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The Technique
Foundations & history exclusively founded and taught by Brad
The Heller Approach is a Los Angeles-based acting school that addresses the obstacles many actors find in achieving believability and authenticity in acting out a role. The Heller Approach offers a successful guide to actors wanting to convey meaningful performances without summoning past painful experiences advocated by the Method approach. Our technique is completely unique, giving actors tools that are simple yet practical and form a solid foundation to engage in any medium. The application for the Heller Approach is based on muscle memory, rather than the Method approach of dwelling on past experiences in order to evoke emotion. This truly frees the artist to access all feelings and emotions that are universal to humans regardless of past experiences. Heller, with its foundation in the teachings of original Group Theater member, Don Richardson. Richardson directed over 800 television shows and his legendary students include Robert Redford, Kirk Douglass, Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft, Zero Mostel, and Spencer Tracy to name a few. The works of Richardsons former students and the Heller Approach current students (including Greys Anatomys Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Heroes Masi Oka, and Rescue Mes Natalie Distler) validate the authenticity of this incredible technique. Brad Heller was also mentored by academy award wining writer and director, Seth Winston. Winstons influence has also been incorporated into The Heller Approach in order to assist students in learning how to analyze a scene and create the most believable and authentic characters
The Heller Approach addresses anxiety, a common obstacle with actors. The problem of nervousness, worry, and unease is a constant issue many actors face, but rarely find the tools to remedy their fears. The Heller Approach teaches actors how to cope with high-pressure situations and embrace their own fear. The technique addresses many of actors biggest issues, including anxiety when auditioning, lack of understanding how to evoke believable emotion, lack of technique that does not require one to dig into past experiences, and a misunderstanding of how to enact a character in a most engaging manner.
The Technique
Stage fright and anxiety can kill any actors drive, performance, and enjoyment in acting. If an actor can learn to cope with anxiety and fear, it will change not only their acting, but also a variety of different other aspects of life, including confidence, relationships, and income to name a few. Below, professional acting coach, Brad Heller, shares his story of how having the right tools for dealing with fear and anxiety changed his life and the futures of his students: For many years, I had debilitating stage fright and anxiety every time I performed. This unease manifested itself in a number of ways. The two ways it hurt me the most arrived in the forms of distracting, impeding thoughts that would not go away, and feeling withdrawn when performing in highpressure situations. It did not matter what acting technique I used, because my brain became so numb from fear that I lost the ability to think clearly. My acting mentor, Don Richardson, repeatedly informed to me Acting is like being an athlete. When he first shared this with me, I did not really grasp how this was possible. Although after working with him for a bit, I finally understood how the two are related: an athlete and an actor require the same training, the same principles of preparation, and the same muscle memory execution. I finally comprehended Dons metaphor; I wanted to be able to handle the stress and the pressure of a professional football player like a wide received who COULD catch the ball when a billion people are watching him in the Super Bowl. Except in my case, I wanted to be able to be an actor who didnt leave an audition with regret. I wanted to be able to leave an audition knowing that I had done the best I could, and that fear and anxiety didnt impede my performance. Because believe me, when you are a at fourth callback for a role any actor REALLY wants, and you see all of the producers, writers, and directors behind a bunch of tables, just waiting for you to impress them, the anxiety can hit you like a ton of bricks. Knowing how to handle the fear when it hits you is paramount to an actors success. The brilliant woman who gave me the tools to cope with anxiety and fear is Dr. Eda Gorbis. After decades of trying to find a mechanism to deal with the unease, I finally found a person who could help me. She completely changed how I handle anxiety, and without her, I would never have been able to achieve the success I currently enjoy. Dr. Eda Gorbis is world-renowned authority on the treatment and research of anxiety disorders, Associate Professor at UCLA, and founder of the Westwood Institute for Anxiety located in Westwood, CA. Dr. Gorbis is an author and co-author of numerous scientifically important articles on anxiety disorders, and has been featured on numerous televised programs and documentaries, including MTVs True Life, ABC News 20/20, NBCs Today Show, and Discovery Health. After my time working with Dr. Gorbis, I discovered that my anxiety had nothing to do with my childhood or how I was raised, but simply that I needed to learn tools to help me cope with high-pressure situations that all actors and performers alike face. I armed myself with tools to help me EMBRACE the anxiety and fear. Dr. Gorbis best advice was to invite your enemies to dinner. In my case, the enemies were anxiety and fear.
