In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act Three of his production of The Cherry Orchard.
Stanislavsky confessed that he asked the stage manager to fill her cup with scalding water. “You have to do everything, anything, even stupid things, to get what you need in the theater,” he said.
This sentiment—unfashionable as it may be today—holds true for other arts, too. I thought of it while reading Philip Gefter’s engaging new book about the making of the 1966 movie By leaning into a biopic of Leonard Bernstein that presents so anodyne a vision of the creative process that it might as well be about dentistry.)
