Let me explain.

The Smartest Actors Don’t Go to LA First

Every year, thousands of actors land in Los Angeles with nothing but ambition and a headshot. Most of them are gone within two years. Not because they weren’t talented. Because they weren’t ready. They arrived trying to scale Mount Everest in flip flops, burning through savings working two jobs, auditioning sporadically, and slowly losing the thread of why they came in the first place.

The actors who make it in LA are almost never the ones who showed up raw and figured it out on the fly. They’re the ones who arrived with craft, with tape, with relationships, and with the mental and financial fortitude to play a long game in a brutally competitive market.

San Francisco can give you all of that.

Think of it as AAA baseball before the major leagues. You get real at-bats. You build your game. You make your mistakes in a market where the stakes are lower and the community is smaller. And when you’re ready, you go. Not desperate, not broke, not starting from zero. You go loaded.

The Advantage of a Smaller Market

Here is something nobody tells you about LA when you’re dreaming about it from somewhere else: it is enormous, fragmented, and deeply impersonal. Breaking in means competing with tens of thousands of other actors for the attention of agents, casting directors, and filmmakers who have seen everything.

Video: Smaller Market

San Francisco is different. It is a real market, with real working filmmakers, real agencies, and real opportunities, but it is small enough that you can actually get known. A talented, hardworking actor in the Bay Area can build genuine relationships with the people who hire. You are not a number here. You are a person, and people remember people.

That intimacy accelerates everything. You can get into rooms faster. You can get feedback. You can build the kind of artistic community that takes years to develop in a bigger market, if it develops at all. Sandy Meisner used to call it building your artistic family, and he meant it literally. Some of the collaborators you find here will be people you work with for the rest of your career.

What the Market Actually Offers

To be straight with you about what San Francisco does and does not offer as a working actor.

The strongest opportunities right now are in voiceover work, which remains robust and in some ways stronger than ever given the concentration of tech companies, gaming studios, and companies in the Pixar orbit that call the Bay Area home. Industrial work, meaning in-house corporate films, training videos, and branded content, has always been a significant part of this market and continues to be. Theater is alive here. Not as much paid theater as there was before COVID, but a genuinely vibrant scene with a lot of actors who want to work and a lot of productions that need them. And independent film, the incubating filmmaker working on their next project under the umbrella of a film society or on their own, has always been a real source of opportunity in the Bay. Ryan Coogler made Fruitvale Station here. Michael B. Jordan was in those rooms. That kind of thing happens, and it happens more than people realize.

What is thin is studio film and television production. San Francisco has never had a strong film commissioner courting Hollywood, and the city has largely preferred it that way. The last television series to shoot here in any sustained way was Nash Bridges, and that was a long time ago. When productions do come through, principal roles are cast in LA first. Local talent gets day player work at best.

So the honest picture is: there is real work here, and it is enough to build something meaningful on, but if episodic television or studio film is the specific dream, at some point LA or New York is where that happens. San Francisco is where you get ready for it.

The Entrepreneurial Reality

One thing that separates actors who work in this market from actors who don’t is mindset. In LA, you can, to some degree, outsource your career to an agent and a manager and wait for the machine to work. In San Francisco, that approach will leave you waiting for a very long time.

The actors who thrive here understand that they are an entrepreneur. They are the product, the sales manager, and the CEO of their own career. Every filmmaker with a camera in the Bay Area should know your name. Every casting director at every agency should have your headshot. You have to make that happen yourself, proactively and consistently, because the infrastructure that does some of that work for you in bigger markets simply does not exist here in the same way.

That is not a knock on San Francisco. It is actually good training. The habits you build here, the hustle, the relationship-building, the self-promotion done with integrity, are the same habits that will serve you when you get to LA.

The Question Everyone Asks: Should I Just Go to LA?

I get this question all the time, and I always give the same answer: it depends on what you are bringing with you.

If you are going to LA with trained craft, some tape, a financial cushion, and a clear plan, go. You are ready. LA will reward you faster than San Francisco will, because the machine is bigger and the opportunities for film and TV work are real and present. Half the value of living in LA is simply being there. Some of my biggest breaks came from a Kinko’s, a softball league, a 4th of July party in Santa Monica, and a bachelor party in Big Bear. The industry is everywhere in that city, and proximity matters.

But if you are going to LA because you are impatient and the dream feels urgent, slow down. The actors who arrive in LA without craft, without tape, and without money almost always end up working two jobs, auditioning inconsistently, and slowly drifting away from acting altogether. They do not quit because they stop loving it. They quit because the life becomes unsustainable before the career has a chance to take root.