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you must create a character that has a lasting impact on the viewer. With regards to scene study, the students bring in a prepared scene that they find on their own, rehearse it outside of class, and then perform it in class soon after. The instructor will give notes on how to improve it, and the students work on it the next week, and bring it in again.
world, many of which claim to have their foundations lie in the teachings of a variety of original Group Theater members. His fellow students include Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, and Uta Hagen. Although Don Richardson is the only founding student who admitted that The Method isnt what acting is about. The technique further maintains that acting should be fun not a self-dissecting experience. This technique gives you a very simple, structured way of working without making acting a complex, traumatic, or painful experience. Furthermore, this technique will help you learn how to analyze a scene and to create the most believable, entertaining characters possible in a very short period of time which is required in todays fast paced Hollywood entertainment industry. The basics of the Heller Approach lessons include Styles of Entertainment, Believability, Scene Study, Emotion, Comedy, and Cold Read/Audition Technique.
Emotion
One of the main principles of the technique pertains to evoking emotion. Emotion is the intensity you feel in your body when you are angry, sad, happy, anxious, etc.. You feel it in every pore of your body when you experience a certain feeling. We teach actors how to create this quality on command, in a very quick and reliable way.
Comedy
The art of comedy is one of the many teachings we specialize in. Many actors and comics come to us to learn how to get laughs in a scene when they are playing a believable character. There are specific principles to comedy ranging from how to set up a joke, to specific tools to get the audience laughing exactly where you want them. Comedy is similar to science, in that it must be precise. The timing of a joke can make or break the moment. Acting in a comedic role can be a lot of fun when you have the necessary tools; otherwise, it can be very intimidating. Most of the shows on T.V. are comedic, and if you cant play a comedy, youre eliminating a significant amount of potential work. The important thing to remember is that once you know the tools of comedy, its very exciting to plan your performance and get the crowd laughing at the right moment!
Styles of Entertainment
There are many different types of entertainment we play: Drama, comedy, farce, modern tragedy, mystery, etc.. We have only named a few, but as actors need to know how to play them all. In fact, all different styles of entertainment have a different purpose in how they are to affect the audience. There are specific tools we give you to help you mold the audience and get the crowds laughing where you want them to, or move them to tears at a specific dramatic moment.
Believability
As actors, it doesnt matter what we do to jazz up a scene if it is not real and believable. Being real is acting. Its not about doing
a tap dance. Although we address creating interesting moments How to WOW the casting director & leave a memorable in a scene to get laughs or create suspense, even more focus is impression requires some very important tools. We emphasize placed on being a real person in the scene. You will wow them the necessity in taking risks in the choices you make, how to by bringing yourself to the role and really believing that you are react and listen in a scene, when to look up from the scene and the character youre playing in the given scene reacting to given circumstances as a real human being. when its ok to read the lines, how to prepare for the audition, learning the role in order to perform at your potential under duress, bringing yourself to the role, taking over the room and enticing the casting director to want to know you, and how to
Scene Study
rehearse for an audition when you dont have a scene partner to After you book the job, you will need to build the roll. To do this, practice with, and making the scene real to you.
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The Technique
The Team
Brad Heller
Brad Heller began his career at Boston University School of Theatre Arts, where he received his theatre degree. Hollywood was his calling, so he moved to Los Angeles, where he began teaching, as well as producing films, while continuing a successful acting career. Brad enjoys teaching the lessons that he uses in his own professional acting career and has a strong passion to pass these tools on to help actors perfect their craft. Brad has students who have studied with him for nearly 15 years; from Judge Reinhold and Mary Gilbert, to David White and Masi Oka, Brads students have successfully created acting careers, and constantly keep their acting tools sharp with the Heller Approach. His students have booked roles on hit shows like Criminal Minds, The Unit, CSI, Las Vegas, Malcolm in the Middle, and Monk to name a few.
