With great care. That happened also by happenstance. In 1994, I had by then, at the urging of
Norman Mailer and his wife Norris Church and others, I had gone over to the Actors Studio to
see what they were doing. I had been trained by Stella, it was a different world, but I went over
there. And Norman said, you’ve got to come over, we’re doing good work. We’re doing
interesting work. I went over and saw what they were doing and I liked it a lot. And I became
involved in the studio and the work and began to work there and ultimately I became a member,
and very deeply involved in the work at the studio. By this time, Strasberg had long since passed
away. I never got to meet him, I regret to say. I was so involved in the work I eventually became
a member of the board of the Actor’s Studio. And just before I became a member of the board, I
became aware, as we all did, that in those parlous times, 1994, for cultural institutions, that the
Studio, which had never been a school, never charged a tuition, which had never been a club that
charged membership fees, that had been living hand to mouth since 1947, that like any other
cultural institution, it was impoverished. And one night after we had been discussing it and how
the Studio could possibly survive under these circumstances, I woke up the next morning and
had an idea. It was crystal clear in detail. It was to create a school. For the first time, a degree-
granting school in a university, under the aegis of The Actor’s Studio with all the core courses to
be taught by life members of the Actors Studio.
We created the program, the Actor’s Theater Drama School and in the fall of 1994, we opened
our doors to the public. Within three years, we were the largest graduate drama school in
America. And today, of course, we are at Pace University, and we are bigger and better than
ever. So here we were, it was 1994, September, we opened our doors. We were accredited,
Masters Degree Program, three year NFA. And I said to myself, and they said to me, by the way,
this was your idea Jim, you’ve led the group that created the curriculum, others participated,
Ellen Burstyn, Bob Blanco, and Lee Grant, and Carolyn Glenn, and Norman Mailer, Paul
Newman. And they said, look, this is your idea, you can’t walk away from it, not you’ve got to
start it. I said I’m finishing the book of lyrics to my third musical. They said, “You’ve got to at
least get it started”. I said, Okay. I’ll do it for a year. I did it for 10 years and became its founding
Dean because I fell so in love with it. But, I was now, I had this Master’s Degree program. And I
had people to teach all year long, I had people who would come and do a six-week workshop,
and then I thought, I’ve got to attract to us our colleagues, members of The Studio, colleagues
that we worked with outside the studio, in films and theater. I’ve got to bring them there for one
night. They can only give me one night of their lives. Okay. I wrote a letter. Give me one night
of your life. Teach our students, and I’ll conduct this seminar. And I got a response from Paul
Newman, Dennis Hopper, Alec Baldwin, Sally Fields, and I sent a letter back into the
professional community from which I had come saying that these people are liable to say
something that is worth preserving. That means television cameras. We can’t afford them.
Anybody interested? And Bravo, the Bravo network, which was then very small, took this
existential leap with us. And so it began.
Anyway, there we were and I had this school now and we had this, I had this Monday evenings I
had this seminar, and there were television cameras. I made two fateful decisions. One, we’re a
school. We will always be a school. This will always be a class. Therefore, we are not interested
in gossip, we’re interested in craft. We will be about craft. Which is not exactly a goldmine in
television, and nevertheless, it will be about craft. And second, there will be no pre-interview. I’d
been on all the television programs as an actor, as a writer, as a director, as a producer. I’d been
on everybody else’s show and there was always a pre interview. Somebody would come with a
tape recorder and you’d talk for three or four hours, and they’d take it back and it would be
transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows,
Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etcetera. And then they choose the answers that will be most
evocative on their show. And then they write the questions that will evoke them and they give
them to the host. Well, they do five shows a week, so they have to do it that way. I couldn’t do it.
They’re much smarter than I am, much cleverer. But no, I said there was going to be no pre-
interview. What did that mean? I had to do the homework. No one else. It takes me two weeks to
prepare for each guest. I work seven days a week and I work about 12 hours a day, from the
beginning of September till the end of May, the school year. I take two days off, Christmas and
New Year’s, Thanksgiving sometimes, two and a half. And the result is that I bonded myself to
my desk. I grappled myself to it with hoops of steel, to quote the Bard. And I do that homework
myself. I have a mass of raw material which is provided to me by a graduate of our school,
Jeremy Caracca, which gives me everything that exists on this particular person. And then I have
two weeks in which to shape it and turn it into a narrative, which is what our show is intended to
be, a beginning, a middle, and an end, with themes that occur and reoccur. And then I put them
on my PowerPoint in my computer and I put them on blue cards with questions that will evoke
the answers, hopefully, that I have found in their personal and professional histories. And there
are about 400 or 500 of those cards for each person. You asked about my preparation, and that’s
my preparation, and it all began with the decision that there would be no pre-interview. The
guests and I have talked about it often. It’s as if it were a circus tent with a rope ladder on one
end, a rope ladder on the other, I go up one rope ladder, the guest goes up the other, and we meet
on a high wire with no net for four to five hours. That’s how long they’re with me on our stage
because it’s a class. I edit it out to an hour, occasionally for two hours for a two-hour special, but
that, we’re up there. And there’s no net because the guest doesn’t know what’s coming next. And
I have no guarantee that they’ll give me the answer that I think I’m going to find from the
research that I’ve done and that’s on my card.