one person trying to pay less than their fair share, or something as big as institutional racism.  People can do better, and they damned well should.

• What sound or noise do you love?

The go-to answer here, from my years of watching Inside the Actor’s Studio, is “the sound of a baby’s laughter.” To the point where you kind of feel like a shitty parent if you don’t say that.  But I’ve always been one to buck a trend.

For me, it’s got to be music.  Music is always such a big part of my life: I play it while I work, while I read, while I program for fun, while I play D&D, while I sleep.  If you’ve read this blog more than casually, you’ll know that I have a ridiculously extensive collection of music mixes, where I try to have a mix on hand for any possible mood I might be in.  I’m listening to music right now as I type this.

• What sound or noise do you hate?

This is another one that some people try to turn into more than what I think the question is actually about.  “I hate the sound of people yelling at other people,” they might say, or somesuch twaddle.  But I take the question literally, so the sound that sets my teeth on edge—even more than fingernails on a chalkboard!—is a knife scraping across a plate.  Not all plates, and I suppose not all knives, but there’s a certain resonance and grinding dissonance that you can hit that just makes my whole body tense up.

• What is your favorite curse word?

This is, of course, one of my favorite questions.  In my experience, most of the men hesitate, and most of the women cheerfully respond with “fuck!” And, hey, don’t get me wrong: “fuck” is a great one.  It’s a classic for a reason.  But I’ve come to love portmanteau curse words: where you take a common curse and tack on something completely silly at the end.  I think “fucksticks” is my all-time favorite, but “shitballs” has its charms too.

• What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

For this question, “other than your own” was always assumed to mean “other than being an actor,” given the context.  For me, it would mean, other than being a programmer.  And I’ve always loved being a programmer.  I find it quite creative, first of all, and also challenging, which is important to keep from getting bored.  Other than that, I suppose “famous author” isn’t exactly a profession, so I think I would say a teacher.  Sadly, there just isn’t enough money in it to support me and my family and my house in sunny Southern California with the pool out back where I can engage in many of those heat-related activities that I described above ... I’m not primarily motived by money, but I do have a certain comfort level that I want to maintain.  I wish that our society valued teachers more.  I’ve taught a few classes in my time (technicall classes, for adults, that is), and I’ve also done some tutoring of people younger than I, and I’ve always enjoyed it and found it very fulfilling.  I would really love to design a college curriculum where I teach classes that eventually deliver you a B.A. in computer programming; I think the current B.S. degrees really don’t prepare you for the reality of programming.

• What profession would you not like to do?

Well, I suck at nearly all forms of physical labor: even when I was more in shape than I am now, I always lacked physical coordination, and I have a tendency to overthink things.  But that feels like a bit of a cop-out.  I think what I would really hate is any job where you have to reject people a lot: HR, maybe, or casting director ... something along those lines.  How can people spend all day breaking other people’s spirits without it breaking their own?

• If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Well, being the confirmed agnostic that I am, I don’t always think of this one strictly in terms of religious imagery.  In fact, there’s something both poignant and comforting in the image that the Red Sea Pedestrians paint when they point out that “We Are So Small”:

So now we long to take to the sky and traverse the reaches of space,
Returning our bodies back to the source that led them to this delicate place.
We’ll ask the forces unknown,
“Are we out here all alone?”
They’ll say “you are so small we can’t see you at all,
But we love you: come on back home.”

But, to answer the question more succinctly and more personally, I think it would have to be: “You did the best you could, and that was good enough.”

Next time, I’ll essay the Colbert Questionert.