Evan Arnold
Evan Arnold is a Los Angeles native, with over 25 years of acting experience in television, film, commercials, and theater (Member: Buffalo Nights and Troubadour theater companies, both award winning). His father was an award-winning member of the DGA who worked on such films as The Godfather Part II, Bladerunner, Sixteen Candles, War Games, and The Jerk. Having met and watched directors on the sets of his Fathers films, Evan has seen a vast cross-section of Hollywood styles in action. His own acting credits include regular roles on Growing Pains, Just the Ten of Us, Close to Home, and The West Wing. Arnold is an alumnus of the prestigious Harvard School (now-Harvard-Westlake) and U.C. Berkley,
Sean Nepita
Sean Nepita began his career when he was cast in the blockbuster hit Titanic, and has since appeared in countless television shows and feature films, including Best Laid Plans (also starring Reese Witherspoon). He has since been in literally hundreds of commercials and televised campaigns. You may recognize him from his numerous Quiznos and IBM commercials, and most recently McDonalds and AFLAC. In addition to acting, Sean is stand-up comedian performing regularly in the Los Angeles stand-up circuit.
David White
David A.R. White has been a working actor and producer in Los Angeles for over 10 years. At the age of 19, David landed a three-year reoccurring role on the Emmy award winning sitcom Evening Shade. David continued to book roles on a number of shows, including Coach, Saved by the Bell, Sisters, Melrose Place, and Martial Law. In 1999, David produced and starred in the feature films The Moment After and Mercy Streets. In 2001, David was nominated for The Movie Guide Awards Best Actor for his dual roles in Mercy Streets. His competitors included Mel Gibson in The Patriot, Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans , and Will Smith in Bagger Vance. In addition, David continues to produce and direct at least five films a year, and students are often cast in his work.
Kerry Stein
Kerry has been an actors since age 16, and has appeared in countless network television shows, commercials, films, and stage plays. Having studied acting and directing for eleven years with the legendary Don Richardson, Kerry has been teaching actors for the past 20 years. He is thrilled to be associated with the academy, as his greatest joy is helping actors use their own presence fully and effectively as the character.
Testimonials
Brad has been coaching my clients for years now, and manages to bring them to a whole new level. I work very hard developing my actors for television and film, and I am always confident sending them to Brad. He has challenged them not to do what every other actor will do with the same dialogue. Whether the project is drama or broad comedy, he is there to help them make strong choices. Many have hailed Brad as being one of the best coaches in Hollywood, and I have to agree. Actors love Brad Heller, and so do I. -Mara Santino, Talent Manager of Luber Roklin Entertainment The Heller Approach could not be more practical; as a teacher, Brad arms his students with the tools necessary to tackle any situation. I was brought in to audition for one of several lead characters in an upcoming feature. After my initial read with the casting director, she told me that she liked me a lot but the part I was auditioning for had already been offered to a well-known actor. She then handed me a set of sides Id never seen before and asked me to step outside, prepare, and read for this new character on the spot. Brad had just taught me a lesson the night before about cold reading and told me that sooner or later, a CD would ask me to read for a different part than Id prepared for and that his lessons in cold reading would prove invaluable if this happened. I never expected this to happen the next day, & I found Brads words of wisdom echoing in my head as I prepared to cold read for this new role. I was subsequently called back twice and went on to screen test for the part. Thanks to Brads foresight and experience, I couldnt have been more prepared for such a curve ball.