Spend the time here. Do it right. Then go with something to offer.

Is There Reason for Optimism About SF’s Market?

Yes, genuinely. Pre-COVID, San Francisco was the second largest commercial market in the United States and the third largest theater market. That did not happen by accident. The infrastructure, the talent, the agencies, and the appetite are all still here. The commercial market has been slower to recover, partly because AI and remote production have changed how companies make content, but those forces are not permanent in their current form.

The Bay Area has always attracted serious storytellers, and that has not changed. The independent film community is active. The voiceover and industrial market is strong. And the city’s unique concentration of tech, gaming, and media-adjacent industries creates categories of work that simply do not exist in most other markets.

The full version of what San Francisco was before COVID may not come back exactly as it was, but the bones are good. Actors who plant themselves here now, build their craft, build their relationships, and build their presence in this market, will be well-positioned whenever the tide shifts.

If You Are Just Starting Out: Three Things to Do First

Find your training. This is not optional and it is not something to rush. Do your research, talk to current students, audit classes where possible, and trust your gut about what feels right. The foundation you build in your first two years as an actor is the foundation you will work from for the rest of your career. Take it seriously.

Video: Finding Your Teacher

Set the table for your career while you train. Get quality headshots done. Build a resume, even if it starts thin. Do student films and independent projects to start building tape on yourself. Get your profile up on the casting platforms, Actors Access, Casting Networks, and make sure every filmmaker and casting director in the market knows you exist. You are not waiting until you are ready to start this. You are doing it in parallel.

Build your artistic community. The relationships you make in class, on student film sets, and in the theater scene here are not just professionally useful. They are the foundation of a creative life. Some of the people you meet in your first year in this market you will still be working with decades from now. Sandy called it your artistic family, and he was right. Start building it from day one.

San Francisco will not hand you a film career. Neither will Los Angeles. But if you are serious about this, if you respect the craft and are willing to do the work, this city will give you something that most actors who rush to LA never get: a real foundation, a real community, and a real shot at arriving in the major leagues ready to play.

The post Is San Francisco a Good Place to Pursue Acting? An Honest Look first appeared on The Meisner Technique Studio.

It All Started With One Russian

Before the 1920s, there was no craft of acting in America. Not in any real sense. The theater scene was immature, we had no great playwrights yet (Eugene O’Neill was still almost a decade away), and if you looked at an income tax form, the profession of “acting teacher” simply didn’t exist. Directors mostly just told you where to stand and how to say it. Sanford Meisner once described that kind of direction as “just another word for a lousy choreographer.”

Then Stanislavski came to New York, and he put the city on its ear.

This Russian theater-maker introduced something American actors had never had: a systematic approach to doing truthful, believable work. And everyone glommed onto it. It’s a little ironic, honestly. A Russian immigrant becomes the godfather of American acting craft. But that’s exactly what happened.

Among the people who fell under his influence was a group called the Group Theater. And within that group were names you’d recognize: Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Bobby Lewis, Harold Clurman, and Elia Kazan to name a few. All of them hungry for something they could use. All of them brilliant. And all of them about to interpret what they’d learned in very different ways.

The Parting of Ways

The elder statesman of the Group Theater was Lee Strasberg, and he became its driving force. At the center of his approach was a tool called emotional memory, the idea that an actor could excavate a painful experience from their past and use it to fuel a truthful performance in the present.

And at first, it was genuinely revolutionary. This was before psychotherapy was widely practiced, before actors had any real framework for accessing inner life. To sit in a room and have a real, cathartic emotional experience and then put text on top of that river of feeling was unlike anything actors had encountered. The results could be stunning.

But problems started to emerge. Emotional memory had a ceiling. Use it enough times and it goes flat, like playing your favorite song on repeat until you can’t stand it anymore. And more troubling, the process of guiding people into their deepest wounds and then walking away without support began to feel, to some in the group, like something between reckless and harmful.

Sanford Meisner was one of the first to say so. He put it bluntly to Strasberg: “Actors are not emotional guinea pigs to be dissected by amateur psychologists.”

Sandy knew something about this personally. He’d been in therapy before therapy was even called that. He’d known Freud. And he’d carried his own wound his entire life: the death of his younger brother, which his parents blamed on him. Sandy understood the power of emotional excavation. He also understood the damage it could do when wielded carelessly.

