Bruce
Adamson P.O. Box 3511,
Santa Cruz, CA, 95063
CLICK HERE FOR RUFUS EASTON Store lots of Goodies from actual painting.
ROBERT EASTON
B I O G R A P H Y -- Photo to right
by Bruce C. Adamson, 1985 "Will Deal" pun inten
ded
Red Badge of Courage will show on Turner Classic Movies May 26-27 at 4:45 AM Red Badge Of Courage, The (1951) A young Union soldier fights to atone for a moment of cowardice during the Civil War. Cast: Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin, Royal Dano. Dir: John Huston. BW-69 mins,
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Though born in Milwaukee, actor Robert Easton has earned much of his cinematic bread and butter playing Southerners. Easton first gained national attention as one of the "Quiz Kids" on the radio series of the same name. In films from 1949, the gangling Easton was often seen as a blank-faced, slow-talking hayseed. Actually, Easton's Southern cadence is but one tiny aspect of his talent; for the past three decades, he has been acknowledged and celebrated as Hollywood's leading dialectician and vocal coach. Stars ranging from Gregory Peck to Sir Laurence Olivier have sought out Easton's services to instruct them in the intricacies of specific regional and ethnic dialects.
Robert Easton continues to appear in rustic
codger roles (picture above from Red Roses and Petrol, 2003)
in such films as The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and Needful T
hings (1993); in 1994,
Easton was forced to bypass his vast repertoire of existing dialects
and come up with a wholly original speech pattern for his role
as a Klingon judge in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1994). -- Hal Erickson Production team:
It should be noted that Robert Easton has worked on many other movies not listed below. Today he specializes in training actors/actresses how to speak in certain dialects. Robert knows more than 80 different dialects. He has worked with many famous celebrities and is one of a few if not the ONLY person who does this work in Hollywood. Robert Easton speaks on Rufus at St. Louis honring the 200th anniversary on Oct. 1, 2004. Man under red mark is suppose to be Rufus Easton.
Robert Easton Founder and President Henry Higgins of Hollywood Inc.
"There's one profession that requires an agility and proficiency in unlearning: That profession is acting. Actors are faced continually with the challenge of unlearning how they speak -- and then learning new accents and dialects. But it's very difficult for the ear to hear a sound that the mouth is not in the habit of producing. And it's also very difficult for the mouth to produce a sound that the ear is not in the habit of hearing.
After years of working with actors, I've formulated "Easton's First Law": People in every community feel certain that the way they act, think, walk, and talk is the "natural" way. Once people learn something, they're reluctant to let it go. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the way people speak. When trying to unlearn a speech pattern, people tend to impose their own intonation patterns and permutations of sound on the target dialect. I blast them out of this by exposing them to a realm of sounds outside of the familiar ones that they know and cherish. Only then do those habits begin to disappear. But I never approach this process by telling them what they need to unlearn. Rather, I stress what they need to learn. It's a small distinction with huge ramifications.
People learn in three different ways. Some are very "ear minded," or auditory. They can hear something and repeat it with almost tape-recorder fidelity. Robin Williams is a great example of that. For his role in "Good Will Hunting," we worked on perfecting a very subtle Boston accent. All we did was to sit together and talk. He has a phenomenal ear.
Others rely on their visual competence. Charlton Heston is a wonderful example of what I call "eye mindedness." He would send me his scripts, and I'd respell his dialogue for him in a visual transliteration that we had agreed on -- what we called "Easton's Half-Assed Respelling." He learned by seeing.
And some people I teach kinesthetically: I tell them exactly what to do with their mouths, when to vibrate their vocal chords, how to move their jaws to produce a particular sound. Everyone has a different style and approach to learning. But no matter how a person learns, it's important to remember what French physiologist Claude Bernard said: "It's what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning."
Robert Easton is known in Hollywood as the Dialect Doctor and as the Mr. Fix-it of Phonemes. He has cured accents and strengthened dialects for thousands of actors, including Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Natasha Richardson, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, and Tom Hanks. Easton, one of radio's original "Quiz Kids," has also appeared in hundreds of films and television shows.
Robert Easton worked with the following, among many others:
Lamar Trotti (Screenwriter), Edwin B. Willis (Set Designer), Gordon Mark (Producer), Joseph Ruttenberg (Cinematographer), Ben Nye, Sr. (Makeup), Bronislau Kaper (Composer), Alfred Newman (Composer), Irwin Kostal (Composer), James Newcom (Editor), Bill Rebane (Director), Cedric Gibbons (Art Director), Lyle Wheeler (Art Director) Actors: Jeffrey Hunter, Richard Karlan, Charles McGraw, Steve McQueen, Walter Pidgeon, Donald Sutherland, Charles Tyner, Dan White, James Whitmore, Jonathan Winters, John Crawford -TV Schedule -DVD from CDNOW
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