-Alex Goode
I never show up for work without working with Brad first. He keeps me real and he points out both my strengths and weaknesses in an encouraging way that allows me to make the most of every opportunity. -Judge Reinhold Beverly Hills Cop 1, Beverly Hills 2, The Santa Claus 1, The
The Heller Approach is so refreshing compared to other classes Ive taken. In my first session with Brad I had a moment of clarity and knew right away what needed to be changed in the scene we were working on. I love the idea of not having to be beaten down and broken to be a good actor. You can still give a great performance and have fun with it! -Brittany Finamore Cory in the House, Ghost Whisperer, Another World
Ive trained with many acting coaches in both NY and LA, and I have never felt as confident going into an audition as I have after working with Brad. He taught me how to be more present and in the moment. Brad is a wonderful teacher that truly cares and knows what he is talking about. The call back today went so great! I felt a million times better about it once I worked on it with Brad! Looking forward to call on Thursday! -Natalie Distler Rescue Me
Testimonials continued
Brad Heller is an acting coach who knows what he is talking about. Most acting coaches will just tell you how to do your scene their way. Brad will work with you to create a character that will feel natural and unique to you as well as the casting director. If you want to go into an audition room and book the job, then I recommend you work with Brad. -George Finn How I Met Your Mother, Cold Case, Beverly Hills 90210 I've trained with different acting coaches in both London and Los Angeles , and I have never found a class that I truly look forward to every week. Brad has taught me to really let go and enjoy what I do, which in turn has made me get out of my head and be more in the moment. Brad is a fantastic teacher and a really great guy.
-Benjamin Stone Ten Things I Hate About You & lead roll in the play The
Brad has been a wonderful acting coach to my son, Freddy. When he works with Brad prior to an audition, he usually books the job. His technique, though not difficult, has brought out the best in Freddy.
-Norine Siglar (Freddys mother) Byron Tyler Perrys I Can Do Bad All By Myself
Brad helped me understand my character and the story being told as a whole, and taught me to become and live the parts I've auditioned for, and projects I've worked on. Thanks Brad! -Arthur Napiontek Pineapple Express
Since I started Brad's class I feel that I have come across a technique that works for me. I highly recommend classes with Brad Heller! -Tyler Blackburn Cold Case, Days of our Lives, Gigantic, Pretty Little Liars
Mr. Heller is an absolutely amazing teacher that will not only take your acting skill to another level that you could never imagine, but will also guide and help you in your career and development as a human being. He is a true Sensei of the craft of acting and a role model that has and will continue to change lives daily.
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Location
Two Roads Theater
Cost
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"Think of your pet dog having a thousand needles stuck into him over his entire body. Think of his pain. Now, while in this state, do your monologue for me." An adult student told me that this is what his acting teacher instructed him to do in order to play a character whos terrified. A 9-year-old student informed me that her previous acting coach had told her that just before starting an emotional scene, she should think of her mommy dying. Little did this teacher know, the girls mother had recently been in a major car accident and was pronounced dead at the scene in front of her daughter before regaining consciousness and being rushed to the hospital. Months later, the girl was still traumatized by the acting exercise. Fortunately, shes no longer studying with that "teacher." As an adult, I dont ever want to think of those images, especially before shooting a scene. I cant imagine how terrible it would be for a child. I thought acting was supposed to be fun. As a kid, I pretended to be a cowboy. I never had to do things like this to be a scared cowboy. Furthermore, you arent playing yourself; youre playing a character. How can remembering a Brad Heller experience evoke emotion effectively for a character Im playing? The amount of terror I feel from thinking about my personal experience wont properly fit the scene Im doing. The character is not Brad Heller. Its like trying to put a piece of one puzzle into anotherit just wont fit. These are the kinds of acting techniques I have experienced myself and have heard about from my students, ages 7 to 70. Some call it affective memory, a technique used in Method acting: using your memory of a personal tragic event to catapult you into a state of mind, at which point, supposedly, the character takes over and youll be emotional for the scene.