Then Stella Adler went to Europe, tracked down Stanislavski himself, spent several months with him, and came back to confront Strasberg directly. She told him he’d been misinterpreting the work. Strasberg’s response was essentially: I don’t care what Stanislavski said. I’m not teaching his method. I’m teaching mine.

He quit the Group Theater that day. Spent the rest of his life advancing what became known as the Method. And American acting was split in two.

So What Is the Method, Exactly?

Before we get into where it went wrong, it is worth understanding what the Method actually is, because it gets misrepresented almost as often as the Meisner Technique does.

At its core, the Method asks an actor to draw on their own life experience to generate authentic emotion. The primary tool is emotional memory: before a scene, you go back to a real event from your past that produced the emotional state your character needs, and you use that memory to get yourself there. If the character walks on stage heartbroken, you find a moment of real heartbreak in your own history and relive it, sensorially and emotionally, until it produces a genuine response. Not simulated. Real.

Closely related is sense memory, which works the same way but focuses on physical sensation rather than emotion. You reconstruct the feeling of cold, the smell of a room, the texture of an object, until the physical reality becomes present in your body. Strasberg believed that the body and the emotions are deeply connected, and that by recreating one, you unlock the other.

The third piece, and the one that gave the Method its cultural reputation, is the idea of total immersion. Some practitioners believe the work does not stop when the cameras stop rolling. You stay in the character’s psychology, adopt their habits, their relationships, their inner life, for the entire duration of a production. The thinking is that the more completely you inhabit a person, the more truthful the performance becomes.

At its best, the Method produced some of the most powerful screen performances in history. It genuinely works, for some actors, some of the time. Sandy never denied that. His argument was not that the Method was wrong. His argument was that it was unhealthy, that it was unsustainable, and that it was solving the wrong problem.

What Sandy Discovered at a Party

Even before all of that drama came to a head, Sandy had been quietly troubled by a deeper problem. He’d been teaching what he was taught, script analysis, character analysis, all the intellectual machinery of early Stanislavski-influenced work, and he knew something was off. He just couldn’t name it yet.

Then it happened at a party.

Sandy had brought a date to a big social gathering in New York City, full of directors and producers and influencers. He kept introducing her around. And every time they moved on, she’d turn to him and ask, “What was his name again? What was her name again?”

Sandy looked at her, frustrated. “Don’t you listen?”

She didn’t miss a beat: “Oh Sandy. No one listens.”

And in that moment, everything clicked.

If people can’t even be present when they’re being introduced to someone at a party, why would they suddenly become present just because they’re on stage with someone else’s words and a director watching? It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. All the pressure, all the self-consciousness, it amplifies the problem.

Sandy realized he’d been teaching actors to become even more self-focused. More intellectual. More in their heads. Script analysis, character breakdowns, emotional preparation, all of it was putting the cart before the horse. The most fundamental thing was missing: the ability to truly listen and respond to another human being.

That insight became the foundation of everything.

What the Meisner Technique Actually Is

The Meisner Technique is not a grab-bag of exercises. It’s a brick-by-brick process, where every class builds on the one before it, every session builds on the last. The goal, by the time the formal training is complete, is to have built a foundation from which you can truthfully call yourself an actor. Not as a title. As a craft.

Video: Jim’s full breakdown of Method vs. Meisner

In the first session, you won’t see a script for months. That’s not an oversight. It’s the whole point. Before Sandy ever let a student touch scripted material, he needed them to learn how to be present. How to listen, really listen, and react instinctively, without performance, without managing the moment.

The primary tool for building that foundation is what Sandy called the Repetition Exercise. Most people have heard of it. Most people have seen a warped version of it. Done properly, it’s not about repeating words. It’s about learning to receive what’s actually in front of you, the other person’s reality, and respond from your gut rather than your head.

When it comes time to work on scenes, the approach is equally counterintuitive. You memorize the lines mechanically, with no inflection. No emotion. No interpretation. Why? Because Sandy believed that from the moment most actors first read a scene, they put their fingerprints all over it. They get an idea of how it should go, memorize it with that impression baked in, and then spend the rest of the process trying to recreate something they decided in advance. Sandy called it “line readings,” and he thought it was one of the central problems with acting in this country. His standard: the entire cast could go to lunch and it wouldn’t affect their performance one bit, because they do it exactly the same way every single time. The Meisner Technique is the complete opposite of that.

The Heart of the Difference

The deepest divergence between the Method and the Meisner Technique comes down to one question: where does the emotional life come from?

The Method, particularly in the Strasberg tradition, reaches backward. Into your personal history. Into your pain. You dredge up the scar tissue of your life and use it to fuel the work.