Brad Heller will host the intensive "Master the Audition" at Actorfest LA on Saturday, Nov. 6. For more information, go to Actorfest.com. **This article is available at http://www.backstage.com/advicefor-actors/acting-teachers/leave-theagony-behind/
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Finding Alan
My husband, acting out
By Erin Aubry Kaplan Thursday, Apr 21 2005
When my husband, Alan, confessed not long after we got married that he wanted to take acting lessons, I was thrilled Alan was in for hell, and I could help him through it. He could prosper in a way that I never did when I studied acting at UCLA, but only if I explained it all. Id have been less thrilled and more jealous were Alan not the most un-actorly guy I know. He hates affect of any kind and despises having his picture taken even more. He likes coffee shops but is wholly suspicious of coffeehouses, which he thinks of as colonies for slackers and model types and people with no real jobs, like actors. Hes a leftist social critic and a public high school teacher with a wardrobe and mindset so utilitarian, I have to beg him to buy new socks or underwear from a real store (he also hates malls) instead of a swap meet. Yet hes always had a flair for the dramatic and a commanding ease in front of tough crowds the hallmark of any successful teacher, and excellent training for any actor. But he still resisted lessons. This was partly because he remained leery of the whole acting culture, but mostly because hes a perfectionist who hates doing anything that he cant do well the first time. Essentially, he fears looking like a fool. If you want to be an actor, I told him, you had better get rid of the idea that you wont look like a fool, at least at first. That much I knew. Like almost every red-blooded Angeleno who grew up with a love of the movies and a chronically vague sense of career, I thought I wanted to be an actor. After college I did the rounds of small theater, playing everything from Anita in a dinner-theater production of West Side Story to a tap-dancing allegory named Life in an ambitious little musical at a community playhouse. It was as good a time as Id ever had while making almost no money, and I thought Id found a calling. In UCLAs graduate theater program, I was taught that acting is about the furthest thing from a good time that a person could possibly imagine. My teacher was a fierce Strasberg devotee who believed people must be reduced to emotional pulp before they can even call themselves actors. I was still in guarded post-adolescence and knew I was in trouble when, during the first moment-to-moment exercise, I stood before my professors famously withering gaze and said, I feel fine. Nothings going on! Bad answer. I eventually ditched my acting dreams for writing, I suppose because as a writer I could detail my feelings without somebody barking from five feet away that I wasnt feeling them. I consoled myself with the thought that I would still be performing, but on the page. Every art form shares a common set of muses, and all that. Finally, Alan agreed to acting lessons, but only after braving tap-dance classes for five weeks and feeling like a total failure from moment one. He was in bad need of an antidote. I leapt into action. I went on the Internet, and, among the 850,000-plus hits I got when I put in acting classes in Los Angeles, found the One: Acting Without Agony. Probably too good to be true, but the mere promise of a painless experience sold me. The program was inspired by the teachings of Don Richardson, a Group Theater alumnus whod decided that the deep-psychology approach of Strasberg and Stanislavsky was bad for good acting, so he created a much more pragmatic-sounding technique that he called an alternative to the Method. Richardson was dead, but one of his protgs, Brad Heller, was running an Acting Without Agony academy out in Studio City. Classes met every Tuesday at Two Roads Theater on Tujunga Avenue, directly across the street from the restaurant where Robert Blakes murdered wife ate her last meal. Alan thought this was a good sign, in a morbid kind of way. Heller turned out to be wiry and bright-eyed, with an impossible amount of energy and dark, wispy hair that always made him look like hed just rolled out of bed, though I could hardly imagine him doing something as passive as sleeping. No coddler, he put Alan onstage right away with a monologue Alan had chosen before this first meeting. I had gone through a monologue book with Alan over dinner to suggest pieces he might like to do. One was a lovely speech about regret and lost youth from a play by Ivan Turgenev. I thought my intellectually inclined, Russian-descended husband would like it; he didnt. I dont get this, he grumbled. Its too talky. What else is there? He ended up choosing a speech from another play called Good Business, in which a character named John, a lowrent white thug from Detroit, tries to talk his partner out of pulling a boneheaded job in a Jewish part of town. West Bloomfield thats way the fuck out there, man, Alan read aloud. Theyre gonna nail our asses to the wall, man. JesusfuckingChrist! He looked pleased. He was more nervous reading it to Heller onstage, though Heller didnt really give him time to be, immediately explaining the basics of Richardsons anti-Method method, which consists of setting an objective and emotion in any scene and sticking with them throughout. Acting is 80 percent emotion, said Heller. We dont