Sandy believed you didn’t need a tortured past to be emotionally alive on stage. What you needed was a developed imagination.

He put it this way: “Acting is the ability to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Not to reproduce real pain. Not to relive real trauma. But to fall, genuinely and childlike, into a world that isn’t real, and behave as if it is. The more developed your imagination, the deeper you fall. The more believable the work becomes.

He also understood emotional preparation differently. Before a performance, Sandy didn’t want actors going back to their darkest memories. He wanted them to deliberately daydream, to let their imagination land on something that has a charge, something unresolved, something that can pull them into an emotional state organically, the way a charged thought can sweep you away in meditation. Not manufactured. Not performed. Created.

Sandy used a beautiful metaphor for this. The text is like a canoe, and the river it sits on is your inner life. If the river inside you is flat, the text comes out flat. If the river is raging, it comes out raging. The work of preparation is about getting that river moving, not about performing the result.

What About Emotional Memory?

Here’s something worth knowing: Stanislavski himself eventually abandoned emotional memory. One of his most devoted disciples took his own life, and while Sandy was careful never to claim that was the direct cause, he believed the practice of steering people into their worst traumas and then walking away was neither safe nor ultimately effective.

Sandy also watched the Method produce a certain kind of reputation. Actors who stayed in character off-set. Actors who had trouble coming back. The “tortured artist” archetype that became almost a cliche. After nearly 40 years of teaching, I can tell you: in the Meisner Technique, I have never once struggled to get out of character. Not in my own career, not with any student. No matter how deep the work goes, it’s always healthy. That’s by design.

None of this means the Method is wrong. Sandy himself said it: “Whatever works, use it. You’re not all the same. You’re not all pianos.” There’s no one path. But he also insisted that whatever approach you take, it should always be healthy. It should build you up, not burn you out.

Why It Matters for Film

Sandy came out of the theater, but his greatest legacy is in front of the camera. His first student to come out of the training was Gregory Peck, who arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1940s and immediately stood out for one reason: he was so incredibly present. Such a world-class listener and reactor.

That’s not an accident. It’s exactly what the camera demands. Film has been called a lie detector test, shot at 24 and now 30 frames a second, and you cannot fake your way through it. When a big moment comes in a scene, a director doesn’t hold on the person delivering it. They cut immediately to the receiver. The audience wants to feel the reaction. And if it isn’t real, they feel that too.

The Meisner Technique is built for that. Presence. Truth. Working moment to moment off another person, not off your rehearsal, not off your plan.

Robert Duvall. Steve McQueen. John Voight. Gregory Peck. Joanne Woodward. Susan Sarandon. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Sandra Bullock. Timothee Chalamet. They built their careers on this. Not on technique for its own sake, but on the thing Sandy cared about more than anything else: stop acting, and start living truthfully.

That’s what we do here. One brick at a time.

Check out the Video Teaching about Method vs. Meisner

The post Method vs. Meisner: What’s the Difference, and Why Does It Matter? first appeared on The Meisner Technique Studio.

Dear Jim,

I was brought to your show last evening by my friend Jennifer who mentioned you might want to chat one day, as I originated and co-wrote “The Deer Hunter,” a film she told me was very instrumental in your background.

It would be my honor.

Last night I was so very impressed not only of your “impression of Sandy” but your ability to actually DO what he was talking about as he/you talked about it – THAT was very cool!

That I somehow influenced you early in your career is one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received because it is clear it is now your turn. You are an actor with vision, passion and enormous talent and I’m told you are somehow an even better teacher.

I look forward to see what you do with it all.

Best,

Quinn K. Redeker
From: jimjarrett@
Date: August 26, 2007 5:54:59 PM PDT
To: quinnredeker

Hi Quinn,

Thank you for the extremely kind words. I am truly humbled and honored as well.

The truth is, I don’t really have the need to talk about it with you as much as I simply wanted you to know that your talent, passion and vision (along with all of the other enormous talent, passion and vision that was part of that film) changed my life and inspired me to pursue my dream with that same passion and vision. “The Deer Hunter” did change my life and because of you/it I have tried to carry on to do the same for others.

And so, I simply wanted you to know that and to thank you. It was my honor to have you at my show and hopefully, someday, I can express these things to you in person.

If you are ever in San Francisco, I would love to have you speak to my students at my acting school, if you were willing.

No matter what, my very best to you…

jim

The post Quinn’s Letter to Jim first appeared on The Meisner Technique Studio.