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Finding Alan(Continued)
My husband, acting out
By Erin Aubry Kaplan Thursday, Apr 21 2005
need sense memory. Objective is the anchor that keeps you focused. With an objective, you always try to get it, to keep the other character here, but you never do. You keep trying, but you never actually achieve the objective. You never figure it out, because then the dog gets the bone. The storys over. The storys never over. Alan nodded vigorously. He was probably thinking of all those students whose attention he had to hold for an hour at a stretch, and then get it back the next day. Alan lived this stuff in a way that I never did, especially at 23. At 7:30 the rest of the class filed in, and Heller introduced the new recruit. Alan got to do the monologue again, this time kind of jumping the gun instead of relaxing, jamming the words together in his haste to get them out. But there was no doubt my husband was interesting to watch, genuine and appealing even as he stumbled. Heller praised him and then gave him copious notes, punctuating every one of them with, Does this make sense? Driving home, Alan was broody, but in a more productive way than usual. I lost it, he muttered. I had it the first time, and then I lost it. I reminded him that the acting flow was like that, maddeningly ephemeral, there one beat and gone the next. But I could see that Alan was on the right track; he wanted to be good. He didnt think he sucked or that this whole enterprise was hopeless. He was having some normal difficulty, but no agony in fact, he was having fun. Now I was envious. The following week he rehearsed John with a vengeance. He said his lines under his breath in the car, around the house, in supermarket lines and parking lots. He started pacing and gesturing with his hands. Once I called him on his cell phone and was startled to hear John answer, Jesus-fucking-Christ! The next class he did the monologue from memory. Heller was impressed enough to let him go to the next step a scene. He assigned him a partner, a veteran actor named Kerry. Alan was excited, though he lapsed for a moment back into his loser gloom. Kerrys a pro, and Im a beginner, he said after class. Hes being polite about baby-sitting me. He probably doesnt even want to do it. Alan practiced even harder the next week. Before I could offer help this time (which by now I could see he didnt need), he drafted me into playing his partner. Over and over we rehearsed the scene, in which Alan played another thug Scottish this time and Kerry played the gang boss. The thug was a loose-cannon underling who tries to get his bosss assurances that he wont screw up a lucrative drug deal. Rudimentary stuff,
dramatically hardly Turgenev and I was already worrying that my husband was typecasting himself as a hood. But maybe he needed this to vent an inner criminal that he didnt normally exercise as a history and humanities teacher dedicated to serving others. Maybe if I had used acting that way when I was studying it, I would be doing it this very moment instead of writing about it.
Alans passion now was such a contrast to my reticence then, I couldnt help but feel a kind of peevishness that I hadnt known or trusted myself enough to walk away, or speak up, or use what I had in me. Nor could I help but wonder what might have happened if Id had a Heller for a teacher instead of an accidental terrorist. But then, one thing Ive already learned from Heller is what he told Alan when he derailed in his monologue: Its always better to be where youre at than to try to recapture a moment you lost. The scene was brilliant, by the way. Dressed all in black, Alan was much more imposing than Id ever seen him. He brought to his character all the nuances of himself, everything utterly familiar to me anxious air, darting eyes, clasped hands, hunched shoulders which now looked utterly different. He was menacing, but oddly sweet, which made him more menacing. He stared at Kerry hard enough to burn a hole in him. I knew the scene by heart, but when Alan leapt up and exploded in anger, I was taken aback. Everybody was. When the scene was done, Heller didnt say anything for several seconds a long time for him to be quiet. Alan was very good, and we all knew it; I felt not regretful or envious at all, but proud. On the way home this time, I said little. I wanted to bask. Alan was torn between being giddy and being sheepish. That was all right, he finally said. That felt good. He let out a long breath and laughed shakily. But you know, I was terrified. I was scared to death. That, of course, is entirely the point of acting, latching on to the moment and riding it wherever it takes you. I never really got a hold of it, but Alan well, hes going to be a different story. One thats hardly going to end anytime soon.
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